Submitted by philosophybreak t3_117z7oh in philosophy
Epicurus also taught that the universe is infinite and eternal and that all matter is made up of tiny, invisible particles called atoms.
All occurrences in the natural world are ultimately the result of atoms moving and interacting in empty space.
“Epicurus deviated from Democritus by proposing the idea of atomic ‘swerve’, which holds that atoms may deviate from their expected course, thus permitting humans to possess free will in an otherwise deterministic universe.”
I like the cut of his jib.
Ahead of the... swerve?
The swervature of spacetime.
General wigglitivity.
Jiggle theory
That’s a solid album name right there
More likely a bar in Amsterdam but I wouldn't completely pass the opportunity to listen to the album
Epicurus was ahead of the curve in so many ways. The stoics get all the praise, but epicurus really laid the groundwork for a lot of what the stoics proclaimed.
He also got rid of 'fate' which to me always seemed to be another cop out and appeal to a higher power rather than people engaging with the extent of their autonomy.
"it is my fate"/"it's god's will", some bullshit lol
Yes, Epicurus was unusual in his era for putting forth a mechanistic, deterministic theory of the universe, governed by natural laws, not functioning pursuant to teleological "final causes" in the Aristotelian sense. The Aristotelian desire to describe the universe in terms of purposes and telos would persist in Europe until the early modern period.
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I don't think fate is the same as determinism. Doesn't fate imply some divine plan that has been set for you?
"the development of events beyond a person's control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power."
Going by Google I'd have to agree with you. However, supernatural power is by definition unfalsifiable. We have no idea and we can never know.
It doesn't really matter though, as long as you don't claim to know the future.
Edit: "atoms may deviate from their expected course, thus permitting humans to possess free will" this is a logical leap into the supernatural. The idea that we somehow have the ability to influence matter from outside it's causal structure.
Possible through QM with GR no?
Uh I guess I have no idea
How? Neither describes anything but deterministic or probabilistic physics.
But if QM is interfered with external to the universal set its non-deterministic [big if]
How would that happen?
Within plank definition
Sorry, you lost me.
Take a snoop at this. https://youtu.be/_Y8HgmOoLCM
This doesn’t say anything about free will. Are you trying to surmise that there are free-will-endowing agents at scales smaller than we can currently examine?
Not necessarily, just that that's the interface at which they would act iif that were the case. But by definition its not what we can currently examine - it's what our model of physics defines elementary by the energy mass defintion.
I wouldn’t think so. QM is probabilistic but things don’t randomly swerve like in Epicurean physics.
Right but the probability is based on the observer structure within the universal set, which could mean 'observation' within the probably include variances outside the universal set by some nonenergy defined process
No
Tangent but I was thinking about it last night lol
The thing that interests me right now is the isolation of the consciousness from outside causes. You could argue that there is no barrier such that outside stimuli influence the brain and the chemicals it creates and thus how we choose. But it's this idea of consideration, of thinking. A pause to consider pathways. We can be influenced but does this ever determine the outcome? Does a time of deliberation within the mind ever create a break in causality, and thus free will? Or is deliberation equally something with a direct cause?
Like have you ever thought of something and been set on a certain understanding, thought about it, and a new understanding upends your perspective? Was that determined to happen? What was the influence upon this sudden intuition? Could it be that this change is not from a causal chain but emergent from the mind?
What's been on my mind is energy. We can imagine possibility. How does the mind have this creativity if it is set in stone? Is the ability to imagine myself in a lego castle determined? Is it possible to imagine something we have not perceived? If a mind creates an alien species like in Peter Watts Blindsight, did he achieve this from causes influencing him or was it the potential of his brain to create new ideas? Even if his creature is made of things he has seen, how can this lead to him combining patterns, thoughts, and ideas into something that is not real? Is there a break from one thing to another such that free will exists and that we choose our path through consideration of possibilities that do not yet exist but are imagined?
Random idea: in the show Dark (all the spoilers) >!the loop is destroyed through a loophole where time is completely stopped, and so cause and effect is effectively stopped. A break. Does time exist within the mind, and therefore does cause and effect exist there?!<
I believe most of what goes on is unconscious, so to claim you know yourself completely is like knowing the future. You can make predictions and be good at it but only the future can tell you what it holds. Only after death can your entire story be told.
The mind is an emergent property of brain stuff. It's like a game that emerges from a rule set. Can the game break the rules? Even when one of the rules is to follow the causal chain? I don't think the chain can be broken. It's my assumption.
I think the only reason anyone would assume the chain can be broken is a feeling. The feeling of agency, the feeling of self. Things that we absolutely unconsciously construct in our minds to be able to make decisions. It's decision making machinery.
Imo. I'll always assume that the causal chain cannot be broken. I guess until I don't
Why not indeterminism?
