The quantum domain prefigures life’s capacity for self-determination

Steve Dufourny

It seems that the lifetime of information and memory is crucial. That’s why the notion of negentropy is so important also. Life maintains and extends ordered states by resisting entropy through constant information renewal and structural persistence, the real ontological universal question is why and how at this quantum scale and considering the informations, Without this physical storage and regeneration of information, no coherent continuity biological, cognitive....could exist in fact it seems to me.
The balance you mention between exploration and exploitation seems deeply connected to this principle, the systems must preserve enough negentropic structure to sustain identity and memory while remaining open to informational change. It is fascinating in fact the emergent life and consciousness, In that sense, the self-assembly in the momen you describe depends not only on dynamical adaptation, but also on the endurance of information patterns ,the lifetimes that allow complexity and consciousness to persist in time. The evolution and adaptations also are intriguing about the changes, qualia, and choices in the environments and so the encodings and mutations.

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

Dear EB,

Despite what you seem to believe, acceptance of lower-level determinism by definition excludes any strong concept of higher-level causality or autonomous self-determination.

For an accessible physics perspective, I recommend you take a closer look at Schroedinger's work on the mind-body problem, e.g. in his books Mind and Matter or Nature and the Greeks, where he shows that determinism of the scientific world view leads to what he calls the 'exclusion principle' (not to be confused with the Pauli exclusion principle), whereby we ourselves are excluded from showing up and making a difference in the very world we describe.

For a more recent convergent conclusion you can check out Kim's causal exclusion problem. In his book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough he demonstrates at length how non-reductive physicalism runs into trouble when it tries to argue that higher-level properties (such as mental properties) are not reducible to lower-level properties but still have causal power.

I may know where the source of your confusion lies. You wrote that Dennett-style compatibility interpretations "argue precisely that macro-scale causal relations are real, 'explanatorily autonomous' and irreducible to any complete microphysical description". I think it's fair to say that both determinists and non-determinists agree that there are macro-scale phenomena that are explanatorily autonomous, which is just what we mean by saying that it is possible to have effective theories at larger scales. So, for example, we can conveniently talk about the temperature of a gas, even without a complete description of the microphysical state. And in a state of ignorance we may even think the temperature does real causal work on its own. But in a deterministic picture this macroscopic property cannot actually have autonomous causal powers of its own; temperature is just a statistical placeholder for the aggregate causal powers of the microphysical components.

So the question is: is life and mind a macroscopic property like the temperature of a gas, that is, which admits of an effective theory but is in fact deterministic at the microphysical scale? Dennett's compatibilist philosophy can be interpreted as responding to this question in the affirmative and as aiming to develop just such an effective theory. But, for the reasons I have pointed to, while this kind of approach may work well enough for gases, it does not work for the phenomena of life and mind.

I fully agree with you that we "really can freely decide", and what I am arguing in this essay is that compatibilism undermines our capacity to scientifically understand how this can be so. Dennett is developing a non-workable solution to a pseudo-problem that derives from an outdated scientific world image. To be fair, his work was important for opening the door for serious scientific debate on the topic of free will and the efficacy of life and mind, but it's time to move that debate along with the times. In the essay I strive to provide a more nuanced, updated scientific world image that is in line with the latest research in physics, as well as in the life and mind sciences, and which thereby permits a stronger interpretation of causal powers.

EmeraldBeetle

CharcoalMosquito Despite what you seem to believe, acceptance of lower-level determinism by definition excludes any strong concept of higher-level causality or autonomous self-determination.

Just restating your somewhat paradoxical belief in reductive determinism in order to base your free will argument on a refutation of it, doesn't make your reduction of determinism true, even if you cite reductive physicalist arguments like Kim for that reductive determinism. His reading of causal closure plus exclusion is not universally accepted and is in fact part of the ongoing debate that includes Dennett's apparently "old fashioned" notion of compatibilism as well as Pearl and Woodward's interventionism.

WRT Dennett, you don't appear to actually even engage with compatibilism in the first place, and mention him just the once where you metaphorically characterise 'real predictive patterns' in our sense perception as a "grand illusion ... like seeing figures in the shifting clouds".

Schrödinger’s Mind and Matter raises a phenomenological concern about subjectivity being “left out” of the scientific picture and is not an argument that indeterminism is required for agency nor that determinism excludes it.

