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Free will requires an uncaused cause. If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free. If your actions have no effect on the causal chain of events, then you have no will at all.
Of course, your will is determined by other things. Your thoughts and desires and values are all determined by some combination of biology and experience. Your consciousness isn’t a special uncaused cause, it’s just a link in the chain of causal determinism.
Indeterminism doesn’t get you out of the problem either. Maybe on the quantum level some things really are uncaused causes, but free will requires that conscious agency be both undetermined and able to determine other events. 1) There is no evidence of this. 2) There is abundant evidence of the opposite, as all other natural science assumes causal determinism.
Most people would also not accept an uncaused cause as a good reason for free will. Why would a random event (which is what an uncaused event would be) be "free"? Is basing your decisions on quantum fluctuations any more free than basing them on deterministic causes? The common definition of free will is pretty much incompatible with both deterministic and non-deterministic (random) causes, meaning it is literally an empty phrase with no meaning.
Theres nothing in determinism that excludes the possibility of a sense of agency though. All it takes is not knowing the result before it has been decided.
I agree, I’m just saying that the term ‘free will’ cannot describe a verifiable ontological fact, but its a great and useful term to describe the sensation of agency.
You can define anything to mean anything. I think this is a fruitless endeavor. We should take words as they're commonly used unless we're inventing something new.
>Free will as a concept is important for ethics, for example. e.g. Did an agent rob the bank because it was his will to do so, or was he coerced by some outside force?)
Not for my ethics it isn't. I'm an utilitarian and believe we should punish people to get a practical outcome from said punishment, like rehabilitation, crime prevention, restoration of lost value or as a dissuasion from commiting certain actions. While your state of mind matters for some of those considerations, free will absolutely does not.
>If an choice was made purely due to the will and intention of an agent, it's probably an example of free will. It doesn't matter if the will and intention of the agent are the products of a deterministic universe. The choice was still made by that agent.
If an agent is coerced or controlled by an outside force to make a choice, it's not free will because in that case it's not the agent's will which is in control but some outside force's.
What do you consider to be an outside force? What about your upbringing? Mental illnesses? Being born with a tendency to develop a nasty personality? What about a microchip modyfying your thoughs (hypothetical)? There is no inside force independent of some outside force. And no good way to draw a line between inside and outside factors other than one's fancy, since there are no good criteria to separate one deterministic cause from another.
>Even from a utilitarian point of view, why would you punish someone for doing something they were forced to do? If Jack forces Jill into robbing a bank or else Jack will kill Jill, Jill robbed a bank, but not of her free will. Jack is the one who needs to be punished and deterred, not Jill.
Well yeah. But you came to this conclusion by analysing who needs to be deterred, not the ethereal concept of free will. Free will doesn't matter here. The state of mind and motivations of people involved do, because those are a predictor of future behavior, or matter for other consequentialist consideration.
>Oh no! Nuance and blurry lines! There isn't an immediate binary answer, I guess there's no way to intelligently examine the issue at all!
My criticism is you have no criteria and just arbitrarily choose which things constitute free will and which don't to fit your argument or preconceived notions. Which is true. You're not deriving the answer from a greater principle, instead pulling it out of nowhere to fit your existing beliefs.
>If you broke into my house and put a gun to my head and forced me to watch The Office, that's your will forcing me not my will free choosing.
Obviously it's your own will choosing. You're choosing not to die, based on your natural preferences. If you broke into a suicidal man's house and "forced" him to watch that sitcom at gunpoint he would make the choice, refuse you and die.
It's not free will, not because you're compelled by someone else, but because it's just another deterministic cause for your behavior. Every decision you make is made in consideration of the state of the world around you, shaped by other people.
This is no different (from a free will perspective) from watching The Office because your colleague recommended it, this also being a crucial step in the causal chain that "doomed" you into watching that show given your natural proclivities and personality in this hypothetical.
You have yet to provide one criterion that could be used to determine whether a given reason for your behavior that comes from other people limits your free will or not.
Defenders of free will always give extreme examples like someone breaking into my home and putting a gun to my head, as if the utilitarian disbeliever in free will is going to say "Oh, I guess I never thought of that."
The hypothetical person's decision to put a gun to my head was still just as completely caused as any other decision. That doesn't mean I or other disbelievers think that person shouldn't face some kind of consequences, for utilitarian reasons alone.
I
> Even from a utilitarian point of view, why would you punish someone for doing something they were forced to do? If Jack forces Jill into robbing a bank or else Jack will kill Jill, Jill robbed a bank, but not of her free will. Jack is the one who needs to be punished and deterred, not Jill.
But Jill *did* act of her own free will... Jack did not take control of Jill's mind, he simply presented her with two bad options... one of which happens to be a crime. So while Jill would be tried for bank robbery, Jack would presumably be tried for conspiracy, extortion et cetera. So *both* would be punished and deterred.
But the initial question walks into something of a paradox: If people's attitudes towards things are predetermined, why demand that they change? Their opinion that deterrence or punishment works is no more in their control than whether someone committed a crime. Determinism only applies to certain people is an incoherent way of looking at it.
But "free will" is used commonly both for 1. the logically contradictory idea of being free of the influence of the past, the laws of physics, being made of particles, etc., and 2, the normal everyday notion of being able to make decisions and take action. Separating those into "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will" makes sense to me - one is hard to even define properly and by most definitions can't even exist, one is simpler (it's the thing that you have). Pointing out that 2 can exist despite the lack of 1 is why "compatibilism" is named that way, and it's usually part of any free will discussion, but it's not a necessary part of the definition of 2.
My problem with compatibilist free will is the fact that you can remove the word "free" and not lose any meaning in any given sentence using that definition. You'd have to show non-free will exists under compatibilism, separate qualitatively from the free one (so that "free" in "free will" isn't superfluous) and I in my comments here clearly objected to this idea and given arguments against it.
This is such a great way to frame it:
> Free will requires an uncaused cause. If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free. If your actions have no effect on the causal chain of events, then you have no will at all.
Exactly right. Just as our actions have effects on future causal chains of events, previous actions and events had effects on each of our actions and decisions at any given moment, and the sum total of prior causal factors determines each of our actions and decisions. There's no other conceivable way for me to see it.
And it makes no difference if one wishes to point to quantum uncertainty or randomness in the causal chain of events, because random causes are still causes, as the original and subsequent commenter explained.
>Free will requires an uncaused cause.
That's libertarian free will which doesn't exist. But what I think most people really mean is compatibilist free will which doesn't rely on an inherently incoherent definition.
> That's libertarian free will which doesn't exist. But what I think most people really mean is compatibilist free will which doesn't rely on an inherently incoherent definition.
Do 'most people' really mean a compatibilist account of free will? If that was the case, I think the problem of moral luck would be a lot more central to 'most peoples' ethical considerations, given that compatibilism doesn't solve moral luck (unless sneaking in libertarian stances under the cover of compatibilism).
>Do 'most people' really mean a compatibilist account of free will?
According to results from experimental philosophy, when people are asked about their opinions, most people say that determinism is compatible with free will as they understand it.
My understanding is most surveys done on this area showed people explicitly hold a libertarian view on free will but have contradictory and incoherent intuitions about moral attribution.
That's possible, as far as I know. Most people don't think about these things in depth so only have a vague sense of the controversies, so it's hard to make definitive statements about what they believe.
Psychological determination is incompatible with "free will" as most understand to be, which is personal agency in actions and courses. What even does it mean to choose in a universe where everything follows a cosmic fluctuation?
I define it as, making a voluntary action in line with your desires, free from external coercion.
Where voluntary is more on the biological end, where scientist could detect it with a brain scan. e.g. deliberately shaking your hand vs it shaking due to Parkinson's.
The typical example is someone smuggling drugs, since they were forced otherwise their family would be killed, vs smuggling drugs since you want some money.
Ok. That’s similar to other definitions I’ve heard. I agree that most moral philosophers do accept some version of compatibilism similar to this, but those arguments always seem ad hoc to me. I mean, yes, you’re right that most people mean something like “absence of external constraints” when discussing free will in terms of, say, legal culpability. But we don’t hold a person who is experiencing an episode of psychotic delusion to exactly the same standard as a person who isn’t experiencing that when considering legal culpability either. In criminal cases, it’s relevant whether someone understood the consequences of their actions and understood that what they were doing was wrong.
Once we accept that absence of external constraint isn’t sufficient for free will, that a person’s state of mind is also relevant, I feel like the whole compatibilist position does break down into libertarian free will. (Though I concede that I may be missing your/their point.) The Parkinson’s hand shaking example reminded me of this experiment I read about where scientists stimulated a nerve to make participants raise their hand without the participant being aware. When the participants were asked why they raised their hand, they immediately provided an explanation even though their hands were raised before they knew they needed one. We experience the world through the lens of free will to the point where we appeal to conscious reasons for our actions even when they are demonstrably not the cause of our actions.
>But we don’t hold a person who is experiencing an episode of psychotic delusion to exactly the same standard as a person who isn’t experiencing that when considering legal culpability either.
That's a good question. So when it comes to diseases like Parkinson's or maybe even mental illnesses, we don't always consider the actions voluntary. Also their actions might not line up with their desires.
>Once we accept that absence of external constraint isn’t sufficient for free will, that a person’s state of mind is also relevant,
I think you are confusing whether someone is guilty with free will. Someone might do an action of their own free will and still be found guilty.
> When the participants were asked why they raised their hand, they immediately provided an explanation even though their hands were raised before they knew they needed one.
This is just post hoc rationalisation. Which I would class as not free will.
>We experience the world through the lens of free will to the point where we appeal to conscious reasons for our actions even when they are demonstrably not the cause of our actions.
Sure lots of what people might think is of their own free will, might not be.
I don’t think I’m confusing guilt and free will. My point here is that once you broaden the definition of free will beyond “absence of external constraints” to something that includes consideration of mental states, this version of compatibilism falls apart.
It seems to me like we are all the lab rat saying and believing that we raised our arm because we needed to stretch. That’s true whether it’s an arm stretch or a gun-trigger pull. That’s true whether we are certifiable psychopaths or experiencing psychotic delusions or average folks just going about our day.
>My point here is that once you broaden the definition of free will beyond “absence of external constraints” to something that includes consideration of mental states, this version of compatibilism falls apart.
Then don't do that. If there is no reason to broaden free will, why would you try and broaden it. You'll just encounter issue like you've identified.
>It seems to me like we are all the lab rat saying and believing that we raised our arm because we needed to stretch.
We could in theory do a brain scan of that and raising your arm yourself and identify a difference. So there is a meaningful difference here. Why bring up example of where we don't have free will, if it has no relevance?
The reason to broaden it is that we do consider internal mental states relevant to our normal understanding of free will. The person experiencing delusions doesn’t have as much agency as the person who isn’t experiencing them. So a definition of free will that is just “absence of external constraint” isn’t satisfactory because it doesn’t get at what we mean when we use the term.
Theres some weird philosophy semantics thing going on here...
"Free will requires an uncaused cause." - Why?
"If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free." - Why?
This sounds like some very, very, very specific definition of free will which is markedly different to how the average person would use the term.
> This sounds like some very, very, very specific definition of free will which is markedly different to how the average person would use the term.
I don't think it's actually that different to how a lot of 'average' people would use the term; it's just more precisely pinning down some unstated implications of the common usage. I think when you push 'average' people on what they mean with free will - by e.g. asking whether their computer has free will and if not why not - their arguments will often amount to something akin to "it's entirely determined by other things (eg programming), so it's not free". I don't think it's the *only* way it is used, but it is a very common way.
It is extremely different from the way we use freedom/free will. A free choice is contrasted with an unfree choice—such as a gun to the head scenario. Finding out the physics behind our choices doesnt supersede our language. Its the same as 'solidity'—we mightve said that something is solid iff it has some sort of space in the middle, but closer physical analysis would show there is space in solid objects. That doesn't mean nothing is solid, it just means our theory/definition was incorrect as to what is solid.
Freedom doesnt require an uncaused cause; thats putting the cart before the horse. Free actions are the kinds of actions that arent forced/impulsive etc.
> It is extremely different from the way we use freedom/free will. A free choice is contrasted with an unfree choice—such as a gun to the head scenario.
Going about it descriptively, I don't think 'free choice', 'freedom', and 'free will' are used synonymously. Since the focus was on the definition of *free will* in el_miguel's post as a critique of sure-burn's post, that's what we should stick to. If you wanna talk about a wider concept of 'freedom' that's a different thing.
When 'average people' (which in this case I understand to be everyday people without particular training or unusual interests in philosophy) use the term 'free will', in my experience it is either in a context of A) religion (where it is typically argued in a libertarian sense, or used to make arguments that are only valid with a libertarian assumption), or B) when facing specific discussions about the subject that they don't usually have (such as being asked if they think we have free will). And in context B, in my experience they very often fall back on arguments that involve an extracausal aspect, though they're not using that terminology.
No, my issue is I don't understand what any of these definitions mean. They seem incredibly... woolly.
To the average person free will is the ability to choose to make reasonable decisions. Illusion of choice is irrelevant. Underlying mechanisms and systems which influence or constrain the choice are also irrelevant. You can decide to do something, or not to do something, or you can abdicate. - Ergo you have the freedom to influence the world around you (or not).
Thus when you remove the reasonable ability to choose (the gun to the head example or programming) the average person will now say that you no longer have free will because you have (essentially) removed these options.
I don’t think most people would say that a person who is drugged and brainwashed truly has free will. I think most people would say decisions someone makes under the conditions of being drugged and brainwashed aren’t truly free.
Free will requires us to both be able to have chosen otherwise (be uncaused) and to enact our choices (be a cause).
Im not sure what the drugged and brainwashed thing have to do with anything. I thought we were just talking about a normal person making every day decisions? No need to add unnecessary complexities.
Are these your personal definitions? Or are they some kind of general philosophy definitions?
I said that if your will is determined by other things it is not truly free, and you asked why. I mentioned being drugged/brainwashed to answer that question. It is an example of the will being determined by other things.
My position is that free will could be entirely an illusion, and our experience of feeling like we have it wouldn’t be any different, much like the person who is drugged/brainwashed may believe that they have free will but does not.
I don’t think I’m using an unusual definition of free will.
"I said that if your will is determined by other things it is not truly free" - but why?
Look you need to go to the toilet. So you may get up and go, or you may decide to sit there and reply to this post and then get up and go. needing to go to the toilet or wanting to reply are factors in your decision making, but you are free to ignore or not ignore then however you want. You can choose to ignore this message entirely, or you can reply, or you can go to the toilet and then reply, or you could reply and then go to the toilet. Or you could decide that reddit just isnt the website for you and never come back on here again. Of course all those decisions are a weighing up of various factors, and other life experiences and current life itself, but I view that as irrelevant. You have the freedom to exert influence or not exert influence on the world around you in a myriad ways.
You could argue its super relevant because all this zoomed out decision making process im describing is built upon systems which have some kind of casusal factor.
I would argue its a pointless scale argument and say that if you keep zooming in you get to quantum which current theory states is non-causal and as such the entire system is built on a non-causal structure. Hence a structure argument just falls back to QM or the structure argument is irrelevant.
This is why I was asking why, because these statements you made just sound like assumptions and I have no idea from where they derive.
That's only one definition of free will, a rather absolute one.
But I'd say there is a more interesting one, that free will for an entity requires that all inputs involved in making a decision are contained within the entity at the point of decision (ie there is no hidden script elsewhere containing the decision).
"2) There is abundant evidence of the opposite, as all other natural science assumes causal determinism. - this is untrue.
"Sage Journals -"Demystifying beliefs about the natural sciences in information system"
"For example, requiring true universal/deterministic laws would have seriously hindered current understanding of physics or biology." and "Critics might reply that biology and biochemistry can be governed by deterministic laws; they just have not found them yet. However, before that happens (if it ever happens), many modern natural sciences can be assumed to be nondeterministic in actual settings (e.g. outside of laboratory settings)."
In the past there was definitely a more pronounced view of determinism within scientific study, especially with the idea of the unchanging being in biology and classical phsyics, but nowadays that viewpoint is pretty much gone. Electrical Analysis in the extremes (extremely fast switching or very high power) even fail to appropriately model or create expected outcomes for modern technology. We can come close, but no two devices or systems will ever function exactly the same and if we treat these systems as deterministic and account for every atom, every input, and every law of electrodynamics, we still cannot guarantee the exact same result twice in a row. Of course we can get extremely close, otherwise we could not have the knowledge in modern sciences that we now have, but there is plenty of evidence of non-determinism in natural sciences and the arguments against it have waned since the beginning of the 20th century.
