Back in 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace was mulling over the implications of Newtonian mechanics, and realized something profound. If there were a vast intelligence — since dubbed Laplace’s Demon — that knew the exact state of the universe at any one moment, and knew all the laws of physics, and had arbitrarily large computational capacity, it could both predict the future and reconstruct the past with perfect accuracy. While this is a straightforward consequence of Newton’s theory, it seems to conflict with our intuitive notion of free will. Even if there is no such demon, presumably there is some particular state of the universe, which implies that the future is fixed by the present. What room, then, for free choice? What’s surprising is that we still don’t have a consensus answer to this question. Subsequent developments, most relevantly in the probabilistic nature of predictions in quantum mechanics, have muddied the waters more than clarifying them.
Massimo Pigliucci has written a primer for skeptics of determinism, in part spurred by reading (and taking issue with) Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, which I mentioned here. And Jerry Coyne responds, mostly to say that none of this amounts to “free will” over and above the laws of physics. (Which is true, even if, as I’ll mention below, quantum indeterminacy can propagate upward to classical behavior.) I wanted to give my own two cents, partly as a physicist and partly as a guy who just can’t resist giving his two cents.
Echoing Massimo’s structure, here are some talking points:
* There are probably many notions of what determinism means, but let’s distinguish two. The crucial thing is that the universe can be divided up into different moments of time. (The division will generally be highly non-unique, but that’s okay.) Then we can call “global determinism” the claim that, if we know the exact state of the whole universe at one time, the future and past are completely determined. But we can also define “local determinism” to be the claim that, if we know the exact state of some part of the universe at one time, the future and past of a certain region of the universe (the “domain of dependence”) is completely determined. Both are reasonable and relevant.
* It makes sense to be interested, as Massimo seems to be, in whether or not the one true correct ultimate set of laws of physics are deterministic or not. He argues that we don’t know, and that’s obviously right, since we don’t know what the final theory is. But that’s a rather defeatist attitude all by itself; we can look at the theories we do understand and try to draw lessons from them.
* Classical mechanics, which you might have thought was deterministic if anything was, actually has some loopholes. We can think of certain situations where more than one future obeys the equations of motion starting from the same past. This is discussed a bit in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on causal determinism. But I personally don’t find the examples that impressive. For one thing, they are highly non-generic; you have to work really hard to find these kinds of solutions, and they certainly aren’t stable under small perturbations. More importantly, classical mechanics isn’t right; it’s just an approximation to quantum mechanics, and these finely-tuned classical solutions would be dramatically altered by quantum effects.
* General relativity is a classical theory, so it’s also not correct, but we don’t have the final theory of quantum gravity so it’s worth a look. As Massimo points out, there are good examples in GR where traditional global determinism breaks down; naked singularities would be an example. (Basically, determinism breaks down when information can in principle “flow in” from a singularity or boundary that isn’t included in “the whole universe at one moment of time.”) We might sidestep this problem by arguing that naked singularities aren’t physical, which is quite reasonable. But there are much more benign examples, such as anti-de Sitter space — a maximally symmetric spacetime with a negative cosmological constant. This universe has no singularities, but does have a boundary at infinity, so a single moment of time only determines part of the universe, not the whole thing. On the other hand, like the classical-mechanics examples alluded to above, this seems like a technicality that can be cleared up with a slight change of definition, e.g. by imposing some simple boundary condition at infinity.
Much more importantly, these kinds of GR phenomena are very far away from our everyday lives; there’s really no relevance to discussions of free will. GR violates global determinism in the strict sense, but certainly obeys local determinism; that’s all that should be required for this kind of discussion.
* Quantum mechanics is where things get interesting. When a quantum state is happily evolving along according to the Schrödinger equation, everything is perfectly deterministic; indeed, more so than classical mechanics, because the space of states (Hilbert space) doesn’t allow for the kind of non-generic funny business that let non-deterministic classical solutions sneak in. But when we make an observation, we are unable to deterministically predict what its outcome will be. (And Bell’s theorem at least suggests that this inability is not just because we’re not smart enough; we never will be able to make such predictions.) At this point, opinions become split about whether the loss of determinism is real, or merely apparent. This is a crucial question for both physicists and philosophers, but not directly relevant for the question of free will.