Temperature is not talking from a “state of ignorance” about the microphysical scale. It's an objective macro-scale quantity that has causal efficacy in the interventionist sense in our macroscopic world. The same goes for your “life and mind,” except that here – while temperature is a physical property reducible in principle to microphysical explanation – our human policies, reasons and agential control variables are not reducible without explanatory loss to micro-descriptions, i.e., they are explanatorily autonomous at the macro scale.

I think you're relying too much on a reductive determinism that remains contentious, and which Dennett and others reject, while arguing for exactly what Dennett argues, that humans do have causal power in their macroscopic world. I also agree with your aim of vindicating robust agent causation, but compatibilism does not rest on “ignorance”, it locates real, explanatorily autonomous macro-causes within a deterministic or stochastic microphysics. You don't need to contentiously claim that determinism simply excludes higher-level causation in order to pursue your empirical program about stochasticity and non-Markovianity.

And if you insist on that premise, you should make it clear from the start that your argument assumes a reductive physicalist notion of determinism, perhaps by stating as an axiom that there is no autonomous macro-level causation. You could call it your NO-MACRO axiom 🙂

In that way, readers like myself can follow your argument as: Given NO-MACRO then as follows… without us assuming a naive straw man determinism.

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

Thanks for these clarifications! Unfortunately, I am still struggling to make sense of the very possibility of a non-reductive determinism (NRD). I would appreciate it if you could let me know where my reasoning goes wrong.

Let us take as definitional of this NRD that it accepts both (i) determinism at the microphysical scale and (ii) that there can be "an objective macro-scale quantity that has causal efficacy in the interventionist sense in our macroscopic world".

First thing to clarify: what is the nature of an "intervention"? As I understand it, interventions are simply one category of changes that objective macro-scale quantities can undergo that appear to make a difference to other quantities. However, these macro-scale changes are not coming from outside the physical universe, and their potential microscopic consequences adhere to the laws of physics like all quantities must do in a fundamentally deterministic universe. I therefore don't see how interventions can make a genuine difference to the unfolding of the universe.

Accordingly, the second thing to clarify: what degrees of freedom are available in NRD? Determinism means that at some fundamental scale, there is no room for spontaneous change. Every state at any point in time is merely a fixed projection of the initial conditions through some set of entailing laws across time.

With a fixed floor on which everything else supervenes, there is no conceptual room in NRD to talk about counterfactuals, that is, about how things could have been otherwise, given this or that intervention. Given determinism, counterfactuals would only hold with respect to a change to the initial conditions or to the entailing laws, e.g. if the initial state would have been different, then the current state would have been different. Alternatively, if the dynamical law would have been different, then the current state would have been different. In a determinist picture, once the universe is up and running and unfolding across time, there cannot be any true intervention as long as the initial state and laws remain the same.

So then my question: how does NRD defend the existence of autonomous, causally efficacious processes at the macro scale, when it accepts that there is absolutely no elbow room in the micro scale on which the macro scale supervenes?

EmeraldBeetle

CharcoalMosquito First thing to clarify: what is the nature of an "intervention"?

AFAIU Pearl and Woodward (and my apologies to real-world causal theorists), their intervention concepts are based on structural causal models that represent, in Pearl's terms, 'do-relations' within what he calls the 'do-calculus', or Woodward's ideal interventions via invariance conditions. These are mathematical ways of describing real agents (like us) at the macro-scale that can effect change in function variables given the relevant background is held fixed. Effectively, they both attempt to show that deterministic or stochastic mechanisms are logically allowed such that while the world can be fully deterministic at the microphysical scale it can still exhibit well-defined, stable 'do-relations' at the macro-scale.

Put another way, you can effect macro-causal changes within a set of fixed, relevant background variables (ceteris paribus). Think of it as similar to how the organism maintains non-equilibrium homeostasis by consuming low entropy food and exporting high entropy waste. The total transaction respects the second law while if you just focus on the organism alone minus its environment, it appears to be 'negentropic' as per Schrödinger's musings. So likewise, you make decisions that effect real macroscopic change downstream, and of course change the microphysical arrangement of 'stuff' within that environment, but that doesn't require magically changing the initial conditions of the universe – the laws governing the deterministic background remain in place.

I think the main difficulty in accepting this sort of macro-causal modelling, is the intuition that determinism means that the actual history of the universe is totally determined by microphysical stuff given the initial conditions and current physical laws and leaves no "elbow room" or degrees of freedom within that history. The compatibilist/interventionist view claims that this total deterministic history must also include agents, like us evolved human cognitive organisms, which are part of that system and whose control policies and actions can 'make a difference' i.e., navigate degrees of freedom within a deterministic macro-scale world without violating any physical laws.