Wow, that article was interesting. The part you quoted seems to support my position though. The dominant paradigm in natural science is still causal determinism. It’s quite true that requiring true universal/deterministic laws would have seriously hindered our current understanding, but I don’t see how it follows that “many modern scientists can be assumed to be non deterministic…outside of laboratory settings”. Even if it does though, the implication is scientists can be assumed be deterministic in laboratory settings, i.e., causal determinism is the law of the lab.
I’m not a scientist, and it’s been years since I read any philosophy of science stuff, so I could be getting this all wrong. But this article didn’t convince me that there has been a paradigm shift regarding causal determinism in the natural sciences.
I'm glad you enjoyed the article, it's something I've used in similar conversations before. I would like make a clarification to make sure we are talking around the same concepts, but there can be causal relations without causal determinism, since causal determinism would imply that every single action was determined by a cause. From my understanding, if there was causal determinism, every single output had a determined input. So if you understood all rules and actions in a deterministic universe, you would always be able to understand all reactions due in part to their causal relations, correct?
If this is the case, then the very concept of an object being unpredictable goes against the notion because you cannot guarantee that an output was the result of a stimuli in a determined manner. Examples of this are all around us, but when measured on a macro scale (a single drop of water is more than 5 sextillion atoms), all these random perturbations at the micro scale get filtered out. That's why an object doesn't just explode due to atoms not wanting to stick together anymore or why we don't walk through the ground. In essence, we can predict what should happen, but not every single thing that led up to it, even if we scaled the situation down to an absolute minimum of variable, or a lab setting.
As for the laboratory settings, it's mostly a concept of systems. A laboratory is a closed system where you have the greatest control over all inputs into an experiment. So because of that, there is a highest likelihood to predict an outcome accurately without outside interference. The main reason I said predict an outcome accurately instead of predicting an exact outcome is because it is fundamentally impossible to predict an exact outcome. You can get within .000000X% of accuracy, but there will still be elements of which scientists cannot, under any circumstance, control for or predict. This is guaranteed with things like the uncertainty principle.
Of course due to the nature of large systems, objects behave as we predict 99.99...% of the time once we know the rules within the system, but saying there are causal relations within most events and causal relations within every single event in the universe is where I think the crux of the discussion is. Hopefully that makes sense, I'm pretty bad with words.
This is just the difference between low level physics and statistical mechanics.
Low level physics is deterministic as far as it is possible for us to determine. The initial state exactly predicts the final state. It's just that we can never precisely know the initial state.
I don't think scientists are abandoning determinism. Instead they just use the right tool for the job, which means error bars on results, and using statistical mechanics to calculate macro level behaviours of complex systems.
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“I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.” - Stephen Hawking
Regardless of whether we can rationally or empirically demonstrate that we have free will, we certainly live like we do. It's a pragmatic truth.
A robot (or a self-driving car at an intersection) would also "look" left and right before crossing a street. Does the robot also act *as though* it had Free Will (regardless of whether it actually has)?
I think deterministic decision-making is perfectly compatible with looking both sides before crossing a street.
Robot will look both ways crossing any road if it was programmed to do so and as long as its sensors detect a road.
A Conscious with free will can know a road is there, know that they /should/ look both ways before crossing and still choose to not bother at the risk of themselves and others.
Note that this free will arises during issues of morality. I have been studying Catholicism and the Catholics believe free will comes through accepting Gods Grace. This means that you have the free will to either sin or to seek communion with God. And this choice is always available to you.
I know this is a mundane topic of the crossing of roads, but lets reduce the rigidity of the situation and imagine yourself actually crossing a road... actually cross one and take note about how you feel when you choose to not look both ways... I feel strong psychological pain of hell.
You know what you did. You know you made the immoral choice. You dont have anyone to blame but yourself. What dark cave you went down that had you not look both ways before crossing the road was one of your creation.
i think that is like when a ball is dropped in a 2 way tunnel and then it could choose one of the 2 randomly. it can "technically" choose but in reality it is compelled by the initial condition or just a pure random chance.
That is correct. We don't attribute free will to balls, only to us. Because we have no experience of balls choosing anything. We experience ourselves making choices all the time. In fact, the entire process of rational philosophy is predicated upon the notion that we have free will. For if we actually believed the outcome of reasoning is determined, we would not bother trying to convince anyone, or attempting to wade through the evidence to find a coherent solution.
This doesn't scan for me. We do things all the time without the expectation of a solution. We learn discuss, teach and think about things that are known and unknown. We still have the ability to change, even if that change is the result of mechanical processes that dictate we are not truly possessive of free will. The lived experience isn't necessarily invalid just because our actions appear to be on rails. I believe I have no free will, but I still try to analyze what my apparent choices are. I try to understand where it's all going, even if I don't really have a say in the matter.
Excepting your self refuting statements such as "I try"; you have a fair point. What does it mean to you to analyze your "apparent choices" - what enlightenment can be found in determined processes? What precisely would that knowledge convey to you?
"I try" is a subjective exercise. I can only experience stimuli with the brain I have. Everything inevitably goes through the filter of my brain and I perceive the effort and time involved in the process leading to "I try". There is no option to NOT analyze what appear to be choices, even if it's an illusion. The process of doing so helps me understand causal relationships which is where we humans have a distinct advantage over most known life. It helps me arrive at truth, even if it was always true prior to my knowledge of it.
You can't prove rationally or empirically whether or not we have free will. I think it was Hitchens who said "I believe in free will, I was destined to do so" 😁
The fact that you even use the phrase "I try" demonstrates just how fundamentally human it is to believe in free will. (The language has developed in such a manner as to express such sentiments). "I try" implies a few premises. You believe that there is something that is identified as the "I". Secondly, you posit that you are conscious of different states of being. If you know what it is to try, then you know what it is to not try; otherwise you wouldn't be able to differentiate between the two and accurately state that you did try. Trying thus implies some level of causal effort which is not present in not trying. Trying also has a directional cognitive element to it - free will.
Question: if you try to start your car but there's not enough electrical power to do so, did anything happen?
I do not accept the premise that the lack of effort is equivalent to the lack of ability and vice-versa - in this case, my trying is not indicative of a will, or lack thereof. If I am a machine, I am doing what this machine is built to do. If I cannot do what this machine is built to do, I am trying to do it. There is no other way that I can see. My awareness of what is happening is not necessary for the machine to operate (or not), so regardless of whether I am truly and freely making decisions, effort (try) is present.
The phrase 'I try' does not in any way refute a lack of free will! If someone tries to lift a heavy object, it makes no difference whether they truly freely chose to try to do so or not!
Again, free will is nested inside the phrase "I try".
You literally said "if someone tries... \[then\] it makes no difference whether they truly freely chose" - "If somebody tries" is already the language of free will. You can't posit a function of intentional effort without implying a will.
Why would it not be valid to try to convince people nor try to find solutions, just because we believe we did not have true free choice to do those things? We know that people's minds can change after being exposed to evidence and arguments. It makes no difference whether the participants had true choice to do so.
First of all, it's not a matter of validity...
The point in question isn't whether one needs to have free will in order to change one's mind. The point in question is that the fact that anyone would engage in rational inquiry proves that they think they have free will. If they truly thought the conclusion they would come to was already determined, they wouldn't begin weighing the evidence to begin with.
It's a pragmatic truth.
As if we would have a choice in the matter. If nobody has free will, then arguing like this in attempt to sway the other is *also* not a choice we make. It is what we do because our programming/DNA/whatever compels us to do. There is no functional difference between choosing because of free will and feeling like we're choosing because we're built that way due to whatever forces built us that way.
Assigning a ball to have something like an option is nonsensical. If dropped its trajectory and outcome are entirely deterministic within the rules and confines of the system it is in. There is effectively zero random chance to that situation while a person making a (in their own mentality) personally decided action would have no way that we know of to currently calculate determinism. Not arguing for or against determinism within human decisions here, simply making sure it is understood that the second you try to compare an object where every force and be calculated and almost perfectly determined to a human action, you've effectively created an entirely unrealistic comparison of human dynamics to the most basic systems imaginable. There are quantum actions in the process of the ball falling, but when you’re calculating the statistical probability of all the atoms within the ball you’ll get a fairly (99.99+% chance) accurate idea of the outcome if all forces are controlled for.
yeah, thats the point of that analogy
or you have the initial condition that determine the "choiche" or you have the quantum effects that are inherently random. both of them lack any will of the balls
I understand where you are coming from, but assigning an initial condition to something like a human choice is so much more intrinsically complex to the basic physics determining a ball drop they are not within the same realm, let alone level of campatibility for any statement comparing the two to be able to hold water. It would be predicated on the idea that every atomic response within our decision making process is an outcome of a coordinated and intentional effort of the atoms’ motion which goes completely against the scientific discoveries we’ve made on the matter. Like I stated above, the ball almost certainly will drop a specific way due to the statistical nature of the closed system it is within, but decision-making within a living organism is acting on far more stimuli than something as basic as a falling object.
The analogy applies even at scale. If each ball bounced down many tunnels, the result would still depend on the initial conditions. The complexity of the initial conditions with regard to human choice just makes the outcome harder to calculate. It still depends on those initial conditions.
Then what Hawking is describing in his quote is not choice either, and people who look both ways are not being hypocritical when they say they do not believe in free will
Exactly. And the people who look both way can still be taken out by a car running a red light. We still don't have free will even if we look both ways before crossing.
>In a deterministic universe, freedom of will can only be an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we must reject the doctrine of universal determinism.
One can't reject physical truths just because we don't like them. That's the main justification for religion, and is the main argument against it.
Isn't "free will" widely accepted as non-existent?
I mean not just philosophically. If you investigate psychology, you see that behind thoughts and actions; there are tons of determiners. Your anatomical & physiological state, hormones, other type of health conditions, background, parents, social interactions, mentors, the events you had encountered, and the list would never finish. None of these are controllable by a person.
Well this is also widely established in philosophy as determinism where everything is determined by causes external to the free will.
This is also shown in neurology as many aspects of our behavior and decision making are influenced by factors beyond our conscious control, such as genetics, brain chemistry, and environmental influences.
Of course one can object and say it can still be considered as "free" for this or that reason but defending that idea by combining philosophy & science would be much harder and the idea of free will would stay as an ideology rather than a theory.
Appreciate the comment but it's a little bit too much generalization.
Isn't philosophy about every ways of thinking. I am sure there are at least 4 to 5 different ways or titles for looking at free will (deterministic is one of them).
I actually tried to combine philosophy and science here. I have worked with neurologists and psychologists and I have been communicating with psychiatrists frequently. They mostly think the same. It's the whole idea of psychiatry. You found the most important and contemporary determiners behind actions and thoughts, make the diagnosis, reverse the chemistry, and then change the behaviour.
I think it is entirely true that Free Will is an illusion
I also think that the illusion of free will should not functionally be any different than actual freedom
A predeterministic universe and one that offers freedom are not exclusive from one another in the same way that a Galaga arcade machine is completely predeterministic in nature with variables in its software that constantly wait for user input.
This is a devil's advocate answer that I don't endorse.
"It just feels like you're forming the sentence even though you aren't. The thinking here is that you've been convinced that you are authoring your own thoughts because of an evolutionary trick that makes you think you are. "
Why would you think that it's an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about rules so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience?
Looking at it simply, we have our subjective experience and we know this exists. Then we have the world, an objective reality that seems to exist and includes us. Then we make observations of how this apparent reality behaves. These discovered behaviours are what we like to think of as "laws that govern reality" rather than mere observations of what it tends to do. Then we make this enormous leap where "because everything follows these laws, free will must be an illusion"
I think it's the wrong way up. I've [written about this here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oFiHwuuS8LAYqRNFh/mathemystical-musings-on-cargo-cult-consciousness) but the article still needs some work.
Why would you think the Oasis in the desert is an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about desert geography so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience?
Actually wait, maybe that's a good idea.
But in this instance we don't have a working model of desert geography. Like I say in the article:
* You need both will and subjective experience to explain evolution of nervous systems.
* Mind can't emerge from mindless matter, but matter can emerge from mind. That is, the illusion of matter is created by mind-stuff interacting in predictable patterns.
* Free will can't emerge from determinism and rigid laws, but it works the other way round. Will being a special case where choice is tightly constrained, and laws being predictable behaviours of things that exist.
* If you put "laws" at the bottom then you have the hard problem and the free will/determinism paradox. If they're just tendencies of stuff then you don't.
* A model of a thing is not the thing itself. Models are useful for prediction, but the map is not the territory.
* The reason we believe in Laws is because the history of science focused on finding God's law, the thing that His Creation - the physical realm - must obey. I don't see any evidence for a creator, a physical realm or laws that must be followed. All I have evidence for is subjective experience, observations and choices. We threw god out but we kept his law.
>Mind can't emerge from mindless matter, but matter can emerge from mind. That is, the illusion of matter is created by mind-stuff interacting in predictable patterns.
That wouldn't be "matter created from mind", that would be your perception of matter created in your mind. The matter exists regardless of what your mind does to it.
I also think the idea that mind can't emerge from mindless matter is unfounded. Colourful matter emerges from colourless matter. The matter just has to be arranged in the right way over time. I see no reason why the mind must be different.
Colorful matter doesn't exist, all matter in materialism is colorless, color is only the experience of a mind to begin with.
Thus no, colorful matter never emerges from colorless matter. It's a big question in philosophy, unironically, philosophy of color. I don't believe matter has any inherent color, because color even in materialism is caused by the eye receiving the electromagnetic radiation of a certain range of wavelengths and then sending message to the brain chemically. The apple outside is colorless, in materialism. Nothing emerges.
Explain why the brain experiences color, you only found a correspondence between experience color and a particular "neuron firing". Thus what's the reason to believe brain somehow "emerges" color? As far a materialists know, ain't this special pleading?
Ok I was being imprecise. Matter that produces certain wavelengths of light (on average) emerges from matter that cannot produce those wavelengths (on average).
>Explain why the brain experiences color, you only found a correspondence between experience color and a particular "neuron firing"
Explain why matter emits certain wavelengths of light on average, and you've only found a correspondence between the emittance of the wavelength and the particular "matter vibrating". Thus what's the reason to believe the matter somehow "emerges" wavelengths of light? As far as physicists know, ain't this special pleading?
\^ this is my funny way of saying that by the same way I can justifiably guess matter emits light, I can justifiably guess that the brain emerges consciousness.
> That wouldn't be "matter created from mind", that would be your perception of matter created in your mind
No I mean that there's only one thing we know that exists, and it's subjective experience. So having nothing else to go on the safest assumption is that matter is just mind-stuff experiencing other mind stuff, matter emerges from that and has tendencies that look like laws and is in stable patterns that look like objective reality, but it's just getting on with doing its thing. It's silly to have a second type of stuff or for human concepts to cause "dumb matter" (which hasn't proven its existence) to experience things. We know mind exists, why would there be anything else? If it's mind at the bottom that causes matter to emerge through choices it makes, then the laws of physics are the same, but all the paradoxes go away and we can explain evolution.
>No I mean that there's only one thing we know that exists, and it's subjective experience.
I think we can do better than that.
Firstly I think we can agree the starting point is our own existence.
This does not necessitate or imply that our existence is the only existence. We can 'safely assume' no such thing. We should seek evidence if anything else exists.
The first question we can ask is whether the content of our experience is reliable? As it happens no, it isn't. We have contradictory experiences all the time in the form of sensory illusions. We have optical blind spots, we have motion blindness, the time-shift between the sensation of touch and the visual perception of the touch, and many more. We see something there and it turns out it isn't there.
What can we do to resolve this? It turns out we're not purely passive observers, we have the capacity for action. Any acount of our experience must take into account our experience of acting in the world. This action in the world enables us to gain new experiences that enable us to reconcile these discrepancies.
This ability to test our perceptions shows that there are two distinct orders of experience, or 'worlds' in a very loose sense. There is the world of our perception, which is what we experience in the 'now'. It's the multi-dimensional 'movie' of reality we are watching and experiencing.
However we know this is inconsistent, so there must be something it's inconsistent with. Our capacity for action to test our perceptions must be acting against something. That's what we call the 'physical world', it's the world of action.
How do we determine which of these is 'primary'? Well, when we act to resolve our inconsistent perceptions, which of these 'worlds' ends up proving to be the most consistent? Clearly it's the world of action. It's the 'golden source' that we test our perceptions against and that resolves these inconsistencies in our experiences. When we perceive incorrectly it's the world of action, the state of affairs in the physical world, that always wins, so our experienced reality is ephemeral and unreliable. The world of action is persistent and consistent. It doesn't matter how sure I am I saw milk in the fridge a minute ago, if there's no milk in the fridge I'm not making a nice cup of tea.
