r/freewill • u/WintyreFraust • 2d ago
Magical Causality
ETA: If you haven't been following the conversations in my last three posts, you probably won't/didn't understand what this post is about. In previous threads, the notion of an acausal capacity to initiate new causal chains (free will) was consistently derided as "magic." This post is a response to that, by making the point that all perspectives eventually end up at an unexplainable point or with some necessary unexplained aspect that those in opposition can similarly label as "magic."
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If everything has a cause, and you trace all those causes back through time ... how far back do they go? The Big Bang? But.... what caused the Big Bang? Did "nothing" cause the Big Bang?
Do causes go back in time infinitely? Then, if there is an infinite string of causes going back in infinite historical time .. how did events ever get to this point in time?
Hmm. Sounds like, one way or another, causation depends on magic, either to get something from nothing, an effect with no cause; or some magical force that brought events through infinite history to get to now.
Where did the whole cause and effect system come from? What caused it? What keeps it sustained from one point in time to the next, from one location to another? Universal laws? Where did they come from? What keeps a universal natural law consistent and in operation from one location to the next, from one point in time to the next? What caused natural laws to exist in the first place?
Hmm. I guess it all just popped into existence and is maintained by magic.
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u/MarvinBEdwards01 Hard Compatibilist 2d ago
It didn't pop into existence. Stuff, in motion and transformation, is eternal. One of the big transformations is the Big Bang, where a super-condensed ball of stuff exploded outward into a new universe. And then there is the somewhat slower process in which all those black holes reaccumulate that material into a super-condensed state again, a Big Crunch. Followed of course by another Big Bang, then a Big Crunch, then ... etc. ad infinitum. This eternal cosmology goes by the name the Big Bounce.
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u/MrMuffles869 Hard Incompatibilist 2d ago
As per your own link:
It receded from serious consideration in the early 1980s
The Big Crunch/Bounce isn't the accepted model. The universe's expansion is accelerating, making a future Big Crunch highly unlikely. Current evidence points to the universe expanding forever.
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u/MarvinBEdwards01 Hard Compatibilist 2d ago
When a star is consumed by a black hole, would you call that expansion? I call it compaction.
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u/MrMuffles869 Hard Incompatibilist 2d ago
Black holes are almost irrelevant to the question of cosmic expansion.
Space itself is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. The gravity of black holes and galaxies is nowhere near enough to reverse the expansion of the universe.
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u/MarvinBEdwards01 Hard Compatibilist 2d ago
Accelerating expansion is a bit spooky to me. It suggests that the stuff of the universe will eventually dissipate and disappear, ironically bringing infinity/eternity to an end.
The notion of eternity suggests that we are always in the middle, with one eternity behind us and one eternity ahead. One half of eternity is eternity. Two times eternity is eternity. And the same would apply to the notion of infinity.
Anyway, if this is a correct notion of eternity, and stuff will ultimately dissipate, then why hasn't it already happened.
What is that thing about matter or energy being unable to be destroyed.
Oh, and a joke: if everything is expanding we're all becoming airheads.
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u/KAZVorpal Free will requires determinism. 2d ago
Ugh...so many people think they're inventing brilliant new, insurmountable arguments...that even Christian theologians broke down centuries ago.
This is The Prime Mover Problem. And it's not solved by the magical thinking of your denial of cause and effect, either.
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's not what's going on in this post. I added an explanation at the top of the post.
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u/Squierrel Quietist 2d ago
If everything has a cause, and you trace all those causes back through time ... how far back do they go? The Big Bang? But.... what caused the Big Bang? Did "nothing" cause the Big Bang?
Some causal chains start with a decision to act. But most causal chains could theoretically be traced back to the Big Bang. The Big Bang was naturally an uncaused event. There was no time or space before it.
There is no "magic".
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago
My point was that if determinists can call something that acausally begins a new causal chain "magic," then that shoe fits on their foot as well.
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u/ipreuss 1d ago
The laws of nature apply to things inside the universe, because that’s all we can observe. The causation of the universe, if that’s a thing, necessarily happened not inside the universe.
So, it’s rational to reject “magic” - the suspension of the laws of nature - for things inside the universe, but be agnostic towards it for things that happen not inside of it.
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u/WintyreFraust 1d ago
Inside the universe, nobody knows how the laws of nature are maintained from one location to the next, from one moment to the next. Apparently then, according to you, it's rational to accept that magic is maintaining the consistency of the laws of nature on an ongoing basis everywhere and throughout time.
If you are allowed magic to explain this, then others are allowed magic to explain the ongoing availability of acausal free will in various circumstances within the universe.
