How determined are you?

Interestingly, weather appears not to be chaotic. Metastudies of weather prediction show that the pattern of accuracy change in weather reporting is inconsistent with the notion that weather is chaotic.

I actually don't think the universe is deterministic; I think it's probabilistic. But that's by-the-by, randomness is no more credible a source of freewill than determinism. So I'll discuss simply in terms of determinism.I have utterly no interest at all in Philosophical thought experiments involving knowledge of the future, perfect knowledge of the universe or any other such thing. Everything we know from modern physics leads us to believe that this isn't even theoretically possible so the "results" of such experiments have no bearing on the reality of the universe.I think we need to be clear about what free will actually is. As I see it free will can be succinctly defined as "the ability to choose your own actions". Again, I have no truck with any notions of replaying the universe and it coming out differently, we have no reason to believe that such a thing is possible, so discussing it's results is nothing more than mental masterbation.By this definition we have free will in a deterministic universe. We, undeniably, choose our own actions. We take the inputs from our external environment, mix them with our internal mental states and spit out some actions. The obvious objection here is that "our brains caused us to do it". A moments thought should lead you to realise that this is a totally nonsensical objection. We are our brains. Our brains cannot cause us to do anything because they are us.

If the weather is chaotic then improvements in short term weather forecasting should not produce an improvement in long term weather forecasting; that is not the case thus, the paper concluded, weather systems are, in fact, not chaotic.

Not quite sure what you mean, please elaborate. What? GR proves it to be impossible. We can never know the state of matter removed from us at any distance at the same moment in time as we are in. But in any case, I was actually thinking of the Uncertainty Principle. The input doesn't define the output, the working of our brain does. Therefore our brains (along, to a lesser extent, with the rest of our bodies) choose our actions.

Doesn't the Uncertainity Principle claim that it is impossible to ever know the initial state? And what about Quantum Tunneling? I was under the impression that Quantum Tunneling demonstrated that the probabilistic nature of sub-atomic particles was not an artefact of measurement. Are you suggesting instead that there is, in effect, a hidden variable that determines this behaviour? If so, then I certainly conceed that is a possible interpretation but I, as a matter of opinion rather than evidential fact, consider it less likely than a genuinely probabilistic world. I'm not arguing for any indeterminacy, I think the process behind our "mind" and actions are just as deterministic as anything else in the universe but I don't think that's relevant to the question of free will. As I see it we have free will if we determine our own actions, and we do.

I believe what nwr is arguing is that the "laws of nature" are emergent from the behaviour of these "bundles of energy" rather than being determining their behaviour.I think he's probably right.

Yeash, I munged that sentence rather didn't I? Remove the 'being' from that last bit and it should make sense.Essentially rather than having actors (particles; sub-atomic and otherwise) whose behaviour are determined by seperate "laws of nature"; you have individual little things who have behaviour and the combination of the behaviour of many, many of them produce what we call the "laws of nature".Like ants, or flocking birds, the whole may move as though it's being directed by an overarching set of laws but in fact each individual is acting according to a simple set of rules.

Are you a physcist, Cavediver, or educated as one? I ask because the explaination you're giving me contradicts all the things I've read on the subject - which, admitedly, are not a great deal better than popular science - and I'd like to know whether this is an area of your expertise or not?In particular, the reading I've seen has led me to believe that the Uncertainity Principle is not about measurement it all but is actually a fundemental property of the universe. But how are you getting at these things?

Right, so you're saying that the properties of the "particle" depend on its state vector which is fixed, but we can't know? Is that right? But if we can't know it then how can we know whether it is fixed or not?

The state vector is surely simply a mathematical description of an actual "thing"? But I agree with your point, language gets difficult when discussing these things. Fixed wasn't a great choice of words. What I mean is that you're saying that the particle has a single state vector at a given moment that uniquely determines its behaviour but that we can't observe all those properties at once? So that it has both a certain momentum, and a certain direction but that they aren't both knowable because you can only measure one at a time and the state vector is changing? But if it were possible to know the state vector exactly you could deterministically predict the particles future?

Ok, I think I'm beginning to understand what you're saying.The wave function is deterministic, and it is the "realest" of descriptions of the sub-atomic world, and it's only when we try to collapse it to classical properties of the world that we get a probabilistic world and those classical properties don't have any fundemental existence at the sub-atomic level?Is that close?