I would probably start from the classic Schrodinger's Cat example. Let me introduce time into the scenario, say the cat has a 50% chance of dying in the box after 10 seconds have passed. Per your common sense, you would think that after 10 seconds, there will have been an outcome, the cat is either alive or dead.

But here's the weird part, there actually won't be an outcome after 10 seconds, unless you actually open the box to observe an outcome. 20 seconds can have passed, and the cat is actually still either alive or dead. And it will continue to be in this limbo until it's actually observed. It's weird right? You would think that simply observing is a passive action on your part that shouldn't affect or influence any outcomes.

So one theory to explain this is that reality branches into two different timelines, one where the cat dies and one where it doesn't. And this may very well relate to the concept of the 4th dimension.

No that's actually what I'm saying. It's ALL semantics. Actual truth/reality is not words, only theories and concepts.

" A tree has leaves" is false because "tree" is a word, nothing like an actual, tangible tree. How can a word have leaves? The statement is true in the linguistic, semantic sense only.

Basically all truths experienced by us have to be translated into words before they can be spoken to ourselves or others. So anytime we communicate, the recipient gets the words, not the true, actual things.

EDIT: TL;DR: There is objective truth, but you can't tell anyone, including yourself.

I think there’s a big leap here.

So our senses aren’t entirely reliable, and it’s conceivable that we experience colors differently. Is reality itself called into question by this!

Has any doubt been raised about wavelengths of light? Or minds?

I think there are some interesting arguments here and there (fine-tuning's one example). It's interesting to consider because it may have some combination of certain metaphysical implications (mind-body dualism, idealism, afterlife, reincarnation), but it is true that it could be possible that these metaphysics may also exist in a creatorless universe. After all, we've yet to solve such issues as bridging the gap between general relativity and quantum physics, consciousness, etc.

Organized religion, kind of a separate matter, is definitely pretty common for humans, though. Whether for social community or authoritarian inclinations of opportunists.

I already had a pretty good grasp of a 4th spatial dimension, not the mathematics behind it, but how to imagine it or how we might perceive certain actions from our 3D point of view. Gave me a lot of new ideas about the universe, especially black holes. However, it didn't help me in trying to grasp quantum physics, but I imagine this could possibly use even more extra dimensions.

Anyway, I understand the point you wanted to make. And now we're really starting to lose track of the topic 😅

Essentially this is a map vs territory issue. Our senses - which is all we have - can tell us what something looks, tastes, feel like, but absolutely cannot tell us what something is. Our brains allow us to create a model from this data, say for instance that the red thing that tastes that way is a tomato. That is then a theory. If more and more evidence backs up that theory, we can be more and more confident that the theory is accurate. But we can never really 'know' the underlying reality of a thing. Apart from anything else, the whole thing could just be an illusion, but even without considering that extreme case, it could be that it's another thing that's very similar to a tomato in most ways but has important differences. At the end of the day, though, all that matters from a practical point of view is whether by treating it as a tomato we are at risk of failing to predict how it will behave in any given circumstance. Prediction of the unknown is the only worthwhile property of a map. The existence or nature of any underlying 'reality' simply doesn't matter.

If your looking for a rabbit hole to go down, explore the concepts of "Slave Morality" and "Master Morality" its a bit of an advanced start but wetting the palette is never a bad thing.

I like the analogy.

For all we know, our current state of brain analysis is a blind person sitting in a house, trying to figure out if it will rain tomorrow.

The task seems impossible, though an astute individual could possibly make some accurate prediction based on information that seems invisible to most. However impressive this skill, it would be nothing compared to modern meteorology and its vast array of thermometers, barometers, radars, satellites and dozens of other measuring tools. A few hundred years ago it would have been sorcery.

Of course I don’t think that we are the exact same thing as a single organic cell. From a certain point of view we are completely different thing (in fact a cell is not made up of billions of cells).

I was just trying to show that from another point of view, cells show complex behavior as a whole, but you wouldn’t say that the single cell has free will.