The traditional (“Copenhagen”) view is that QM is truly non-deterministic, and that probability plays a central role in the measurement process when wave functions collapse. Unfortunately, this process is extremely unsatisfying, not just because it runs contrary to our philosophical prejudices but because what counts as a “measurement” and the quantum/classical split are extremely ill-defined. Almost everyone agrees we should do better, despite the fact that we still teach this approach in textbooks. Someone like Tom Banks would try to eliminate the magical process of wave function collapse, but keep probability (and thus a loss of determinism) as a central feature. There is a whole school of thought along these lines, which treats the quantum state as a device for tracking probabilities; see this excellent post by Matt Leifer for more details.
The other way to go is many-worlds, which says that the ordinary deterministic evolution of the Schrödinger equation is all that ever happens. The problem there is comporting such a claim with the reality of our experience — we see Schrödinger’s cat to be alive or dead, not ever in a live/dead superposition as QM would seem to imply. The resolution is that “we” are not described by the entire quantum state; rather, we live in one branch of the wave function, which also includes numerous other branches where different outcomes were observed. This approach (which I favor) restores determinism at the level of the fundamental equations, but sacrifices it for the observational predictions made by real observers. If I were keeping a tally, I would certainly put this one in the non-determinism camp, for anyone interested in questions of free will.
* Then there is the question of whether or not the lack of determinism in QM plays any role at all in our everyday lives. When we flip a coin or play the lottery, one might think that the relevant probabilities are “purely classical” — i.e. they stem from our lack of knowledge about the state of the muscles and nerves in my hand and the wind and the coin that is about to be flipped, but if I knew all of those things I could make a perfectly deterministic prediction about what would happen to the coin. (Indeed, a well-trained magician can flip a coin and get whatever result they want.)
This is actually a tricky problem, to which the answers aren’t clear. Yes, there may be a level of classical description in terms of a probability distribution; but where does that probability distribution come from? Physicists disagree about whether or not quantum mechanics plays a crucial role here. Since I have friends in high places, this weekend I emailed Andy Albrecht, who answered and brought David Deutsch into the conversation. They both argue — plausibly, although I’m not really qualified to pass judgment — that essentially all classical probabilities can ultimately traced down to the quantum wave function. And indeed, that this reasoning provides the only sensible basis for talking about probabilities at all! (David mentions that Lev Vaidman seems to disagree, so it’s not uncontroversial by any means.) They are both, in other words, firmly anti-Bayesian in their view on probability. A good Bayesian thinks that probabilities are always statements about our fundamental ignorance concerning what is “really” going on. Albrecht and Deutsch would argue that’s not true, probabilities are ultimately always statements about the wave function of the universe. If they’re right — and again, it looks plausible, but I need to think about it more — then QM effects are indeed of crucial importance in accounting for our inability to predict the future in the everyday world.
* I should say something about chaos, which always comes up in these discussions. In classical mechanics, even when the underlying model is perfectly deterministic, it can often be the case that a small uncertainty in our knowledge of the initial state can lead to large uncertainty in the future/past evolution. (E.g. for the tumbling of Hyperion.) This is sometimes brought up as if it causes problems for determinism: “since tiny mistakes propagate, you couldn’t realistically predict the future anyway.” This is about as irrelevant as it is possible to be irrelevant. The Laplacian viewpoint was always that if you had perfect information, you could predict the past and future. But that was always a statement of principle, not of practice. Of course, in practice, you have nowhere near enough information to make the kinds of calculation that Laplace’s vast intellect likes to do. That was perfectly obvious long before the advent of chaos theory. The correct statement is “in a classical deterministic system, with perfect information and arbitrary computing power you can predict the future in principle, but not in practice,” and that statement is completely unaltered by an understanding of chaos.
So where does that leave us? My personal suspicion is that the ultimate laws of physics will embody something like the many-worlds philosophy: the underlying laws are perfectly deterministic, but what happens along any specific history is irreducibly probabilistic. (In a better understanding of quantum gravity, our notion of “time” might be altered, and therefore our notion of “determinism” might be affected; but I suspect that there will still be some underlying equations that are rigidly obeyed.) But that’s just a suspicion, not anything worth taking to the bank. For everyday-life purposes, we can’t get around the fact that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to predict the future robustly.