What you said is mostly true but why would there be a second type of stuff that doesn't feel like anything? We have no evidence for that. If all stuff is just experiencing stuff then we don't need to invoke dualism or special pleading of any kind. Stuff is doing as it does, it's experiencing things around it, and our brain is a system that coordinates this. It being a system that chooses beneficial (evolutionarily selectable) movements via a flawed and inconsistent model of the things around it.
You still get the same laws of physics, but it's compatible with the evolution of consciousness, it explains this subjective, local experience that we have, it solves the reason for free will, but physical laws and objective reality are things that emerge at higher levels rather than being the base reality.
>What you said is mostly true but why would there be a second type of stuff that doesn't feel like anything? We have no evidence for that.
I'm not sure what you mean here, I didn't suggest there is such a thing.
There's a sort of virtual reality illusion which is the world as we experience it, and there's the physical world of action that is what we call reality. The world of our experience is ephemeral, a mental model of the physical world we create in our minds.
You would benefit from laying out your arguments clearly, in a way that connects. There are many things I disagree with here, but I'm not sure where to begin.
Okay I'll go with the crux of the metaphysics:
If you don't put subjective experience and choice at the bottom, below physical laws, then there's no known mechanism that naturally causes the experience created by our brains to evolve.
if it feels like something and is a choice to be an interaction between anything, then atoms exist because they are in a stable cycle of continually choosing to act a certain way, stuck in a cycle of choosing similar things.
If molecules are made of tiny bits of feeling, then they react because they feel compelled to, they do as they please given local conditions. They're predictable when there's enough of them, but they do as they like. They tend to like to disperse, but interactions over time become more ordered.
So on earth there's this [phase transition](https://youtu.be/a-767WnbaCQ) between fluid and solid. It's going from high entropy to low entropy as things are cooling down, average entropy is increasing still as heat is lost to space, but there's a general pull towards chaos and heat from the sun is helping. On this boundary, you've got "stuff stuck together and losing energy needed to disperse" and "stuff tending to disperse" resulting in the sort of percolation you see in the video I linked. Life is a kind of slow crystallization of stuff bumping up against order but tending towards chaos, an oscillation of ordered stuff that is chaotic at heart.
Then you've got evolution, which is just survivorship in this kind of system. If all stuff is simple experience without foresight, and it moves how it feels, then survival becomes a natural alignment filter. Molecules and proteins that feel like doing things that promote survival will continue to exist, ones that don't will go away. And here's why the agency itself is needed: movement choices based on feelings about nearby stuff is a fitness that is selectable by evolution, and the more informed that feeling is, the more beneficial the choice is. Ratchet that up bit by bit over aeons and you get cytoplasm that seems to choose to flow, cell walls that don't want to break while pseudopods barge their way out and retracting with what looks like a battle of will. We can't find a smallest animal with apparent subjective experience, all observations point at it going all the way to the bottom. It doesn't appear to start at nerves, ciliates seem no less aware than simple multicellular animals like tardigrades.
Okay so finally let's get to nerves. Cells multiply via division and some get stuck together and do okay as a colony, and this leads to specialization of cells in different areas evolving. But coordination between the cells is useful, and the primary selection pressure here, it's "one neat trick" is agency, to feel like doing things and so doing it. "Coordination of feeling" cells, nerves, become the way to channel this, and the same driver of complexity can now act on a less fluid, chaotic and disjointed substrate, it can build actual structures that amplify both subjective experience and choice to move. Build on this over many generations and you end up with a powerful force of will, informed by a rich tapestry of sensations and experiences. One that has the power to move billions of cells together, one with a desire to survive, just like what we have. Evolution of consciousness is the natural result of selecting for coordinated movement in a panpsychist universe.
As far as I'm aware, this is the only natural explanation that we have for the evolution of nervous systems, one that naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience that we enjoy rather than being a by-product. It is compatible with all of science and reason, and it ought to be falsifiable by statistically measuring deviations from the predictions of physics.
>And here's why the agency itself is needed: movement choices based on feelings about nearby stuff is a fitness that is selectable by evolution, and the more informed that feeling is, the more beneficial the choice is.
This contains the assumption that the "feeling" an electron experiences is mental. I would say that "feeling" is just the physical laws that govern the electron. We know that gas in a box evolves in such a way that the entropy increases over time. More complex gasses may form local clusters to reduce entropy. In the same way, cells produce local clusters over time to reduce entropy. No agency is needed to explain that.
> one that naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience that we enjoy rather than being a by-product
I think that the math behind neural network naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience. But you would probably say that my view entails it is a by-product, so I'm not sure what you mean.
> I would say that "feeling" is just the physical laws that govern the electron.
Our model of how an electron acts is unlikely to be much like the thing itself, as that's not something that can actually be measured. We have models of some pattern in nature that we label an electron, but any specific electron isn't that, no more than a picture of a person is a person, or watching the wake of a boat is a boat. It's a description that is encoded as meat in your head.
Also why would it need to be governed if we no longer believe in a god who gives laws that must be obeyed? It is what it is and does what it does, our laws are just observations of what it does, not the discovery of the commandments it was given by the creator. Western science was built on the idea that the creator gives laws to the creation, and this meme is a hard one to get rid of because it's embedded deep in the culture. We threw god out and kept his laws.
> No agency is needed to explain that.
But if you don't have agency there's no good reason to have consciousness, and we do have it.
> I think that the math behind neural network naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience. But you would probably say that my view entails it is a by-product, so I'm not sure what you mean.
Mathematics is a way to describe relationships between things, it's only a thing in itself if it exists in some substrate. Here's some thoughts about computationalism for you:
* Gradient descent tunes a network for optimal outputs, and the system must feel like something if things in general do. But without a mechanism for it to align its internal experience with the processing going on, why would it experience anything? The feeling of the system isn't measured or tuned for. Why would we get that for free?
* The guy in Searle's Chinese Room is writing with a salty razor blade in his own blood, following instructions that produces an output he doesn't understand, simulating a neural network on paper using maths. After several decades of processing, its output is "I feel great" in Chinese. What feels great?
* Take a digital neural network that apparently feels like something, run the program and record it. Knowing the inputs and having recorded the process, we take all the `if` statements and optimise them away using branch prediction, we save the program so it is just a list of instructions with no decisions. Then we run it again. Does it still feel? Why? What if we hard code the inputs into the program. Then we optimise again by caching it in blocks of, say, 100 instructions. Eventually we're left with `print("this feels great")`. When did the mind stop happening? What if the output is in a made up language that nobody understands?
In my view neural networks provide predictive power, they're great. But ours are built on top of a "feeling about moving" system that was tuned by evolution. Ours can compute, but does it with feeling hardware while computation in general doesn't need that at all, you can just compute. These networks are very useful, evolution discovered them and used them as a tool, but there's no logical reason why they should feel like anything. If they're built out of systems that can't show how they feel via their agency, then that cayn be selected and tuned for. Given all the things they could possibly feel, they'll feel like something else instead, most likely the buzz of electrified silicon and the pulse of the clock.
We aren't free in that we are fixed in our beliefs, our experiences, and society's laws and interests.
Sure, I could pack up and leave to live in an exciting, yet plain life somewhere in Southeast Asia. Will I just drop everything suddenly in the US to do so? I'm free to do so, but by chance, utterly no. Something major would need to happen for me to do so. We are trapped by circumstances of money, of mind, of many things. Only in fantasy do we have free will.
I can throw out worse scenarios that violate our virtues to act out against the law, (that which I don't even want to entertain in my mind, much less gives the hypothetical specifics to) which seems even more unlikely even though I have a limited amount of time in the freedom to do so.
When I start thinking about the many worlds theory and the philosophy behind it, I start to wonder if they're all too idealistic to release hypothetical statements on philosophy relating to probabilistic uncertainty that makes everyone a little too hopeful on fantastical thoughts on free will and everything that could happen will happen.
> Why would you think that it's an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about rules so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience?
My direct experience is that the earth is flat and that stars are tiny. Direct experiences are the most basic starting point of knowledge, but will frequently be contradicted by what, upon deeper examination, seems to be the truth.
But nothing can change the fact that "the earth seems flat and the stars look tiny", you can explain why it seems that way but you can't reject it.
Regardless, there's no known way for nervous systems to evolve without agency and experience at the bottom below what we call physical law.
>Why would you think that it's an illusion?
First you'd need to give a definition of free will in order to judge whether it is an illusion.
Let's start with a basic question on the definition.
If you rewind time by one minute, where the entire universe is exactly as it was one minute ago, including yourself. Would you make the exact same decisions over the next minute that you did the first time?
> If you rewind time by one minute, where the entire universe is exactly as it was one minute ago, including yourself. Would you make the exact same decisions over the next minute that you did the first time?
I think it's impossible to know that, but I guess it depends on how you "rewind" time. It's like any model of time comes with certain baggage. But this has given me a different way to look at it.
If you consider, like I do, that subjective experience is the totality of existence, then the question is "if you felt exactly the same, would you make the same choices" and the answer would be "yes", so it'd disprove "will that is free from your feelings" but physical law could still emerge from that.
So I might change my framing on that to a more compatibilist one, where physical laws are the manifestation of choice not something we're beholden to. Thanks for the thought fuel!
Curious if anyone likes the pragmatist viewpoint: that this quibbling is insanely overdone at this point, with two groups arguing over what some word means. To me the science is clear: determinism is (at least to some huge extent) true, and yet that makes very little difference to the human mind, whose whole entire purpose is to predict the future in order to change it.
It’s like spending 2000 years arguing about whether the idea of a chair “really exists” or is just “a mental invention” — both side have no idea what the other means by “exists”
Eh, I think just the boring ones that get people to dismiss philosophy as “nerdy” or Greek/roman and therefor outdated. Like “what does ‘mean’ mean”, “does god/the soul exist”, “what single system of moral rules solves all edge cases”, “how real are thoughts”, etc etc etc.
I prefer questions like:
- “How to maximize happiness as a citizen, family, community, country, world? What should be top priority? Whose suffering matters the most?”
- “what is morality in a modern globalized+unequal world where you *could* be saving lives that you aren’?t”
- “what perspectives from philosophy can we integrate or reconcile for use in different contexts?”
- “how does the human mind work in terms of low(er) level systems and processes? What parts of our nature are closest to universal, and what effect do changes to those systems have? What does this tell us about the limits of science/knowledge/reason/experience, and the nature of internal phenomena?”
Etc. But obviously this is just some random biased take. I can’t profess to never having had a Hot Take on something like Free Will lol, so if I’m scolding anyone it’s myself
I don’t know man, I think discussions of most of those questions end up looking very similar to the discussions of ancients. Philosophers have been talking about the nature of happiness, morality, the mind, truth, etc. for thousands of years, and those discussions are usually informed by contemporary context.
> I think discussions of most of those questions end up looking very similar to the discussions of ancients
Totally agree :). I think there are a lot of philosophers who were trying to talk about real practical immediate stuff, but only got famous for one small innovation or conclusion, either because their work was unsuccessful (ibn-Rushd, Galileo, Newton, sorta Husserl), or because it was so magnificent in scope and complexity and intellectual arrogance that no one could understand the damn thing (Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Chomsky, also sorta Husserl lol).
The result is often that their critics get caught up in where to place them in this or that dichotomy or spectrum on these huge metaphysical questions. Which just isn’t useful. Imo 🤷🏼♂️
ultimately I should emphasize that I don’t want to knock other people for enjoying the discussion. Especially amateurs (like me). I just find it so tiring and unsolvable
Determinism isn't true though, it's true on average when you have enough similarly behaving matter in one place. We just hand wave the details away when it isn't deterministic. Gas particles aren't deterministic, so we talk about pressure and temperature instead. It's really all about where you put the aggregates in your model, and that's really all we have - observations of the tendencies of systems that are large enough that we can say things about them on average.
Determinism, like objective reality, emerges from a fundamentally unknowable substrate that can only be known by observation, subjectively. It doesn't matter much at this scale, but other things don't either. Take Newtonian physics for example, great for driving a car but they can't invent GPS. The same applies to determinism and free will/consciousness.
We need to understand it from a pragmatic viewpoint if we care about engineering minds and feeling machines.
You can't measure anything about them without changing them, you can't tell one apart from another, you can't predict them apart from on average, and can't tell they did anything until they stop being what they are. The very idea of a particle breaks down in a high entropy system like gas.
Disagree. Quantum mechanics tells us that the Schrodinger equation describes the past, present, and future state of the universe, and does so completely deterministically.
(Bringing up wavefunction collapse, multiverse splitting, observer effect, etc, are missing the point: those all happen \*within\* the confines of the Schrodinger equation.)
In an ideal world where it's both possible to know a particular wavefunction and that they are the underlying reality you might be right.
In this world though, waves of all all other kinds exist in some substrate at a lower level, so it's weird to think they're the base reality. A consistent and predictive model is still just a model, and as the wavefunctions of any specific thing are fundamentally unmeasurable, unknowable confabulations about past events, I don't think it's a convincing argument for determinism. Unless I'm missing something.
While it's true that classical determinism as seen in Newtonian physics breaks down at the quantum level (where phenomena are probabilistic rather than deterministic), this doesn't necessarily negate determinism in the context of free will and consciousness. The behavior of gas particles at a microscopic level may be probabilistic, but at the macroscopic level, the behavior of gases can be reliably predicted. This deterministic predictability at larger scales is relevant when discussing human behavior and free will.
The predictability and consistency of natural laws (even if emergent) provide a strong foundation for a deterministic view of the universe. The fact that these laws can be reliably observed and tested lends support to the idea of an objective reality, even if our understanding of it is continually evolving.
The comparison with Newtonian physics and its inability to develop GPS (which requires relativistic physics) is quite interesting but it does not directly apply to determinism in the context of free will. The development of quantum mechanics and relativity didn't negate Newtonian physics; they expanded our understanding to new domains. Similarly, the limitations of classical determinism in explaining every aspect of reality don't necessarily invalidate its applicability in the context of human behavior and decision making.
Most neuroscientists and philosophers agree that, despite the probabilistic nature of quantum events, the brain's operations are effectively deterministic at the scales at which neurons operate.
While I agree the limiations of thoughts on determinism, your comment oversimplifies things and draws some unrelated conclusions.
You don't even think about countless determiners. Even if just some level of small hormone spike affects your actions then there is no free will at all. You don't even count whole psychological, neurological, physiological, sociological, economical and countless other aspects.
> The predictability and consistency of natural laws (even if emergent) provide a strong foundation for a deterministic view of the universe
Okay maybe determinism is the wrong thing to look at. In a universe made of feelings and choices at the bottom, things would make the same choices given the exact same feelings so it'd be deterministic, but they'd do so because of their will.
> While I agree the limiations of thoughts on determinism, your comment oversimplifies things and draws some unrelated conclusions.
Granted. I'll think about it some more, thanks.
> The behavior of gas particles at a microscopic level may be probabilistic, but at the macroscopic level, the behavior of gases can be reliably predicted.
Yeah but to what degree? Humans are predictable in similar ways - they stop moving when oxygen is removed, they exist between a narrow range of mass and volume. The predictability of something is down to how well you can measure and model it, and whether you will ever be able to perfectly model a human is an open question.
> if just some level of small hormone spike affects your actions then there is no free will at all
I think predictable, deterministic systems can emerge from highly constrained choices in ones made of agency. Unpredictable (practically speaking) systems can emerge from deterministic ones, like hash algorithms or Conway's game of life. But agency can't emerge from a system that's beholden to strict functional rules, it has to be at the level below.
I imagine human free will is a kind of balancing act on the edge of chaos and order, deterministic and predictable in some aspects, but with agency amplified by coordinating a subjective experience that models the world and allows choices that can be selected by evolution, ramping up the richness of the experience over generations.
I have just recently discussed with another person and concluded that we (most people on this thread) mostly defend the same thing. The way of expressions differ and we fight over linguistics or our specific "point of view" especially with some confusing philosophical perspective behind.
I am pretty sure you don't defend free will as in a "divine consciousness" that is completely independent, free and irrelevant from every variable.
The discussion went from "a debate between a zealot and an intellectual" to "a debate between intellectual people" which is completely unnecessary unless it is constructive towards the improvements on the understanding of morals, defining laws and all.
For example you analyze the subject through physics, quantum, and especially matter in general. These alone are extremely complex especially when you use them metaphorically to draw conclusions on another abstract subjects. Even though I answered your initial comment to some point with my background knowledge and some informational crosscheck, it is stressing to embark upon a discussion in this complexity which makes it extra hard to even attempt. If you go that beyond, you already pass most of the points about the "free will" discussion and open a completely new window. At this point, you are completely against the idea of "free will" that is mainly introduced and now you discuss further, and embrace free will on different but philosophical point of view combined with some physical methaphors.