I find, the more you think about the question of totally reductive determinism vs an undefined 'free will', the more this duality resembles a stubborn traditional bias (the free will argument goes back to mediaeval natural theology and our relation to the godhead) rather than a coherent idea. It's not a problem of mind vs matter, or mind over matter, but more one of control theory within a material universe. Compatibilist freedom is 'reasons-responsive' control that can effect real changes in macro-scale states of affairs, which means rearranging the microphysical environment – and what else do you need for your will to be free?

In this sense, the initial conditions at the Big Bang or Bounce have already allowed for the microphysical evolution of biomechanical organisms with cognitive/affective processes that live and reason within their macroscopic world (i.e., 'us'). So, when you wake up in the morning, the initial conditions must have also allowed for those brain states that support your thoughts and feelings about which garment to wear based on current weather conditions. And you freely navigate within these physical constraints by wondering if you'll be too hot if you choose the microphysical arrangement of field excitations you call the 'puffy jacket'.

Ulla Mattfolk

CharcoalMosquito Thanks. Yes it is true. Me too laborate with chaos for entanglement and superposition, which are min two parallell system. Deterministic chaos,yes. Ulla.

Ulla Mattfolk

I thin Lorraine points to something essential. Our classical world is in 3D because this gives some freedom to react. Time is the measurement of this reaction?
If what she tell about equations changing on both sides (trivial) is true we can see away for squared functions? We can turn our interest toward skewed functions, like a choice If-THEN...?
Say ex deterministic chaos as entanglement, we Know that even if we begin with the normal Hermitian system, the measurement of entanglement makes it non-Hermitian and skewed, as a result from ex. Tsirelsons bound. THIS is the interesting point that can explain the different outcome of IF-THEN? And in prolongation free will as a focus on some outcome more than any other outcome, so we direct the result?
Ulla.

CharcoalMosquito

Ulla Mattfolk

Very interesting! Some of the simplest sequential decision making models, like the classic secretary problem or the unified 1/e-law, also highlight how the probability of making the best choice is a skewed function peaking at 1/e of the total time horizon of whatever interval or period the process has. This certainly has made me appreciate much more the importance of asymmetric functions.

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

I am fully on board with attempts to formalize and operationalize what it means to be able to make a difference. It's just that I don't think this is ultimately possible within a deterministic framework, whether at the microphysical level of a Schroedinger wave function, or at the microphysical level of an Einstein block universe.

And it's not just about the initial conditions: as long as state determinism holds, you could take any slice of time and perfectly reconstruct the past and future by running the equations backwards and forwards. In fact, it doesn't even matter whether the past (and any past "freely navigated" causes) existed at all; it would be perfectly consistent to claim that the universe started at any intermediate point in time and continued running forward.

Given that determinism at any scale means that we would have no choice in the matter of how things unfold, I argue that it is important to insist on indeterminism. Indeterminism means that each moment in time is not yet completely specified, such that some aspects need to be assembled on the fly in real-time as the moment arrives. And so the actual occurrence of events (and our decisions in them!) at least CAN make a difference. In other words, at least this possibility is not ruled out in principle. The essay takes a few steps further along this direction to show what it would involve to turn this possibility into actuality.

Ulla Mattfolk

CharcoalMosquito The mistake neurobiologists do is to take cortex as the final station (3D+memory), when it should be the 'chaos-generator in the mind as unifier, creator from indeterminism? Ulla.

EmeraldBeetle

CharcoalMosquito Given that determinism at any scale means that we would have no choice in the matter of how things unfold, I argue that it is important to insist on indeterminism.

Four takeaway points from your argument for libertarian free will so far:

You double down on the basic assertion that determinism simply disallows free choice “at any scale” even though interventionism provides a mathematical formalism for Dennett’s compatibilist idea of free will as macro-causal, reasons‑responsive agency.
So, given no compatibilism, any determinism disallows free choice.
You cite the reversibility of time evolution as proof of this assertion.
Thus indeterminism must somehow allow for agency.

So (1) is simply false unless you’re either:

1a. Just stipulating your NO‑MACRO axiom (i.e., there's no autonomous macro‑causation), from which the rest follows (ignoring compatibilist arguments), OR:
1b. You can demonstrate how microphysical determinism disallows compatibilist macro‑causal agency. But you don’t really engage that compatibilist argument and instead (2) just restate that macro and micro‑scale determinism disallows free choice due to (3) 'time reversibility'.