Of course, this is all utterly irrelevant for questions of free will. (I’m sure Massimo knows this, but he didn’t discuss it in his blog post.) We can imagine four different possibilities: determinism + free will, indeterminism + free will, determinism + no free will, and indeterminism + no free will. All of these are logically possible, and in fact beliefs that some people actually hold! Bringing determinism into discussions of free will is a red herring.
It matters, of course, how one defines “free will.” The usual strategy in these discussions is to pick your own definition, and then argue on that basis, no matter what definition is being used by the person you’re arguing with. It’s not a strategy that advances human knowledge, but it makes for an endless string of debates.
A better question is, if we choose to think of human beings as collections of atoms and particles evolving according to the laws of physics, is such a description accurate and complete? Or is there something about human consciousness — some strong sense of “free will” — that allows us to deviate from the predictions that such a purely mechanistic model would make?
If that’s your definition of free will, then it doesn’t matter whether the laws of physics are deterministic or not — all that matters is that there are laws. If the atoms and particles that make up human beings obey those laws, there is no free will in this strong sense; if there is such a notion of free will, the laws are violated. In particular, if you want to use the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics to make room for supra-physical human volition (or, for that matter, occasional interventions by God in the course of biological evolution, as Francis Collins believes), then let’s be clear: you are not making use of the rules of quantum mechanics, you are simply violating them. Quantum mechanics doesn’t say “we don’t know what’s going to happen, but maybe our ineffable spirit energies are secretly making the choices”; it says “the probability of an outcome is the modulus squared of the quantum amplitude,” full stop. Just because there are probabilities doesn’t mean there is room for free will in that sense.
On the other hand, if you use a weak sense of free will, along the lines of “a useful theory of macroscopic human behavior models people as rational agents capable of making choices,” then free will is completely compatible with the underlying laws of physics, whether they are deterministic or not. That is the (fairly standard) compatibilist position, as defended by me in Free Will is as Real as Baseball. I would argue that this is the most useful notion of free will, the one people have in mind as they contemplate whether to go right to law school or spend a year hiking through Europe. It is not so weak as to be tautological: we could imagine a universe in which there were simple robust future boundary conditions, such that a model of rational agents would not be sufficient to describe the world. E.g. a world in which there were accurate prophesies of the future: “You will grow up to marry a handsome prince.” (Like it or not.) For better or for worse, that’s not the world we live in. What happens to you in the future is a combination of choices you make and forces well beyond your control — make the best of it!
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I am curious why nowhere in the several discussions of determinism & freewill is there any consideration of the idea that if all our behavior, including our thoughts, are the result of determinism – i.e. are predetermined to be whatever they are by brain structure, evolution, whatever – then all our reasoning pro and con about determinism or anything else is pointless, because we then think whatever we think not because we have correctly (or incorrectly) judged evidence etc., but merely because we are predetermined to think whatever we think. Seems to me that this means that IF determinism is true, then all reasoning is illusory. This doesn’t show that determinism is wrong – only that IF it is true, then we can’t have good reasons for anything (including determism).
Frank of#52, I think the Katherine’s quote from Stephen Hawking in #24 is an example of something pretty close to what you say is missing.
Re #52, 53: Also see comment #45.
Re: 50
‘Perhaps “choice” = “outcome” + “consciousness”’
If consciousness is only observing the outcome after the fact, as some of the neuroscientific evidence suggests in at least some cases, it seems strange to call it a “choice”. After all, I can observe other peoples’ actions after the fact too (or the measurement of the spin of an election, after the fact) but that doesn’t mean I had any “choice” about these outcomes.
So, consciousness of an outcome would not seem to be sufficient, unless your are comfortable in calling everything you observe the result of your “choices”. One might object that there’s something special about the fact that you’re observing yourself, but I’d argue that’s just an illusion; consciousness is just one part of a complex system “observing” the other parts. There seems to be no particular reason why this couldn’t just as well be said about any of the other complex systems we are a part of (such as social, or physical).
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Suppose I were to tell you that right now, I decided to post on this website, b/c my photomultiplier (with a very high filter) just clicked! Chances are, it was going to click at least once in the next 10 seconds, but I decided I would post if it was anytime in the next 5 seconds starting now.
Now, it is completely clear that this isn’t just about classical Poisson statistics, even though I have no detailed knowledge about the state of the system emmitting the photon and how my measuring apparatus observed the state. The experiments have been done in full detail, and there is a irreducible measure of probability within such a system that is simply due to the nature of quantum mechanics
The point is, it is very easy to make an arbitrarily large macroscopic change (posting or not posting on a website), based upon the details of a microscopic experiment, where we have reduced to a minimum all classical notions of measurement error.