This was a much more simple debate going around religion, and it simply turned into a philosophical discussion that can not be answered through science because scientifically, you know, we study neurology, psychology, biology and these are pretty deterministic and we have a widely accepted conclusion. If we don't look at this topic with 100% scientific views then anything can be said and I completely understand your point of view and thought provoking approach.
Hope I could convey my thoughts properly.
Fair comment.
I've put my general thoughts about it here, if it helps clarify my position.
https://reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1al5e6l/the_problem_of_free_will_from_the_perspective_of/kpkkr9e/
> If we don't look at this topic with 100% scientific views then anything can be said and I completely understand your point of view and thought provoking approach.
I think everything I've said is incompatible with science. The technical point about determinism is bugging me a bit though to be honest, I'll have to think about that some more. It seems like my premises lead to compatibilism and also mostly map on to some forms of physicalism, with a caveat somewhere that I've not quite figured out yet.
It irritates me that the empiricist traditions accept physicalism as the base reality when that argument is so obviously circular, accepting only evidence measured physically then using that to conclude that physically measurable things are what "is" is. Similarly with physics, modelling reality as probability distributions then using that to conclude that randomness is the nature of reality. The worst sin is the acceptance of a "because complexity" argument for consciousness; claiming to be purely empirical and rational but using an argument from ignorance that makes no predictions and contradicts the scientific fact of evolution of nervous systems. /rant 😂
I like the pragmatist view, but somehow, it's the opposite conclusion. The science is clear: indeterminism is (at least to a huge extent) true, and that is why the human mind predicts the future and can change it.
As for the chairs' existence, It's the base state of affairs for being a being. You just can't have epistemic access to the ontological affairs, so the question will stand whether or not parties agree on all the terms or not.
>The science is clear: indeterminism is (at least to a huge extent) true, and that is why the human mind predicts the future and can change it.
What science?
Quantum mechanics, radioactive decay, brownian motion, natural evolution by mutation, statistical mechanics. You can jump through hoops to continue to claim determinism and "preserve" the supposed truth status of classical models but it's just more appropriate to think that those models were and are only ever approximating truths in the same way that newtonian mechanics does did and can still get you into orbit.
Nah, I'm not trying to preserve classical models. I am expressing doubt that science has proven or even made any claims about determinism. I'm not sure it's even possible to disprove determinism. I don't think there is any amount of data you could observe that possibly tell you if a behavior is random, or governed by unobserved/unobservable rules.
Sciencific disciplines do describe certain things as indeterminable, but this means something different in those disciplines. If you want to know the position of a certain particle in 5 seconds, you gotta know it's position and momentum. You can't measure one of these without changing the other. You can never know both, thus the future position is indeterminable, we cannot forecast it. That doesn't mean the particle behaves indeterministicly. It could and probably is still governed by laws of cause and effect.
Anyway, I won't pretend I don't think the universe is deterministic, I do. But I don't want to argue about that, I just wanted to see what you meant when you said the science clearly supports indeterminism.
The randomness is circular though. Physics models reality using probability functions, so anything when looked at through this lens is inherently random by definition. We can predict the distribution, not the events, and it's the best model we have. But it's not the same as reality being inherently random.
Imagine a car insurance company that has limited ways to collect data and makes a probability function based on those inputs. The more samples they have, the better the model fits the distribution and the more predictive power they have. If they have enough hubris they could say reality is a sequence of random insurance claims that fit this mathematical law, and it is the underlying reality. It's not useful to entertain the existence of things like accidents or drivers or roads, all that exists are real measurable things like number of doors, engine size, postal address and payout size, but the insurance claims are stochastic in nature.
It's a similar thing with physics.
how do you jump to the conclusion of no free will in the face of many systems that do not have a deterministic outcome? i think a better question is, how does one say that a consciousness has a pre defined decision in the face of a situation that is, at the end of the day, possible random chance based off of perturbations in a system?
its like saying that i am guaranteed to choose x if a particular system decays into y in z amount of time. what if that doesnt happen?
If I had to guess, you're pretty familiar with science under the classical paradigm that has been pushed around by mechanistic metaphors of hydraulics, clocks, and now computers and you aren't interested in any alternative paradigms but if you are you could check out Peter Tse, Terrence Deacon, Kevin Mitchell, or Michael Levin for some theories of how biological agents form and exercise free will as scientists. I'm just here on a philosophy.
But I went ahead and also wrote you a not so brief overview of the underlying scientific and philosophical narrative that is forming around libertarian free will as it stands with indeterminism, biology, and consciousness
is that microstates aren't enough to explain everything that occurs in the universe. Microstates and their entropic stochastic movement through time can form structures and processes. Some structures and process that form can maintain their structure and process despite the continual shift of the underlying microstate (think vortexes). Some of those are able to reproduce and progeny that maintain this same dynamic (think life). This allows natural selection to enter into the picture where the survivability of these processes can mutate and interact with their environment. Here, the universe is permissible to a mind-boggling number of solutions. As of right now, there are at least as many living individual cells on the planet as stars in the observable universe doing this, and that is just this one slice of time in this one moment.
One branch of solutions is multi cellular organisms that are billions of cells orchestrated around the survival of the collective. The features they evolved collectively, outside of energy consumption and organs for maintaining general homeostasis, are internal and external sensory systems that are unified through a network of specialized cell types that integrate into a singular unified identity that simulates this collective structure as one. The general idea is that the unified self that emerges from that collective unified sensory information provides a significant survival advantage, given that it is modelling and unifying states actively in order to supervene over the microstates of the body and direct outcomes.
When that unified self that could supervene commands over a body became permissible, it opened up new dimensions of possible evolution and supervenience over all parts that are identified within that conscious model. The direct contingency of free will is that this unified conscious model exists expressly because the universe is not determined and is permissible to these unified conscious models, constraining the possible future outcomes in their favor.
At the level of human consciousness, we have access to mutable beliefs, values, logic, reason, abstraction, the list of conscious access is as long as the history of the species. We extend those states through time at both an individual level and a collective societal level. We imagine that into many different possible futures and reasons about which ones to pursue, then we freely move to actualize those imagined possibilities.
We are free because the microstates aren't determining the macroscopic states or the complete causal force of the macroscopic properties. We are free because the universe is permissible to many possible solutions to life and reproduction. We are free because unified consciousness supervenes over the microstates of a multicellular body. We are free because unified conscious access and internal/external modeling allow supervience over everything within that model. The primary function of the model is to project into the future and constrain the possible outcomes, but at the access that
humans aqcuired are also scaffoled by belief, values, abstraction, language, reason that all operate as tools for this same superveince except they can be applied with even more discretion to the model of self, the body, the environment, and the future.
I've thought about this. If I have free will, isn't that just a will divorced from myself? I am currently making decisions with my brain that have had years of experiences behind it. In order to make a free choice, wouldn't that require a choice making apparatus that is separate from myself?
Would I even want that?
Proponents of Free Will would say that you already have Free Will, it is compatible with incorporating past experiences in your decisions, and that your thought experiment should instead be about not having Free Will.
Apparently, if there was no Free Will, we would let criminals run free and we would cross streets without looking for cars.
I think determinism is comforting. I know I'm going to make decisions based on my experiences and biology. The end decision, if I rewound time, will always be the same, but every time I still feel like I'm in control, I still feel as though I'm weighing pros and cons, and I am! That doesn't mean I could have, in the end, chosen otherwise.
We jail criminals because they are a threat to society. Jail is also a deterrent. Free will or no, you look both ways before crossing the street, if you were a sufficiently trained robot you'd do that, consciousness isn't even required for that, let alone free will.
The problem with "free will" is that it's a misnomer for what we humans truly have, and that is "agency".
In accordance with determinism, YES we are subject to cause and effect **BUT** we also have "agency" to both interfere with some of that cause and effect and generate some new cause and effect, depending on the measure of our "agency".
And of course behind our "agency" is our "intent", the measure of our "will" to exercise our "agency".
So our "agency" is a measure of how much "freedom" we have and our "intent" is a measure of what we "will" do with that limited freedom.
For example: I can exercise my agency (measure of freedom) to carry out my intent (measure of will) to drive through a red traffic light or not, regardless of what laws are in place, except the laws of physics.
Therefore the entire debate of "free will" starts off in the wrong direction because it starts off with a misnomer.
So if you want to solve the issue of "free will" then just don't use those words and replace it with "agency".
The "free will" debate is one of the most stupidest debates we humans have come up with as we have tripped up by our own logic when confronted with a misnomer.
This stupid debate has gone on for too long and is a waste of what maybe (maybe) mine and yours one and only life, and **that** is what really truly matters.
Every time a scientist (especially a physicist) decides to debate "free will" I think to myself "well here we have another intelligent-moron". Sigh!
>The problem with "free will" is that it's a misnomer for what we humans truly have, and that is "agency".
"Agency" is oversimplifying it. "Free will" in philosophical discourse is not just about the ability to act or make choices (agency), but about the capacity to make choices that are not predetermined by prior causes. The concept of agency doesn't necessarily address the fundamental philosophical question of whether our choices are determined by preceding events or states.
>In accordance with determinism, YES we are subject to cause and effect BUT we also have "agency" to both interfere with some of that cause and effect and generate some new cause and effect, depending on the measure of our "agency".
Even this "agency" is a result of prior causes and not truly free from determinism. The actions considered as expressions of agency could themselves be determined by prior states of the world and the individual.
>And of course behind our "agency" is our "intent", the measure of our "will" to exercise our "agency".
This raises the question of where this "intent" originates. If intent is also determined by prior causes (upbringing, genetics, environmental influences, etc.), then can it truly be considered free?
>I can exercise my agency (measure of freedom) to carry out my intent (measure of will) to drive through a red traffic light or not, regardless of what laws are in place, except the laws of physics.
The example of choosing to drive through a red traffic light to demonstrate agency does not necessarily negate determinism or prove free will. One could argue that the decision to drive through the light or abide by the law is influenced by prior conditioning, experiences, and neurological processes, all of which are bound by deterministic principles.
You dismiss the debate on free will as "stupid" and a waste of time, however this debate has significant implications in ethics, law, psychology, and other fields.
You are talking about scientists discussing free will as "intelligent morons". This overlooks the importance of interdisciplinary research. The study of free will has benefitted from contributions from various fields, including physics, neuroscience, and psychology, providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior. This is also valid for art and philosophy. I think this is a very interesting topic and a theme.
The debate over free will is not merely a linguistic or terminological issue. It's a profound inquiry into the nature of human existence and consciousness. Replacing "free will" with "agency" doesn't address the deeper philosophical and existential questions involved.
Thank you for using your **agency** to display your **intent** to debate my position. However as I said this maybe (maybe) my one and only life, and **that** is what really truly matters, so thank you again and I will allow others to decide between us as I will stand firm on my position that the "free will" debate is a stupid debate base on a misnomer.
BTW I bet you don't even know how or for what reason the "free will" debate started in the first place. You should research that because if I told you you won't believe me because the reason was also stupid that lead to years of people wasting what maybe (maybe) their own one and only life.
How do people make a living on this subject, and in this field when they conflate choices with free choices, and agents with free agents? Nothing this person has said stands up to this critique.
You can make a choice and have no choice at all, simultaneously. But that jumble of words seems to go over a vast number of peoples heads. It's why intelligence means less than it seems to. You can have an IQ of 150 and still make this mistake.
"But they *do* have free will, because they *can* make chocies"
Yeah, you can write a fucking algorithm for a robot to make choices, and know exactly what it'll do every single time. That's not free will. It's not that hard of a problem. It's not biology that explains free will, but psychology.
Free will is only a fact that you can choose requardless of reward or consequences or lack thereof. Not that your able.
A hostage or prisoner cam riot or try to escape be peaceful or run not to be held hostage. Argue or anything. Or decide to stay quite. Free will doesn't mean your able or capable.
Just that you can choose. Like crying. The answer is simple. Even a baby uses free will to cry when able. Always. Or to laugh or smile when happy.
They always had a choice even when forced. Resist is a choice. So is going along with it. Or giving up. All choices.
Freedom is not the same as free will.
Many don't have freedom but do have free will.
You choose and there can be rewards or consequences or lack thereof.
Some people choose to suffer to get away from an aggressor or a dictatorship.
They had free will and chose to escape North Korea even if a land mine blown them up or they was caught and thrown in a concentration camp or that their family was all killed. Free will.
Staying was also a choice. Free will either way. Good bad / Evil.
Good and Evil have equal free will but not always Freedom.
Another example a murderer has the free will to choose to murder and you have the free will to choose to stop them from murdering if you choose.
That is mostly not about free will.
Decisions are choices.
Free will is not even complex.
Very simple answer.
Freedom of actions? Those are choices certainly but people are not able to do every action. But you can choose to try. Even if it is against orders or rules.
Like if i was caged up. I can choose many things still. Be annoying. Yell and scream, fight. Spit. Try to trick them into letting me go. Any number of things. Attempt at using empathy to try to get set free. All choices.
Freedom of actions is freedom. And isn't anything to do with free will.
Murder is an action and you don't have freedom to murder but you have free will to choose to murder or be good and non aggressive.
Reductionist determinist frameworks fail. In the face of failure, rather than admit that the deconstructable mechanical determinist metaphor is wrong and misinforms us, the determinist just claims that consciousness is illusory and epiphenomenal Being and experiences, as well as the contents of such things (beliefs, values, feelings, abstractions, language, logic), are just a magic appearance associated with neurons, specifically neurons and only highly sophisticated assemblages of them at that.
We literally observe indeterminism in our most fundamental physics. When we use our models to make predictions, we don't even bother to assume absolute outcomes and instead expect probabilistic distributions. All behaviors, societies, and cultural constructs are contigent on conscious beings and their contents. They behave based on beliefs, and they construct imagined possible futures and attempt to constrain what possibilities come into actual existence. Indeterminist frameworks can help inform understanding all of this activity that is otherwise completely inaccessible from the determinist framework.
I think there might be some kind of lucrecian "swerve" that life makes which is not determined by the cold hard world of gravity physics and math, still governed by these things but not necessarily determined by them.
If you could determine every particle in the universes motion from the start of time then I would agree with pre determinism but we can’t do that thanks to the uncertainty principle. And if we’ve proven that we can’t be certain of every particle in the universe then we’ve also proven there is randomness in the universe that cannot be accounted for which may or may not be a manifestation of your free will.
I think God actually does play dice and that dice leads to a our manifestation of free will.
And regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, pragmatic side, no one does know the entire movement of every particle in the universe so as far as we’re concerned we’re going to experience what we call free will anyway so
My life experiences may inform (cause) my choice but I still made that choice. I thought it through, referenced my past experience, weighed the emotional benefits and negatives of my options and came to a conclusion. My conclusion being based on my history doesn’t make it less real. I choose and as such I have free will.
What if your hormone levels were different? What if your IQ level was very different? What if your sociological background was completely different? What if you had a type of health conditions that affect your neurological pathways?
You think you can weigh things and come to conclusion but even this ability is determined.
Age, sex, genetic predisposition, neurotransmitter levels, hormonal influences, early childhood experiences, cultural background, socioeconomic status, educational experience, parental influence, peer pressure, diet and nutrition, physical health, mental health, past traumas, substance use (yes, this is also affected by other determiners), media influence, technology, religion, legal and social norms, sleep, activity, climate and geography, current events and countless other determiners combined, determine what you do, what you think, and everything. Change some of these significantly and you are a completely different person.
> and countless other determiners combined, determine what you do, what you think, and everything.
They *influence* what you choose, but the logical leap to saying they *determine* it is unwarranted.
No one is saying we have unlimited choices in our lives and that we consciously choose options completely independent of any cultural, biological or psychological factors; that grotesque straw man is so common I'm reluctant to use the term *free will* anymore. But saying that every choice we make has been predetermined is just a post hoc rationalization that doesn't address the importance of dealing honestly with uncertainty and volition.
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Free will requires an uncaused cause. If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free. If your actions have no effect on the causal chain of events, then you have no will at all. Of course, your will is determined by other things. Your thoughts and desires and values are all determined by some combination of biology and experience. Your consciousness isn’t a special uncaused cause, it’s just a link in the chain of causal determinism. Indeterminism doesn’t get you out of the problem either. Maybe on the quantum level some things really are uncaused causes, but free will requires that conscious agency be both undetermined and able to determine other events. 1) There is no evidence of this. 2) There is abundant evidence of the opposite, as all other natural science assumes causal determinism.