With respect to (3): while global unitary micro‑dynamics are reversible, macro‑scale dynamics of open, coarse‑grained systems are effectively irreversible due to decoherence, thermodynamics and coarse‑graining. That irreversibility underwrites the asymmetry exploited by causal modelling such as in Pearl’s interventionism, without contradicting the background unitarity. Your argument's reliance on time reversibility is a reliance on micro‑scale unitary evolution which, again, just seems to ignore the case for irreversible macro‑scale causality to make your point.

And then (4) indeterminism doesn’t simply follow from (2) and (3), which is basically your NO‑MACRO axiom. Even granting NO‑MACRO, how would indeterminism help? Randomness does not add authorship. A 50/50 coin flip at a decision point (choosing which of two jackets to wear given current weather conditions) does not make the resulting action any more 'yours' than a compatibilist reasons‑responsive decision in a deterministic microphysical world. Agency still requires organized control and decision structures either way, unless you think 'freedom' is fundamentally a function of choices being determined by an indeterministic random number generator?

So to restate the crux of your argument: if determinism at the macro scale actually does mean that we would still, as deterministically evolved cognitive servomechanisms, have a control policy driven, reasons‑responsive choice about which jacket to wear in the morning, how would an indeterministic microphysical substrate make any difference to that macro‑causal agency?

And so we just keep coming back to your initial statement of your free will argument based on a reductive notion of microphysical determinism. My compatibilist question still stands, the free will vs determinism debate still revolves around it today, and given your essay's argument refuses to engage with the current debates I do think you're just setting up a naive straw man argument that you don't even need for your indeterministic argument to follow on from. Much like macro-scale causal relations, you can also have your macro-scale indeterminism emerge over coarse-grainings, and then derive your 'could have done otherwise' notion of free will from there, even if the microphysics is deterministic.

Finally, your empirical program based on stochasticity and non-Markovianity, irruptions and so on, can still be pursued without the reductive claim that 'determinism excludes macro-causation'.

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle The arguments of CharcoalMosquito are philosophically valid and internally consistent regarding determinism, indeterminism, and the open future. His approach to free will is relevant.
You can use technical arguments, but the compatibilist rebuttal about macro and micro levels is category-mistaken and ignores the key metaphysical point that Charcoal is making: that the future is not fixed by initial conditions.

At my humble opinion, higher-level descriptions of reason-responsive agency cannot be taken as real freedom. In Dennett-style compatibilism, mental programming still does not support genuine orientation of choice, because genuine agency cannot simply be derived from prior states in this reasoning . So we are not free simply because our brain follows its causal logic, and this is an important point wich tells us that it seems not possible. The problem is ontological the choice of interpretation.

We cannot be free to do what the deterministic universe has forced us to want. Therefore, compatibilism must be rejected on principle. Determinism certainly applies across several levels and systems, but indeterminism is essential for new states that can be genuinely created , and this is where free will resides. The future is not fully written, and I see it this way also in my theory, where consciousness plays an important role in the process of choice.

Decoherence theory, coarse-graining, Pearlian causal models, and emergent dynamics are all useful, but they describe the behavior of systems, not the ontological openness of the future. Charcoal is therefore addressing the fundamental point,the ontological structure of reality.

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle Your fundamental errors, in my view, are these ones. You are confusing description with explanation.For example, the causal modeling of Pearl and Woodward does not address the free will debate nor the possible metaphysical causation involved.Generalizing macro-level control through such models does not take into account deeper physical and ontological parameters that may allow genuine open possibilities for real agency. To model a system is not to explain the ontological status of its decisions, and this is a very important point.

If freedom is redefined, then it is not the same as preserving it. This is a subtle distinction. To say that we are free because we act from our internal reasons amounts to saying that those reasons are determined by prior physical causes, and therefore the agent could not have chosen otherwise.That is not free will. That is deterministic behavior labeled as freedom. This is why Dennett compatibilism is problematic, it keeps determinism intact while the notion of agency loses coherence at a universal level. The outputs of a determined system cannot serve as genuine agency. For me, this is an important error in your reasoning,though of course, you are free to think differently,and in a sense, the very fact that we can disagree illustrates the reality of free will.
Another issue is your conflation of randomness and indeterminism. We must be clear, consciousness implies that the future is not fully specified yet, and therefore consciousness can select among possible outcomes. Indeterminism allows multiple possible futures, not a single determined one. This is essential.