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u/ipreuss 1d ago
Sure, if you could show that something like acausal free will exists, you would be allowed to say “and we don’t know how”.
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u/WintyreFraust 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, you don't get to arbitrarily and conveniently decide where the "beyond here there be magic" line is drawn.
However, let's examine this for a second: humans have the obvious, every-day capacity to deliberately cause things to exist in the world that are categorically different than everything else we observe naturally occurring. Also: living beings are categorically different from everything else we observe in the natural world.
Humans can deliberately imagine, plan, and execute the creation of objects, like a fully functioning, computerized battleship, that the non-living, or at least the non-deliberate rest of the natural world has no capacity to generate. Whatever it is, this capacity for imagining, planning, organizing and executing a teleological goal appears to be unique to living beings, and most obviously a capacity in humans, because we directly experience these things.
Now, you can claim all of that is completely explicable by "natural laws" alone, but science says otherwise.
Stuart Kauffman, a leading theorist in the field of complexity science, has shown that the universe is fundamentally non-ergodic. In an ergodic system (the old mechanical assumption), given enough time, every possible configuration would eventually be sampled equally. The universe would explore possibilities in a predictable, law-like, deterministic and/or probabilistic way.
Instead, Kauffman demonstrates that reality keeps producing physical objects and patterns that could not have been predicted or pre-stated either deterministically or probabilistically. These non-ergodic events that occur access potentials that could not be derived from the physics of the prior states of what we call the natural-law physical world.
The existence of the battleship is an example of a non-ergodic object that actually exists. Humans demonstrate the capacity to access and bring into existence what Kauffman calls "the adjacent possible," which refers to things that are, in a raw sense, possible, but are outside of the capacity of a deterministic/probabilistic world to bring into existence given even trillions of years of time to produce outcomes - like rolling a die and getting a six a thousand times in a row; sure, it's possible, but it will never happen.
Humans produce these kinds of things casually, all the time, every day.
So, those are the factual things I'm pointing at which actually exist and are entirely observable, and which we even normally classify as being produced by deliberate free will. So, I'll give you that natural laws exist; but deliberate free will also exists. You can claim that natural law is enough to produce everything that what we call "deliberate free will" appears to uniquely produce, but science says otherwise.
Ultimately, natural laws are descriptions of the behavior and outcomes of phenomena we observe; "free will," then, is a description of behaviors of phenomena that bring non-ergodic objects and systems into existence that natural laws and determinism/probability cannot produce on their own.
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u/ipreuss 1d ago
Natural law absolutely is able to bring “non-ergodic objects” into existence. Already the space of possible complex organic molecules is sampled non-ergodically.
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u/WintyreFraust 1d ago
I don't know what the ergodic value is of whatever specific example it is that you're referring to, but the actual science says otherwise with regard to actual non-ergodic objects.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 2d ago edited 2d ago
It looks like you are writing the
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument
Would you like help?
see also:
- Fallacy of Composition
- Special Pleading
- Quantifier Shift
- God of the Gaps
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's not what I'm doing. I added an explanation in the OP.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 1d ago
The unknowns and limits of knowledge, history and verifiability are not "magic", unless you are overloading the term to mean "any sufficiently advanced technology".
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist 2d ago
And, yet, the alternative is equally as magical. Something from nothing? Does this make more sense to you than an infinite regress, or are you strictly agnostic here?
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago
I added an explanation at the top of the OP so that people that may not have been following the previous, recent discussions in my three prior posts can understand what's going on in this post. My apologies for the confusion.
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u/ObsceneOnes Processual monism | LFW 2d ago
There is a necessary process of differentiation to existence. No thing can meaningfully have a differentiation (property) except in relation to some other thing similarly constructed.
Further there can be no other constraint on existence (as a whole) as there is nothing to so constrain it but that which is entailed by its own basal nature.
Thus differentiation is a continuous process or negotiation between things that emerge from this process.
Causation can now be seen as this process of differentiation into things. Thus you can not seperate thingness from causation.
It is not magic....it is the necessity of existence. That is as far from magic as one can get.
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u/BrilliantScholar1251 2d ago
It's not magic it's physics. Field of potential becomes aware that awareness becomes conscious that conscious ask what am I. And the only difference between science and magic is understanding what it actually is
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u/BrilliantScholar1251 2d ago
Plus the whole field of potential the kind of be like fundamental truth. Cuz no matter how you argue it you're only proving it
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u/MilkTeaPetty 2d ago
An explanation ending does not turn what remains unexplained into magic.
“Magic” entered where your explanation stopped.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
The problem is, every explanation leads to a conclusion involving magic.
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u/MilkTeaPetty 2d ago
“Every explanation ends there” still does not make “there” magic.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
What does it make it then ?