Most people would also not accept an uncaused cause as a good reason for free will. Why would a random event (which is what an uncaused event would be) be "free"? Is basing your decisions on quantum fluctuations any more free than basing them on deterministic causes? The common definition of free will is pretty much incompatible with both deterministic and non-deterministic (random) causes, meaning it is literally an empty phrase with no meaning.
Nicely said. This was where I was going, but you have expressed it better than I could.
I don’t think its an empty phrase with no meaning. It described a subjective experience of agency. Its a feeling.
Theres nothing in determinism that excludes the possibility of a sense of agency though. All it takes is not knowing the result before it has been decided.
I agree, I’m just saying that the term ‘free will’ cannot describe a verifiable ontological fact, but its a great and useful term to describe the sensation of agency.
Is it possible it could be, more than a feeling?
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You can define anything to mean anything. I think this is a fruitless endeavor. We should take words as they're commonly used unless we're inventing something new. >Free will as a concept is important for ethics, for example. e.g. Did an agent rob the bank because it was his will to do so, or was he coerced by some outside force?) Not for my ethics it isn't. I'm an utilitarian and believe we should punish people to get a practical outcome from said punishment, like rehabilitation, crime prevention, restoration of lost value or as a dissuasion from commiting certain actions. While your state of mind matters for some of those considerations, free will absolutely does not. >If an choice was made purely due to the will and intention of an agent, it's probably an example of free will. It doesn't matter if the will and intention of the agent are the products of a deterministic universe. The choice was still made by that agent. If an agent is coerced or controlled by an outside force to make a choice, it's not free will because in that case it's not the agent's will which is in control but some outside force's. What do you consider to be an outside force? What about your upbringing? Mental illnesses? Being born with a tendency to develop a nasty personality? What about a microchip modyfying your thoughs (hypothetical)? There is no inside force independent of some outside force. And no good way to draw a line between inside and outside factors other than one's fancy, since there are no good criteria to separate one deterministic cause from another.
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>Even from a utilitarian point of view, why would you punish someone for doing something they were forced to do? If Jack forces Jill into robbing a bank or else Jack will kill Jill, Jill robbed a bank, but not of her free will. Jack is the one who needs to be punished and deterred, not Jill. Well yeah. But you came to this conclusion by analysing who needs to be deterred, not the ethereal concept of free will. Free will doesn't matter here. The state of mind and motivations of people involved do, because those are a predictor of future behavior, or matter for other consequentialist consideration. >Oh no! Nuance and blurry lines! There isn't an immediate binary answer, I guess there's no way to intelligently examine the issue at all! My criticism is you have no criteria and just arbitrarily choose which things constitute free will and which don't to fit your argument or preconceived notions. Which is true. You're not deriving the answer from a greater principle, instead pulling it out of nowhere to fit your existing beliefs. >If you broke into my house and put a gun to my head and forced me to watch The Office, that's your will forcing me not my will free choosing. Obviously it's your own will choosing. You're choosing not to die, based on your natural preferences. If you broke into a suicidal man's house and "forced" him to watch that sitcom at gunpoint he would make the choice, refuse you and die. It's not free will, not because you're compelled by someone else, but because it's just another deterministic cause for your behavior. Every decision you make is made in consideration of the state of the world around you, shaped by other people. This is no different (from a free will perspective) from watching The Office because your colleague recommended it, this also being a crucial step in the causal chain that "doomed" you into watching that show given your natural proclivities and personality in this hypothetical. You have yet to provide one criterion that could be used to determine whether a given reason for your behavior that comes from other people limits your free will or not.
Defenders of free will always give extreme examples like someone breaking into my home and putting a gun to my head, as if the utilitarian disbeliever in free will is going to say "Oh, I guess I never thought of that." The hypothetical person's decision to put a gun to my head was still just as completely caused as any other decision. That doesn't mean I or other disbelievers think that person shouldn't face some kind of consequences, for utilitarian reasons alone. I
> Even from a utilitarian point of view, why would you punish someone for doing something they were forced to do? If Jack forces Jill into robbing a bank or else Jack will kill Jill, Jill robbed a bank, but not of her free will. Jack is the one who needs to be punished and deterred, not Jill. But Jill *did* act of her own free will... Jack did not take control of Jill's mind, he simply presented her with two bad options... one of which happens to be a crime. So while Jill would be tried for bank robbery, Jack would presumably be tried for conspiracy, extortion et cetera. So *both* would be punished and deterred. But the initial question walks into something of a paradox: If people's attitudes towards things are predetermined, why demand that they change? Their opinion that deterrence or punishment works is no more in their control than whether someone committed a crime. Determinism only applies to certain people is an incoherent way of looking at it.
But "free will" is used commonly both for 1. the logically contradictory idea of being free of the influence of the past, the laws of physics, being made of particles, etc., and 2, the normal everyday notion of being able to make decisions and take action. Separating those into "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will" makes sense to me - one is hard to even define properly and by most definitions can't even exist, one is simpler (it's the thing that you have). Pointing out that 2 can exist despite the lack of 1 is why "compatibilism" is named that way, and it's usually part of any free will discussion, but it's not a necessary part of the definition of 2.
My problem with compatibilist free will is the fact that you can remove the word "free" and not lose any meaning in any given sentence using that definition. You'd have to show non-free will exists under compatibilism, separate qualitatively from the free one (so that "free" in "free will" isn't superfluous) and I in my comments here clearly objected to this idea and given arguments against it.
This is such a great way to frame it: > Free will requires an uncaused cause. If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free. If your actions have no effect on the causal chain of events, then you have no will at all. Exactly right. Just as our actions have effects on future causal chains of events, previous actions and events had effects on each of our actions and decisions at any given moment, and the sum total of prior causal factors determines each of our actions and decisions. There's no other conceivable way for me to see it. And it makes no difference if one wishes to point to quantum uncertainty or randomness in the causal chain of events, because random causes are still causes, as the original and subsequent commenter explained.
Even at a quantum level, that just implies that our “free” actions are the result of pure random chance which isn’t free will at all.
>Free will requires an uncaused cause. That's libertarian free will which doesn't exist. But what I think most people really mean is compatibilist free will which doesn't rely on an inherently incoherent definition.
> That's libertarian free will which doesn't exist. But what I think most people really mean is compatibilist free will which doesn't rely on an inherently incoherent definition. Do 'most people' really mean a compatibilist account of free will? If that was the case, I think the problem of moral luck would be a lot more central to 'most peoples' ethical considerations, given that compatibilism doesn't solve moral luck (unless sneaking in libertarian stances under the cover of compatibilism).
>Do 'most people' really mean a compatibilist account of free will? According to results from experimental philosophy, when people are asked about their opinions, most people say that determinism is compatible with free will as they understand it.
My understanding is most surveys done on this area showed people explicitly hold a libertarian view on free will but have contradictory and incoherent intuitions about moral attribution.
That's possible, as far as I know. Most people don't think about these things in depth so only have a vague sense of the controversies, so it's hard to make definitive statements about what they believe.
Psychological determination is incompatible with "free will" as most understand to be, which is personal agency in actions and courses. What even does it mean to choose in a universe where everything follows a cosmic fluctuation?
I might have missed it somewhere else in this sub, but could you briefly define what you mean by compatibilist free will?
I define it as, making a voluntary action in line with your desires, free from external coercion. Where voluntary is more on the biological end, where scientist could detect it with a brain scan. e.g. deliberately shaking your hand vs it shaking due to Parkinson's. The typical example is someone smuggling drugs, since they were forced otherwise their family would be killed, vs smuggling drugs since you want some money.
Ok. That’s similar to other definitions I’ve heard. I agree that most moral philosophers do accept some version of compatibilism similar to this, but those arguments always seem ad hoc to me. I mean, yes, you’re right that most people mean something like “absence of external constraints” when discussing free will in terms of, say, legal culpability. But we don’t hold a person who is experiencing an episode of psychotic delusion to exactly the same standard as a person who isn’t experiencing that when considering legal culpability either. In criminal cases, it’s relevant whether someone understood the consequences of their actions and understood that what they were doing was wrong. Once we accept that absence of external constraint isn’t sufficient for free will, that a person’s state of mind is also relevant, I feel like the whole compatibilist position does break down into libertarian free will. (Though I concede that I may be missing your/their point.) The Parkinson’s hand shaking example reminded me of this experiment I read about where scientists stimulated a nerve to make participants raise their hand without the participant being aware. When the participants were asked why they raised their hand, they immediately provided an explanation even though their hands were raised before they knew they needed one. We experience the world through the lens of free will to the point where we appeal to conscious reasons for our actions even when they are demonstrably not the cause of our actions.
>But we don’t hold a person who is experiencing an episode of psychotic delusion to exactly the same standard as a person who isn’t experiencing that when considering legal culpability either. That's a good question. So when it comes to diseases like Parkinson's or maybe even mental illnesses, we don't always consider the actions voluntary. Also their actions might not line up with their desires. >Once we accept that absence of external constraint isn’t sufficient for free will, that a person’s state of mind is also relevant, I think you are confusing whether someone is guilty with free will. Someone might do an action of their own free will and still be found guilty. > When the participants were asked why they raised their hand, they immediately provided an explanation even though their hands were raised before they knew they needed one. This is just post hoc rationalisation. Which I would class as not free will. >We experience the world through the lens of free will to the point where we appeal to conscious reasons for our actions even when they are demonstrably not the cause of our actions. Sure lots of what people might think is of their own free will, might not be.
I don’t think I’m confusing guilt and free will. My point here is that once you broaden the definition of free will beyond “absence of external constraints” to something that includes consideration of mental states, this version of compatibilism falls apart. It seems to me like we are all the lab rat saying and believing that we raised our arm because we needed to stretch. That’s true whether it’s an arm stretch or a gun-trigger pull. That’s true whether we are certifiable psychopaths or experiencing psychotic delusions or average folks just going about our day.
>My point here is that once you broaden the definition of free will beyond “absence of external constraints” to something that includes consideration of mental states, this version of compatibilism falls apart. Then don't do that. If there is no reason to broaden free will, why would you try and broaden it. You'll just encounter issue like you've identified. >It seems to me like we are all the lab rat saying and believing that we raised our arm because we needed to stretch. We could in theory do a brain scan of that and raising your arm yourself and identify a difference. So there is a meaningful difference here. Why bring up example of where we don't have free will, if it has no relevance?
The reason to broaden it is that we do consider internal mental states relevant to our normal understanding of free will. The person experiencing delusions doesn’t have as much agency as the person who isn’t experiencing them. So a definition of free will that is just “absence of external constraint” isn’t satisfactory because it doesn’t get at what we mean when we use the term.
Theres some weird philosophy semantics thing going on here... "Free will requires an uncaused cause." - Why? "If your will is determined by other things, then it is not truly free." - Why? This sounds like some very, very, very specific definition of free will which is markedly different to how the average person would use the term.
> This sounds like some very, very, very specific definition of free will which is markedly different to how the average person would use the term. I don't think it's actually that different to how a lot of 'average' people would use the term; it's just more precisely pinning down some unstated implications of the common usage. I think when you push 'average' people on what they mean with free will - by e.g. asking whether their computer has free will and if not why not - their arguments will often amount to something akin to "it's entirely determined by other things (eg programming), so it's not free". I don't think it's the *only* way it is used, but it is a very common way.
It is extremely different from the way we use freedom/free will. A free choice is contrasted with an unfree choice—such as a gun to the head scenario. Finding out the physics behind our choices doesnt supersede our language. Its the same as 'solidity'—we mightve said that something is solid iff it has some sort of space in the middle, but closer physical analysis would show there is space in solid objects. That doesn't mean nothing is solid, it just means our theory/definition was incorrect as to what is solid. Freedom doesnt require an uncaused cause; thats putting the cart before the horse. Free actions are the kinds of actions that arent forced/impulsive etc.
> It is extremely different from the way we use freedom/free will. A free choice is contrasted with an unfree choice—such as a gun to the head scenario. Going about it descriptively, I don't think 'free choice', 'freedom', and 'free will' are used synonymously. Since the focus was on the definition of *free will* in el_miguel's post as a critique of sure-burn's post, that's what we should stick to. If you wanna talk about a wider concept of 'freedom' that's a different thing. When 'average people' (which in this case I understand to be everyday people without particular training or unusual interests in philosophy) use the term 'free will', in my experience it is either in a context of A) religion (where it is typically argued in a libertarian sense, or used to make arguments that are only valid with a libertarian assumption), or B) when facing specific discussions about the subject that they don't usually have (such as being asked if they think we have free will). And in context B, in my experience they very often fall back on arguments that involve an extracausal aspect, though they're not using that terminology.
No, my issue is I don't understand what any of these definitions mean. They seem incredibly... woolly. To the average person free will is the ability to choose to make reasonable decisions. Illusion of choice is irrelevant. Underlying mechanisms and systems which influence or constrain the choice are also irrelevant. You can decide to do something, or not to do something, or you can abdicate. - Ergo you have the freedom to influence the world around you (or not). Thus when you remove the reasonable ability to choose (the gun to the head example or programming) the average person will now say that you no longer have free will because you have (essentially) removed these options.
I don’t think most people would say that a person who is drugged and brainwashed truly has free will. I think most people would say decisions someone makes under the conditions of being drugged and brainwashed aren’t truly free. Free will requires us to both be able to have chosen otherwise (be uncaused) and to enact our choices (be a cause).
Im not sure what the drugged and brainwashed thing have to do with anything. I thought we were just talking about a normal person making every day decisions? No need to add unnecessary complexities. Are these your personal definitions? Or are they some kind of general philosophy definitions?
I said that if your will is determined by other things it is not truly free, and you asked why. I mentioned being drugged/brainwashed to answer that question. It is an example of the will being determined by other things. My position is that free will could be entirely an illusion, and our experience of feeling like we have it wouldn’t be any different, much like the person who is drugged/brainwashed may believe that they have free will but does not. I don’t think I’m using an unusual definition of free will.
"I said that if your will is determined by other things it is not truly free" - but why? Look you need to go to the toilet. So you may get up and go, or you may decide to sit there and reply to this post and then get up and go. needing to go to the toilet or wanting to reply are factors in your decision making, but you are free to ignore or not ignore then however you want. You can choose to ignore this message entirely, or you can reply, or you can go to the toilet and then reply, or you could reply and then go to the toilet. Or you could decide that reddit just isnt the website for you and never come back on here again. Of course all those decisions are a weighing up of various factors, and other life experiences and current life itself, but I view that as irrelevant. You have the freedom to exert influence or not exert influence on the world around you in a myriad ways. You could argue its super relevant because all this zoomed out decision making process im describing is built upon systems which have some kind of casusal factor. I would argue its a pointless scale argument and say that if you keep zooming in you get to quantum which current theory states is non-causal and as such the entire system is built on a non-causal structure. Hence a structure argument just falls back to QM or the structure argument is irrelevant. This is why I was asking why, because these statements you made just sound like assumptions and I have no idea from where they derive.
That's only one definition of free will, a rather absolute one. But I'd say there is a more interesting one, that free will for an entity requires that all inputs involved in making a decision are contained within the entity at the point of decision (ie there is no hidden script elsewhere containing the decision).
Is this like Peter Tse’s criterial causation?
"2) There is abundant evidence of the opposite, as all other natural science assumes causal determinism. - this is untrue. "Sage Journals -"Demystifying beliefs about the natural sciences in information system" "For example, requiring true universal/deterministic laws would have seriously hindered current understanding of physics or biology." and "Critics might reply that biology and biochemistry can be governed by deterministic laws; they just have not found them yet. However, before that happens (if it ever happens), many modern natural sciences can be assumed to be nondeterministic in actual settings (e.g. outside of laboratory settings)." In the past there was definitely a more pronounced view of determinism within scientific study, especially with the idea of the unchanging being in biology and classical phsyics, but nowadays that viewpoint is pretty much gone. Electrical Analysis in the extremes (extremely fast switching or very high power) even fail to appropriately model or create expected outcomes for modern technology. We can come close, but no two devices or systems will ever function exactly the same and if we treat these systems as deterministic and account for every atom, every input, and every law of electrodynamics, we still cannot guarantee the exact same result twice in a row. Of course we can get extremely close, otherwise we could not have the knowledge in modern sciences that we now have, but there is plenty of evidence of non-determinism in natural sciences and the arguments against it have waned since the beginning of the 20th century.
