You know what I always find so hilarious. How people always seem to qualify luck - even when they show us how lucky they have actually been.
I continuously hear statements like "it's partly luck", or "luck is obviously a component of it", or "luck is clearly a factor", or "luck plays a role" [1] - all attempting to downplay the enormous magnitude random chance has on our daily lives. Hell, they might even put numbers on it like "it's probably 50% luck", or "90% luck". Nobody seems willing to go all they way to and just come out and say "Yeah - I got really lucky and that's about all there is to the story".
The just world fallacy is a very, very strong illusion.
Still our brain is, for all practical purposes, a classical machine. No quantum effects are observed at the neuron level. So we can't use indeterminism to save free will.
Luck are unexpected good things that happen to you and that you didn't work for. It has little to do with randomness in a physical sense and thus philosophical discussions about determinism aren't really relevant in this context.
Look further down the discussion chain. confluence has been telling people to "learn physics" and seems to be equating luck with random chance or determinism.
Where you do think your values and behaviours came from in the first place?
Your values/behaviours are given to you via both your genes and your environment - which are effectively random. If your parents were prone to addictive behaviour in an environment that provides addictive substances - you will probably do the same.
This reminds me of thing I've always found highly curious about how the religious think.
They can't seem to understand that their choice in religion is relatively arbitrary and geographically dependent. Born in America you're Christian. Born in Pakistan now you're Muslim. Born in India now you're Hindu. Born in Israel now you're Jewish.
The fact that people can't seem to understand that the reason they believe in X god instead of Y is merely a question of a few hundred miles.
Life is particularly arbitrary. For example: I'm an atheist because of my environment (middle-class male, western country, studies science and technology, with access to freedom of speech). This is irrelevant as to whether atheism is actually the right option (which I believe it is - but then of course I would :) - the key fact to understand here is how the environment determined it.
Finally, physics eliminates the case for free will. So yes - you do what you do because you were set up to do it.
My problem with this kind of absolute determinism is that it reduces everything to pointlessness. So much so that you can't really stick with the idea for any length of time. For example, from your top post:
"You know what I always find so hilarious. How people always seem to qualify luck - even when they show us how lucky they have actually been. ..."
What's so funny about it? Their fallacies are predetermined anyway. (Tangent: how can you call it luck, coming from this perspective?)
So it seems to me a particularly useless line of thought. I'm not saying you can't indulge in it for kicks, but doesn't provide any useful input to behavior.
Well then - I guess you'd really hate physics then, a field that reduces everything you see around you to a series of equations with a tad of randomness thrown in for good measure.
Now then - if you don't believe humans obey the law of physics - well then - that's your problem.
I don't have a problem with physics, I just think that applying this level of determinism to human interactions is useless. And as I said, if you have completely internalized that yourself, how is it that you are question other people's behavior? It is, after all, predetermined.
To put it another way, it's like trying to fix a watch with a shotgun. And as long as you would like to keep the watch, I'd say save the shotgun for other uses.
Pure determinism is fun to play with, and you can believe that it is the ultimate answer, but it has no real use here and now.
This is separate to my main point, but I like this quote from E. F. Schumacher: "Relativism and positivism, of course, are purely metaphysical doctrines with the peculiar and ironical distinction that they deny the validity of all metaphysics. including themselves."
I'm constantly intrigued by how people can keep such dual world views. Like Christians who also believe in natural selection. It seems like they don't really want to think it through, so whatever they just accept both conflicting notions. If you come to understand and appreciate high-school level physics, chemistry and the workings of the brain, which most high-schoolers don't, it really strikes me as conflicting how you could not become a determinist. We're just machines fueled by chemistry.
> I'm constantly intrigued by how people can keep such dual world views. Like Christians who also believe in natural selection.
I'm not a Christian, but I can easily see how someone could be a Christian while not accepting the fundamentalist outlook (i.e. that the world is only 6,000 years old, we're not descended from other species, etc.). Those "other" Christians believe in God, but don't accept the literal interpretation of the Old Testament.
To argue that all Christians are fundamentalists would be like arguing the all Muslims want to fly airplanes into buildings. As a viewpoint, it lacks evidence.
Even Einstein held something resembling a religious outlook -- but his supreme being couldn't be bothered to deal with us lowly insects:
“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Also, remember that, until the end of the 19th century, there was no plausible way for the sun to have been in existence for more than a few million years (in that pre-relativistic era, the sun's energy was thought to arise only from gravitational contraction), which wasn't enough time to support Darwin's timetable. So at that time, even scientists couldn't explain how complex species arose.
> We're just machines fueled by chemistry.
