Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

OK, so the first three pages were devoid of this level of conversations. Where would be a good place to start so a substance dualist can jump into the conversation? Perhpas a list of questions or a post number reference?

It started with a trickle on page 5, first post, when I necroposted to a dormant thread. Imho, it really started to get going on . My whatever you want to call it with me and Rhythm is probably 5-10 pages further in (maybe starting in pages 15-20), but, I think our discussion was largely a tempest in a teapot, and so is probably not worth seeking out on its own account (Rhythm may feel otherwise; that's just imho).

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I just want to note for your benefit that I am intentionally skipping this point. Partly because I'm not up to it at the moment, and partly because the question of what an emergent property is, what their ontological status is and whether there can be anything attributed to them independent of non-emergent properties is such a large topic that I'm not sure it isn't simply a distraction.

A quick example. Let's suppose we simulate a hurricane on a computer by programming in all the relevant conditions, humidity, pressure, temperature and gravity, and all the relevant rules of physics. Suppose it's six days before landfall of Katrina, and we want to try to predict what areas are going to be hardest hit. We run our simulation and six days later, Katrina comes ashore exactly where our model predicted. Now, the course of the hurricane in our simulation is an emergent property: we did not program in which direction Katrina was going to go, that emerged as a result of the totality of all lower level properties. However, calling the hurricane's course emergent doesn't in and of itself get you anything, as emergent properties are every bit as deterministically caused as lower level causes, they are just a higher level characterization of the same phenomenon.

Emergent entities and their properties, by their very nature cannot be independent of their constituent entities. But their consideration is not a distraction, since in doing so we can regard it as an entity in its own right.

Yes, and if the emergent entity is not independent of its constituent entities, and those constituent entities are fully determined, then the emergent entity is also full determined. The emergent entity doesn't "break free" of lower level properties just because it is an emergent entity.

Where do you expect that any entity that is fully determined by entities that themselves are fully determined is going to get anything non-deterministic? You don't get to just "invent new properties" because you used the word emergent. Think again of my example. The hurricane follows the same path as the real thing, not because the underlying properties and the emergent property happen to coincidentally converge on the same result, the result is the same because the emergent property is fully determined by the underlying properties. In what sense is our model hurricane and its path not fully determined even though those are both emergent properties?

I get the feeling that like others are using "quantum mechanics" in place of "magic", you are using "emergent properties" as a substitute for "magic". You can't get indeterminism or freedom out of a system in which the behavior of the constituent entities are fully deterministic, no matter how many "emergent properties" or "emergent entities" there are.


(And I'll point out a couple things just so neither you or I get confused. 1) equating chaos and unpredictability with indeterminism; chaos, or chaotic systems are fully deterministic, the unpredictability comes from a lack of knowledge about the system (in principle, see Heisenberg; we may not have adequate mathematics either). That is not indeterminism, that is a practical knowledge problem. 2) You might half be thinking of emergent self-organization, which is not really related, but that again does not get you indeterminism. 3) Not sure this was you, but someone was asking whether determinism equals predestination; no, because the laws of our universe include laws that are essentially stochastic ("in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element" ). Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, so the future state isn't fully determined by the present state, only the probabilities of any particular future state (I think I'm implicitly appealing to the Copenhagen interpretation, which, may be slightly illicit, as interpretations of QFT and QFT itself are two separate things).)


-- and I think I'll bow out here : I need to be doing other things; thanks for the discussion everyone --

(ETA: There is a famous quote which I won't run down but basically says that if a thing with a certain property is indistinguishable from a thing without that property, then the property alleged is not a property at all; what property of the simulated hurricane or its path is not fully described by the underlying properties, and if there is none, then the emergent entity's properties are indistinguishable from the properties of its constituent entities, and any hypothetical "added" property is not a property. (That might actually be a part of the definition of what a property is; old, grey, neurons, weakening....)