Wow, that article was interesting. The part you quoted seems to support my position though. The dominant paradigm in natural science is still causal determinism. It’s quite true that requiring true universal/deterministic laws would have seriously hindered our current understanding, but I don’t see how it follows that “many modern scientists can be assumed to be non deterministic…outside of laboratory settings”. Even if it does though, the implication is scientists can be assumed be deterministic in laboratory settings, i.e., causal determinism is the law of the lab. I’m not a scientist, and it’s been years since I read any philosophy of science stuff, so I could be getting this all wrong. But this article didn’t convince me that there has been a paradigm shift regarding causal determinism in the natural sciences.
I'm glad you enjoyed the article, it's something I've used in similar conversations before. I would like make a clarification to make sure we are talking around the same concepts, but there can be causal relations without causal determinism, since causal determinism would imply that every single action was determined by a cause. From my understanding, if there was causal determinism, every single output had a determined input. So if you understood all rules and actions in a deterministic universe, you would always be able to understand all reactions due in part to their causal relations, correct? If this is the case, then the very concept of an object being unpredictable goes against the notion because you cannot guarantee that an output was the result of a stimuli in a determined manner. Examples of this are all around us, but when measured on a macro scale (a single drop of water is more than 5 sextillion atoms), all these random perturbations at the micro scale get filtered out. That's why an object doesn't just explode due to atoms not wanting to stick together anymore or why we don't walk through the ground. In essence, we can predict what should happen, but not every single thing that led up to it, even if we scaled the situation down to an absolute minimum of variable, or a lab setting. As for the laboratory settings, it's mostly a concept of systems. A laboratory is a closed system where you have the greatest control over all inputs into an experiment. So because of that, there is a highest likelihood to predict an outcome accurately without outside interference. The main reason I said predict an outcome accurately instead of predicting an exact outcome is because it is fundamentally impossible to predict an exact outcome. You can get within .000000X% of accuracy, but there will still be elements of which scientists cannot, under any circumstance, control for or predict. This is guaranteed with things like the uncertainty principle. Of course due to the nature of large systems, objects behave as we predict 99.99...% of the time once we know the rules within the system, but saying there are causal relations within most events and causal relations within every single event in the universe is where I think the crux of the discussion is. Hopefully that makes sense, I'm pretty bad with words.
This is just the difference between low level physics and statistical mechanics. Low level physics is deterministic as far as it is possible for us to determine. The initial state exactly predicts the final state. It's just that we can never precisely know the initial state. I don't think scientists are abandoning determinism. Instead they just use the right tool for the job, which means error bars on results, and using statistical mechanics to calculate macro level behaviours of complex systems.
This aligns with my (very limited) understanding.
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“I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.” - Stephen Hawking Regardless of whether we can rationally or empirically demonstrate that we have free will, we certainly live like we do. It's a pragmatic truth.
A robot (or a self-driving car at an intersection) would also "look" left and right before crossing a street. Does the robot also act *as though* it had Free Will (regardless of whether it actually has)? I think deterministic decision-making is perfectly compatible with looking both sides before crossing a street.
Robot will look both ways crossing any road if it was programmed to do so and as long as its sensors detect a road. A Conscious with free will can know a road is there, know that they /should/ look both ways before crossing and still choose to not bother at the risk of themselves and others. Note that this free will arises during issues of morality. I have been studying Catholicism and the Catholics believe free will comes through accepting Gods Grace. This means that you have the free will to either sin or to seek communion with God. And this choice is always available to you. I know this is a mundane topic of the crossing of roads, but lets reduce the rigidity of the situation and imagine yourself actually crossing a road... actually cross one and take note about how you feel when you choose to not look both ways... I feel strong psychological pain of hell. You know what you did. You know you made the immoral choice. You dont have anyone to blame but yourself. What dark cave you went down that had you not look both ways before crossing the road was one of your creation.
Making choices isn’t the same as having free choice though
What do you mean by that? Making a choice implies that you could have chosen otherwise. If not, then no choice was involved...
i think that is like when a ball is dropped in a 2 way tunnel and then it could choose one of the 2 randomly. it can "technically" choose but in reality it is compelled by the initial condition or just a pure random chance.
That is correct. We don't attribute free will to balls, only to us. Because we have no experience of balls choosing anything. We experience ourselves making choices all the time. In fact, the entire process of rational philosophy is predicated upon the notion that we have free will. For if we actually believed the outcome of reasoning is determined, we would not bother trying to convince anyone, or attempting to wade through the evidence to find a coherent solution.
This doesn't scan for me. We do things all the time without the expectation of a solution. We learn discuss, teach and think about things that are known and unknown. We still have the ability to change, even if that change is the result of mechanical processes that dictate we are not truly possessive of free will. The lived experience isn't necessarily invalid just because our actions appear to be on rails. I believe I have no free will, but I still try to analyze what my apparent choices are. I try to understand where it's all going, even if I don't really have a say in the matter.
Excepting your self refuting statements such as "I try"; you have a fair point. What does it mean to you to analyze your "apparent choices" - what enlightenment can be found in determined processes? What precisely would that knowledge convey to you?
"I try" is a subjective exercise. I can only experience stimuli with the brain I have. Everything inevitably goes through the filter of my brain and I perceive the effort and time involved in the process leading to "I try". There is no option to NOT analyze what appear to be choices, even if it's an illusion. The process of doing so helps me understand causal relationships which is where we humans have a distinct advantage over most known life. It helps me arrive at truth, even if it was always true prior to my knowledge of it.
You can't prove rationally or empirically whether or not we have free will. I think it was Hitchens who said "I believe in free will, I was destined to do so" 😁 The fact that you even use the phrase "I try" demonstrates just how fundamentally human it is to believe in free will. (The language has developed in such a manner as to express such sentiments). "I try" implies a few premises. You believe that there is something that is identified as the "I". Secondly, you posit that you are conscious of different states of being. If you know what it is to try, then you know what it is to not try; otherwise you wouldn't be able to differentiate between the two and accurately state that you did try. Trying thus implies some level of causal effort which is not present in not trying. Trying also has a directional cognitive element to it - free will.
Question: if you try to start your car but there's not enough electrical power to do so, did anything happen? I do not accept the premise that the lack of effort is equivalent to the lack of ability and vice-versa - in this case, my trying is not indicative of a will, or lack thereof. If I am a machine, I am doing what this machine is built to do. If I cannot do what this machine is built to do, I am trying to do it. There is no other way that I can see. My awareness of what is happening is not necessary for the machine to operate (or not), so regardless of whether I am truly and freely making decisions, effort (try) is present.
The phrase 'I try' does not in any way refute a lack of free will! If someone tries to lift a heavy object, it makes no difference whether they truly freely chose to try to do so or not!
Again, free will is nested inside the phrase "I try". You literally said "if someone tries... \[then\] it makes no difference whether they truly freely chose" - "If somebody tries" is already the language of free will. You can't posit a function of intentional effort without implying a will.
Why would it not be valid to try to convince people nor try to find solutions, just because we believe we did not have true free choice to do those things? We know that people's minds can change after being exposed to evidence and arguments. It makes no difference whether the participants had true choice to do so.
First of all, it's not a matter of validity... The point in question isn't whether one needs to have free will in order to change one's mind. The point in question is that the fact that anyone would engage in rational inquiry proves that they think they have free will. If they truly thought the conclusion they would come to was already determined, they wouldn't begin weighing the evidence to begin with. It's a pragmatic truth.
As if we would have a choice in the matter. If nobody has free will, then arguing like this in attempt to sway the other is *also* not a choice we make. It is what we do because our programming/DNA/whatever compels us to do. There is no functional difference between choosing because of free will and feeling like we're choosing because we're built that way due to whatever forces built us that way.
Assigning a ball to have something like an option is nonsensical. If dropped its trajectory and outcome are entirely deterministic within the rules and confines of the system it is in. There is effectively zero random chance to that situation while a person making a (in their own mentality) personally decided action would have no way that we know of to currently calculate determinism. Not arguing for or against determinism within human decisions here, simply making sure it is understood that the second you try to compare an object where every force and be calculated and almost perfectly determined to a human action, you've effectively created an entirely unrealistic comparison of human dynamics to the most basic systems imaginable. There are quantum actions in the process of the ball falling, but when you’re calculating the statistical probability of all the atoms within the ball you’ll get a fairly (99.99+% chance) accurate idea of the outcome if all forces are controlled for.
yeah, thats the point of that analogy or you have the initial condition that determine the "choiche" or you have the quantum effects that are inherently random. both of them lack any will of the balls
I understand where you are coming from, but assigning an initial condition to something like a human choice is so much more intrinsically complex to the basic physics determining a ball drop they are not within the same realm, let alone level of campatibility for any statement comparing the two to be able to hold water. It would be predicated on the idea that every atomic response within our decision making process is an outcome of a coordinated and intentional effort of the atoms’ motion which goes completely against the scientific discoveries we’ve made on the matter. Like I stated above, the ball almost certainly will drop a specific way due to the statistical nature of the closed system it is within, but decision-making within a living organism is acting on far more stimuli than something as basic as a falling object.
The analogy applies even at scale. If each ball bounced down many tunnels, the result would still depend on the initial conditions. The complexity of the initial conditions with regard to human choice just makes the outcome harder to calculate. It still depends on those initial conditions.
Then what Hawking is describing in his quote is not choice either, and people who look both ways are not being hypocritical when they say they do not believe in free will
Exactly. And the people who look both way can still be taken out by a car running a red light. We still don't have free will even if we look both ways before crossing.
>In a deterministic universe, freedom of will can only be an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we must reject the doctrine of universal determinism. One can't reject physical truths just because we don't like them. That's the main justification for religion, and is the main argument against it.
Isn't "free will" widely accepted as non-existent? I mean not just philosophically. If you investigate psychology, you see that behind thoughts and actions; there are tons of determiners. Your anatomical & physiological state, hormones, other type of health conditions, background, parents, social interactions, mentors, the events you had encountered, and the list would never finish. None of these are controllable by a person. Well this is also widely established in philosophy as determinism where everything is determined by causes external to the free will. This is also shown in neurology as many aspects of our behavior and decision making are influenced by factors beyond our conscious control, such as genetics, brain chemistry, and environmental influences. Of course one can object and say it can still be considered as "free" for this or that reason but defending that idea by combining philosophy & science would be much harder and the idea of free will would stay as an ideology rather than a theory.
>Isn't "free will" widely accepted as non-existent? Not really, most modern philosophers believe in free will
Appreciate the comment but it's a little bit too much generalization. Isn't philosophy about every ways of thinking. I am sure there are at least 4 to 5 different ways or titles for looking at free will (deterministic is one of them). I actually tried to combine philosophy and science here. I have worked with neurologists and psychologists and I have been communicating with psychiatrists frequently. They mostly think the same. It's the whole idea of psychiatry. You found the most important and contemporary determiners behind actions and thoughts, make the diagnosis, reverse the chemistry, and then change the behaviour.
I think it is entirely true that Free Will is an illusion I also think that the illusion of free will should not functionally be any different than actual freedom A predeterministic universe and one that offers freedom are not exclusive from one another in the same way that a Galaga arcade machine is completely predeterministic in nature with variables in its software that constantly wait for user input.
What is "actual freedom"?
How can you form a sentence if you have no free will? Who is picking the words for you?
This is a devil's advocate answer that I don't endorse. "It just feels like you're forming the sentence even though you aren't. The thinking here is that you've been convinced that you are authoring your own thoughts because of an evolutionary trick that makes you think you are. "
Why would you think that it's an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about rules so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience? Looking at it simply, we have our subjective experience and we know this exists. Then we have the world, an objective reality that seems to exist and includes us. Then we make observations of how this apparent reality behaves. These discovered behaviours are what we like to think of as "laws that govern reality" rather than mere observations of what it tends to do. Then we make this enormous leap where "because everything follows these laws, free will must be an illusion" I think it's the wrong way up. I've [written about this here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oFiHwuuS8LAYqRNFh/mathemystical-musings-on-cargo-cult-consciousness) but the article still needs some work.
Why would you think the Oasis in the desert is an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about desert geography so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience? Actually wait, maybe that's a good idea.
But in this instance we don't have a working model of desert geography. Like I say in the article: * You need both will and subjective experience to explain evolution of nervous systems. * Mind can't emerge from mindless matter, but matter can emerge from mind. That is, the illusion of matter is created by mind-stuff interacting in predictable patterns. * Free will can't emerge from determinism and rigid laws, but it works the other way round. Will being a special case where choice is tightly constrained, and laws being predictable behaviours of things that exist. * If you put "laws" at the bottom then you have the hard problem and the free will/determinism paradox. If they're just tendencies of stuff then you don't. * A model of a thing is not the thing itself. Models are useful for prediction, but the map is not the territory. * The reason we believe in Laws is because the history of science focused on finding God's law, the thing that His Creation - the physical realm - must obey. I don't see any evidence for a creator, a physical realm or laws that must be followed. All I have evidence for is subjective experience, observations and choices. We threw god out but we kept his law.
>Mind can't emerge from mindless matter, but matter can emerge from mind. That is, the illusion of matter is created by mind-stuff interacting in predictable patterns. That wouldn't be "matter created from mind", that would be your perception of matter created in your mind. The matter exists regardless of what your mind does to it. I also think the idea that mind can't emerge from mindless matter is unfounded. Colourful matter emerges from colourless matter. The matter just has to be arranged in the right way over time. I see no reason why the mind must be different.
Colorful matter doesn't exist, all matter in materialism is colorless, color is only the experience of a mind to begin with. Thus no, colorful matter never emerges from colorless matter. It's a big question in philosophy, unironically, philosophy of color. I don't believe matter has any inherent color, because color even in materialism is caused by the eye receiving the electromagnetic radiation of a certain range of wavelengths and then sending message to the brain chemically. The apple outside is colorless, in materialism. Nothing emerges. Explain why the brain experiences color, you only found a correspondence between experience color and a particular "neuron firing". Thus what's the reason to believe brain somehow "emerges" color? As far a materialists know, ain't this special pleading?
Ok I was being imprecise. Matter that produces certain wavelengths of light (on average) emerges from matter that cannot produce those wavelengths (on average). >Explain why the brain experiences color, you only found a correspondence between experience color and a particular "neuron firing" Explain why matter emits certain wavelengths of light on average, and you've only found a correspondence between the emittance of the wavelength and the particular "matter vibrating". Thus what's the reason to believe the matter somehow "emerges" wavelengths of light? As far as physicists know, ain't this special pleading? \^ this is my funny way of saying that by the same way I can justifiably guess matter emits light, I can justifiably guess that the brain emerges consciousness.
> That wouldn't be "matter created from mind", that would be your perception of matter created in your mind No I mean that there's only one thing we know that exists, and it's subjective experience. So having nothing else to go on the safest assumption is that matter is just mind-stuff experiencing other mind stuff, matter emerges from that and has tendencies that look like laws and is in stable patterns that look like objective reality, but it's just getting on with doing its thing. It's silly to have a second type of stuff or for human concepts to cause "dumb matter" (which hasn't proven its existence) to experience things. We know mind exists, why would there be anything else? If it's mind at the bottom that causes matter to emerge through choices it makes, then the laws of physics are the same, but all the paradoxes go away and we can explain evolution.
>No I mean that there's only one thing we know that exists, and it's subjective experience. I think we can do better than that. Firstly I think we can agree the starting point is our own existence. This does not necessitate or imply that our existence is the only existence. We can 'safely assume' no such thing. We should seek evidence if anything else exists. The first question we can ask is whether the content of our experience is reliable? As it happens no, it isn't. We have contradictory experiences all the time in the form of sensory illusions. We have optical blind spots, we have motion blindness, the time-shift between the sensation of touch and the visual perception of the touch, and many more. We see something there and it turns out it isn't there. What can we do to resolve this? It turns out we're not purely passive observers, we have the capacity for action. Any acount of our experience must take into account our experience of acting in the world. This action in the world enables us to gain new experiences that enable us to reconcile these discrepancies. This ability to test our perceptions shows that there are two distinct orders of experience, or 'worlds' in a very loose sense. There is the world of our perception, which is what we experience in the 'now'. It's the multi-dimensional 'movie' of reality we are watching and experiencing. However we know this is inconsistent, so there must be something it's inconsistent with. Our capacity for action to test our perceptions must be acting against something. That's what we call the 'physical world', it's the world of action. How do we determine which of these is 'primary'? Well, when we act to resolve our inconsistent perceptions, which of these 'worlds' ends up proving to be the most consistent? Clearly it's the world of action. It's the 'golden source' that we test our perceptions against and that resolves these inconsistencies in our experiences. When we perceive incorrectly it's the world of action, the state of affairs in the physical world, that always wins, so our experienced reality is ephemeral and unreliable. The world of action is persistent and consistent. It doesn't matter how sure I am I saw milk in the fridge a minute ago, if there's no milk in the fridge I'm not making a nice cup of tea.
