Prior causality is only one way of examining the question of “why” status quo is what it is.
It’s highly useful for prediction, and for recipes and other procedures where you are setting out to make something happen.
The cornbread happened because the ingredients of which cornbread are formed were brought together in a 400° F environment for 50 minutes. The cornbread also happened because I, anticipating cornbread as an outcome, intentionally did things to make cornbread happen. I, in turn, chose to bake cornbread because the events of my life, including culture (exposure to cornbread, familiarity with the recipe, receiving accolades for my cornbread reinforcing my gustatory pleasure with social pleasure, etc) came together with me having physical proximity to the ways and means of making it plus the time in which to make it, etc. All those things, in turn, can be explained as the outcome of people’s intentional acts, choices, and plans.
Neither is intrinsically a “more correct” way of answering the question “why did ____ occur?”
Yet when you back off and look for “ultimate causes”, obvious actors unto whom intentionality and volition is generally attributed are not apparent: homo sap evolved from precursor forms of primates, a prior-causality approach to explaining why WE occurred, and in the absence of being able to point to an obvious actor and say “yeah, but ____'s intentional activities and plans can be understood as the reason why that happened”, prior causality ends up looking…well, prior. And therefore, in its own terms, the prior cause of all intentionality. Or the illusion of it, insofar as if specific intentionalities can all be explained by prior causes but not all prior states of affairs can be readily attributed to intentional acts, maybe intentionality just kind of washes out of the picture and doesn’t even exist, yes?
No. (Not necessarily). But that is where this is all going, yes? The question of intentionality is irrevocably all bound up in the question of theism versus atheism, and vice versa. For many of us, theism is not about Sky Gods and Invisible Pink Unicorns, or even specifiable Entities with specifiable Divine Identities who think Specific Divine Thoughts at any specifiable times; but rather Purpose, Meaning, Deliberation, Intent, Volition, et al.; an alternative, if you will, to the mechanistic explanation of everything as the ‘accidental’ outcome of a cascade of events, each being caused by whatever preceded it, none of it ‘on purpose’. If we are here to see it, consciousness is; if ‘consciousness’ is a mechanical by-product of mechanical causal determinism, we are not, in fact, ‘here to see it’. From the hypothetical outside, that determination could not be made: are these things aware and cognizant, or do those ‘brain’ things they’ve got just react automatically to stimuli in some occasionally-impressive & convoluted ways without awareness existing? From the inside, though, I have full faith that I’m actually here, actually aware, and that my acts are my intentional acts. And while logic doesn’t necessarily demand that intention not arise spontaneously in a world previously absent of it, it does reject the notion that intentionality can both exist, in a nonillusory sense, and also be the dependent variable of some prior cause that was not or cannot be ascribed to intent.
Whether or not there’s a “you” is entirely irrelevant to the debate. I don’t know why you keep fixating on that.
We are not debating whether people have intentions. The point is that they have no control over what their intentions will be.
How so? How could it possibly be otherwise? By the way, the variables do not have to be “prior.” I’m not saying that all will is determined prior to birth. Determinant variables act on the will at all times.
And you keep making that distinction as if it were a meaningful one. (Of course you can’t help doing so, being no more than the passive automatic reaction-pool… I persist in arguing with you, but if I perceived you according to your perspectives and not mine, I would not do so… what’s the point of discussing something with an automated process that can’t reach its own conclusions? To me, you would not “be there”; there would not, in fact, be a “you”.)
The following string of characters visually and grammatically resembles a sentence but contains no meaning: “You have no control over what your intentions will be”.
That’s like saying “You cannot control yourself”, in the sense that when you try to control yourself the “you” that is doing the controlling is acting rather than being controlled, whereas if you cease to engage in the act of controlling, the “you” that would be controlled by that act is not being controlled and again you are failing to control yourself. In both cases, it’s an error of treating “self” as if there were two of it, subject and object, one possessing intentions and the other controlling what those intentions will or will not be, or one controlling and the other being controlled by the first.
