But I DID decide what to do on my most recent vacations

 This is a refutation of Massimo Pigliucci's most recent piece defending determinism, which I decided not to link to.

I pondered it a bit during my winter holidays vacation at the end of last year and start of this, and even more during spring vacation in March.

On the winter vacation, after it started, more than once, I decided to adjust where I would go, and when.

In March, based on weather, I first decided, before leaving home, to kill my original plan of going to Joshua Tree National Park, including the Sonoran Desert side, on day 1, moving day 2 up, and adjusting in other ways.

I decided to start my vacation here, on the Mother Road, then up to Mojave National Preserve, rather than going to Joshua Tree National Park. 

While that was weather dependent, other decisions made within this trip, like the winter vacations ones, were made after talking to and interacting with other people.

Massimo's version of determinism appears to be more than just a physicalism tautology that folks like Coel the slightly bonkers British astronomer and even more clearly, a chap handled as Disagreeable Me used to push on one of his longer-ago sites.

No, it appears to be something more strongly philosophical than that.

And per Johnson vs Berkeley, while I didn't kick an actual rock while on vacation, I still "refute it thus." Per Johnson, any stone I kicked was one I decided to kick. And, since Pigliucci has in the past largely rejected the idea of classical informal logical fallacies ... 

Quantum microeffects aside? Or maybe not aside, since we're arguing this from an entirely secularist, non-metaphysical angle?

First, while quantum mechanics is, generally, classical statistical mechanics all the way down, nonetheless, at a small enough scale just above the fuzzy borderline with the fully quantum world, a "butterfly effect" can indeed happen that is not classical statistical mechanics turtles all the way down.

On the organic, or semi-organic side, call it the "virus effect" instead of the "butterfly effect." A virus could actually get knocked slightly hither or yon, and perhaps infect in a slightly different way. 

That's all it takes.

I've long said I'm not a classic free willer. I've said that I support subconscious semi-free will. Subselves and more. I've cited Daniel Wegner and his "The Illusion of Conscious Will" many a time. Beyond the issue of subconscious free will, or unconscious free will, Wegner talks about how free will, if not an "affect," is similar to that. If we think, or maybe rather believe that we're freely willing something, we have a higher emotional investment in the idea of free will in general and also in the particular matter at hand. (I also think Wegner's idea is compatible with my idea of "psychological constraint," which is that our "working space" for freedom of action is psychologically constrained by past life events, especially traumatic ones.) 

Tying this with Dan Dennett and his ideas on consciousness? (I reject his ideas on compatibilist free will.) I don't think "subselves" and "multiple drafts" are incompatible. I think that certain subselves, on a subselves-based version of consciousness, can be seen as more "core" and more stable than others, and therefore more likely to rise to the top of the "drafts." These more stable subselves have more of a "commitment" to the quasi-affect idea that they're causing something.

I don't have to prove my version of free will right. 

All I have to do is show determinism wrong.

Now, in a sense, per Schrödinger, referencing the observer effect, I can't truly do that on quantum effect. But, I've laid the mental framework for that.

Determinism suffers another flaw, this one on the psychological side, for secularists.

I think it remains tainted with Deist ideas of the god who winds up the world like clockwork. David Hume, not Boswell, has refuted that one. 

And, to riff on Wegner, if a quantum butterfly effect means that another person's actions leading up to my interaction with them can't be determined, then the emotional affect of the perception of free will at the moment of that action certainly can't be determined.

Beyond that, modern cosmology and its Big Bang say that ideas of determinism, like general relativity, must yield to the quantum frontier. 

I think Pigliucci's neo-Stoicism, to go beyond Enlightenment empiricism, has influenced him on this one. It's the same idea is Deism, though: a "Logos" put it all in order.

To riff on Hellenistic philosophy in response? Massimo doesn't need to read Stephen Greenblatt to know to take a page from Epicurus.

Or, take a page from Laplace, instead of either Johnson or Epicurus? I do, and I say of determinism that I have no need for that hypothesis. And, as an invocation of Ockham's Razor, at least in part, it's not a logical fallacy.

