It sounds like you’re saying “let’s take the illusion of the classically defined free will and just give it the label of free will from now on.” That’s not very satisfying. It’s kind of like sticking ones head in the sand.
I think the AI efforts are about creating a program that works comparably to a human or animal brain. If I think the human or animal brain work differently, doesn’t it make sense i’d consider an AI to be different to someone who believe in free will?
I see your point, though (I think). I’m not disagreeing that there is a “self”, or that there is a will. However, unlike the computer program, that has a programmer, our far more elaborate program is adaptable, and our *initial * programmer is nature. Our basic systems start off with “Ow, that hurts” “Sucking this thing takes away pain in my stomach” and the basic physical needs. And there is a will that they bounce off; there seems to be some kind of central processor that takes it all together and actually pokes the body into doing conscious things. But as we grow, our systems adapt - “I can also remove hunger with this food”, “This food tastes nicer than that food”, “This food is healthier”. They get added into the program since they’re more efficient ways to fill our needs. The programmer becomes the influences that affect us - and even ourselves, through reasoning (“This food is nice, but I need to lose weight, therefore I will eat less of it”). There’s certainly something which we can call a “self”; but it’s choices are not free choices.
But I can predict someone’s behaviour if I know enough about them. Any formula I could come up with would be incredibly complex, and the variables that need to be taken into account would be many, but I see no reason why I can’t predict someone’s behaviour.
I don’t know about that. Randomness certainly fulfilled the “free” part of it.
The AI folks (presumably) believe in free will.
I’m not. It’s a wonderously complex thing. But it’s still a program.
Apologies, then.
No, there’s an “I”. You have a will. Your will is influenced by influences and you possess free will insofar as your behaviour is not a dependent variable of any finite subset of any influences at play. Since all of your behaviour is, you don’t have free will (and neither does anyone else).
Right. Because it’s impossible. You can’t choose to do something you don’t want to do (taking all influences into account). Thus, free will can’t exist. If it did, it would be like that, but it can’t.
Yes.
Right, and that’s my point. It seems i’ve misunderstood your idea of free will, then; could I be horribly stupid and ask you to dumb it down for me?
Ah, I think I get it. You’re saying that all of those outside influences affect you, but that you are a sum of those influences, and thus your “self” makes free choices? You’re internalizing the influences? Fair enough. We just have a different idea of what the self is then; I think it’s the thing that is affected by the influences. If i’ve not got your gist, though, please show where i’m wrong. 
Yeah, I think mainly we’re using different terminologies in different ways but have pretty convergent perspectives, all in all.
I should point out that while the entirety of the context in which I exist can be said to have caused me, it is reciprocally true that I have caused the entirety of my context. We define each other. It may not be as immediately apparent that itsy bitsy tiny little old finite me conjured galaxiy clusters 9 billion light years away into existence eons before my species evolved, but it’s easier to understand if you cleave the entire universe into two more or less equal parts (best if the elements comprising each part are mixed in with the other both in time and space): each can be said to have caused the other because for each, the other is its context, the “other” to which it responds, the “it” about which any choices it makes would be made about, etc etc.
When we consider the individual, it is easy to think of causality as going in one direction only: the huge huge universe (time and space, history and culture, your innards and your environment, etc etc) determines YOU, whereas it, of course, is not (meaningfully) affected by you in turn. But that’s not so.
Any white shape against a black background defines a black shape with an empty white space in it, and each equally defines the other. Doesn’t become less true if you make one element considerably smaller than the other.
I’m not sure I understand your objection (especially in light of the passage you quoted), but let me take a stab at this.
Let’s return to the dog example. In previous times, people believed that the statement “every dog has a dog for a mother” led to either an infinite regress, or could be stopped by an act of special creation, an “uncaused” dog. Most people favored the special creation, so it was considered true that all dogs are descendents of a first dog (or perhaps the first two dogs). Then Darwin comes along and shows us a way to get around both of those explanations. Now we have these creatures standing in front of us, and we need a name for them. The way we conceive of them now is clearly different than we did before, now there are not the products of special creation. In the end, we decide to give them the name “dogs.” We do this because the dogs themselves did not change, only our conception of them.
