Free Will and Determinism

Mon, 11 May 2015 11:59:00 -0500

It seems that I find a number of people who take issue with the idea that we live in a deterministic world. I think some people don’t like this idea because they feel like this limits their creativity and ability to choose. Others take issue because they believe this raises issues in regards to moral responsibility. Are these issues really problems for determinism, though?

I think it’s reasonable to assume we live in a chaotic system. (See: Chaos Theory) Whilst living in our world, which, in large, we act within as though it is deterministic, we as mere humans, cannot currently (or possibly ever) predict the entirety of next state of another human and therefore their actions with an very high degree of certainty. For what reason must we not hold beings accountable if they operate deterministically? There are social rules (or maybe absolute morals, but we’re not going there today) setup, such as “murder is punishable by, prison, possibly death in some areas, etc.”, which, especially in this case, all humans are aware of and take into account when performing an action. The mere fact that a law exists gives additional input information to every agent. Why then do people still break the law? In some humans the weights on different input information may be skewed, due to other conditions, such that within the local area of the complex error hyper-surface of life breaking the law appears the best choice. However, we, as mortals, with our current technology, cannot predict, nor are we even aware of all the factors involved in bringing a person to the point of violating a law.

Lack of ability to choose or creativity is a much less difficult issue. Chaotic systems exhibit such apparent “randomness” that, again due to our lack of omniscience yielding the ability to predict, one could easily choose from a vast array of things and none of us would be the wiser as to why you thought you decided you chose it. I, personally, actually find determinism relaxing and it doesn’t bother me at all because when, for example, I’m picking out a shirt I pick it for whatever reasons I can think of and I get pleasure from it because it satisfies the current need of my current state.

Allow me to give an interesting demonstration. This is a plot of 100 numbers (scaled, to look nice). Look at the points. I propose they are random. Do you see any pattern in them? Would you agree with my proposal?

Interestingly enough, these numbers fit what is known as a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG for short). All of those numbers above were generated according to the following equation.

S_n = (A × S_n-1 + B) mod M

Thus, despite appearances, the points above were not chosen randomly but, rather, generated quite deterministicly. In this particular instance I chose the values: S₀=2024; A=150; B=473; M=7543;

When substituting these in the equation above one could get all the exact same numbers used to generate the graph above.

This system, however, is not really even a chaotic one, yet clearly those numbers at first appear random before you know how they were generated. To demonstrate just how deterministic this is (and why it’s not really chaotic, which would make things appear more random), suppose I told you that 3 consecutive “random” numbers generated here were 1429, 3619, 227 and asked for the next 20 that would be generated. (Those are actual values from the graph above.) Could you find them? The answer is, interestingly enough, yes. This happens to be a system that, though it first appears to be random is very much not. You can take any 3 consecutive of those points and determine all the ones that will follow. (See: “Cracking” an LCG) Additionally, if one picks a value for M (which adjusts the period) not too large, one could easily find even the numbers preceding the consecutive 3, as the numbers would start to repeat.

perplexing labs

Free Will and Determinism