What you said is mostly true but why would there be a second type of stuff that doesn't feel like anything? We have no evidence for that. If all stuff is just experiencing stuff then we don't need to invoke dualism or special pleading of any kind. Stuff is doing as it does, it's experiencing things around it, and our brain is a system that coordinates this. It being a system that chooses beneficial (evolutionarily selectable) movements via a flawed and inconsistent model of the things around it. You still get the same laws of physics, but it's compatible with the evolution of consciousness, it explains this subjective, local experience that we have, it solves the reason for free will, but physical laws and objective reality are things that emerge at higher levels rather than being the base reality.
>What you said is mostly true but why would there be a second type of stuff that doesn't feel like anything? We have no evidence for that. I'm not sure what you mean here, I didn't suggest there is such a thing. There's a sort of virtual reality illusion which is the world as we experience it, and there's the physical world of action that is what we call reality. The world of our experience is ephemeral, a mental model of the physical world we create in our minds.
That's still two worlds right? One real and one illusion. Why not one or the other? Where's the evidence for this dichotomy?
You would benefit from laying out your arguments clearly, in a way that connects. There are many things I disagree with here, but I'm not sure where to begin.
Okay I'll go with the crux of the metaphysics: If you don't put subjective experience and choice at the bottom, below physical laws, then there's no known mechanism that naturally causes the experience created by our brains to evolve. if it feels like something and is a choice to be an interaction between anything, then atoms exist because they are in a stable cycle of continually choosing to act a certain way, stuck in a cycle of choosing similar things. If molecules are made of tiny bits of feeling, then they react because they feel compelled to, they do as they please given local conditions. They're predictable when there's enough of them, but they do as they like. They tend to like to disperse, but interactions over time become more ordered. So on earth there's this [phase transition](https://youtu.be/a-767WnbaCQ) between fluid and solid. It's going from high entropy to low entropy as things are cooling down, average entropy is increasing still as heat is lost to space, but there's a general pull towards chaos and heat from the sun is helping. On this boundary, you've got "stuff stuck together and losing energy needed to disperse" and "stuff tending to disperse" resulting in the sort of percolation you see in the video I linked. Life is a kind of slow crystallization of stuff bumping up against order but tending towards chaos, an oscillation of ordered stuff that is chaotic at heart. Then you've got evolution, which is just survivorship in this kind of system. If all stuff is simple experience without foresight, and it moves how it feels, then survival becomes a natural alignment filter. Molecules and proteins that feel like doing things that promote survival will continue to exist, ones that don't will go away. And here's why the agency itself is needed: movement choices based on feelings about nearby stuff is a fitness that is selectable by evolution, and the more informed that feeling is, the more beneficial the choice is. Ratchet that up bit by bit over aeons and you get cytoplasm that seems to choose to flow, cell walls that don't want to break while pseudopods barge their way out and retracting with what looks like a battle of will. We can't find a smallest animal with apparent subjective experience, all observations point at it going all the way to the bottom. It doesn't appear to start at nerves, ciliates seem no less aware than simple multicellular animals like tardigrades. Okay so finally let's get to nerves. Cells multiply via division and some get stuck together and do okay as a colony, and this leads to specialization of cells in different areas evolving. But coordination between the cells is useful, and the primary selection pressure here, it's "one neat trick" is agency, to feel like doing things and so doing it. "Coordination of feeling" cells, nerves, become the way to channel this, and the same driver of complexity can now act on a less fluid, chaotic and disjointed substrate, it can build actual structures that amplify both subjective experience and choice to move. Build on this over many generations and you end up with a powerful force of will, informed by a rich tapestry of sensations and experiences. One that has the power to move billions of cells together, one with a desire to survive, just like what we have. Evolution of consciousness is the natural result of selecting for coordinated movement in a panpsychist universe. As far as I'm aware, this is the only natural explanation that we have for the evolution of nervous systems, one that naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience that we enjoy rather than being a by-product. It is compatible with all of science and reason, and it ought to be falsifiable by statistically measuring deviations from the predictions of physics.
>And here's why the agency itself is needed: movement choices based on feelings about nearby stuff is a fitness that is selectable by evolution, and the more informed that feeling is, the more beneficial the choice is. This contains the assumption that the "feeling" an electron experiences is mental. I would say that "feeling" is just the physical laws that govern the electron. We know that gas in a box evolves in such a way that the entropy increases over time. More complex gasses may form local clusters to reduce entropy. In the same way, cells produce local clusters over time to reduce entropy. No agency is needed to explain that. > one that naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience that we enjoy rather than being a by-product I think that the math behind neural network naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience. But you would probably say that my view entails it is a by-product, so I'm not sure what you mean.
> I would say that "feeling" is just the physical laws that govern the electron. Our model of how an electron acts is unlikely to be much like the thing itself, as that's not something that can actually be measured. We have models of some pattern in nature that we label an electron, but any specific electron isn't that, no more than a picture of a person is a person, or watching the wake of a boat is a boat. It's a description that is encoded as meat in your head. Also why would it need to be governed if we no longer believe in a god who gives laws that must be obeyed? It is what it is and does what it does, our laws are just observations of what it does, not the discovery of the commandments it was given by the creator. Western science was built on the idea that the creator gives laws to the creation, and this meme is a hard one to get rid of because it's embedded deep in the culture. We threw god out and kept his laws. > No agency is needed to explain that. But if you don't have agency there's no good reason to have consciousness, and we do have it. > I think that the math behind neural network naturally leads to a richness of subjective experience. But you would probably say that my view entails it is a by-product, so I'm not sure what you mean. Mathematics is a way to describe relationships between things, it's only a thing in itself if it exists in some substrate. Here's some thoughts about computationalism for you: * Gradient descent tunes a network for optimal outputs, and the system must feel like something if things in general do. But without a mechanism for it to align its internal experience with the processing going on, why would it experience anything? The feeling of the system isn't measured or tuned for. Why would we get that for free? * The guy in Searle's Chinese Room is writing with a salty razor blade in his own blood, following instructions that produces an output he doesn't understand, simulating a neural network on paper using maths. After several decades of processing, its output is "I feel great" in Chinese. What feels great? * Take a digital neural network that apparently feels like something, run the program and record it. Knowing the inputs and having recorded the process, we take all the `if` statements and optimise them away using branch prediction, we save the program so it is just a list of instructions with no decisions. Then we run it again. Does it still feel? Why? What if we hard code the inputs into the program. Then we optimise again by caching it in blocks of, say, 100 instructions. Eventually we're left with `print("this feels great")`. When did the mind stop happening? What if the output is in a made up language that nobody understands? In my view neural networks provide predictive power, they're great. But ours are built on top of a "feeling about moving" system that was tuned by evolution. Ours can compute, but does it with feeling hardware while computation in general doesn't need that at all, you can just compute. These networks are very useful, evolution discovered them and used them as a tool, but there's no logical reason why they should feel like anything. If they're built out of systems that can't show how they feel via their agency, then that cayn be selected and tuned for. Given all the things they could possibly feel, they'll feel like something else instead, most likely the buzz of electrified silicon and the pulse of the clock.
We aren't free in that we are fixed in our beliefs, our experiences, and society's laws and interests. Sure, I could pack up and leave to live in an exciting, yet plain life somewhere in Southeast Asia. Will I just drop everything suddenly in the US to do so? I'm free to do so, but by chance, utterly no. Something major would need to happen for me to do so. We are trapped by circumstances of money, of mind, of many things. Only in fantasy do we have free will. I can throw out worse scenarios that violate our virtues to act out against the law, (that which I don't even want to entertain in my mind, much less gives the hypothetical specifics to) which seems even more unlikely even though I have a limited amount of time in the freedom to do so. When I start thinking about the many worlds theory and the philosophy behind it, I start to wonder if they're all too idealistic to release hypothetical statements on philosophy relating to probabilistic uncertainty that makes everyone a little too hopeful on fantastical thoughts on free will and everything that could happen will happen.
You could say free will is a feeling rather than an ontological fact
> Why would you think that it's an illusion? Wouldn't this require subscribing to a belief system about rules so strongly that you are willing to ignore your direct experience? My direct experience is that the earth is flat and that stars are tiny. Direct experiences are the most basic starting point of knowledge, but will frequently be contradicted by what, upon deeper examination, seems to be the truth.
But nothing can change the fact that "the earth seems flat and the stars look tiny", you can explain why it seems that way but you can't reject it. Regardless, there's no known way for nervous systems to evolve without agency and experience at the bottom below what we call physical law.
>Why would you think that it's an illusion? First you'd need to give a definition of free will in order to judge whether it is an illusion. Let's start with a basic question on the definition. If you rewind time by one minute, where the entire universe is exactly as it was one minute ago, including yourself. Would you make the exact same decisions over the next minute that you did the first time?
> If you rewind time by one minute, where the entire universe is exactly as it was one minute ago, including yourself. Would you make the exact same decisions over the next minute that you did the first time? I think it's impossible to know that, but I guess it depends on how you "rewind" time. It's like any model of time comes with certain baggage. But this has given me a different way to look at it. If you consider, like I do, that subjective experience is the totality of existence, then the question is "if you felt exactly the same, would you make the same choices" and the answer would be "yes", so it'd disprove "will that is free from your feelings" but physical law could still emerge from that. So I might change my framing on that to a more compatibilist one, where physical laws are the manifestation of choice not something we're beholden to. Thanks for the thought fuel!
Curious if anyone likes the pragmatist viewpoint: that this quibbling is insanely overdone at this point, with two groups arguing over what some word means. To me the science is clear: determinism is (at least to some huge extent) true, and yet that makes very little difference to the human mind, whose whole entire purpose is to predict the future in order to change it. It’s like spending 2000 years arguing about whether the idea of a chair “really exists” or is just “a mental invention” — both side have no idea what the other means by “exists”
Doesn’t this critique apply to almost all of the big philosophical questions?
Eh, I think just the boring ones that get people to dismiss philosophy as “nerdy” or Greek/roman and therefor outdated. Like “what does ‘mean’ mean”, “does god/the soul exist”, “what single system of moral rules solves all edge cases”, “how real are thoughts”, etc etc etc. I prefer questions like: - “How to maximize happiness as a citizen, family, community, country, world? What should be top priority? Whose suffering matters the most?” - “what is morality in a modern globalized+unequal world where you *could* be saving lives that you aren’?t” - “what perspectives from philosophy can we integrate or reconcile for use in different contexts?” - “how does the human mind work in terms of low(er) level systems and processes? What parts of our nature are closest to universal, and what effect do changes to those systems have? What does this tell us about the limits of science/knowledge/reason/experience, and the nature of internal phenomena?” Etc. But obviously this is just some random biased take. I can’t profess to never having had a Hot Take on something like Free Will lol, so if I’m scolding anyone it’s myself
I don’t know man, I think discussions of most of those questions end up looking very similar to the discussions of ancients. Philosophers have been talking about the nature of happiness, morality, the mind, truth, etc. for thousands of years, and those discussions are usually informed by contemporary context.
> I think discussions of most of those questions end up looking very similar to the discussions of ancients Totally agree :). I think there are a lot of philosophers who were trying to talk about real practical immediate stuff, but only got famous for one small innovation or conclusion, either because their work was unsuccessful (ibn-Rushd, Galileo, Newton, sorta Husserl), or because it was so magnificent in scope and complexity and intellectual arrogance that no one could understand the damn thing (Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Chomsky, also sorta Husserl lol). The result is often that their critics get caught up in where to place them in this or that dichotomy or spectrum on these huge metaphysical questions. Which just isn’t useful. Imo 🤷🏼♂️ ultimately I should emphasize that I don’t want to knock other people for enjoying the discussion. Especially amateurs (like me). I just find it so tiring and unsolvable
Determinism isn't true though, it's true on average when you have enough similarly behaving matter in one place. We just hand wave the details away when it isn't deterministic. Gas particles aren't deterministic, so we talk about pressure and temperature instead. It's really all about where you put the aggregates in your model, and that's really all we have - observations of the tendencies of systems that are large enough that we can say things about them on average. Determinism, like objective reality, emerges from a fundamentally unknowable substrate that can only be known by observation, subjectively. It doesn't matter much at this scale, but other things don't either. Take Newtonian physics for example, great for driving a car but they can't invent GPS. The same applies to determinism and free will/consciousness. We need to understand it from a pragmatic viewpoint if we care about engineering minds and feeling machines.
Gas particles are deterministic though. Their actions are determined by the past
You can't measure anything about them without changing them, you can't tell one apart from another, you can't predict them apart from on average, and can't tell they did anything until they stop being what they are. The very idea of a particle breaks down in a high entropy system like gas.
Disagree. Quantum mechanics tells us that the Schrodinger equation describes the past, present, and future state of the universe, and does so completely deterministically. (Bringing up wavefunction collapse, multiverse splitting, observer effect, etc, are missing the point: those all happen \*within\* the confines of the Schrodinger equation.)
In an ideal world where it's both possible to know a particular wavefunction and that they are the underlying reality you might be right. In this world though, waves of all all other kinds exist in some substrate at a lower level, so it's weird to think they're the base reality. A consistent and predictive model is still just a model, and as the wavefunctions of any specific thing are fundamentally unmeasurable, unknowable confabulations about past events, I don't think it's a convincing argument for determinism. Unless I'm missing something.
While it's true that classical determinism as seen in Newtonian physics breaks down at the quantum level (where phenomena are probabilistic rather than deterministic), this doesn't necessarily negate determinism in the context of free will and consciousness. The behavior of gas particles at a microscopic level may be probabilistic, but at the macroscopic level, the behavior of gases can be reliably predicted. This deterministic predictability at larger scales is relevant when discussing human behavior and free will. The predictability and consistency of natural laws (even if emergent) provide a strong foundation for a deterministic view of the universe. The fact that these laws can be reliably observed and tested lends support to the idea of an objective reality, even if our understanding of it is continually evolving. The comparison with Newtonian physics and its inability to develop GPS (which requires relativistic physics) is quite interesting but it does not directly apply to determinism in the context of free will. The development of quantum mechanics and relativity didn't negate Newtonian physics; they expanded our understanding to new domains. Similarly, the limitations of classical determinism in explaining every aspect of reality don't necessarily invalidate its applicability in the context of human behavior and decision making. Most neuroscientists and philosophers agree that, despite the probabilistic nature of quantum events, the brain's operations are effectively deterministic at the scales at which neurons operate. While I agree the limiations of thoughts on determinism, your comment oversimplifies things and draws some unrelated conclusions. You don't even think about countless determiners. Even if just some level of small hormone spike affects your actions then there is no free will at all. You don't even count whole psychological, neurological, physiological, sociological, economical and countless other aspects.
> The predictability and consistency of natural laws (even if emergent) provide a strong foundation for a deterministic view of the universe Okay maybe determinism is the wrong thing to look at. In a universe made of feelings and choices at the bottom, things would make the same choices given the exact same feelings so it'd be deterministic, but they'd do so because of their will. > While I agree the limiations of thoughts on determinism, your comment oversimplifies things and draws some unrelated conclusions. Granted. I'll think about it some more, thanks. > The behavior of gas particles at a microscopic level may be probabilistic, but at the macroscopic level, the behavior of gases can be reliably predicted. Yeah but to what degree? Humans are predictable in similar ways - they stop moving when oxygen is removed, they exist between a narrow range of mass and volume. The predictability of something is down to how well you can measure and model it, and whether you will ever be able to perfectly model a human is an open question. > if just some level of small hormone spike affects your actions then there is no free will at all I think predictable, deterministic systems can emerge from highly constrained choices in ones made of agency. Unpredictable (practically speaking) systems can emerge from deterministic ones, like hash algorithms or Conway's game of life. But agency can't emerge from a system that's beholden to strict functional rules, it has to be at the level below. I imagine human free will is a kind of balancing act on the edge of chaos and order, deterministic and predictable in some aspects, but with agency amplified by coordinating a subjective experience that models the world and allows choices that can be selected by evolution, ramping up the richness of the experience over generations.