Of course, this conversation didn’t actually happen. No one believed that we should call a dog by a different name because we had a new theory of its existence. Nor did they propose that dogs are illusory. It’s just that our understanding of exactly what dogs are changed. I don’t see why free will should be any different. The fact that we have a different conception of the internal workings of the brain certainly does not seem to me to be a good reason for discarding the term itself, especially when the new framework yields a way of keeping all of the important pieces intact.
You are getting dangerously close to my definition of a supernatural Free Will in post #140. And I may even like your wording better. Do you have any mechanism to explain how we define our universe?
Keep in mind that
• (Ignoring, momentarily, the complex question of “who we are”) We affect things, in ordinary everyday ways. I speak to someone. I kick a stone. I inhale some air and do some chemical conversions (mostly slow oxidation of carbon). I take up space, forcing a sparrow to veer around. I feed a cat and get bitten by a mosquito.
• (Looping back now to the complex question of “who are we”) Insofar as all of the complexities of my environment have gone into influencing me — those that do not influence me directly may influence something else which does influence me directly, the whole universe as Seven Degrees of Separation — I do similarly affect some things directly, which in turn affect some other things which I don’t affect directly, causing me to affect them indirectly, and so on and so on.
• That the future effects the past is far far less obvious than the past giving rise to the future. But that is because we forget about volition, intentionality. The notions of cause and effect that prevailed in the last bit of the 2nd Millennium CE have tended to make us think everything is caused by what preceded it, rather than being caused by where it was going, but the very notion of intention implies that the reason for something may have to do with a later stage that is anticipated, for which it is headed. I like to push people who are overly invested in deterministic cause-and-effect toward the writings of Alan Watts, who says (paraphrase, I don’t have it in front of me), “Consider a cat walking into a room. The head comes in first, followed by midsection, and finally the tail. We do not think of the head as being the cause of the tail, it’s a unified head/tailed cat. But we divide the unified reality into events and then forget that we did the dividing; we consider the prior event to have caused the subsequent event, but that’s just one way of looking at it; the events can also be considered part of a unified whole, like our cat.” And the tail of the cat didn’t come into the room because the head came into the room, but rather the cat came into the room, head tail and all because the cat chose to do so and did so. The cause of the cat entering the room is the future state of the cat already being in the room, anticipated by the cat!
AHunter3, I’m really not following you at all. How did you cause galaxy clusters 9 billion light years away to exist? I don’t see how defining things in terms of what they aren’t mean they are caused by those things. You haven’t caused the entirety of your context; some of it, certainly, but not all.
This assumes that the camera is capable of capturing a fairly faithful image. That only happens because cameras are typically designed to do so. One could easily conjure up a camera that generates a grossly distorted image. How would the camera know if its image is accurate or not?
Indeed, some human brains conclude that there is free will, whereas others don’t. Clearly, the mere operation of the human brain does not guarantee accuracy.
Additionally, the question “Is there free will?” is by no means analogous to the problem of forming a complex image. The free will question is essentially binary, demanding a yes or no answer. The formation of an image is not, as it requires much more information content (millions of colored pixels, for example). Thus, while someone might answer the free will question correctly through dumb luck, a faithful image is unlikely to be formed through such a process.
So if the human brain is governed completely by random and/or pre-determined processes, why should we consider the processes of one brain (e.g. the one that denies free will) to be more reliable than that of another brain? Even if its conclusion happens to be correct, that says nothing about the validity of the process by which it arrived at that conclusion.
Did I already mention the genetic fallacy in this thread? You are committing it.
The argument you are trying to make is one not even most theist philosophers take seriously. It just doesn’t make any sense: it’s a basis category error, confusing the soundness of an argument with motives for thinking about it or the process that allows one to think about it. They aren’t the same, and you’re simply wasting your time by trying to refute a logical argument by trying to question why or how its being made.
Just to expand on what Apos said;
If we concluded that human beings have flawed reasoning processes, then that conclusion would be itself the result of a flawed reasoning process, and thus potentially flawed and invalid.
In this case, however, we’re concluding that there is no free will, and this conclusion is itself the result of a mind without free will. The difference, however, is that a lack of free will doesn’t make something invalid. What you’re saying, JThunder, is more anagalous to concluding that many English-speakers think in English, therefore the thought processes I used to conclude this were in English, therefore the conclusion is invalid. The quality of not having free will, like the quality of thinking in English, does not mean there’s a flaw in the reasoning.