Beyond the quantum mechanics basics, there's the question, per Einstein's "the old one doesn't play dice," as to whether Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorum is something that's merely a human limit, or an actual graininess of the universe. Einstein certainly saw it as the latter, as do most modern interpretations of QM, whether they invoke Schrödingerian "collapses of eigenstates" or not. (He smoked too much Gita and his cat stacks the deck. See here.)

Even if just a human limitation, it is such. We can't "measure in" a precision in actions in the world to say "Voila, determinism!" 

So, unless Massimo and other philosophers supporting determinism can top Einstein and offer up the philosophy version of a GUT? No, again, determinism doesn't work. And, remember, if you're a methodological materialist, a scientific naturalist, you can't pluck H. sapiens out of the rest of the world. If determinism fails somewhere else, it fails for human volition. 

And beyond THAT, Massimo himself seemingly fails to square the circle, within his neo-Stoicism, in this Big Think piece, referring back to Epictetus: 

In a sense, Epictetus is saying that only one thing is truly up to us: our deliberate, conscious judgments. If you think about it, our intentions to act or not are the result of our preliminary judgments about things, and our values and disvalues are also forms of judgments.

If they're in my control, and if they're "up to me," the individual version of "up to us," then they're not determined. And, if Massimo, or someone else, claims that my control is itself determined, and therefore actually an illusion? At that point, we're at a determinism equivalent of why Aristotle's prime mover or first cause argument for the existence of a god falls apart, or so I see it.

A few other points.

First, as I said in my initial shorter callout of Little Bobby Sapolsky, this is not a dichotomy. The lack of conscious free will (which is not what I am claiming, anyway, nor defending against, either) does not by default imply determinism. I think Massimo is better than that. I am charitably assuming he is.

Second, per my 10,000 word detailed callout of Sapolsky, I am sure that Massimo is not committing a category mistake. Sapolsky did, in the detailed, precise philosophical sense. His real issue was ethics, and what's really discussing is moral realism, not determinism, in much of his book. That said, per the snarky header, I chose to kill Little Bobby.

Third, the exact moment of willing action X is fleeting. No doubt about it. It's as fleeting as Hume's famous attempts to apprehend his self, noted here:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself that is, when I introspectively reflect on what’s present to my mind, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. ... If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular.

And, do you reject the idea of selfhood, of consciousness, just because you can't pin it down? No, no more than you reject the existence of a quark for that reason, to tie this back to the quantum world. And, so, because a moment of willing can not be tied down, whether or not we actually act before we decide to act, per Libet, also referenced in the link above, doesn't mean that the whole idea should be rejected. (Per that link, I don't see the Libet experiments as supporting determinism.)

To claim that IS the case is to be in the nutbar world of Alex Rosenberg, whom I know Massimo has, or has had, little use for. Maybe that's changed, though; maybe he thinks Hume's bundle theory supports determinism. 

Hume's bundle theory may not be totally right, but it's certainly not all wet.  

Two more notes.

One, per the end of this piece? Even if current conceptions of free will are not right, that does NOT mean that determinism is the default option. 

Second, riffing on me saying "mu," time after time after time, to the old issue, the old chestnut, of "free will VERSUS determinism," if we think in terms of gradations, we avoid polarities. 

Why Schroedinger was wrong about his cat

Simple statistical mechanics.

He stacks the deck from his Hindu infatuation with his “superposition of eigenstates.”

NOTHING is being “superimposed.” It’s all classical statistical mechanics, from the way I see it.

And, there is no such thing as an “eigenstate” involved.

Let me up the ante on Schroedinger.

Put a cat in a closed box.

Restrain it, because I’m using guillotines, in the plural, rather than poison gas, in the singular.

Give me three radioactive elements with half-lives of X, 2X and 4X.

Give me three guillotines, attached to the cat’s tail, a paw, and its neck respectively.

At X, you have 50 percent chance the cat has lost its tail, 25 percent it has lost its paw and 12.5 percent chance it is dead.

At 2X, probabilities are 75, 50 and 25 percent, respectively.

At 4X, they’re 87.5, 75 and 50 percent.