“I”, and my intentions, are one. There is no “intentions” separate from an “I” who would, or would fail to, control “them”. My intentionality is me.
I share Dio’s feeling that I just don’t get why people have a hard time understanding this.
We want to be able to say that you make a choice. What does that mean? It means that there is some THING that can meaningfully be called you, that you identify with, that makes a particular choice in a PARTICULAR WAY distinctive to YOU, and not to some other random factor outside of you.
It doesn’t matter whether the choosing process takes places in neurons in the brain, or in some fantastical supernatural soul made of fairy dust. The very fact that we require identity to assign responsibility makes the idea of freedom from ones own makeup absurd.
Put it another way. Free Will really, really seems like just a very basic error in the use of language. We DO often want to speak of some thing being free of the influence of something else. I can act freely: make my own autonomous choices even though others external to me might want to determine how I choose. The fact is, they can’t: I am still, self-contained, capable of making a choice, sometimes in direct opposition to what they want.
The problem comes when we claim that we want to be free from our own natures. Suddenly, the “free” part of free will is applied not to external influences, but instead to the WILL ITSELF. And that, friends and countrymen, doesn’t make any damn sense at all. How can a choice be free from the will of the person making it and still be THEIR choice? Who is the THEY we are talking about at this point if we’ve just ruled out EVERYTHING that could distinguish them from any other person?
To explain why one person acts criminally and another responsibly, we need to be able to ultimately point to some DETERMINING difference between the two that made the difference in what things they chose. But the assertion of free will rules that out, leaving us with no explanation, and indeed a flat out denial that there CAN be any explanation, for the choices made.
Put it in a religious context: if God damns evil souls, then God is damning souls with a PARTICULAR nature, not souls who just happened, through no particular influence of their nature, to make bad choices. What does it even MEAN to say that a soul or a person is evil if we claim that ones nature doesn’t determine their choices or their will? The answer is that it doesn’t mean anything at all at that point.
But from the other POV it doesn’t matter if the “you” is made up of neurons, circuit boards, fairy dust, or an immaterial everlasting soul … it is still a you that on the basis of its history and origins is “making up its mind” and given that it experiences the process as a decision between choices of different values freely made and is responsible for the consequences of those choices, is experiencing “free will” … why is that so hard to understand?
I do appreciate the initial point made, that “God of the Gaps” comparison, but this does begin to sound more lie a tautology than an analysis. “Free Will” cannot exist because everything is a culmnative reaction to that which has happened before. By that analysis freedom is defined as an impossiblity. I have along the way of reading this thread become convinced to change my mind about free will: I now believe that it exists, just as “I” exist, as a functional entity.
You must know something about rocks that I do not I use “cause” not in the sense of causality (the kick caused the rock to roll), but in the sense of “motivation” or a “goal” (to die for a cause). Rocks, so far as I know, are incapable of taking any sort of action “on its own;” the rock lives in a fatalistic (not deterministic) universe. Let me try some examples:
A simple robot can perform tasks, i.e., act in accordance with its “cause,” but it is incapable of changing its programming. All of the goals of the robot (so far as it can be said to have goals) are externally imposed. Its goals are not its own, but those of its designer(s).
Most life has (1) but not (2). Most life forms take action under their own power to reach the goals of reproduction and survival. But the goals they follow are the goals of their genes (getting a little Dawkinsian here), so they are goals forced on them from an external power.
Some higher animals, however, are capable of both (1) and (to a greater or lesser degree) (2). They are capable of examining their goals, and changing them if necessary. To be able to create new goals, adopt goals from others, or discard old “causes”, the being must be capable of self-reflection, imagination, communication, etc., that I mentioned at first. These aren’t the definition of free will, so much as pre-requisites for free will.
I basically agree with everything you said here, but I clearly don’t get the same meaning out of it. I suspect that I know what the difference is, but I would rather wait to see your reactions to what I said above.