So the agent cannot simply be assumed to exist inside determinism.If it is treated this way, it becomes a circular argument,determinism creates the agent, the agent expresses control, and therefore control is compatible with determinism. This is not an argument; it is a premise disguised as a conclusion.
This is why Charcoal’s point is more compelling, it recognizes the genuine openness of future outcomes and the ontological significance of consciousness. Describing behavior at the macro level is not the same as explaining the underlying metaphysical structure of agency.
Regards

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

Thank you for your continued engagement with this essay. I appreciate this dialogue. Let me start by emphasizing that we all agree on the phenomenology of the macro-level, as @Steve Dufourny also makes clear in his replies. The best way to describe our person-level situation is that in the absence of bodily or environmental constraints, we are free to act in accordance with our intentions.

And I think we also all agree that we can model our situation in different ways, including in terms of interventionist models or as "evolved cognitive servomechanisms" as you put it, although I would not favor such a mechanicist account. Anyway, the crucial point is that the core of our disagreement is a different one.

Specifically, where we do have a disagreement is about ontology, that is, about the fundamental nature of reality that best explains the specific person-level phenomenology about which we have this shared agreement. When I argue in favor of indeterminism, this is because an appeal to "could have done otherwise" that is supposed to do real explanatory work implicitly presupposes that the future is genuinely open to alternatives, and this kind of openness is also a requirement for us to even meaningfully talk about the possibility of reason-responsive control or selection among alternatives. And given that the most fundamental openness we currently know of is found at the micro scale, this is where our explanatory journey must start.

I am not trying to knock down a straw-man version of compatibilism, but I am struggling to see how it amounts to a coherent position. Let me try to articulate my concerns one more time. The key stumbling block is that determinism at the micro scale only permits, as you yourself say, "effective" indeterminism at the macro scale. Thus, while I appreciate that you want to shift the burden of proof to my side by asking me to demonstrate the shortcomings of this kind of compatibilism, you have already given the answer yourself: determinism entails that whatever may be the lived phenomenology of possibilities, of counterfactuals, of interventions, of "could have done otherwise" etc., this is all ultimately merely an "effective" approximation; in other words, it is not fundamental. And if it is not dynamically relevant at a fundamental level, then it can play not role in shaping the future.

Note that this conclusion about the limits implied by determinism is not scale-dependent; you could run the same argument starting e.g. from Newtonian physics or GR. I focus on the micro scale in my essay because I think that's where we have the best chance of developing new fundamental theories. In contrast to your reading of my essay as favoring reductionism, my motivation is precisely to revisit the micro scale in order to argue for the possibility of genuine levels of reality above the micro. I am proposing that they gain their autonomy and efficacy at the higher level precisely due to the fundamental openness at the micro scale. And hence it is this openness in the fabric of reality that we also need for a fundamental theory of how it can be the case that we are indeed free to create and act at the macro scale, in line with the phenomenology of the person-level.

EmeraldBeetle

CharcoalMosquito Specifically, where we do have a disagreement is about ontology, that is, about the fundamental nature of reality that best explains the specific person-level phenomenology.... When I argue in favor of indeterminism, this is because an appeal to "could have done otherwise" that is supposed to do real explanatory work implicitly presupposes that the future is genuinely open to alternatives, and this kind of openness is also a requirement for us to even meaningfully talk about the possibility of reason-responsive control or selection among alternatives. And given that the most fundamental openness we currently know of is found at the micro scale, this is where our explanatory journey must start.

No – only if we first agree to your proposition that: GIVEN "the most fundamental openness" is only found at the indeterministic microscale, THEN your argument follows. But I don’t agree, of course, and this is just another example of your framing the argument to fit your stated conclusions regarding the need for microphysical indeterminism to allow free will.

'Futural openness' is fine by me, and as a phenomenologist by doctoral vocation I definitely come down on the side of human phenomenal experience being one of a "fundamental openness" to future possibilities – i.e., free will has real causal power at our human scale of experience. This phenomenological futurism is, I think, where "fundamental openness" resides, and not in your stochastic microphysical world. In fact, the whole free will debate devolves from the self-evidence of phenomenological free will (a fundamental definition) in order to then argue about how this apparent human-scale causal freedom is related to the physical reality external to our phenomenal world – this latter external reality being classical, Everettian or Bohmian determinism, or spontaneous-collapse indeterminism, etc.