NO “superposition of eigenstates.” I hope this thought experiment makes the whole idea look ludicrous.

When the lid is lifted of the box, ALL we are doing is checking which of the probabilities is the actuality. Nothing else is being done. The quantum events have happened independently of any observer.

What if a neo-Schroedinger says, lifting the box is itself an observation.

Well, first of all, that’s a “Newtonian” level observation, not a quantum-level one. Unless you try to nano-scale shrink box, cat and guillotines.

Second, I’ll accept the challenge and one-up it.

Give me radioactive element No. 4 with half-life of 8X. It controls a circuit that raises the lid on the box.

OK.

At 8X, we have 93.75 percent chance the cat has no tail, 87.5 that it’s lost a paw, 75 percent that it’s dead, and …

A 50 percent chance that we can see inside the box to determine these probabilities.

Again, all statistical probabilities.

In fact, like the turtles of Schroedinger’s beloved Hinduism, it’s statistics all the way down.

Am I arguing there’s nothing “mysterious,” – as long as you append scare quotes – about quantum mechanics? No, of course not. The two-slit experiment with light rays is proof enough of that.

I AM arguing, though, that quantum mechanics is NOT “metaphysically mysterious.” Or anything on those lines.

I am suggesting that Erwin Schroedinger bears a certain amount of the blame for the rise of today’s Deepak Chopras of the world.

And, albeit for different reasons than Einstein, while I don’t believe that some “naïve realism” interpretation of quantum mechanics will win out, should the Holy Grain of a UFT ever be achieved, I do think there will be something more quasi-realistic than the consensus of today.

I think, per Wiki's article on Schrödinger and his damned cat, that the ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics, while not the ending point, is a good starting point and certainly the best starting point we have right now. It's the one that, I think, does the best job of clearing the decks of mystical and semi-mystical mumbo-jumbo that have accumulated to many interpretations of quantum mechanics like barnacles. It offers the least confusion between physics and philosophy in cases where they define the same concept differently. And, it certainly seems to properly address Occam's Razor. On the probabilities and statistics issues, it squares exactly with what I've said all along. I just didn't realize there was an official theory for my version of understanding QM.

Part of the problem, related to this, is that full-on Copenhagians, or QM schools of thought in their vicinity, at least, seem to like their undiluted shot — or three — of mysticism.

I know that Schrödinger himself was, essentially, trying to "spoof" Copenhagianism. However, because of his own Hindu influences, I think he failed to see how his thought experiment would be co-opted. (That said, somebody else would surely have come up with a similar one.)

Schrödinger reportedly said, decades later, that he wished he had never "met" his cat. Again, interesting that it took him that long to see that.

And, he apparently never explained the "why" behind that. Was it because had lost control of "his" thought experiment?

After writing the original version of this post, I came upon a great book, "The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments." From it, I became more convinced than ever that what "collapses" is not any "superposition of eigenstates" but a "superposition" of multiple states of partial or obscured knowledge.

Per Richard Buller and others, I'm also more convinced than ever that things like Schrödinger's Cat show the need that scientists have for philosophers of science.

Or, to quote Stephen Hawking: "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol."

And now, here's a good piece from the Stone, the New York Times' op-ed series about issues philosophical, that covers some of the same ground, about the mystical misuse of quantum mechanics. However, I'd qualify it a bit.

If anybody's to blame, it's Schrödinger and his damned cat, even more than Bohr, let alone Heisenberg, for the mystical misuse of quantum theory and mechanics. Schrödinger with his immersion in Hinduism. That said, as noted above, the cat was ... er, catnip! for the Copenhagians.

Anybody who buys into non-mystical versions of quantum mechanics knows Schrödinger's cat's all about probabilities and nothing else. A simple thought experiment, with multiple radioactive substances and guillotines attached to various appendages of the cat, underscores that.

Update, 2026: Let's go further to cut Schrödinger off at the quantum pass. It's not a black box, it is a glass one. And, we have staggered shift workers, so that somebody is seeing inside the glass all the time. No obscured box, and no lid to be lifted.