Thus, I mantain the case is pretty clear, nature is nondeterministic unless you believe in something like hidden variables (which are almost ruled out entirely)
Re: 50
We often use the word “choice” in contexts where free will or consciousness aren’t an issue, e.g. we will say that a computer playing chess will “choose” to make a particular move, or will “choose” a particular element of a set in a sorting algorithm. I didn’t mean anything more by “choose” than that.
Eric
Re: 58
Then you didn’t mean ‘Perhaps “choice” = “outcome” + “consciousness”’, but rather, ‘Perhaps “choice” = “outcome”’?
#46 Eric
I don’t think that demonstrates free-will, since in a large sequence of “trials” you would drink T 50% of time, free-will would be more illustrated by you drinking T 100% of the time even when it seems (to an outsider) that either T or C could be drunk with equal probability.
The signature of free-will is the regular appearance of statistically unlikely outcomes. So if you found the works of Shakespeare in written form on Mars you could conclude that it was put there by something exercising free-will – since the statistical likelihood of macroscopic pages forming with written text by random is so unlikely as to not be expected to occur in several lifetimes of the universe.
In the very unlikely event that such a ‘miracle’ occurs – then unlucky us we may make a false attribution of free-will, but it is so unlikely as not to concern proper scientifically minded people.
(In the same way poincare recurrence doesn’t contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics in any scientifically relevant way)
“If consciousness is only observing the outcome after the fact, as some of the neuroscientific evidence suggests in at least some cases, it seems strange to call it a “choice”.”
I don’t see any reason to assume awareness would be instantaneous. When a computer CPU makes a “decision”, that isn’t instantly reflected outside of the CPU (on the screen, in RAM, etc). That’d take few more nanoseconds.
After all, in the brain the decision would be made probably by some process of weighing alternative activation patterns, in a manner that isn’t necessarily tied into the verbal or visual centers. If that’s the case, it’d make sense for there to be a slight delay while the decision result was translated into language, or into a visualized image, or into an action.
The mind may not be dualistic in the mind/body sense, but there’s also no reason to assume that it all works together as an atomic unit, with a decision being instantly reflected throughout the brain and available to be expressed.
Re: 61
“If that’s the case, it’d make sense for there to be a slight delay while the decision result was translated into language, or into a visualized image, or into an action.”
As an experimental psychologist, I can tell you that 300ms is an eternity in behavioral response time studies. If it really took 300ms to turn a decision into a verbal response, then it would be really hard to get verbal responses in any paradigm less than, say, 350ms. But that’s not the case. You can’t wave it away that simply.
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Is it possible that this is a discussion about whether physics can (even in theory) understand human freedom?
It just seems to me that, within the context of the argument, what would resolve the issue in favour of the existence of free will would be a theory that explains it. Wouldn’t genuinely self-determined behaviour be exactly not this, ie not anything that you could explain, that wouldn’t conform to laws, that wouldn’t look like any form of behaviour in the inert universe.
I think the argument over Free Will is actually an argument over the limits of the scientific method. The reason it continues to go around and around is that it is impossible for physics and biology to explain the human capacity for voluntary action, and yet that thought means science cannot answer every question, and that is unthinkable (from within the system) so it returns to the begining again. These endless iterations leave plenty of time for coming up with quasi-technical terms that make it all look like a very important discussion.
As far as I’m concerned, we learn how to be free. You can’t learn a law of physics. Therefore, human freedom doesn’t have anything to do with physics.
http://bit.ly/thoughtknot
I would really like to see Sean respond to Mitchell Porter’s post about the deep problem of probability in MWI
Actually, this argument of determinism and free will is almost exactly analogous to a theological discussion stirred up by John Calvin in the 16th Century. His issue was with the apparent contradiction between the omniscience of a Christian god (his Laplace’s Demon) and the claim that human beings have free will (absence of predestination).