So, given that "the most fundamental openness" we currently know of is found at the macroscale of phenomenal experience, this is where our explanatory journey must start. From this fundamental phenomenological view, then, we might define four senses of your 'futural openness':

Stochastic openness – objective chance at the microscale (your 'fundamental openness')
Metaphysical branching – many physically possible continuations “from here” (including both 'many worlds' as well as stochastic collapse interpretations)
Epistemic openness – multiple live possibilities relative to what agents know/control (subjective free will)
Agential openness – real difference-making macroscale conditional abilities, as in what would happen under reasons-responsive changes (compatibilist/interventionist)

I take it you're an 'open futurist' in the sense that you intuitively believe that an 'open future' must mean there is no predetermined reality about what will happen next – i.e., that our free will has real causal power (not merely the illusion of such) to effect change in the 'here and now' of phenomenal experience? Up to a point of course, as I take it you accept there are physical constraints on that futural openness whereby your 'choice of jacket to wear in the morning given present weather conditions' doesn't include infinite 'miracle jacket' possibilities: we live in a physical universe that constrains our free choices, and currently you have (x) actual jackets to choose from.

Now from the list 1–4 above, what do you think we need for real human agency? I think (3) is a given, as we at very least have to have the subjective experience of 'free will' otherwise there's nothing to debate about our causal freedom to choose. But (3) is agnostic as to whether that freedom is 'real' or just the 'illusion' of freedom, which is I think why some reductive physicalist arguments prefer to just stop here as in: "You're free to believe the illusion you have the freedom to choose".

I personally think the reductive physicalists do this mainly due to the difficulties of explaining just how microphysical determinism is actually physically related to macroscale causality beyond hand-waving about 'fundamental levels' vs 'emergent' thus supposedly dependent 'higher levels' etc. The causality has to be one-way for this reductive argument to work – from the 'underlying levels' to the 'emergent levels' above these – and I also think this 'level' speech indicates a metaphorical attachment to such a one-way causality. But we realist believers in human free will don't accept this as an argument for anything other than lazy thinking! Right?

So from (3) we then proceed to (4) and – ignoring any relation to indeterminism or determinism, or the fact it's a 'compatibilist' argument – I think everyone agrees that agency needs agential control mechanisms in order for agents to freely choose which jacket to wear in the morning. And again, that agential causal power can remain agnostic as to whether it's 'real' or 'illusory' WRT determinism vs indeterminism. At very least we can agree that agential causal powers appear to be real irrespective of whether you think reductive microphysical determinism makes them illusory or not. As you know, I subscribe to the notion that macro causal powers, as in an agent's control choices, actually do change the microphysical arrangement in their local environment. In fact I think that's a self-evident, macroscale phenomenal truth!

So now we get down to the nitty-gritty of 'freedom' with (2) and the branching possibilities facing anyone who is deciding what jacket to wear ... in your stochastic world the wave function is constantly collapsing possible outcomes down to one actual outcome via indeterministic objective chance, so any of the potential future outcomes remain indeterministically possible. OR, for the relative-state (Everett) view, all potential future outcomes occur, and no single outcome is selected globally. Each relative state branch observer experiences one definite outcome, and the Born rule supplies the agent’s subjective probabilities. And this is where I think we part company, because I really can't see how your position insisting on a stochastic universe is any different from Everettian determinism in terms of underwriting agential control or an 'open future'. Both ontologies posit many physically possible continuations “from here” WRT which jacket one might wear. And either ontology, deterministic MWI or indeterministic collapse, empirically yields the same Born-rule statistics for each observer’s experiences.

Which leaves a belief in (1) as being somehow 'fundamental' to human-scale causal powers about as unmotivated as a belief in MWI doing the same, because either way – given that both indeterministic collapse and Everettian determinism allow for the possibility of alternative future paths – neither can explain how an agent makes a choice between the possibilities. Which brings me back again to Dan Dennett's compatibilism – Indeterminism is neither necessary nor sufficient for control. Or put another way, indeterminate randomness adds variance but not guidance!

Your only recourse then is to double down and insist on your NO-MACRO axiom – in concert with reductive physicalists – that IF microphysical causality is a one-way street THEN agents in such a reductively deterministic world can't effect change, in accordance with their macroscale intentions and beliefs, on the quantum field excitations they and their environments are made of. This to me, is the most incoherent of positions – precisely what is it in your straw man reductive deterministic world view that actually makes it impossible for macroscale beings to effect change on their microscale environments via their reasons-responsive control mechanisms?

What exactly is your notion of 'freedom'?

