some of my older myspace blogs are really cool, but i don't think many people scroll down that far. Here's a repost from january 2006:
God's Great Game of Checkers
If everything that ever happens in the universe is dictated by physics, a great chemical reaction, including everything every person has ever thought or done, then is everything that ever will be pre-ordained or determined since the big bang?
I was watching this mostly unrelated lecture by Richard Feynman - he's a very animated speaker, a nobel prize winner who deals with very complicated mathematics and physics problems. I will link to it here. The part I am going to talk about is 14 minutes 40 seconds into the video.
Anyway, he created this brilliant analogy, i'm not sure if he realized how brilliant it was, that can be applied to many levels of life and nature. He hated philosophy, and is probably turning in his grave to have this scientific analogy turned onto the problems of free will, but he at least intended it to be used to answer questions about causality, at least from a physics perspective, and in my mind the two are linked inextricably. I am going to expand on it quite a bit in this blog.
He said that we have pretty much figured out the rules of physics, at the quantum level, the subatomic level, and we know how various particles can interact with each other, individually. The problem is, knowing how these subatomic particles can interact with each other individually doesn't mean we can get the slightest idea what is going to happen in an experiment on the whole, which deals with many different particles, some controlled and others less controlled.
He said that physics, the nature of the world and matter and energy, is like a huge game of checkers. Like a checkerboard with a million squares on each side and millions of peices. Even though a person can know the "rules" of the game - as far as individual peices are concerned, the entire outcome of the game is a mystery, even to the fastest supercomputer, when the game first starts. I love this analogy. It ties in so nicely to explain the parts of my Free Will blog that I wasn't able to articulate well enough to write down.
He goes on to say, if you are dealing with a very small part of the board, somewhere in the middle of a game, where there are just a few peices, you can get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to those peices as the game plays out, but when you are dealing with so many peices with so many possible moves it gets very difficult to imagine the outcome of any specific peice on the board.
I wish to connect this now with free will. People are very frightened by the idea that they have no true control over themselves or anything else really, and it seems somehow like they must have a personal ability to control themselves and their lives. The reason for this is that they have, under their own direct interactions, a few peices on this great checkerboard. They become very concerned with what happens to these few peices, and they feel like because they know the rules of checkers in and out, they must have good control over what happens to those peices as they interact with the other peices on the board. It is difficult to see that no matter how well you know the rules of how things react to each other in life, no matter how simple the rules are and how carefully you make your moves, this great big checkerboard with all of its millions of peices is very likely to put you in unexpected situations, and truthfully there is not much you can do aside from watching the game play out and following and anticipating it's rules to the best of your abilities.
Another interesting nuance to this analogy is the fact that in checkers, every peice has equal rules. Every peice has equal chances of affecting every other peice. You can get a whole fleet of these peices together and try to use them to have some substancial affect on another fleet of peices, but at he single-peice level each peice is pretty much matched with each other peice.
This analogy can be applied to people interacting with other people, thoughts interacting with other thoughts, atoms interacting with other atoms. At every level we see that in nature there are thousands of different configurations of basic elements, which seem to have their own rules and their own capabilities, but at the basic level each element has an equal chance and magnitude of reaction with each other peice.
In the context of free will, this helps to explain the chaos in the universe that can still exist even though the individual rules of interaction are so well-defined and always followed. Even though everything that is is part of this vast chemical reaction I mentioned before, it can't be predicted or preordained in any way because the peices are so vast and all interacting and the game is largely undecided and constantly changing. Determinism is not a part of my beliefs because even with these well-defined laws of physics and this greater understanding of the world, the game is so vast that noone knows how god's great game of checkers is going to play out.
So, you see, everything in this world is indeed out of your control, in the big picture, out of anyone's control. It's millions of billions of God's checker peices playing out this immeasurably vast game, and all of us are just groups of peices following the rules.
God's Great Game of Checkers
If everything that ever happens in the universe is dictated by physics, a great chemical reaction, including everything every person has ever thought or done, then is everything that ever will be pre-ordained or determined since the big bang?
I was watching this mostly unrelated lecture by Richard Feynman - he's a very animated speaker, a nobel prize winner who deals with very complicated mathematics and physics problems. I will link to it here. The part I am going to talk about is 14 minutes 40 seconds into the video.
Anyway, he created this brilliant analogy, i'm not sure if he realized how brilliant it was, that can be applied to many levels of life and nature. He hated philosophy, and is probably turning in his grave to have this scientific analogy turned onto the problems of free will, but he at least intended it to be used to answer questions about causality, at least from a physics perspective, and in my mind the two are linked inextricably. I am going to expand on it quite a bit in this blog.
He said that we have pretty much figured out the rules of physics, at the quantum level, the subatomic level, and we know how various particles can interact with each other, individually. The problem is, knowing how these subatomic particles can interact with each other individually doesn't mean we can get the slightest idea what is going to happen in an experiment on the whole, which deals with many different particles, some controlled and others less controlled.
He said that physics, the nature of the world and matter and energy, is like a huge game of checkers. Like a checkerboard with a million squares on each side and millions of peices. Even though a person can know the "rules" of the game - as far as individual peices are concerned, the entire outcome of the game is a mystery, even to the fastest supercomputer, when the game first starts. I love this analogy. It ties in so nicely to explain the parts of my Free Will blog that I wasn't able to articulate well enough to write down.
He goes on to say, if you are dealing with a very small part of the board, somewhere in the middle of a game, where there are just a few peices, you can get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to those peices as the game plays out, but when you are dealing with so many peices with so many possible moves it gets very difficult to imagine the outcome of any specific peice on the board.
I wish to connect this now with free will. People are very frightened by the idea that they have no true control over themselves or anything else really, and it seems somehow like they must have a personal ability to control themselves and their lives. The reason for this is that they have, under their own direct interactions, a few peices on this great checkerboard. They become very concerned with what happens to these few peices, and they feel like because they know the rules of checkers in and out, they must have good control over what happens to those peices as they interact with the other peices on the board. It is difficult to see that no matter how well you know the rules of how things react to each other in life, no matter how simple the rules are and how carefully you make your moves, this great big checkerboard with all of its millions of peices is very likely to put you in unexpected situations, and truthfully there is not much you can do aside from watching the game play out and following and anticipating it's rules to the best of your abilities.
Another interesting nuance to this analogy is the fact that in checkers, every peice has equal rules. Every peice has equal chances of affecting every other peice. You can get a whole fleet of these peices together and try to use them to have some substancial affect on another fleet of peices, but at he single-peice level each peice is pretty much matched with each other peice.
This analogy can be applied to people interacting with other people, thoughts interacting with other thoughts, atoms interacting with other atoms. At every level we see that in nature there are thousands of different configurations of basic elements, which seem to have their own rules and their own capabilities, but at the basic level each element has an equal chance and magnitude of reaction with each other peice.
In the context of free will, this helps to explain the chaos in the universe that can still exist even though the individual rules of interaction are so well-defined and always followed. Even though everything that is is part of this vast chemical reaction I mentioned before, it can't be predicted or preordained in any way because the peices are so vast and all interacting and the game is largely undecided and constantly changing. Determinism is not a part of my beliefs because even with these well-defined laws of physics and this greater understanding of the world, the game is so vast that noone knows how god's great game of checkers is going to play out.
So, you see, everything in this world is indeed out of your control, in the big picture, out of anyone's control. It's millions of billions of God's checker peices playing out this immeasurably vast game, and all of us are just groups of peices following the rules.