The ensuing discussion about predeterminism, predestination and whether or not these contradict free will, were fascinating anticipations of Laplace’s dilemma, and ahead of their time philosophically. A key revelation from these discussions is (as indeed you observe) that it is possible for an omniscient being (or supercomputer) to be able to predetermine the outcome of a person’s choices without violating their free will (i.e. there is no predestination). This was the view held by the Catholic Church and opposed by Calvin (who concluded that there must be predestination). It appears that this makes one philosophical point on which you, Sean, and the Catholic church’s agree — even if you disagree that the existence of the Church’s particular “Laplace Demon” 😉
Is there really any meaning to the word determinism that does not imply that whatever is being determined takes some particular value? I don’t think so. Thus, if the free will is not determined by something else, it doesn’t have any particular values. In coin tosses, the values are either heads or tails, and in physics there are measurable observables. It’s not quite certain what a will, free or otherwise consists on, but if whatever it is made of has no values, it is doubtful we can meaningfully say it exists. If it has self-determined values, we are positing a metaphysical entity which is pretty much indistinguishable from the soul.
But if we postulate the will is not an entity but a process, we are left either with deterministic processess or interministic, i.e., probabilistic ones. By definition a deterministic process forming the “will” is unfree. But a probabilistic process means that the will is random. It seems inescapable to me that there’s a real problem in associating freedom of the will with the randomness of the will.
You could get around this by treating probabilistic processes as determinate, while acknowledging the plain truth that individual trials are not. Fair coins come up heads 50% of the time, a very specific value, which as the opening question highlighted, is in fact a key aspect to determinism. (I like to think of determinism coming in three varieties: mechanism, stochasm and history.) But it sppears this is not an option. This seems to be a shame, because if any individual act of will is an outcome of a probabilistic process, the peculiar determinateness of probabilistic processes can provide the bias predictability we associate with personal character, while the inherently probabilistic nature of individual outcomes, specific acts, account for the equally real unpredictability.
If the many clauses of the last sentence left it too obscure, think of it this way. The will plainly cannot be unconstrained. If Sean has an embarrassing need for latex for sexual fulfillment, he cannot will that he will be aroused in more socially acceptable. This is not reflection on Sean. I myself cannot reliably will myself to remember facts that I know! For both of us, I suppose exercising the will to decide to cultivate good habits would constitute freedom of the will, while the subsequent habits (should we be so fortunate as to succeed in our endeavors,) would not constitute will, but, well, habit. And for both of us, delaying gratification is in no sense a defiance of needs or desires imposed upon us by deterministic processes, even though it is entirely volitional.
As for alarm at the notion that a scientific understanding of the mind will leave old ideals of morality shamed, I’d say that’s because it’s true. On the one hand, miscreants who would simply be condemned as bad stand relieved of full responsibility. The insistence upon treating them as sinners would not just seem, but be, barbarous. And those of us fortunate to have met social expectations (publicly, anyhow) could not honestly congratulate ourselves upon our probity. All this would change society and undermine religion of course. The old joke is that hell was created so that heaven would have some entertainment. How could we be religious when delight in God’s justice is philistine backwardness?
I made it all the way through the comments! Clearly, an act of free will.
Does free will exist if there is no brain to ponder it? Free will would seem to require life, minds, intelligence, and probably more than a single instance (to encourage interaction, socialization, the creation of civilization, culture, philosophical thought, science, and science blogs with comments). Epistemology and existentialism, anyone?
Let’s assume free will does exist. Did it always exist? If not, then when, why and how did it come into existence?
What manner of things possess free will? Does a chimp have free will? A snake? A fruit fly? A worm? A nematode? An amoeba? Does free will require a complex nervous system? Or self-awareness?
Consider entropy and Time’s Arrow. Our own limited existence, including our free will, is merely an eddy of local, temporary order in the rush toward the heat death of the universe. It is highly localized, extremely constrained.
What is free will within the context of the evolution of the universe? Is it nothing more than an temporary emergent property, possessed by only an insignificant number of small clumps of matter?
Is free will nothing other than a rounding error in the statistics of the universe?
My brain hurts. Can we stop now?
It is truly fascinating how early non-scientific ideas of Laplace (who apparently never fully understood classical dynamics) are being re-branded for forcing a fabulous fitting into many-worlds and similar post-modern metaphysical stuff.