It is possible to string words into sentences, and include the concept of “Free Will” in the sentence, but to not actually address the topic, and that is what I feel you’ve done here.
All you are doing is defining Free Will by what it isn’t: it makes choices indepedent of, apparently ANYTHING AT ALL (as I’ve noted, retreating out of the natural world doesn’t help in any way: whatever supernatural things there are, their character can’t be allowed to determine anything either or else the whole game is up just the same).
First of all, that doesn’t really define anything. What is this component DOING: how does it play a role in the process of making a choice, and WHAT ROLE does it play? Telling me what it doesn’t have to do with doesn’t tell me anything about WHY a particular person would choose X over Y. The problem for you is that any attempt to even answer that question is fatal to the concept.
But worse than that is that it is self-defeating. If a choice is made that is not in response to anything at all, then how can it be anyone’s will in the first place? You’ve already ruled everything out of the equation, including everything that could possibly distinguish one “chooser” from another.
What is the point of punishing the person that killed your wife if nothing about that person in any way ultimately determined their choice to kill? The “spontaneous” whateverwhatsit that made the choice to kill isn’t demonstrably still around, or have anything to do with whatever is going on in the person two seconds after the killing. So punishment of the person seems to be an act of completely random violence, by your own logic.
I dunno: I haven’t seen any, and as we noted, it’s not clear exactly what they mean by free will. There is a perfectly rational definition of free will that simply means that one makes choices and is responsible for them, rather than being controlled in this choice making by something external to oneself. This is a rather trivial form that virtually everyone would agree to.
Again, you imply that the supernatural somehow affords some leeway that the natural world lacks. Of course, that’s always a bit premature, since we don’t truly know everything about the natural world. But I also think it’s empty bravado. The supernatural can’t do any better at solving the problem regardless.
I’m not following what you are saying the person is claiming at all. Purpose is not inconsistent with reductive determinism. Purpose could well be a RESULT of those underlying events: the experience and appreciation of purpose could be what a particular bumping happens to accomplish. There is little doubt that life has purpose for me, for instance, utterly regardless of WHY I think it has purpose. I do think and feel it does, and that’s pretty much that. It’s almost axiomatic. I value life and the lives of others. Whether or not I was programmed to is entirely irrelevant, and judging the actions of others against those values is also perfectly legitimate, again completely regardless of the nature of the black box question.
Sorry, but no dice. You can’t accuse the natural world of failing to explain something, dangle out the supposedly much cooler supernatural world, and then beg off of explaining exactly how the supernatural world could get the job done.
GD can hold any sort of debate. There is nothing wrong with leaving the bounds of the natural world. This is a philosophical discussion about a metaphysical issue after all. Please, stop stalling, and explain how Free Will works, supernaturally.
I’m perfectly willing to start with our current understanding of the brain and use whatever terminology and definitions you’d care to propose. But this is my problem with compatibilism. It only works when one tortuously constructs the definitions to make it work. We can shift the words around but not the concepts.
It seems that there’s probably more to your argument, but as far as I can tell… you’re saying we experience events that we commonly refer to as choice or spontaneity and the reasons are so incalculably complex that we should just go ahead and call the experience free will. I don’t buy that. You still can’t get around the problem of events being either caused or random. But if you could correct me with a succinct summation of your argument I might be better able to accept or refute it. After all, I was once a free will advocate.
I have no worries that people will stop behaving as though they have free will if they accept there is no such thing. I do worry that we will become incurious and misled if, when in our more investigative modes, we don’t accept that there are deterministic (and possibly random) reasons for what we do.
Not at all. I’m not saying that this automatically disproves Dio’s claim that there is no free will. What I am saying is that if his claim is correct – if all decisions are either random or pre-determined – then we have no particular reason to trust the soundness of his reasoning. Indeed, even the perception that his argument is sound would be something that’s either random or pre-determined. This is NOT the same as saying that his conclusion is necessarily wrong.
You test it the way you test other things. I test ideas according to their predictive value; if that’s impossible, I look at the reasoning that resulted in the idea, and look for similar patterns of reasoning that result in ideas with predictive value, and judge those predictive values.