I think the first thing to accept is that we're 3-dimensionally bound beings, and we're still trying to figure out how to grasp the 4th dimension.

Best way to explain why 4D is tricky to grasp, is by going down a level in the comparison: pretend we're 2D beings trying to understand 3D.

If we're 2D beings, then that means we can perceive height and width, but not depth. That means you would be unable to see a sphere, but you would be able to see each 2D circle of it, if you were to slice the sphere into tiny cross sections.

Picture a sphere resting on a piece of paper. The flat circle it imprints on the paper would just be a dot. As you lower the sphere through the paper, the circle it leaves on the paper keeps getting bigger until you reach the middle of the sphere. At which point it will go back to being smaller again as you continue to lower it, eventually ending up back at the dot.

So while you can never actually see the entire sphere all at once for yourself, you would theoretically be able to infer the true nature of the sphere by stacking all these circles on top of each other. However the problem here is that you wouldn't even understand the concept of stacking the circles. The only thing you can perceive for yourself, is the 2D circle increasing and decreasing. It's difficult to try to imagine the sphere, when you've never seen a 3D object.

And it's even worse if a 1D being tries to grasp the sphere. They would only see a dot that grows into a line, which then shrinks back into the dot. To infer that you're looking at a sphere, you would have to take note of the fact that the line expands at a higher rate initially, only to eventually slow down in its growth until it stops. And actually, you don't have enough information available to you to actually conclude that it's a sphere. It could be a cylinder or cone lying on its side with the circle facing you, you'll never know.

So yeah, sorry if this seemed off-topic, but I just think the first thing to wrap your head around when trying to understand quantum physics is that our natural senses are limited. Things aren't supposed to make sense or feel intuitive, when you're punching a dimension above you.

We are not just the sum of our cells because emergent properties exist, and those always show complex behavior that are not intrinsically present in the individual cell.

Much like an ant: she doesn’t own the whole knowledge needed to run a colony, but sure as hell the whole colony does.

> So what good does it do me what the objective truth is?

I don't disagree that true propositions that aren't known to me, aren't useful to me.

I just don't draw the conclusion that "true" and "possible to know" is the same concept. Maybe that depends on what possible means. Like "theoretically possible" vs "practically possible".

> There might in fact be an objective Truth [...] assuming the objective Truth is the red ball is there [...]

This looks to me like you agree that unknowable truths can exist.

You say there are propositions that can be true without anyone knowing them as it happens to be, such as a particular person is a philosophical zombie - a biological robot, or there being water on a planet beyond the observable universe.

You say that there are no true propositions without anyone knowing them because they are impossible to know, by principle, such as undetectable ghosts existing or them not existing.

Is that correct? That would be less controversial than if propositions of the first category couldn't be true either. I'm not sure, maybe the philosophical zombie belongs in the second category. Consciousness is weird anyway.

Can you think of good examples that people really care about in the second category - principally unknowable, and therefore impossible to be true or false claims?

Supernatural claims often just propose alternative physics. People say that ghosts act against the laws of physics, but they could theoretically exists and if they turned out to exists, the written laws of physics would need to be adjusted to accomodate them.

The existance of the judeochristian god is a weird claim. It depends how he is actually defined. Maybe god according to an unfalsifiable definition would occupy this space of neither true or false.

Is god's existance an example of unknowable claim? Does it make the claim neither true nor false or just false?

You can ignore the rest if you don't have much time.

"Possible" is an interesting word. I have a theory that possibility as opposed to certainty always has something to do with incomplete knowledge. In a universe without conscious humans with blind spots, there is no "possibility". It's not an inherent property of a shuffled deck of cards to be random. It can just be random to an observer. That's my weird theory.

If I'm correct then there is no difference between a fact that is impossible to know and a fact that I just happen not to know. Everything that is not actually the case, is impossible and everything that is the case, is impossible to be different. Possibility only arises when you don't know some facts or ignore them.

Well, maybe there are levels of impossibility. I can get to late to work, because I didn't set an alarm. Given that fact, it is impossible to arrive on time - but this excuse won't impress my boss. If I had to break the laws of physics or even logic, that's an arguably deeper level of impossibility.

