Sabine Hossenfelder released a video in which she said, “Now that Science told me I can’t make any choices, I make better choices.”
Or words to that effect.
She wants you to know you can’t make choices, either, so that you too will make better choices. In particular, if you know you cannot make any choices, you will choose not belittle or tease people who say you cannot make any choices. But, of course, if you can’t make any choices, you have no choice but to tease and belittle people who say you can’t make any choices. And they, in turn, have no choice but to suck it up and accept such teasing and, yes, belittling, because they know you have no choice but to do as you do.
But those who say you cannot make any choices can still choose to make mean faces about people who say you can make choices, sure you’ve goofed in your reasoning somewhere, but also sure you cannot reason but how you have reasoned.
Now we have teased Sabine before for this, as I had no choice but to do, just as I have no choice this time. But here I won’t tease (any more). Because in her video she made it exceptionally clear what her error is, which is of tremendous service.
If you are the sort that can make choices, or think you can, then you might choose to watch Sabine’s video first: it is only seven-some minutes long. If you can’t make any choices, then nothing I can say will influence you, at least not in ways that were not pre-determined by “laws”, just as what I said was also pre-determined by those “laws”.
Which Sabine is hot on. Physics, she says, tells us what the “laws” of Nature are, the “laws” that everything “obeys”. Now obeys, the word, implies a suppressed freedom. Slaves obey. When HR sends an email saying it’s time for your weekly DIE training, you obey. But most would rather not. You knew you could make the choice not to obey, but there would be consequences. Like hectoring lectures in small rooms on which are small tables on which are small boxes of tissues.
Sabine would deny this use, and likely say her intent is metaphorical. But, to her, it is an impossible metaphor, one that should be unthinkable if her contention were true. It’s impossible to imagine how “laws” would cause the “illusion” (in who?) that freedom is a possibility, while no such thing is possible. It is like the “laws” giving you the notion that you exist, whereas this is also not possible. There is nothing there there, no you to have an illusion, not if all there is are bunches of “particles” obeying “laws”.
She says we are nothing but big boxes of “particles”. She says this talking into the camera hoping to communicate with you, using language and machines men have made, knowing you will understand what she means, insisting we have “no evidence” that we aren’t just bags of particles. No evidence. Ah.
She says “we” “know” “the equations” those particles “obey”. I put scare quotes around each difficult word. We means her and her pals; it does not mean me, nor likely you. I know of the equations, too, but unlike her I don’t claim they have power; indeed, I deny it. “Particles” don’t obey equations.
Again, she might claim she meant “obey equations” metaphorically. But I doubt it. I think she means it literally. And so we have reached the Deadly Sin of Reification. Those equations, some of which predict beautifully, and some not so well, have more than one interpretation. Hers is causal. She believes all things march, with no possibility of deviation save one, according to unbreakable rules. Since we are “nothing but” particles, we march, too.
Those equations are her model of the world, and to her the model is the world. That is the Deadly Sin. Only she doesn’t think her model is a model.
My interpretation of the equations, which gives just as much weight to their predictive ability as hers, and even much to their causal aspirations, is best put as Pro-Reality, which is something closer to seeing physicists’ “laws” as correlational. Their “laws” aren’t laws. The “laws” of the physicist are only idealizations which never hold exactly in Reality. Which means they are approximations of something deeper. Like substances exercising powers, under this-and-such conditions.
Quoting myself quoting Nancy Cartwright’s How The Laws Of Physics Lie:
Speaking more carefully, the law of universal gravitation is something like this:If there are no forces other than gravitational forces at work, then two bodies exert a force between each other which varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses.
She [Cartwritght] allows that this might be true, “But it is not a very useful law.” Because, as is obvious, of that no other forces bit. Which never happens. The gravity “law” only explains ideal, which is to say unobservable, or approximate situations. Saying the “law” is universal involves an extrapolation in thought, an induction to what cannot be observed; i.e. no observational verification is possible of the situation where only—the word is strict!—gravity between M and m is in play. You must grasp this before moving on.
That is only a small quote from a long article about an even longer book (which is online). So please to read the whole thing. In it you will learn the mistake which gave rise to the notion of “laws” was bottom-up reductionism, which was to suppose that the smallest bits of Reality, put in strange situations and isolated, were somehow indicative of how everything worked. When, of course, physicists can’t even tell us why water exists. I mean why water is unpredictably different than its constituents.
Sabine says the particles are “deterministic” and “random”. To an extent, “determinism” is a truism: it means changes are caused. Very well. Our disagreement arises from what the causes are. Then comes “random”, which at first she gets right: it means, as she says, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Both words refer only to us and our vantage point, which is often forgotten. Sabine forgets.
She says “fundamentally random” means “nothing controls it.” Which is false. As in, it is not true. If nothing controls quantum outcomes, then quantum outcomes cannot happen. You can’t squeeze something from nothing, no matter how big the size of your grant. You get no assistance from calling nothing “randomness”, because that implies something—about which you cannot know, hence the unpredictability.
If you think that’s wrong, then find one of those equations-thingees and show us how Nothing causes Something to happen.
The true lesson of Bell’s theorem (which describes some quantum outcomes) and all that is that Reality is not local, that something deeper than particles obeying “laws” is happening.
This means her chief conclusion that “the uncomfortable truth that Science gives us is that human behavior is pre-determined, except for the occasional quantum random jump that we can’t control” is false. It is true that is what The Science says, but The Science is wrong. The Science is so far from right that The Science is left. She loves her model so hard she has lost sight of Reality.
I warn people often in the Class of how easy it is to fall in love with models, especially when you have done the hard work of producing those beautiful equations. The models become realer than Reality. The Deadly Sin strikes many. Indeed, so alluring are the equations that it takes a will of steel—or, ahem, a tendency to indifference—to be released from their grip.
