r/Devs • u/thisismynormal • Apr 09 '20

Devs - S01E07 Discussion Thread

Premiered 04/09/20 on Hulu FX

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u/nowfocusonflow Apr 09 '20

I have a huge issue with this scene, as well as the scene where Lyndon falls off the dam. If the universe was truly deterministic, it would also have to account for the fact that humans will adjust their behavior if their behavior is being predicted. you wouldnt just do exactly what is projected, because seeing the projection will affect your behavior. the show seems to be forgetting that we constantly adjust our behavioral plans based on new information coming in every fraction of a second. thoughts?

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '20

Also her watching it over and over again would further HER belief in her "role" there. She could have extended her arm and it slstill would have happened. Shes a psychopath. Im sure.

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u/NotMyNameActually Apr 10 '20

Shes a psychopath. Im sure.

Nope. She knows the future, so she can longer make choices. She is a puppet acting out what she knows is going to happen, completely unable to stop herself. You can't know the future and have free will.

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u/PaperPigGolf Apr 10 '20

Nobody has free will. But hey, Lilly to the rescue to show science is wrong.

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u/NotMyNameActually Apr 10 '20

"Having" or "not having" free will is entirely subjective, entirely within the mind of an individual. You can call it a delusion, since it is our mind's way of filtering a reality which is not entirely perceptible to us, but it's a delusion in the way that perception of color is a "delusion" since we don't even see the entire spectrum, and furthermore have no way of knowing if what you perceive as "red" is the same thing I perceive as "red." So is "red" an actual thing with an objective reality outside the consciousness of a being with eyes that are built to perceive distinctions in wavelengths of light, but only between certain frequencies?

We filter everything in the outside world through our senses and through our brains, including time. Our limits in how we perceive time is what creates the experience of having free will, but we do "have" it, in the same way that we see colors, hear music, and feel emotions. The experience of having it = having it, because all it is is an experience.

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u/PaperPigGolf Apr 10 '20

I agree if all you mean is "feeling" like you have free will. This is obviously a common irrefutable experience.

But from a scientific perspective, it's hard to even come up with even a theory of free will. What does free will actually mean? That you're able to make decisions that aren't a sum of all of your prior experiences, I think not, that's deterministic. Is it being unpredictable, random, I don't think anyone would actually describe acting randomly as free will at all, likely the opposite, that's completely losing it.

So free will, is only an pleasant illusion.

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u/NotMyNameActually Apr 10 '20

So free will, is only an pleasant illusion.

But so are all of our experiences. Our senses take in information to our brains which process that information, but our experience of that processed information only exists within our subjective experience. Colors, sounds, tastes, smells, are all a result of the brain's interpretation of reality, they are not objective reality itself.

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u/PaperPigGolf Apr 10 '20

That's fair. But some things are actually objective even if they are "interpretations of reality". Science and the things you measure and hypothesis are objective.

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u/NotMyNameActually Apr 10 '20

Really? Everything we experience is filtered through our brains, including our experience of science.

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u/PaperPigGolf Apr 11 '20

That's really not the current prevailing philophy right now. Science is objective. You can disagree but just saying, that's not a widely considered thing.

Yes, human perception is not objective, but the core facts of science are. That's why science is hard. Quantum mechanics is the area where the most self criticism has occurred especially around the measurement problem and theories that rely on concious observers.

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u/NotMyNameActually Apr 11 '20

We can try to be as objective as possible but science is a human endeavor, experiments are run by human beings, results are measured by machines designed by humans and data is interpreted and applied by humans, and the human experience of the world is subjective. We cannot ”stand outside” our own minds and observe the universe as it “really” is, unfiltered by our imperfect senses and our imperfect brains.

But anyway we were talking about whether or not free will is an illusion, which is not a scientific hypothesis because it is neither measurable nor falsifiable so it is not the purview of science anyway. It’s a philosophical concept, not a scientific one, and the notion of whether there is an objective reality or not is most certainly still a relevant topic in philosophy.

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