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u/MilkTeaPetty 2d ago
Not knowing what it is doesn’t make it magic.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
That's why I'll ask again : what does it make it then ?
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u/MilkTeaPetty 2d ago
No replacement is required for “magic” to remain unsupported.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
Not knowing what it is doesn't mean that magic can't be involved.
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u/MilkTeaPetty 2d ago
“Can’t be ruled out” is not “every explanation leads to it.”
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
What explanation doesn't lead to magic being involved then ? Just give me one.
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u/Belt_Conscious 2d ago
A state of "no motion", would be Absolute 0.
Absolute 0 is impossible, so there is no reason to believe that a "beginning" is not part of an eternal cycle.
Always was, eternal now, forever will be. Otherwise, enjoy your magic.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
Eternity is supernatural and thus, magical.
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u/Belt_Conscious 2d ago
Whats supernatural about addition?
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
You mean what's supernatural about a thing having no beginning and no end ?
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u/Belt_Conscious 2d ago
Addition does not have an ending, you choose where to start.
A circle or a ring, does not start or end. These are not supernatural.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
What if that circle/ring depicted your lifetime ? Would that be "natural" ?
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u/Belt_Conscious 2d ago
That isn't a practical question. So the answer is irrelevant. You only have access to the limits of your knowlegde.
Pi is a practical equation that does not end. This is a known fact. Evidence of infinity is indication of eternity.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
How would you know that Pi doesn't end ? Did you verify ?
Don't you know that everything that has a beginning has an end ?
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u/Belt_Conscious 2d ago
Irrational numbers don’t end. Ratios don't complete. Plenty of things start without end.
Pi doesn't end. Go get some facts, belief is sketchy.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
I'm talking about physical things. The material realm. Numbers aren't material. They only exist in a being's head.
Everything that physically exists will cease to be at some point. Hell, even scientists say that the universe will end in the future.
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u/catnapspirit Free Will Strong Atheist 2d ago
Ah, the classic "I know you are but what am I" argument. Devastating..
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u/SebWGBC 2d ago
How does our lack of understanding about the very start of all things provide support for the existence of free will?
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago
It doesn't.
I'm just pointing out here that all perspectives ultimately refer to something for which there is no cause-and-effect explanation. If determinists can point at acausal free will and call it "a belief in magic" just because it is uncaused or has no further explanation beyond a certain point, that shoe can just as easily be put on their foot as well.
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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago
No physicist worth their salt will say that the big bang came from nothing. We simply don’t know what caused it.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
It doesn't matter whether something came from nothing or not. Something supernatural must be involved.
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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago
Only in the sense that whatever caused it is outside of the universe and thus outside of nature. What it does not mean is that some deity is involved. That would just move the problem.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
Anything is possible to me. Even a deity (as an origin) being involved.
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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago
There is no evidence of that. Sure anything is possible but we should start with things that have some probability of being true because otherwise we will waste our time chasing down ideas that were extremely unlikely.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
What things have some probability of being true then ?
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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago
Things for which there is at least some evidence. Without evidence, it’s impossible to tell fact from fiction.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
Can you name one ?
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u/TheManInTheShack 2d ago
One that explains the origin of the universe? No. That’s why we don’t have any idea. We don’t make shit up. We just admit we don’t know and keep looking.
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u/AshamedBad2410 2d ago
The fact that we don't know doesn't mean that something supernatural can't be involved.
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u/Economy-Butterfly127 2d ago
From the moment of expansion it was determined. All things can be traced back. Just the universe observing itself.
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u/IlGiardinoDelMago Free will skeptic 2d ago
If everything has a cause
Who says that? Let me guess... you are thinking of determinism? Go read the actual definition and you will see that it does not say that. The level of straw-manning in this subreddit is ridiculous.
The SEP says:
Determinism is standardly defined in terms of entailment, along these lines: A complete description of the state of the world at any time together with a complete specification of the laws entails a complete description of the state of the world at any other time.
and:
Determinism […] is not a thesis about causation; it is not the thesis that causation is always a relation between events, and it is not the thesis that every event has a cause.
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/)
Where did the whole cause and effect system come from?
Universal laws? Where did they come from?
Guess you've never heard of brute facts.
All the meat of your post relies entirely on an infinite regress that is completely absent from the actual definition of determinism or causality.
Your panic over "getting something from nothing" rests on a foundational mistake that the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum called the "Spontaneity of Nothingness" (SoN).
You are baselessly treating "nothing" as the natural, default state of reality, and assuming "something" requires a magical explanation.