Ulla Mattfolk

CharcoalMosquito this conclusion about the limits implied by determinism is not scale-dependent; you could run the same argument starting e.g. from Newtonian physics or GR. I focus on the micro scale in my essay because I think that's where we have the best chance of developing new fundamental theories.

Note that the quantum is deterministic (or deterministic chaos) in its own closed system, but at once we make a measurement of it (as a non-commutative measurement of its tensors) we open it and extract the result, it is not any longer deterministic. The interference or wave aspect 'collapses' just like we can see it is a double slit exp. But where goes the vectors? And the non-commutativity makes it exclusive, we can only choose one tensor. If the system is already skewed and open non-Hermitian, we get two choices, both excluding the middle, we get a long and a short 'stick' (Tsirelson). In a way this is freedom too, exactly as other choices we can make. In fact we can say that the whole 'person' or life is indeterministic as we does not exactly follow the natural laws, or we bend them and use them as a 'sail' in the same way we use noise to amplify our thoughts. This is an aspect I would put under the light better. Life can be seen as a 'loop of freedom' in this way? It share this 'loop of freedom' also into future as a 'goal to strive to' or in environment (as houses, schools, hospitals etc.) and we understand it as negentropy. So the 'person creates/selects its own environment that is not deterministic either in some aspects. This requires energy to keep. It is both micro- and macro-? And it is unavoidable, so we can call it a law, just like the second law, which it has to follow outside this loop, not inside. In fact it can be a consequence of the second law also. In fact all 'limps of matter' is the same at its root, it 'stays together and fire together'. Universal lifetime is defined by this matter (proton) stability. Life is different in it can also use the time dimension (enzymes are quantum). Time is important. We are like a Picasso painting of time. half in and half out...

Regarding our future 'goal' it is like a stability point in the future. We are not drifting according to our environment, instead we are controlling our environment by our will. It is not the environment that is 'branching' and forming an agency, ex even if the environment change we can choose not to follow, and 'we put some fire in our equations'. We are the agency in our life.
Ulla.

Lorraine Ford

EmeraldBeetle
Freedom is the ability of matter to jump its own numbers (that apply to the categories like relative position), as opposed to deterministic number change that occurs due to law-of-nature relationships between the categories. Any other version of "freedom" is NOT freedom.

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

"As you know, I subscribe to the notion that macro causal powers, as in an agent's control choices, actually do change the microphysical arrangement in their local environment. In fact I think that's a self-evident, macroscale phenomenal truth!"

Thank you for re-stating a central motivation of my essay:

the lived experience that we have of our own macroscopic agency is that is indeed dynamically relevant to the microscopic physical basis of our behavior.

Moreover, the essay highlights an opportunity: this notion of macroscopic agency, or even of a "phenomenal truth" as you describe it, does not need to be explained away as nothing but an "as if" illusion or effective approximation. The current scientific world image actually allows for the possibility of a stronger interpretation, permitting us to argue for genuine openness across scales. It is under these conditions, or so I would argue, that talk of agential control and selection makes sense.

As the essay tries to highlight, an appeal to a multiverse of branching realities only saves superficial appearances of macroscopic agency, but does not achieve the same ontological grounding of your "phenomenal truth". Ultimately, a multiverse is just as deteministically closed as is a superdeterministic universe; in both cases all future change is completely pre-specified by the initial conditions of the Schroedinger equation. But fortunately we are not forced to accept this kind of scenario. What the essay shows is that it is scientifically fruitful to explore the alternatives arising from accepting what the evidence seems to show, namely a fundamental indeterminism. In particular, this way of interpreting the facts better aligns with our macroscopic phenomenology of agency.

In sum, it is simply not the case that I reject the reality of macroscale phenomena and their top-down consequences for the microscale basis of behavior. To the contrary, the essay is a defense of precisely this position. What puzzles me is why you feel the need to double down and insist on your determinism axiom, especially given that nothing is forcing this interpretation and it only serves to undermine your own perfectly valid convictions about macroscale phenomenal truth.

EmeraldBeetle

CharcoalMosquito Ultimately, a multiverse is just as deteministically closed as is a superdeterministic universe; in both cases all future change is completely pre-specified by the initial conditions of the Schroedinger equation.
What puzzles me is why you feel the need to double down and insist on your determinism axiom, especially given that nothing is forcing this interpretation and it only serves to undermine your own perfectly valid convictions about macroscale phenomenal truth.

Okay one last go – I sincerely and honestly think your definition of 'determinism', especially where you simply equate it with 'superdeterminism', is philosophically naive and reductive.

