Is human thought deterministic or probabilistic?

False dichotomy.

Even if a series of events is probabilistic, there’s still no room for ‘agency’ under the current understanding of Physics (yes; capital P).

Therefore, the problem of consciousness (for many the problem of volition) cannot be solved by invoking quantum theory. We’re still just along for the ride, except the ride is unpredictable.

All I know is that it’s highly probable I just walked into the wrong room. This is WAY too high-brow for lowly me.

Why can’t it be both at the same time?

It is an interesting article. Human beings don’t think in a deterministic way I don’t believe. The world is too complex and dynamic for that to work. And where do quantum effects end anyway, they are manifest in all sorts of ways in the ‘real’ world we all experience.

@the100thmonkey Thanks. I appreciate the challenge to my thinking. You rightly saw where I was heading with this. In rebuttal, I would say there is no more proof that “agency” doesn’t exist than there is proof it does. Just because we don’t know how something works does not mean that it doesn’t work. The possibility exists that free will is an emergent phenomenon growing out of self-programming, self-teaching neural networks within a probabilistic brain. We already know that such neural networks are a major part of what allows us to learn, and to form analogies. This isn’t speculation, it’s hard science.

@picante GA award for you. This may be the most honest answer I’ll get to this question. Those in the scientific community who totally grasp its nuances tend to have already grouped into ideological camps unwilling to consider that anything other than their answer might be right.

@Lightlyseared My best guess is that this is exactly what it is.

@flutherother Excellent point. While quantum mechanics applies to subatomic levels, the entire Universe is made up of things ruled by quantum mechanics. I suspect we’ll learn much more when we perfect quantum computing.

No. If you know how a person thinks [you are a close friend] you might know how is he going to react but not all the time. And this, only, if you know him or else you will just try to guess.

Oh and it comes to other things. One might try to see how another will think and the first one just do a bunch of random things without knowing the outcome. How can one try and guess the probability when even the person doing them doesn’t know these things. Leave a question mark ^^

Let’s see.. What was the word before quantum? That’s It!! It was what it was before the word quantum.. There, now until a better word is created to describe it, we shall use the word quantum. (amen)

It’s probabilistic. As is the entire universe. Nothing behaves the same way every time given the same initial state. Not that there can be the same initial state, but never mind. Even if something happens the same way except once in a trillion times, there is that once that makes the response probabilistic.

Our thought processes are much more probabilistic than that. No way to predict them.

@ETpro – I accept the hard science, although just how ‘hard’ emergentism actually is remains to be seen, in my opinion – it’s still a hypothesis that attempts to explain how concsciousness arises deus ex machina.

Besides, conflating complexity theory with quantum theory is a category mistake, is it not?

Maybe I’m not following, but it seems that invoking quantum probability to neurobiology ends not with agency or with determinism, but rather determinism with a sprinkling of randomness.

@wundayatta Weather is probabilistic and still “predictable” to a large degree. Light in a vacuum behaves the same way given the same initial state.

@Hibernate GA! What a clever way of saying “I know that I don’t know.” :-)

@chewhorse I’m not sure what you are asking. The word before quantum in my question was “the”. The Bible’s answer to what was the word before quantum is “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1. In physics, the word before quantum mechanics was classical mechanics. Most automobile repair is still done by classical mechanics. I’ve never gotten good results from a tune up by a quantum mechanic.

@wundayatta I believe you are absolutely right, and that Henri Poincaré‘s Principle_of_relativity_and_Lorentz_transformations proves that.

@the100thmonkey Re a category mistake, I do not see that. I believe that I laid out solid logic leading to the linkage. You’;re certainly welcome to assail that logic. I’ve been wrong before, and if I am wrong in this, I’d like to know it.

@crazyivan Weather is relatively predictable in the two to three day range, but even then, massive mistakes do occur. Longer range forecasting is so shaky as to be useless. THe Farmer’s Almanac is equal in accuracy to long range forecasting done by our best supercomputers running models with all measurable initial conditions.

As to light in a vacuum botle, I believe there is a flaw in that argument. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity states that it is relative. Special Relativity “generalizes Galileo’s principle of relativity—that all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (no privileged reference frames)—from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be. Special relativity incorporates the principle that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers regardless of the state of motion of the source.”

Of course, each individual photon of light still behaves like both a particle and a wave. In a classic double-slit experiment, it will create an interference pattern with itself. Measurement of its particle state collapses the state, so that no prediction of its future state is possible after having measured its initial condition. It’s future state is entirely probalistic, is it not?

It’s worse than a category mistake, @ETpro, it’s a failure of basic reading comprehension.

The actual article in The New Scientist clearly states that the authors of the paper do not draw a link between quantum mechanics and cognition (let alone consciousness). Instead, the authors note that certain elements of decision-making, for example, seem not to follow the rules of formal logic and are instead better described with the mathematics (logic) of quantum mechanics.

Category mistake? I think so.

Now, if you wish to make the link between quantum mechanics and the emergence of consciousmess in biological organisms, please do, and be sure to link me to the peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals that support your case.

I would note that any relationship between the two is not a necessary one, as properties emerge from systems way above the quantum level.

@crazyivan If you lived around here, you might rethink your view that weather is predictable “to a large degree.” And don’t forget the number of neurons in the brain. Data about weather represents a very small number of observations compared to the number of observations that could be made, but you probably couldn’t make a similar proportion of observations of a brain only if you had a quantum computer and even then, it would take far longer that it would take to simply observe the brain at work, even though the quantum computer can make an infinite number of analyses at the same time. You limit would be on the amount of data gathered, anyway.

@the100thmonkey I did stray into the possibility of emergence explaining sentience, but that was not the intention of the original question. I know of no papers proving that sentience is an emergent phenomenon. What I have seen is speculation—posing the question, not answering it.

What I am more interested in here is whether the Universe itself is entirely deterministic or whether it is ruled by deterministic chaos. Are there truly stochastic processes?

Here is a short film clip of some paramecium snuggling. These are very simple single celled animals. But to believe that all activity in the Universe is ruled completely by determinism, we must believe that if we had been around at the moment of the Big Bang and could have measured all the initial conditions perfectly, we would then be able to predict to a tee every action these single cell creatures exhibit at the moment this film was shot?

Probabilistic behavior is not dichotomous with deterministic behavior. Determinism enters into probabilistic behavior as well as intop the movement of billiard balls on a billiard table. The difference is the degree that determinism controls each. So I wasn’t trying to ask, in the original question, if the two views of human thought are polar opposites. I was asking

@crazyivan Weather is a perfect example of chaos in action. It is generally possible to predict from observing the initial conditions the behavior of a chaotic dynamical system for a short period of time, but as the time scale is extended, the behavior becomes ever more unpredictable. This is the famed buttterfly effect that Lorenz described.