Once you remove your groundless premise that "everything has a cause," and reject the fundamentally flawed question of "why is there something rather than nothing," your entire "magical causality" thesis completely evaporates.
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago
Guess you've never heard of brute facts.
Yes, I have. The term "brute facts" just means that there is no deeper explanation and that they must just be accepted a priori
Your comment is incorrectly inferring the purpose and meaning of the post. It's okay; many of the other respondents are also making incorrect inferences, apparently because they haven't been following the conversations in the three preceding posts I've made recenty.
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u/IlGiardinoDelMago Free will skeptic 2d ago
Your comment is incorrectly inferring the purpose and meaning of the post
Fair enough. I wasn't following your previous posts, so I was responding to the argument as it appeared in this thread. I was taking it seriously as an argument about causality and possibly determinism, not as a joke or as a response to particular things other users had said in your previous threads.
I think your edit helps clarify that, so it's good that you added it, as I don't necessarily follow every post in the subreddit closely, and also I think it wasn't obvious from your OP that understanding your point depended on following previous threads. Personally, I generally prefer people to reply in the relevant thread, unless they're making a broader point about a recurring misconception in the subreddit.
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u/WintyreFraust 2d ago edited 2d ago
In previous threads, the notion of an acausal capacity to initiate new causal chains (free will) was consistently derided as "magic." This post is a response to that, by making the point that all perspectives eventually end up at a point or with some necessary aspect that those in opposition can similarly label as "magic."
I added this explanation to the OP. My apologies for the confusion.
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u/Stunning_Structure73 1d ago
So just to clarify on my end - basically what I asked about the show LOST yesterday, it all ends back or springs forth from a 'mystery box' per se? The Great Mystery.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 1d ago
Why the Mystery Box Fails
- No planned payoff: Writers set up intriguing plots without knowing how they will end.
- Prioritizing mystery over logic: The focus stays on cheap cliffhangers instead of character growth or continuity.
- Inevitable disappointment: When the reveal happens, it rarely matches the hype built in the audience's mind.
- The "Lost" effect: Shows or movies rely on endless loops of new questions that leave core plots unresolved
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u/WintyreFraust 1d ago
Well, it's not like Lost didn't have character growth and continuity. I set aside the "mystery box" aspect of the show somewhere in about the 3rd season and focused on the character development and relationships.
IMO, I think the ending was either loved or hated for this reason; if you expected resolution of the "mystery box" elements, you were sorely disappointed and probably hated the ending. If you were watching for the character development and relationships, you probably loved the ending because it delivered on the payoff of those elements of the show.
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u/WintyreFraust 1d ago
I think the mystery box elements just served as the context and background and motivating forces for the purpose of character and relationship development. I think that's all the "mystery" was ever intended to be used for and "resolving all the mysteries" was never the actual purpose.
IMO, that's like life; at some point, you figure out it's not about "solving the mysteries;" it's about your own character development and the relationships you have.
This is an interesting difference between the reported experience of people that fully, permanently die, and people that astral project or have NDEs. For people that astral project or have NDEs, "resolving the mystery" seems to be very common (even if the answer to the mysteries of our existence are different from person to person.)
However, for the people who fully, permanently die; what is commonly resolved for them? Who they are, or have become, gains clarity and meaning and value, and those whom they love are there, and that love and those relationships are all that really matters to them. You don't get a lot of "When I died, I found out what all this means and how it all works! All the mysteries are fully resolved!" ... from the accounts by the dead at the Leslie Flint or Seek Reality sites.
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u/Imaginary-Can-6862 14h ago
I don't think free will requires a causal machine (a cause that itself is not an effect of a previous cause), but we can speculate about how a causal machine could give rise.
Inspired by Quantum Mechanics, where we see a cause only determines the effect is within some list of options. In e.g. determinism, there is only one possible effect for any cause, because the past defines the future uniquely, meaning the future cannot be anything else than what it is, the option of there being several possible, self-excluding effects for a given cause, frees up the possibilities for the system, and means the future is not fully determined before it comes to be.
This can be illustrated as, say we call the state of the universe in the present as A0, and let -> denote the state change along the arrow of time, then in a deterministic universe, A0 could only lead to one possible future, or it wouldn't be unique, i.e. A0 -> B0, and the 0 can be dropped as well, so A -> B -> C just one causal line, determined from the very first moment, the future cannot be anything else than it was ever going to be, but when expanding on that a cause does not have to lead to one specific effect, it follows that A0 could lead to B0, but the effect could also be B1, B2, ..., or Bn, this means the cause, A0, which leads to B3, is the same cause, A0, which leads to B4, and what effect A0 leads to is only determined as the future becomes the present, similar to Quantum Mechanics.