Wow, didn't realized he guessed at quantum uncertainty. That does not affect human brains as far as we know (too big & hot for quantum behaviors), but still, he is prescient.
No, he did not. Reading quantum theories into the unusable non-scientific ideas of Greeks gets it backward. It looks familiar because the Europeans who spearheaded the scientific revolution came from a tradition whose education was so steeped in Greek philosophy that they borrowed the language for their original and unrelated ideas. looking around and saying big things tend to be made up of smaller component parts that have some sort of behavior is the extent of their insight.
>big things tend to be made up of...extent of their insight
Specifically, "swerve" being nondeterministic looks a little like quantum superposition/wave function collapse. That's the extent of my comment, and I do think it's notable.
No, obviously, he didn't observe quantum mechanics. Yes, I know early particle philosophy was guess work. I fully stand by my original comment.
I guess I see his use of atomic swerve as a generalization being made to justify his desired outcome, which is a universe, where humans have free will. So, I wouldn't see it as an insight based on intuition about the nature of the universe that ultimately proves to be precient. It looks to me like he starts from the assumption that humans have free will, and if he wants that to be true, it's gonna be a problem for humans to be made up of a bunch of billiard balls knocking around in a completely determined way. So his solution is just to say, but what if they don't do that. If the insight is pointing out, a discontinuity between deterministic cause and effect and free will, fair enough. Anything beyond that feels a stretch because if you don't want a deterministic universe without free will, and you don't want to ditch atoms entirely, you are only gonna be left with atoms that are not deterministic. So, the paradox kinda creates a problem for determinism that is partially explained by quantum mechanics (similar to plank lengths with xemos paradox). If that's the interesting part, fair enough.
Swerve was just the philosophers’ way of arguing for free will against deterministic ideas right?
I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior. Not any that is freely willed. I genuinely don’t understand why people are always trying to fit free will into their theories or philosophies, like it’s some innate thing that is self evident. I have seen videos where otherwise very intelligent people explain some mind blowing physics concept and then they’re like “well, that would be the case, but we know it’s wrong because it leaves out free will.” I thought it was just an axiom for the theist, but why then do scientifically inclined individuals still hold out hope for the discovery of free will? I just don’t understand it, and it seems frustrating.
I've started to believe that free will is simply a bad concept. It doesn't even make any sense. Its not that we have or don't have free will, but that it simply is a made up idea that doesn't actually refer to anything real.
The problem is that the self is itself an illusion, and free will is trying to determine if the the main cause of behavior is from within the self or not. Therefor any claim of free will - or no free will - will be completely arbitrary.
> The problem is that the self is itself an illusion,
As someone who firmly believes in the same notion, it is a pretty wild thing to just assert it as a known fact. Thousands of years have passed debating this very concept, and the roots of consciousness still evade us to this day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m on the “self is an illusion” team, and being born in the land of the Buddha, we’ve had some interesting variations of this notion. But it isn’t established knowledge. If it were the question of “will” would dissolve away entirely.
>The problem is that the self is itself an illusion
I've found these claims largely come down to how the self is initially conceptualised, someone might say the self is some "inner entity" within experience, upon which someone else may say no it's not, therefore it's declared illusory (similar to how Harris argues for the illusory self). Someone else may simply define self as not a "thing" one has but a "thing" one is, i.e talk of "self" is just talk of the human being I am, not talk of some "self" I own/have. It can largely just come down to linguistics & how we define "self" etc, it's an extremely jumbled topic & can also be conflated with maintenance of personal identity, which is largely a different philosophical discussion. Overall though, I don't see that there is any genuine "problem" of the self, rather just countless linguistic confusions & various moves people make. See here -
Yeah, I agree with this take. The self is just a mental conception that is used by the human animal to set a boundary between what he is directly responsible for and what is the outside world. While the self is a real, definite thing that all humans construct, I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment, yet it is optimal to operate as if that is the case for survival.
>I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment
It's not clear to me why that should be an illusion, I don't see why individuation can't exist via certain boundary conditions, for example I can't access your mind, you can't access my mind, we're located in different spatial coordinates etc. Unless there's some ultimate "one" solipsistic mind which we are all fragments of, I don't see anything much illusory regarding individuation.