That's my outlook also, but I can see how religious people might possess different views on the literalness of scripture.
It's called cognitive dissonance. It's how religious people can argue on an internet developed using science or risk their lives to machines made with science. They never join the two logically incompatible worlds.
>Your values/behaviours are given to you via both your genes and your environment - which are effectively random.
This is an information free sentence. Everything that makes me _me_ comes from my genes and my environment. If it were much different, I wouldn't be me. If you are attributing everything I do to an external force even though it goes through the intermediate step of my identity and skills in the process, then you just have a tautological statement. Sure, things happen because things happen. Bravo, but I'm also one of those things.
Point being, a whole lot of what makes you "you" is completely not in your hands. Not free will. I didn't choose to get born.
To dictate policies that advocate punishing and killing people for what they had no control over (like being born in a muslim-majority country) is folly, or worse - a justification for bad behavior.
The point of that sentence was to indicate two things. Firstly your existence is random. Secondly - you are wholly the product of your arbitrary environment. That is all.
Yes. But you should notice how we don't blame machine no. X for not doing it's job correctly (aka having buggy programs run on it) - it does exactly what it was supposed to do.
No - we blame the programmer/hardware manufacturer for screwing things up - which in the case of humans is the environment and genes.
Your reductionist mindset seems to be on a path of destruction, leaving many useful abstractions in its wake.
Is a car actually a car, or is it just a collection of atoms? It's both. Does the car actually drive, or is it just physics? It's both - "driving" is a subset of physics that acts on a collection of atoms known as a "car".
When people say "luck", they are usually referring to external circumstances not under the influence of the biological machine's algorithm. To say that luck is the only factor, or never a factor, is wrong. Given similar inputs, some algorithms will excel and some will fail.
You certainly can "blame" an algorithm for certain outcomes. How the algorithm formed is a red-herring.
> When people say "luck", they are usually referring to external circumstances not under the influence of the biological machine's algorithm
Your DNA, aka the algorithm that is who you are, is given to you by the external environment - you have no control over it, and neither do you have any control over your upbringing - rich/poor/race/sex.
I don't understand the reasoning behind your comment here.
First, how does physics eliminate the possibility of free will?
Second, why are you even bothering to tell us this?
How do you personally justify taking any action in life, as the pointlessness of it all clearly hasn't escaped you. Yet, from my naive perspective, I see someone determined to have their self-perceived intellectual superiority and ability to transcend it all recognized. I don't understand why, though.
Are people that use Newtonian physics to calculate bilard ball movement also wrong? They know theorethically they should use general relativity, but they also know it won't change the result in any meaningful way. So they optimize it away.
Thinking of yourself as probability function interconnected with the whole universe all the time must be pretty inconvenient for you. Why not simplify it to "this factors are ME, and the rest it external Universe, and the interactions can be rounded to work mostly like Newton said. Bonus - your algorithm now knows almost exactly which parts of that function are under his direct control. It's very useful model, why not use it?
We're not sure our current best model is The Truth anyway. And notion of free will is another useful simplification. You already think in its terms (English is impossible to use otherways).
I've actually thought about this a long time ago -- back in high school, and came to the conclusion that if everything were to follow a certain set of "laws", then indeed free will wouldn't exist.
But that isn't the case. Have you heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for starters? If not, look more deeply into physics. After a certain point, the "laws" stop governing, and probability takes over. Probability leaves room for multiple possiblities -- a.k.a. choice. I can't say an electron chooses to be at position X at time T, but I can say that the fact that you can't determine it's positions and that it does tend to be "wherever it wants" within a certain range, hints at something of the kind. For more lookup the "Free Will Theorem": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
This is getting frustrating. Physics being at the beginning of the causal chain does not invalidate latter sections of the chain. If "A → B → C", pointing out "A → B" does not make "B → C" false.
A = physics
B = individual values and behavior (aka "algorithm")
Indeed so. But still how much luck is there between B and C? Some[0] argue there might be quite a lot of it, which we don't notice, overestimating causality. (Not to say it's bad—imagine constantly keeping in mind that our lives largely depend on chance.)
[0] Like author of Fooled by Randomness, an interesting book on the subject.
I continuously hear statements like "it's partly luck", or "luck is obviously a component of it", or "luck is clearly a factor", or "luck plays a role" [1] - all attempting to downplay the enormous magnitude random chance has on our daily lives. Hell, they might even put numbers on it like "it's probably 50% luck", or "90% luck". Nobody seems willing to go all they way to and just come out and say "Yeah - I got really lucky and that's about all there is to the story".
The just world fallacy is a very, very strong illusion.
Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.
[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174488