You may have a different way of evaluating ideas, but just throwing up your hands and claiming that no ideas may be evaluated is a self-contradictory claim, to the extent that you want us to evaluate it as true.
Even so, your if-then statement doesn’t follow.
IF: decisions are random or pre-determined
THEN: we have no reason to trust the soundness of any reasoning.
How do b follow from a?
The brain, to use a different metaphor, is a tremendously complex algorithm for evaluating data. Some algorithms are superior to others, but any particular algorithm will evaluate a given set of data in one specific fashion.
Daniel
Succinct: that things are caused or random is not important, how things are caused is what is important. Free will means that we can (1) act in accordance with our causes, and (2) have the capacity to have our own causes. This requires capacities such as communication, self reflection, and the ability to plan for the future. All these important features can be had in a deterministic universe, without any need for dualism or uncaused causes.
Cite for where I claimed you did? I actually directly addressed what you claim I missed below, and I’ll do so again now.
As I said, this is the genetic fallacy. Why he says certain things has no bearing on their soundness as claims.
This argument is just plain silly. If a computer is programmed to check for errors in logical statements, it is pretty darn deterministic and pre-determined which ones it will pick out: the illogical ones. What bearing does that have on whether or not it does a good job or not?
The argument you are making is simply as incoherent as Free Will itself (which, you, of course, have also not bothered to take a crack at explaining, making your claim that without it we have some sort of problem trusting our judgments pretty darn specious)
It’s an attempt to claim that what he’s saying is self-defeating, when in fact it is not.
I hope I can be permitted to respond directly to the OP as though I hadn’t read the rest of the thread. (Because I haven’t.)
Why couldn’t they be uncaused?
Why would the cause’s being random render the choice morally valuless?
I guess here you may be about to answer my first question, or something like it.
I agree that you can’t make a choice without deciding what to choose, but this is because making a choice is deciding what to choose. These are just two ways of describing the same event, as far as I can tell. If I’m right about that, then there’s no vicious regression.
What do you think of this formulation of a problem for libertarian free will:
Either the choice I make is determined by past states of the universe, or past states of the universe do not determine it. If it is determined, then my choice is not free–I could not have done otherwise–so libertarian free will does not exist. But if it is not determined by past states of the universe, then my choice is as good as random. If my choice is as good as random, then the choice is not determined by any kind of rationality. If it is not determined by any kind of rationality, then it is not determined by any kind of agency. And if it is not determined by any kind of agency, then it is a fortiori not the choice of a free agent.
Does that summarize the kind of argument you are trying to make?
-FrL-
Apos has already covered this pretty well. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m not making any argument from authority. My logic either holds up or it doesn’t. You have the ability to check my math for yourself. By the way, just because thinking is determined, doesn’t mean it’s unreliable. It may be, it may not be. It’s really neither here nor there.
I think I may get a little bit of something your saying about how the responses to an argument will themselves be determined. That’s true but not really significant. The argument itself is a determinant (one way or the other). So are all of the rebuttals to it. Determinantion doesn’t just apply to the past. It’s ongoing all the time.
Physics.
Because the chooser would have no responsibility for it.
But there is, because something still has to will the decision. You have to be willing to do something in order to do it. I’m saying that willingness must either be determined or random. I’m sorry to sound repetitive. I don’t know how else to try to communicate what I mean.
Yes, pretty much but I would add that the determinants don’t have to be in the past. Determinant variables are just as active (if not more so) in the present as in the past.
Rocks have (1) and (2). The requirement to have the capacities of communication, self reflection, and the ability to plan for the future sounds like a (3) rocks wouldn’t have.
(1) Everything can act in accordance with its causes. In fact, everything does. What could do otherwise?
(2) Everything has the capacity to have its own causes. Again, everything does. What doesn’t?
(3) Communication, self reflection, and the ability to plan the future are products of a sufficiently developed brain. Brains are naught but electrochemical processing units. Stop the brain processes and those capabilities stop too. The brain is a product of determinism. The capabilities of the brain are products of determinism. Anything those capabilities determine are the products of determinism too.
Saying that actions stemming from (3) are free will is arbitrary and unsatisfying. If I slim down the archaic definition of a square to simply “a shape”, and do similarly for circles, I can now draw a circle that is a square. I’ve become a circle/square compatibilist. Isn’t that unsatisfying to you too?