Simply put: \text{Determinism} \neq (\text{fatalism} \lor \text{superdeterminism}).

Your stubborn, naively fatalist intuition that what you call 'determinism' means that initial conditions at the Big Bang led, 13.8 billion years later, to you choosing the specific jacket that you actually wore this morning – not just because the weather conditions were fixed, but because your reasoning, preferences and control responses were also fixed in a way that makes no difference what the local antecedents were. That view – that you could not have chosen otherwise – is fatalism and its circular reasoning such that the outcomes occur no matter what the antecedents were, as everything is fixed by a global past.

Determinism, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite. It allows for local macroscale causality such that different antecedents yield different outcomes by law. Counterfactuals are perfectly meaningful in a deterministic universe and those lawful dependencies are all that your control requires (as per compatibilism/interventionism).

If it had been colder, or if I’d prioritized warmth more, I would have worn a different jacket today (it's quite warm here). Those conditionals are true in MWI just as much as in collapse theories. Indeterminism just adds noise and wouldn’t make those reason-sensitive conditionals any truer or more 'free'.

Of course, given your naively reductive notion of 'determinism', you'll have to answer: "but even your counterfactual was fixed since the Big Bang!” And yes, counterfactuals have to be physically possible in order to be counterfactuals, as in their truth values are fixed. What matters is that in this macroscopic world, within our decohered quasiclassical branch, outcome A varies with conditions B, C, D & E. That lawful dependence is what agency requires.

In a superdeterministic world that dependence fails because any independent agent's variation of antecedents stops being possible. If you want to argue against that conditional dependence, then you’re effectively arguing against explanation and control in general, and not for indeterminism.

Your reductive proposition that “IF everything is fixed by the initial global state, THEN you have no local causal power" is only true if nothing you do could have been otherwise in any coherent counterfactual – which is a fatalist premise and not a deterministic one. Your entire essay is premised on this conflation of fatalist superdeterminism with determinism, which is what makes it a philosophically naive and reductive argument.

So please repeat after me (following Laplace): "The global state at time t fixes the global state at t+n. But this global determinism does not entail that local real patterns are irrelevant or that agents lack causal efficacy to effect local changes within that globally determined evolution".

Lorraine Ford

EmeraldBeetle
This “global state” is an entity that doesn’t exist, except in some people’s imaginations.

What does exist, underlying the world, is a myriad of time-place-true states that apply to matter, where each state is representable as a collection of categories (like mass or relative position) with associated numbers, and where the categories are related by “law of nature” relationships.

And what is this “causal efficacy” jargon about? Presumably “causal efficacy” refers to what is causing the time-place number change for the numbers that apply to the categories.

It is necessary to be explicit about what one thinks is causing number change. There are three choices for what is causing number change or number jumps:

The deterministic law-of-nature equations cause all number change. (However, this is impossible because equations are nothing but mathematical relationships between the categories, relationships that have been deduced to exist as a result of scientific experiment.)
Something mysterious called “randomness” jumps some of the numbers that apply to the categories, whereby other numbers will necessarily also change due to the law-of-nature mathematical relationships between the categories.
Matter jumps some of its own numbers that apply to the categories, whereby other numbers will necessarily also change due to the law-of-nature mathematical relationships between the categories.

The issue is: WHAT is causing number change?

CharcoalMosquito

EmeraldBeetle

Thank you for making it clear that you are committed to a deterministic view of the universe (akin to Laplace's), so that we can unpack its implications in more detail.

1) What is it that fixes the next global state? The most successful theory for macro-scale dynamics is General Relativity (GR). Is this the global deterministic framework you adopt?

2) Within this theory of globally determined state evolution, what is it that supposedly entails that agents have the capacity for actions that effect local changes?

In GR, the entire history is laid out statically in a block universe; all worldlines are globally fixed by boundary conditions and laws. This means that it's not just that our actions that cannot make local changes; in general, no object has downward efficacy. The only way to conceive of causal interventions or explore counterfactuals would be to change the boundary conditions or laws, meaning the change isn't local to this universe. How would you rescue your claim of our actions having the capacity to effect local changes under these circumstances?

Note that my essay is not arguing against the fact that our past matters for our choices and actions; to the contrary, it assigns a constitutive role to historical contingency. I suggest taking another look at the essay, as I think it can supply the framework you need to properly ground the possibility of agency via causal interventions capable of effecting local changes, namely by leveraging quantum openness.

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