Before a complete hijack happens here, I’d like to pose the question to the group at large.
Does free will exist?
There are a few threads active at the moment that hinge on free will existing, yet… I don’t think it exists. I think it’s an illusion - and a very critical one.
I’ll be voting and caucusing tomorrow, but I’d really like to have this discussion…
so… thoughts?
We experience feelings of being able to have done other than we did. This is the compatibilists version of free will. (I think this is pretty much what Daniel Dennett has in mind when he says we have the kind of free will worth having.) The deeper, more elemental version of free will, libertarian free will, is nonsensical. It can’t be defined and it can’t exist.
Heck, good luck defining what it is. By one slice it’s nondeterminism, simple, stupid, nondeterminism. If we have that or not is unknowable; however if we do it’s no more relevent to making our thought processes somehow more “special” than it is to making raindrops splash in an unpredictable manner.
By another way it’s this magical black-box thing which makes us sentient, and rocks and such not. Of course, to buy into that, you have to pretty much ignore how much of cognition has been shown to be mechanical within the brain, lest your black box be cracked open.
Are there any others? I think the first is irrelevent (except to discussions of precognition) and the second is a naively imagined impossibilty.
It depends on how you define it. If you define it as the free will libertarian does (not to be confused with the political libertarian)–as a choice that is genuinely undetermined but you, the agent, somehow originate the choice and are responsible for it–then not only doesn’t it exist; the very notion is incoherent (as pretty much every philosopher recognizes who isn’t driven into the arms of libertarianism by his theistic commitments).
If you mean some compatibilist notion of freedom (where a notion of freedom is defined that is compatible with the idea that our choices are determined by heredity, environment, circumstance, etc.) then I think the answer is ‘probably’, but the debate is on-going. Many philosophers (John Martin Fischer is one of the best, IMO) have written some very good things on compatibilism lately.
No, I’d say not. Theoretically, omnipotence would allow us to raise a being who did and thought exactly what we wanted it to think, without us having to actually force it to do so (in essence because we would be creating “it”).
Whether or not the illusion of free will is critical pretty much depends on whether we have it or not. I imagine if we didn’t have the illusion we pretty much wouldn’t have “we’s” to complain about it. A situation were some have it and some don’t, that’d be a problem.
It occurs to me that the illusion of free will may just be an artifact of the fact that we our aware of our thought processes mid-stream. We are aware of decisions that we have not yet come to a decision about or acted upon, and we also know that often the “correct” answer for us will toggle back and forth as our knowledge, curcumstances, and internal state change over time. So, we recognize that we could have come up with a different answer if asked at a different time or while in a different state, and then we might naturally extrapolate (perhaps incorrectly) that we are always capable of choosing a variety of outcomes, even if at the given instant that we acted on our decision with the knowledge and internal state we had, there was no other decision we could have made after all.
I think that the artifice of free will is essential in complex social animals. And that it would be conditioned from an early evolutionary point.
Why else would we punish? How else would we select for more beneficial traits? We make that person responsible (or their genes + experience) and punish it. It sounds cold, but… there’s a poetry in there - I think.
Is punishing a person really all that different from leveeing a river that floods?
Yes; because we still have the illusion of free will, it’s still a deterrent to future acts.
The feature being invoked there is memory, not free will. A non-free will computer could be deterred from future acts.
Free will exists.
Those of you who believe otherwise are not free to believe except as you do, you being passive constructs already overdetermined by your context.
That doesn’t happen to the rest of us though.
“You” may posit arguments to the contrary if you “wish” but since that would just be a mechanical process playing out in the form of you generating such a post, there’s no reason for me to ascribe much to it other than whatever causal explanation best explains how it came to be that you constructed such a post.
Memory in conjunction with the illusion of free will. If we didn’t think we chose what to do, that we have memory of a deterrent wouldn’t matter at all to us regarding future decisions.
I would argue that the illusion of free will is that there is an “I”, created by our physical nature and all the varied feedings in of information we get from, well, everywhere we can do. And so I would argue that a computer too has the illusion of free will, albeit a hugely less complex one; it responds, just as we do, with a preprogrammed response appropriate to all the information it has been given. Put another way, if a computer program didn’t have a concept of itself as a unit that makes decisions, no matter how much it may know that programs do a particular task it’s not going to connect that to itself and what it must do unless somewhere there’s a piece of information which says “You are the thing which does this, and in these situations you make these decisions”.
A non-free will computer cannot be deterred, because while it may remember unpleasant things happening, it cannot associate those unpleasant things with “itself”.
I don’t understand the Christian version of free will. It seems to conflict with the belief that God “works through people”.
Isn’t a computer that shuts down when the CPU temperature rises to a certain point deterred from running by an application of heat? “Deterred” is not the usual word for this but it’s the same effect.
As far as I’m concerned, I have free will. Somebody who studies my life extensively, on the other hand, might be able to work out what I might do. Someone who has the ability to thoroughly study my background, my life and the background of friends that might influence my decisions might be able to determine even more.
I think it might work a bit like motion. As you sit reading this, you are probably sitting still. Someone with a wider view, though, will see you moving as the Earth revolves in place. Someone with an even wider view will see the Earth orbiting around a stationary sun. Further out, you will see the sun moving in a large galaxy. And so on, and so on. You are, at the same time, siting perfectly still and moving millions of miles an hour.
As with free will, I think it’s just a matter of perspective.
I’m always skeptical of people who argue against free will. If they, themselves, don’t have free will, why should I listen to their arguments? Why would their arguments be any more convincing than mine, since everything they say is a result of determinism, not reason?
Yes. And don’t blame me – I’ve been forced to say this! :eek:
Or
No; but you’re free to believe otherwise… 
Seriously, at the very least on the conscious level, of course free will exists! Your decision which brand of cereal to buy at the supermarket would seem very different if you were held at gunpoint and told “take the Cheerios!” – right!? So, if it seems different, then for all intents and purposes, it is different.
Whether the choices our conscious brain makes are, at some level, determined by the state of each individual atom in the Universe at some point shortly after the Big Bang is, IMO, completely moot in this discussion, even if this proposition could be proven to be true. The atomic and sub-atomic level are so far away from the level of organization at which our intellect operates, that even if they are connected somehow, this connection cannot be routinely followed (or possibly at all) and is thus irrelevant.
Very nicely done.
I’m not sure if I’m free to decide this thread is a lot more boring than I thought it would be. 
I’d tend to disagree that it’s the same thing. Deterrence is a warning; it’s saying “Do this, and these bad things will occur to you, you want to avoid those things”. A computer might not even know that it shuts down when the CPU temperature is too high; in order for it to be deterrence, there needs to be an equivalent of a “fear” program; something that understands when bad things are happening, that those things are something to avoid, and that they are happening to itself - as well as the ability to choose to avoid it in the future.
Think of it like a diabetic human being deterred from eating sugary things because they collapse. It’s only a deterrent if they can recognise what it was that caused it and that it happened to them, and if they can choose to do otherwise in the future. The event itself isn’t deterrence without these things, it’s just stopping of the harmful action.