Determinism, free will, consciousness and emergent phenomena

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Tomdstone said:
It seems that some animals have the ability to think at an elementary or lower level.
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Indeed. I cannot answer for Barr, and in any case probably would have an answer more monistic and emergentist than would Barr, but I do see clues to Barr’s thinking in Barr’s review (“Man the Mystery”) of a rather recent book entitled From Big Bang to Big Mystery.

Barr likes the book, and he seems (as far as I can tell) to agree with the book’s author that:
  • though humans evolved from non-human primate ancestors and though animals (to various degrees) indeed have abilities to sense and process information,
nonetheless (quoting now from Barr’s piece)
  • “the suprasensory faculties by which man is able to achieve self-transcendence in the grasp of truth, goodness, and beauty … [show] man’s discontinuity with his hominid forebears, since … these higher faculties cannot be explained solely in biological terms.”
 
I’m treading into water where my understanding is very weak, but shouldn’t the uncertainty principle make physical reality non-deterministic?
 
Mort_Alz said:
I’m treading into water where my understanding is very weak, but shouldn’t the uncertainty principle make physical reality non-deterministic?
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No. The reality is described by wave function which evolves determistically. Quantum interpretation of wave function could be probabilistic.
 
STT said:
No. The reality is described by wave function which evolves determistically…
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If reality is deterministic, then all our actions are predicted and known in advance, so how can we have free will?
 
Tomdstone said:
If reality is deterministic, then all our actions are predicted and known in advance, so how can we have free will?
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Whether or not reality would be deterministic, all our actions are part of a pretty much infinite continuum of change. To know what is in the moment or of what was in the relative past and will be in the future implies a perspective from outside of time. We know the past from the record that remains of what once was. We predict the future using knowledge of what is: the more we know, the greater the predictive value. But, there is no now in time. And, it is right here and now that we know and exercise our free will. There is no-where/now-here else we can be, because this is the nature of the human spirit, transforming itself towards or away from God within eternity.
 
Tomdstone said:
I disagree. I think that there is a now. Now is the moment in time that separates the past from the future.
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Actually, not in physics. A satellite has a trajectory that can be known if we place ourselves at any point in its course. It has no now, we do.
 
Tomdstone said:
If reality is deterministic, then all our actions are predicted and known in advance, so how can we have free will?
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I should have said that the movement of a single particle is deterministic. The behavior might change in thermodynamic limit. This is subject of this thread whether one can find a specific transformation which map the original Hamiltonian (which describe motion of system) to a new Hamiltonian in which the system is conscious. You can think of wetness of water as another example. A molecule of water is not wet but an assembly of them is.
 
STT said:
I should have said that the movement of a single particle is deterministic. The behavior might change in thermodynamic limit. This is subject of this thread whether one can find a specific transformation which map the original Hamiltonian (which describe motion of system) to a new Hamiltonian in which the system is conscious. You can think of wetness of water as another example. A molecule of water is not wet but an assembly of them is.
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Why is the behavior of a single particle analogous to a human person?
 
davidv said:
Why is the behavior of a single particle analogous to a human person?
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I didn’t say so. I said that the behavior of an assembly of particles could be different from the behavior of a single particle. I hope that I didn’t misunderstand your question.
 
STT said:
I didn’t say so. I said that the behavior of an assembly of particles could be different from the behavior of a single particle. I hope that I didn’t misunderstand your question.
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OK. Then I don’t understand the point relative to the topic of this thread.
 
Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe it’s more proper to say that, even if our future’s are “predetermined” by the laws of physics, it is still certainly true that WE are making all of the conscious choices that we make to get there, even though, theoretically, we could not have made any other choice. So, by the voluntarily of the act, it was therefore a “free” act of the “will.” Free will.
 
Mort_Alz said:
Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe it’s more proper to say that, even if our future’s are “predetermined” by the laws of physics, it is still certainly true that WE are making all of the conscious choices that we make to get there, even though, theoretically, we could not have made any other choice. So, by the voluntarily of the act, it was therefore a “free” act of the “will.” Free will.
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Well, that is a nice way of putting things together. The free will ability however just appears when the size of system is huge enough.
 
STT said:
Well, that is a nice way of putting things together. The free will ability however just appears when the size of system is huge enough.
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There is no obvious reason why size has anything to do with our power to choose how to behave or not to behave. From a scientific point of view we cannot violate the principle of conservation of energy because we are biological machines incapable of original activity.
 
tonyrey said:
There is no obvious reason why size has anything to do with our power to choose how to behave or not to behave. From a scientific point of view we cannot violate the principle of conservation of energy because we are biological machines incapable of original activity.
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Size matters. think of a couple of molecules of water. They are not wet. But a large assembly of them is wet.
 
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