Sabine also frets about her computer attacking her, which we’ve discussed before, so I’ll pass by all that except for her boast “There is nothing going on in the human brain that a computer can’t simulate.” Which is false. And a Great Bluff. If you think not, ask her, “Hey there, Sabine. Tell me precisely how a brain works, and how it gives rise to consciousness and impossible illusions.”
Video
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Just read Michael Egnor’s bool “The Immortal Mind” – he is a neurosurgeon, former atheist, who had a revelatory experience. Good book for average folks to get a grasp on the immaterial existence of our spirit selves.
If you think that science is so wrong, it’s ‘left’, prove it. In so doing, you’d be disproving any and all physical laws for which there is empirical evidence. I cannot wait to see you try.
Seems to me free will means we are free to make mistakes. Mistakes are unexpected outcomes whether good or bad.
Mistakes can happen because of ignorance, over-confidence, etc.
I would like to learn more about this subject. But from a practical point of view following the laws of God is the best way to minimize mistakes.
Editing and doubt. Deniers of free will cannot explain either , yet both are common occurrences among humans. (“Doubt” here is not restricted to The God Question but to such small matters as, “Did I leave the coffee pot on?” Or “Did I pay the water bill?”)
People have convinced themselves that the only allowable concepts to think about the world are concepts taken from physics. That sounds okay at first, but where do the physics concepts come from? They come from physicists trying to make sense of the world. But physicists live in the world of our experience. And mind and free will our part of our experience of that world.
Another way to describe it is that according to the models of physics, particles are the most fundamental entities. But we know the models themselves aren’t the most fundamental because the models originate from the world of our experience. The models of physics ultimately exist in the minds of physicists. A mind is needed to interpret the words in a book or the output of a computer program. But the minds of physicists aren’t part of the model, so the world includes at least one thing that is not part of the model.
Ultimately, the world of our experience is the real world, that’s the starting point for all scientific investigations. And in that world, we experience choice.
ASBroad,
Oh my, we’ve done that many times. Including here today in your presence. Stick around for more great fun!
The laws of physics are silent on the subjects of consciousness, intellect, and the soul. It is a category error to attempt to apply them so.
@ASBroad: Fallacy of composition.
Just because some things are provably false does not make all things false.
So much confusion with so many strawmen thrown in that video and this discussion.
First, it is a nice thing to philosophize but just don’t pull physics into it for attribution. The notion that “physics tells us” something is simply giving physics an attribute it does not contain. As Feynman opined, “When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it” Indeed the practice of physics never aims for truth or being right in some absolute sense about statements, whether it is called a law or a theory or a principle. Every statement, or “model”, or theory physics deals with is considered only to not be demonstrably wrong for the set of conditions under which it has been compared to experiment. The only arbiter of whether a theory or model or law is assessed to be not wrong for now is whether it gets close enough to experimental outcomes, given at least the known uncertainties of the experiment. The only entity that is never wrong, again from Feynman, is Nature, not anything in physics. Nature is never wrong, where an experiment is how physics asks Nature if we are wrong. So, when Hossenfelder goes on about what “physics tells us” she is philosophizing perhaps but her thoughts have nothing to do with physics.
Her Proustian (although thankfully much briefer) musings about “what physics tells us about consciousness and free will” having something to do with physics are also patently mistaken since the part of the universe that physics addresses is that part that can be described using a small (7) set of well defined standard units and other units derived from them. The 7 basic units (SI) are kg, meter, second, ampere, Kelvin, mole, and candela, all currently defined in terms of what appear to be universal constants, not physical objects. Unless Hossenfelder can define “consciousness” or “free will” in such units, she is welcome to think and talk about them, but perhaps the more appropriate disciplines to invoke would philosophy or theology, don’t draw physics unwillingly into it. Physics has as much to do with her musings as whatever psychological things may or may not have happened to her in the course of her life.
“Those equations are her model of the world, and to her the model is the world. That is the Deadly Sin. Only she doesn’t think her model is a model.”
Brilliantly put! Yes, Laws are not binding, they have no enforcement, they have no ability to constrain Nature. They only SEEM to constrain reality because so much effort has gone into formulating them as an accurate description of what has been observed.
And speaking of Newton and gravitation… Newton was very careful NOT to say that gravity is a force. He stressed that no one could be so foolish as to claim that a force could be conveyed across millions of miles of vacuum. What he said is that masses are attracted to each other “AS IF” there were a force. Not that there IS a force, but that objects acted AS IF there were a force. Big difference.
One can make an argument that the models of physics exist in the minds of physicists and the fact that these minds are not modelled shows us that we have one more thing not included in the model. Or other arguments along similar lines.
Some materialists are aware of such considerations, but they dismiss them because the mind is seen as just one small niche. Their attitude is that either it will eventually succumb to reductionism or it’s just an epiphenomenon, not really fundamental. One way to argue against this is point out that the materialist models of the universe work by excluding mind and quality from the world. Edward Feser’s rug analogy gives a good illustration of this approach (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/03/nagel-and-his-critics-part-vii.html).
Another way to look at it is in terms of conceptual argumentation generally. To show that a model is incomplete just shows that that particular model does not describe everything, but it doesn’t tell you what else is out there. To do that, you would need to come up with a new framework, which is much more difficult than just showing one is incomplete.
Here’s another example of reified models in action… and what a consequence!
The Key Nuclear Allegation That Started the War Was Coaxed from a Palantir Counter-Intelligence Algorithm
https://www.unz.com/acrooke/the-key-nuclear-allegation-that-started-the-war-was-coaxed-from-a-palantir-counter-intelligence-algorithm/