Determinism vs. Indeterm...

Determinism vs. Indeterminism in Physics

(15:47) Spinosa the main threat to Free Will as it was conceived in the debate at that time was considered to be determinant the idea that all of our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control and if that's the case we can backtrack causality all the way back to before

(16:07) you're even [Music] [Music] born determinism is the view that you could not have done otherwise than what you did that your behaviors are subject to the laws of physics you don't have any agency and what you did what you do is determined solely by the laws of physics and if you think you could have

(16:40) chosen otherwise you're mistaken if you were to repeat the universe to that exact same moment you would have no choice because of your traits and your instincts and your desires and your history no matter what everywhere in life at all times one pathway is the

(16:55) only one possible and every other one is causely impossible that's hard for me to [Music] buy when we act when we make decisions at least it's often the case that it seems evident to us that we could have acted otherwise for example suppose you're at the ice cream counter you've got the

(17:17) choice between chocolate and vanilla it seems to you under those circumstances as if you've got the power to decide for chocolate and the power to decide for vanilla there don't seem to be any factors that prevent you from performing either action from making either

(17:35) decision the sarisan study surveyed four countries the US Hong Kong India and Colombia and they surveyed people asking them do we live in a universe in which decision making is truly free and I think it was between 65 and 85% of people in all those four areas said yes

(17:54) we do so that showed that most people you know conceived of us as agents that do have free will in the libertarian sense and the second question they asked him well if we live in a world in which everything is purely determined and you don't have any agency are people morally

(18:09) responsible for their actions and again like 60 80% of the people said no so clearly the notion of moral responsibility has something to do with free will if our choice were undetermined that would mean in effect that given exactly the same path leading up to a choice the same desires the same

(18:34) beliefs the same reasoning everything else the same if it was undetermined we might make either choice and there wouldn't be an explanation for why we made one rather than the other because everything was in our past was exactly the same up to that particular point

(18:52) but the laws had better not be deterministic okay and if if they should turn out to be determined then that would be [Music] sad quantum mechanics on the traditional Copenhagen interpretation posits real metaphysical indeterminacy at the very lowest level of the universe Libertarians often site

(19:24) this claim about quantum mechanics as a reason for believing their view Einstein made his famous quip God does not play dice with the universe he used that metaphor to say you know how can it all just be random and chaotic Einstein himself believed the universe was deterministic that

(19:50) agents lacked Free Will so he believed that it can't be the case that quantum mechanics is really indeterministic and Bor at some point apparently answered that you wish that Einstein would stop telling God what to do uh and what not to do and just accept that

(20:05) things are that way it's one of the embarrassing facts about modern theoretical physics that we don't actually know whether the laws of physics in the real world are deterministic or not we teach that it is not so what we teach people is that when you observe when you make a measurement

(20:21) of a Quantum system the best you can do is predict the probability of getting certain measurement outcomes the actual outcome is not determined by anything but we haven't specified exactly what it means to do a measurement this is called the measurement problem of quantum

(20:37) mechanics we don't know what it means to do a measurement we don't know what it means to say that a particle a wave function a Quantum system suddenly collapses in some probabilistic [Music] way ever since the presocratic we've had the problem of free will the ancient Greeks certainly had

(21:06) interesting ideas about it uh the two major schools there were the epicurian and the stoics uh the epicurian thought that reality is just a bunch of atams you know bumping into each other in the in the void and the Greeks knew enough to already worry that if these atams

(21:23) follow the deterministic laws of nature how could there be free will and then they introduced a particular concept That was supposed to account for free will the atomist democratus thought that if determinism was true then there had to be these random swerves of the of the

(21:40) atoms and then lucretius picked up the idea of the clean or random swerve and without that there was there was no free will but very quickly people worried that the Lucian swerve was not going to preserve Free Will and more than a deterministic view cuz random swerving

(21:59) of atoms seems no more in the control of Agents than deterministic atoms falling in straight lines due to the laws of nature the swerve of the atoms uh that would just be chance how could free will just be chance and that was really the essence of the debate that has gone on