I personally believe in extended mind theory. I would consider your distance to me the only real thing that prevents your mind from not being accessible to me. But the people around me they go have their own life experience, and then I probe them for their perspective when I require it. Sure I don’t have access to their entire mind, just like I don’t have access to the entire internet (for example, it would be impossible for me to watch every YouTube video) yet I can still answer virtually any question I have through researching via this extended mind. Your personal thoughts like what constitute your identity or your feelings towards a girl aren’t really useful to me, so it’s not so bad if they get filtered before reaching the societal mind. But the people around me I would certainly consider their minds, at least what they are willing to communicate to me, as an accessible part of my own mind. But that muddies the boundaries for my self concept. But my self concept still remains, whether it’s boundaries are muddied or not, I still will use terms like me and I, and that is just a concrete fact that this mental system exists. The illusion is that these boundaries must be set where we have traditionally set them. I am of the opinion I have responsibility to maintain not only my own life, but the life of the people I care about. If my best friend were to die, it would genuinely feel like a part of my own self died; like I lost a piece of my own mind. When I dropped my phone in a lake while kayaking, I lost a part of my mind, many ideas I chose to store on it rather than in my brain or on the internet, and now they’re gone.
Also to add, one does not get to choose what their own preferences are, so there cannot be free will. Our preferences come from genetics and knowledge passed down to us from generation to generation /culture. No where is there an individual deciding all these things.
>I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior.
It's easy to take random noise and turn it into meaningful results. Look at Perlin noise generators or how video games use seeds.
I can happily believe that true random 'swerve' of simple elements can be exploited by evolutionary processes to lead to a sort of 'weighted decision maker'. Couple that to consciousness and you've got free will.
How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything? Deviations from what we expect, but suggesting that is the same as deviating from causality suggests also that we have a perfect grasp on all things down to the most basic and miniscule of scales, and that we understand 100% all things and their infinitely interconnected causal relations. I do not believe we are that all-knowing.
>How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything?
We can't.
Remember, I'm responding to the 'what if' of 'what if there was truely random swerve'. If there was true random swerve, then I could see how evolutionary processes could exploit that. I'm not say we can determine whether or not atoms have truely random swerve.
You seem to redefine free will here. Even a ‘weighted calculation’ wouldn’t amount to free will. That’s just another bias our brains would use when making calculations. Free will would require that against all odds, you still possess the ability of choosing your future out of multiple possible futures. That the responsibility of the situation you’re in lies mostly on yourself. That at any point in your life, you could have made a decision differently via unbound will. If you replayed a choice in your life like chocolate vs white milk at lunch, say you chose chocolate, determinism would say that you could replay infinite times and you would choose chocolate every time. With your suggestion of the weighted calculations based one random quantum probability, if replayed, and the quantum probability was like 70% odds chocolate, 25% odds white, 3% odds strawberry, and 2% you don’t take a milk, then when replayed an infinite amount of times over, your behavior would match that spread. Where is the free will in that? It happened according to a mathematical function that existed well before and after your existence. Just laws of a universe much bigger than the individual self.
True randomness is just as inexplicable as free will. What determines the outcome? A mysterious thing called the will or nothing at all? An undetermined yet somehow concrete outcome sounds pretty paradoxical.
The point is if an outside observer cannot predict the outcome, it's impossible to say anything further about it, either declaring it random or an act of will.
Lol you’re arguing that quantum uncertainty “could be random, could be god idk”
Well, yeah
Maybe in some sort of obligatory defense of the status-quo (conscious or subconscious); ultimately even science is limited by institutional structures, presumably. Kind of lays to rest the idea that anyone and everyone can pull themselves out of any given societal/socioeconomic condition with enough personal responsibility.
Though I’ve been reading a lot of Marx lately, so I might be a tad influenced/biased with this take.
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That's interesting! Does the sum of the atomic swerves determine the will - which doesn't sound free to me - or does the will determine the sum of the atomic swerves?
This has nothing to do with epicureanism, but I always thought micro-phenomena determine macro-phenomena - that seems more obvious to me - but you can also think about the possibility of macro-phenomena determining micro-phenomena.
For example in video games, sometimes when a character walks over rough terrain or stairs, the legs are positioned such that the body in a specified position is supported by them. Keyword "inverse kinematics" How Link's Climbing Animation Works in Breath of the Wild (10:48)
Maybe it's impossible to determine if the real world works "process-oriented" bottom-up or "goal-oriented" top-down. It might be impossible to determine empirically. When you assume a bottom-up physics, you will find a bottom-up physical laws (~ forward kinematics). In games, the apparent laws of physics are sometimes broken when no satisfying reason for a desired goal state can be found. That's when a character hovers in the air, "because" their feet aren't long enough to reach the ground or when a character is too far away from the place he is supposed to be, he is yanked there by invisible rubber bands.
'your' world (that is, your experienced reality) probably does both. There is always a bottom-up process orientation happening to resist the ground and gravity and that determines which hemisphere of your brain is getting more pressure-generated sensation and therefore more activity depending on the leg you're standing on. That orientation then also has to form the basis of a goal-oriented hand-to-ground stability that works in more of a top-down manner. For the large majority of humans that usually happens on the right side/left hemisphere
Do we control this atomic swerve or is it down to some other factor out of our control?
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