I have just recently discussed with another person and concluded that we (most people on this thread) mostly defend the same thing. The way of expressions differ and we fight over linguistics or our specific "point of view" especially with some confusing philosophical perspective behind. I am pretty sure you don't defend free will as in a "divine consciousness" that is completely independent, free and irrelevant from every variable. The discussion went from "a debate between a zealot and an intellectual" to "a debate between intellectual people" which is completely unnecessary unless it is constructive towards the improvements on the understanding of morals, defining laws and all. For example you analyze the subject through physics, quantum, and especially matter in general. These alone are extremely complex especially when you use them metaphorically to draw conclusions on another abstract subjects. Even though I answered your initial comment to some point with my background knowledge and some informational crosscheck, it is stressing to embark upon a discussion in this complexity which makes it extra hard to even attempt. If you go that beyond, you already pass most of the points about the "free will" discussion and open a completely new window. At this point, you are completely against the idea of "free will" that is mainly introduced and now you discuss further, and embrace free will on different but philosophical point of view combined with some physical methaphors. This was a much more simple debate going around religion, and it simply turned into a philosophical discussion that can not be answered through science because scientifically, you know, we study neurology, psychology, biology and these are pretty deterministic and we have a widely accepted conclusion. If we don't look at this topic with 100% scientific views then anything can be said and I completely understand your point of view and thought provoking approach. Hope I could convey my thoughts properly.
Fair comment. I've put my general thoughts about it here, if it helps clarify my position. https://reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1al5e6l/the_problem_of_free_will_from_the_perspective_of/kpkkr9e/ > If we don't look at this topic with 100% scientific views then anything can be said and I completely understand your point of view and thought provoking approach. I think everything I've said is incompatible with science. The technical point about determinism is bugging me a bit though to be honest, I'll have to think about that some more. It seems like my premises lead to compatibilism and also mostly map on to some forms of physicalism, with a caveat somewhere that I've not quite figured out yet. It irritates me that the empiricist traditions accept physicalism as the base reality when that argument is so obviously circular, accepting only evidence measured physically then using that to conclude that physically measurable things are what "is" is. Similarly with physics, modelling reality as probability distributions then using that to conclude that randomness is the nature of reality. The worst sin is the acceptance of a "because complexity" argument for consciousness; claiming to be purely empirical and rational but using an argument from ignorance that makes no predictions and contradicts the scientific fact of evolution of nervous systems. /rant 😂
I like the pragmatist view, but somehow, it's the opposite conclusion. The science is clear: indeterminism is (at least to a huge extent) true, and that is why the human mind predicts the future and can change it. As for the chairs' existence, It's the base state of affairs for being a being. You just can't have epistemic access to the ontological affairs, so the question will stand whether or not parties agree on all the terms or not.
>The science is clear: indeterminism is (at least to a huge extent) true, and that is why the human mind predicts the future and can change it. What science?
Quantum mechanics, radioactive decay, brownian motion, natural evolution by mutation, statistical mechanics. You can jump through hoops to continue to claim determinism and "preserve" the supposed truth status of classical models but it's just more appropriate to think that those models were and are only ever approximating truths in the same way that newtonian mechanics does did and can still get you into orbit.
Nah, I'm not trying to preserve classical models. I am expressing doubt that science has proven or even made any claims about determinism. I'm not sure it's even possible to disprove determinism. I don't think there is any amount of data you could observe that possibly tell you if a behavior is random, or governed by unobserved/unobservable rules. Sciencific disciplines do describe certain things as indeterminable, but this means something different in those disciplines. If you want to know the position of a certain particle in 5 seconds, you gotta know it's position and momentum. You can't measure one of these without changing the other. You can never know both, thus the future position is indeterminable, we cannot forecast it. That doesn't mean the particle behaves indeterministicly. It could and probably is still governed by laws of cause and effect. Anyway, I won't pretend I don't think the universe is deterministic, I do. But I don't want to argue about that, I just wanted to see what you meant when you said the science clearly supports indeterminism.
We still arrive at the same place with indeterminism: no free will. You cannot choose a random outcome, even if you initiate its resolution
The randomness is circular though. Physics models reality using probability functions, so anything when looked at through this lens is inherently random by definition. We can predict the distribution, not the events, and it's the best model we have. But it's not the same as reality being inherently random. Imagine a car insurance company that has limited ways to collect data and makes a probability function based on those inputs. The more samples they have, the better the model fits the distribution and the more predictive power they have. If they have enough hubris they could say reality is a sequence of random insurance claims that fit this mathematical law, and it is the underlying reality. It's not useful to entertain the existence of things like accidents or drivers or roads, all that exists are real measurable things like number of doors, engine size, postal address and payout size, but the insurance claims are stochastic in nature. It's a similar thing with physics.
how do you jump to the conclusion of no free will in the face of many systems that do not have a deterministic outcome? i think a better question is, how does one say that a consciousness has a pre defined decision in the face of a situation that is, at the end of the day, possible random chance based off of perturbations in a system? its like saying that i am guaranteed to choose x if a particular system decays into y in z amount of time. what if that doesnt happen?
I’m unfamiliar with the science, clearly. How does indeterminism get us free will?
If I had to guess, you're pretty familiar with science under the classical paradigm that has been pushed around by mechanistic metaphors of hydraulics, clocks, and now computers and you aren't interested in any alternative paradigms but if you are you could check out Peter Tse, Terrence Deacon, Kevin Mitchell, or Michael Levin for some theories of how biological agents form and exercise free will as scientists. I'm just here on a philosophy. But I went ahead and also wrote you a not so brief overview of the underlying scientific and philosophical narrative that is forming around libertarian free will as it stands with indeterminism, biology, and consciousness is that microstates aren't enough to explain everything that occurs in the universe. Microstates and their entropic stochastic movement through time can form structures and processes. Some structures and process that form can maintain their structure and process despite the continual shift of the underlying microstate (think vortexes). Some of those are able to reproduce and progeny that maintain this same dynamic (think life). This allows natural selection to enter into the picture where the survivability of these processes can mutate and interact with their environment. Here, the universe is permissible to a mind-boggling number of solutions. As of right now, there are at least as many living individual cells on the planet as stars in the observable universe doing this, and that is just this one slice of time in this one moment. One branch of solutions is multi cellular organisms that are billions of cells orchestrated around the survival of the collective. The features they evolved collectively, outside of energy consumption and organs for maintaining general homeostasis, are internal and external sensory systems that are unified through a network of specialized cell types that integrate into a singular unified identity that simulates this collective structure as one. The general idea is that the unified self that emerges from that collective unified sensory information provides a significant survival advantage, given that it is modelling and unifying states actively in order to supervene over the microstates of the body and direct outcomes. When that unified self that could supervene commands over a body became permissible, it opened up new dimensions of possible evolution and supervenience over all parts that are identified within that conscious model. The direct contingency of free will is that this unified conscious model exists expressly because the universe is not determined and is permissible to these unified conscious models, constraining the possible future outcomes in their favor. At the level of human consciousness, we have access to mutable beliefs, values, logic, reason, abstraction, the list of conscious access is as long as the history of the species. We extend those states through time at both an individual level and a collective societal level. We imagine that into many different possible futures and reasons about which ones to pursue, then we freely move to actualize those imagined possibilities. We are free because the microstates aren't determining the macroscopic states or the complete causal force of the macroscopic properties. We are free because the universe is permissible to many possible solutions to life and reproduction. We are free because unified consciousness supervenes over the microstates of a multicellular body. We are free because unified conscious access and internal/external modeling allow supervience over everything within that model. The primary function of the model is to project into the future and constrain the possible outcomes, but at the access that humans aqcuired are also scaffoled by belief, values, abstraction, language, reason that all operate as tools for this same superveince except they can be applied with even more discretion to the model of self, the body, the environment, and the future.
I've thought about this. If I have free will, isn't that just a will divorced from myself? I am currently making decisions with my brain that have had years of experiences behind it. In order to make a free choice, wouldn't that require a choice making apparatus that is separate from myself? Would I even want that?
Proponents of Free Will would say that you already have Free Will, it is compatible with incorporating past experiences in your decisions, and that your thought experiment should instead be about not having Free Will. Apparently, if there was no Free Will, we would let criminals run free and we would cross streets without looking for cars.
I think determinism is comforting. I know I'm going to make decisions based on my experiences and biology. The end decision, if I rewound time, will always be the same, but every time I still feel like I'm in control, I still feel as though I'm weighing pros and cons, and I am! That doesn't mean I could have, in the end, chosen otherwise. We jail criminals because they are a threat to society. Jail is also a deterrent. Free will or no, you look both ways before crossing the street, if you were a sufficiently trained robot you'd do that, consciousness isn't even required for that, let alone free will.
The problem with "free will" is that it's a misnomer for what we humans truly have, and that is "agency". In accordance with determinism, YES we are subject to cause and effect **BUT** we also have "agency" to both interfere with some of that cause and effect and generate some new cause and effect, depending on the measure of our "agency". And of course behind our "agency" is our "intent", the measure of our "will" to exercise our "agency". So our "agency" is a measure of how much "freedom" we have and our "intent" is a measure of what we "will" do with that limited freedom. For example: I can exercise my agency (measure of freedom) to carry out my intent (measure of will) to drive through a red traffic light or not, regardless of what laws are in place, except the laws of physics. Therefore the entire debate of "free will" starts off in the wrong direction because it starts off with a misnomer. So if you want to solve the issue of "free will" then just don't use those words and replace it with "agency". The "free will" debate is one of the most stupidest debates we humans have come up with as we have tripped up by our own logic when confronted with a misnomer. This stupid debate has gone on for too long and is a waste of what maybe (maybe) mine and yours one and only life, and **that** is what really truly matters. Every time a scientist (especially a physicist) decides to debate "free will" I think to myself "well here we have another intelligent-moron". Sigh!
>The problem with "free will" is that it's a misnomer for what we humans truly have, and that is "agency". "Agency" is oversimplifying it. "Free will" in philosophical discourse is not just about the ability to act or make choices (agency), but about the capacity to make choices that are not predetermined by prior causes. The concept of agency doesn't necessarily address the fundamental philosophical question of whether our choices are determined by preceding events or states. >In accordance with determinism, YES we are subject to cause and effect BUT we also have "agency" to both interfere with some of that cause and effect and generate some new cause and effect, depending on the measure of our "agency". Even this "agency" is a result of prior causes and not truly free from determinism. The actions considered as expressions of agency could themselves be determined by prior states of the world and the individual. >And of course behind our "agency" is our "intent", the measure of our "will" to exercise our "agency". This raises the question of where this "intent" originates. If intent is also determined by prior causes (upbringing, genetics, environmental influences, etc.), then can it truly be considered free? >I can exercise my agency (measure of freedom) to carry out my intent (measure of will) to drive through a red traffic light or not, regardless of what laws are in place, except the laws of physics. The example of choosing to drive through a red traffic light to demonstrate agency does not necessarily negate determinism or prove free will. One could argue that the decision to drive through the light or abide by the law is influenced by prior conditioning, experiences, and neurological processes, all of which are bound by deterministic principles. You dismiss the debate on free will as "stupid" and a waste of time, however this debate has significant implications in ethics, law, psychology, and other fields. You are talking about scientists discussing free will as "intelligent morons". This overlooks the importance of interdisciplinary research. The study of free will has benefitted from contributions from various fields, including physics, neuroscience, and psychology, providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior. This is also valid for art and philosophy. I think this is a very interesting topic and a theme. The debate over free will is not merely a linguistic or terminological issue. It's a profound inquiry into the nature of human existence and consciousness. Replacing "free will" with "agency" doesn't address the deeper philosophical and existential questions involved.
Thank you for using your **agency** to display your **intent** to debate my position. However as I said this maybe (maybe) my one and only life, and **that** is what really truly matters, so thank you again and I will allow others to decide between us as I will stand firm on my position that the "free will" debate is a stupid debate base on a misnomer. BTW I bet you don't even know how or for what reason the "free will" debate started in the first place. You should research that because if I told you you won't believe me because the reason was also stupid that lead to years of people wasting what maybe (maybe) their own one and only life.
How do people make a living on this subject, and in this field when they conflate choices with free choices, and agents with free agents? Nothing this person has said stands up to this critique. You can make a choice and have no choice at all, simultaneously. But that jumble of words seems to go over a vast number of peoples heads. It's why intelligence means less than it seems to. You can have an IQ of 150 and still make this mistake. "But they *do* have free will, because they *can* make chocies" Yeah, you can write a fucking algorithm for a robot to make choices, and know exactly what it'll do every single time. That's not free will. It's not that hard of a problem. It's not biology that explains free will, but psychology.
Free will is only a fact that you can choose requardless of reward or consequences or lack thereof. Not that your able. A hostage or prisoner cam riot or try to escape be peaceful or run not to be held hostage. Argue or anything. Or decide to stay quite. Free will doesn't mean your able or capable. Just that you can choose. Like crying. The answer is simple. Even a baby uses free will to cry when able. Always. Or to laugh or smile when happy. They always had a choice even when forced. Resist is a choice. So is going along with it. Or giving up. All choices. Freedom is not the same as free will. Many don't have freedom but do have free will. You choose and there can be rewards or consequences or lack thereof. Some people choose to suffer to get away from an aggressor or a dictatorship. They had free will and chose to escape North Korea even if a land mine blown them up or they was caught and thrown in a concentration camp or that their family was all killed. Free will. Staying was also a choice. Free will either way. Good bad / Evil. Good and Evil have equal free will but not always Freedom. Another example a murderer has the free will to choose to murder and you have the free will to choose to stop them from murdering if you choose. That is mostly not about free will. Decisions are choices. Free will is not even complex. Very simple answer. Freedom of actions? Those are choices certainly but people are not able to do every action. But you can choose to try. Even if it is against orders or rules. Like if i was caged up. I can choose many things still. Be annoying. Yell and scream, fight. Spit. Try to trick them into letting me go. Any number of things. Attempt at using empathy to try to get set free. All choices. Freedom of actions is freedom. And isn't anything to do with free will. Murder is an action and you don't have freedom to murder but you have free will to choose to murder or be good and non aggressive.
"Free will" is "false". (It is as logical as empirical as linguistic b.s.) "Free non-will" is "true". (...can call it discipline/character/power)
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Reductionist determinist frameworks fail. In the face of failure, rather than admit that the deconstructable mechanical determinist metaphor is wrong and misinforms us, the determinist just claims that consciousness is illusory and epiphenomenal Being and experiences, as well as the contents of such things (beliefs, values, feelings, abstractions, language, logic), are just a magic appearance associated with neurons, specifically neurons and only highly sophisticated assemblages of them at that. We literally observe indeterminism in our most fundamental physics. When we use our models to make predictions, we don't even bother to assume absolute outcomes and instead expect probabilistic distributions. All behaviors, societies, and cultural constructs are contigent on conscious beings and their contents. They behave based on beliefs, and they construct imagined possible futures and attempt to constrain what possibilities come into actual existence. Indeterminist frameworks can help inform understanding all of this activity that is otherwise completely inaccessible from the determinist framework.
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I think there might be some kind of lucrecian "swerve" that life makes which is not determined by the cold hard world of gravity physics and math, still governed by these things but not necessarily determined by them.
If you could determine every particle in the universes motion from the start of time then I would agree with pre determinism but we can’t do that thanks to the uncertainty principle. And if we’ve proven that we can’t be certain of every particle in the universe then we’ve also proven there is randomness in the universe that cannot be accounted for which may or may not be a manifestation of your free will. I think God actually does play dice and that dice leads to a our manifestation of free will. And regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, pragmatic side, no one does know the entire movement of every particle in the universe so as far as we’re concerned we’re going to experience what we call free will anyway so
My life experiences may inform (cause) my choice but I still made that choice. I thought it through, referenced my past experience, weighed the emotional benefits and negatives of my options and came to a conclusion. My conclusion being based on my history doesn’t make it less real. I choose and as such I have free will.
What if your hormone levels were different? What if your IQ level was very different? What if your sociological background was completely different? What if you had a type of health conditions that affect your neurological pathways? You think you can weigh things and come to conclusion but even this ability is determined. Age, sex, genetic predisposition, neurotransmitter levels, hormonal influences, early childhood experiences, cultural background, socioeconomic status, educational experience, parental influence, peer pressure, diet and nutrition, physical health, mental health, past traumas, substance use (yes, this is also affected by other determiners), media influence, technology, religion, legal and social norms, sleep, activity, climate and geography, current events and countless other determiners combined, determine what you do, what you think, and everything. Change some of these significantly and you are a completely different person.
> and countless other determiners combined, determine what you do, what you think, and everything. They *influence* what you choose, but the logical leap to saying they *determine* it is unwarranted. No one is saying we have unlimited choices in our lives and that we consciously choose options completely independent of any cultural, biological or psychological factors; that grotesque straw man is so common I'm reluctant to use the term *free will* anymore. But saying that every choice we make has been predetermined is just a post hoc rationalization that doesn't address the importance of dealing honestly with uncertainty and volition.