That reads more like a demonstration of supposed randomness to me.

I think that-given enough raw data and the power to sort and process it-even that animal, number, time etc. might turn out to be not so random.

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Yes, the whole emerges from the parts AND the parts are irrelevant to certain questions.

It's not obvious that would be the case. That's why I wrote a whole paper about it. I want to do a better job of explaining it, but I already put my best effort into the explanations in the paper.

That first part sums up what I've understood about it. Also, I think that despite it not allowing future predictions, you could predict or calculate a certain amount of probability of getting a specific future result and that the result is also subjective to the method of observing it. Which I think can give reasons to suspect determinism

The second part is also a nice clarification of how or why it could suggest free will as far as I understand it. Then again, I've also seen explanations of how it can suggest determinism. And I'm not sure I completely understand any of them. At least I know that at this moment, nobody really knows all the answers yet, still leaving it in a state of superposition until we find a way to measure it.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your clarification! Think I learned something 🙂

Being a writer, I am a little worried about being made irrelevant by the next version of ChatGPT. But a month ago, I actually tried to get the current version to of ChatGPT to generate the main idea of this free will paper. I couldn't get it to succeed without feeding it the answer. That made me feel a little better, but I'm still concerned about the future.

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The point with the molecules it that after acknowledgeing the whole emerges from parts you casually say the parts are irrelevant. And now you're ignoring what the guy said of it.

Ultimately, it's hilarious to posit Laplace's Demon and then try to define it at all.

The author talks about "red." People with sight have a sense of "red" that blind people don't. Laplace's Demon, though? Nah, that guy couldn't possibly know anything about time, quantum mechanics, or anything else that might blow a giant hole in every one of my arguments. Not possible.

Honestly. Even extant philosophy can point towards versions of the demon that wouldn't be surprised by anything - not even these systems that are "undecidable," because that "undecideability" relies upon McTaggart's A-series time being an objective, cosmic truth. The paper itself concedes that we should be wary of that premise because of those weird quantum mechanics experiments.

How hard is it to posit that Laplace's Demon sees the universe via B-series time instead? Nothing's unknowable then, so long as everything is determinate. By brute force, if nothing else, the demon knows every output of the algorithm.

Now, does the demon not knowing why the algorithm produces those outputs count as a surprise? Maybe? But then I repeat my point from my own top-level comment: how in the heck isn't the human "agent" equally, or more, surprised by their own actions?

If we begin to elevate "Holy shit why did I do that? I don't even know!" to a truth of the determined universe, I think we've found yet another argument against free will. Perhaps some clever chap will come along to redefine "free" (yet again, and again, and again) as "totally unmoored from literally everything," thus raising an immediate contradiction with the "will" part.

Plot Twist- ChatGPT wrote this.

No, I think quantum effects do propagate up into the macro world. But that's just beside the point of what I argue in the paper.

Your guesses about what I mean haven't been great so far. I would explain what I mean, but that was the whole point of writing the paper. If you don't want to read it, don't. But it is the explanation of what I mean.

Regarding god, if there were a being that created the universe, I would expect something to suggest that, which is not the case. Furthermore, even if we entertained the idea of a creator it would not be one that stuck around. It is abundantly clesr that the universe has ran itself since its inception, whether that inception was some concious entity's design is interesting, but ultimately unlikely and makes no difference to reality.

The idea of a creator being needed is a human construct, it follows our instinct, nothing else in reality suggests the need for a creator.

I'm not exactly certain what you are saying but I think the implication is that you posit that the quantum uncertainty doesn't have an influence on the macro universe in a direct way. Every experiment with quantum mechanics that proves its existence and defines its properties are an undeniable example of quantum effects directly affecting the macro universe and therefore must be taken into account.

But none of this really matters in a discussion of free will. No action can be taken without that action being directly affected by genetic predispositions and environmental influences. You can not have free control over your genetic predispositions nor do you have free control over your environmental influences therefore no action can ever be made that is a free action.