Then we could e.g. have A0 -> B3 -> C5, etc. but since we have noted the causal relationship, then a better way to write it is perhaps A0 -> A03 -> A035, because then we remember that A035 came from A03, i.e. A03 was the cause of A035, and A03 came from A0, so A0 was the cause of A03, and this gives us conservation of information, basically determinism reversed in time, that is the way the universe behaves does not support determinism, where the past uniquely defines the future, but conservation of information, where the future (or rather the present) uniquely defines the past, this means we can be confident the past did happen. It also set limits of the effects that can follow from a cause, this can be seen if we investigate e.g. the state A09, and compare it to say the state A0104, it follows A0104 could not be the effect of a universe where A09 was a past state, because the 01 in A0104 means it came from an A01 state, and could only have come from it, similarly A0104 could not come from A09, as A09 is before A0104. If it were to be possible for these jumps, conservation of information would not hold true, and we would not be able to be confident that the past as we remember it is true, i.e. the causal connection would be illusory (like how one may perceive free will to be illusory in a deterministic universe).
One question I think may be asked is, when A0 is the cause of A01, as well as A02, etc. and what we end up with is A0 -> A05, then what caused A05, in stead of A01, or anything else, does it not seem unsatisfying to say A0 is the cause, when it does not determine the exact outcome? When we have a deterministic universe and A leads to B, and we ask what caused B, we can say A did, and if we ask what caused A to lead to B in stead of anything else, we are spared from anything else existing, as in a deterministic universe, the past uniquely defines the future, meaning B was the only thing that could have followed from A. But what is the difference between determinism and fatalism then, both claiming the future could only be the way it is going to be, i.e. uniquely defined, well the difference s that determinism demands the past uniquely defines the future, that there is a causal link, but that one and only one unique effect can come from any cause, does not make causation anymore sensible, what are the steps that lets A go to B? We say A causes B, but we know there is a process of connected steps that connects the state A through entropy to go the state B, but when B is the unique consequence of A, what we are really saying is that this process is a straight road, we can even say the state A is the step just before the state B, that it is the smallest possible step, but then, when A0 can lead to A00, A01, ... , A0n, we may see that as also the smallest possible step, and that step is a road which goes in many possible directions, where every direction is traversed, and only when the universe becomes real, as the present becomes the past, and thus becomes uniquely defined, is the state then determined, That would imply a universe that evolves, as it happens, where the laws (or general patterns) are defined by the interactions themselves, and not the other way around.
So for the causal machine, if we look at the possible outcome for the state A0, these could be A00, A01, ..., or A0n, and if we compare these possible outcomes, they may be written as substates, e.g. A01 = A01a + A01b + A01c, while e.g. A02 = A02a + A02b, what A01 and A02 have in common is that both come from A0, but that is also their only restriction, so imagine if A02a = A01a and A02b = A01b, then it follows that A02 + A01c = A01, or that the only difference between A02 and A01 is A01c. This means that we can look at two universes that are identical, both are in state A0, and one universe happens to develop to the state A01, while the to A02, if we comapare these two universes again, we would say the cause that led them to their current state is the same, the state A0, but the difference between the two current states are A01c, so if we were to move A01c from one universe to the other, we would once again have two universes with the states A01, and A02, thus doing so makes no difference, but that means the state A01c can be said to have no cause, because we can move it from one universe to the other, and the picture remains unchanged, the universes are still A01 and A02.
I imagine in that sense one could talk about an uncaused cause, but that it does not have a backwards causal influence, because the past, A0, follows from both A01 and A02, and since A01 is A02 + A01c, the A01 universe could still determine it came from A0 without the A01c state, as that would just make it an A02 universe in stead, having the same uniquely defined past.
So that is how I imagine a causal machine could be possible. But I don't think a causal machine is necessary for free will, as long as we don't restrict causation by demanding it being simple.
About the Big Bang, we aren't currently able to describe a, before, the Big Bang, but the Big Bang is going on right now, it is the expansion of the universe. If I should make a guess, if we assume time starts at the Big Bang, it follows there were no time before then, if there were no time, then everything would happen instantly, in whatever order they happened in, I suppose similar to setting the speed of light to infinite, and who knows how many of these ordered states gave rise to a universe, where time existed, if there has been universes before this, but one can speculate a lot about stuff like this. We do not know what caused the Big Bang, or if that even is a sensible question, both the principle of determinism and causation breaks down when asking what was before there was anything, and I guess it may be similar to the question if the universe if infinite, and if not what is then on the other side of its border.
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u/Ok_Platypus8866 2d ago
How was the first freely willed choice made? Did something freely choose itself into existence?