First, many-worlds is not another interpretation of QM, as one reads sometimes, but a well-known misunderstanding of QM that cannot reproduce what we observe at our labs
Against Many-Worlds Interpretations 1990: Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 5, 1745–1762 by Kent, Adrian.
see also
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/topics/manyworlds
Note that Kent article is titled , in plural, because there is not one MWI but a collection of mutually contradictory MWIs. The MWI by Deutsch (who you cite) is not the same than MWI by Everett, which is not the same than MWI by Hartle…
Second, science is an enterprise with no room for the kind of supernatural observers G introduced in many-worlds for justifying the kind of metaphysical process associated to
http://juanrga.com/en/knowledge/a1110222009v1.html
Therefore it would be a good idea to keep in mind the limits of the scope of science when discussing about science.
and third, I am not surprised that when you write about chaos you only cite deterministic chaos (where uncertainty of final states is due to our a small uncertainty in our knowledge of the initial state of a deterministic system), whereas you omit to cite the case of nondeterministic chaos, where the uncertainty about the system remains although you know the initial state with infinite precision.
This omission of fundamental results is still more glaring when a famous Nobel laureate wrote several popular books (including bestsellers) about the current state of the science of chaos.
I simply don’t believe free will is a tractable problem, scientifically (at this time). From an everyday standpoint we all act as if free will is true, whether it is or not. In the same fashion, our everyday actions and ambitions are based on the sense that they are meaningful.
Just as we cannot know scientifically (at this time) whether our lives are meaningful, in my opinion, we cannot know whether free will exists or not based on current science. Arguably, we’re no closer to resolving the free will debate than we were 100 years ago or in the time of Newton.
Most of us act, then, on the assumption that we have free will.
Whether we can answer that definitively, at some future time, remains to be seen.
I’m quite astonished that nobody has clearly made what seems like the most relevant point here; if determinism rules out freedom, indeterminism almost certainly does as well. At least, randomness is no help at all; how can a roll of the dice constitute an exercise of agency, a person choosing for themselves what to do? But the interpretations of physics are only arguing about whether there are dice, so they aren’t talking about anything that’s relevant to the real questions of freedom.
Regardless of free will or no free will, if determinism is true, then all scientific theories based on empirical observation of cause and stochastic effect are illusionary. Determinism would ultimately invalidate most science, and it would be completely ridiculous then to appeal to scientific discoveries to support determinism. Nobody can disprove determinism, but accepting it is an implicit rejection of most empirical observation.
Cheers,
James Goetz
James, you seem to be assuming that cause and effect in the intellectual sphere is necessarily our enemy – that it can only have the role of forcing our thoughts down a path which has no a-priori relationship to the truth. But reasoning is itself a causal process; being caused is part of why it works.
Natural selection – or even just the simpler truth that survival is not guaranteed – dictates that the intellectual processes of an organism must have some capacity to represent the world correctly, or else it will swiftly die. Meanwhile, the modern theory of computation (due to people like Turing) tells us that a relatively simple set of symbol manipulations is “computationally universal”, capable of doing anything that a modern computer can do. So above a very elementary threshold of computational ability, cognitive dispositions selected merely for compatibility with survival will also give rise to open-ended powers of rationality, bounded only by restrictions on memory, sensory bandwidth, etc.
In other words, the argument is:
1) The need to survive dictates that cognitive processes have some fidelity to reality.
2) Turing universality tells us that it’s a short step from “cognition with some fidelity to reality” to “cognition with an open-ended capacity to analyse data and draw correct conclusions”.
It is absolutely true that we may be caused to make mistakes. I mean, I believe in cause and effect, and I believe that people make many mistakes, therefore I believe those mistakes have causes! But I don’t believe that determinism implies the uselessness of science or of thought. Cause and effect can be our epistemic ally too.
I understand James point, if determinism ruled universe, then giving people Nobel Prizes would be as giving gifts to a rock when falling from a terrace roof. Both the Nobel laureate and the rock would be merely following rules (deterministic laws) established even before them existed, without any fundamental difference.
In a purely deterministic world, fraudulent scientists would have the same respect than Nobel Prize winners. Because none of them would have the most minimum possibility to chose their own actions (good or bad).
In a world where a nondeterministic evolution is possible, we would be giving Prizes to people, because the creation of a scientific theory is not a deterministic process, but the outcome of a wise mixture of human intelligence, perseverance, and personal choices; whereas no prize would be given to a falling rock, because the rock is merely following a law in a passive way. We would recriminate fraudulent scientists, because they had the option to chose their actions and decided to make the fraud.
No chaos, only random chance?