What would be a non-arbitrary and satisfying statement of free will? So far as I can tell, the only classical aspect missing in what I have said the “ability to have done otherwise.” But that can be fixed easily enough. Either quantum uncertainty has a role in decision making, or if it doesn’t, we can install a simple random number generator in your brain. Does this change give you anything more than you already have? Are you more praiseworthy or blameworthy with a random number generator in your head? Does your life have any more purpose or meaning? I believe that we can get everything important about libertarian free will in a natural and deterministic setting, without any need for drastic changes in our old terminology.
Because that’s not what is meant by Free Will. Theologians mean something much stronger by it. In part, their strong form is necessary because they need some reason to alleviate a creator of any responsibility for determining the nature of the “you” in question.
Congratulations! I now propose that you define free will and explain what role it plays in the making of choices, as opposed to not having it. Ok?
Well AHunter did a decent job of it a few pages back. Not to quote exactly but the gist was that “free will” is that aspect of decision processes which the “I” (which includes that which has been my life experience and inate nature) bring to the decision process, as oppposed to those forced upon my “self” by the will of others.
It is a functional reality and functional definition. No more and no less than my sense of self is. Both are metaphysical results of physical reactions. To experience making a choice as a self is to functionally experience free will: without that experience we would not experience making choices; we would have no conscious life and no need for a conscious life; we could exist as input-output machines without qualia.
Ah, I wasn’t using the definition of “cause” you intended but I will start. What determines an entity’s causes? It seems you’re saying it doesn’t matter. I am not satisfied by such incuriosity.
Go on. Give it a shot.
One that doesn’t label selected deterministic actions as free will. Or you can simply drop the “free” part. “Will” seems like a perfectly good term for what you are describing. Or, we can agree to use qualified terms like “apparent free will” and “actual free will”.
I think we agree on what is balderdash; our communication problem stems from the fact that you define the term “free will” in terms of that very balderdash, and my definition is very different.
So there’s no more purpose in us debating whether “free will” exists or not than there is in arguing about which foods go best with truffles when to you “truffles” refers to fine chocolate candy while to me “truffles” means a type of mushroom.
You can’t. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Ultimately “you” have no control at all.
That’s correct. Something has to cause the will to control yourself.
You can’t cease to engage in it. Attempting to do so requires the WILL to do so.
Yes it is. It’s being controlled by the “will” to cease controlling itself.
This is not what I’m saying at all. I’m not saying there are two “selves.” I’m saying there’s only one but that it can’t control or decide its own 'will." It can only follow it and it cannot cease to follow it.
Irrelevant. This still misses the fact that “you” do not decide what your intentions will be. Your DNA is “you” as well. That doesn’t mean that you have any control over it or that you are the one who determines it.
You can’t win a debate just by changing the definitions. I don’t want to say this discussion is over your head but I can’t help wondering that. You seem to be very invested in the idea that will is part of the self, which is not at issue. Just because something is part of the self does not mean that the self determines what it is. It’s like I keep saying you can’t decide how tall you are and you keep arguing that “my height is part of ME!” So what?
But this is the trivial definition to which no one really disagrees.
It’s also not what anyone means by Free Will. While they continually refuse to define what it is, they assert that its existence:
-relieves an omnipotent creator of all responsibility for his creations being the way they are
-that there is some meaning to the idea that choosers “could have” chosen differently than they did and so we should be mad at them above and beyond understanding all the functional reasons for why a person like themselves would choose something bad
I think I’m sort of getting what you’re saying, but not quite the point of it. Yes, we experience choosing things, and this experience, as far as I can tell, is perfectly legitimate. We have wills, we will things, our wills make choices. This is entirely consistent with the idea that those choices are pre-determined and or predictable to the degree that they are not simply ruled by random chance.
Depends on the specific cause and entity in question. Some causes were taken up as a result of discussion with others, others were programmed into the entity. How any entity came to take up a certain cause is of paramount importance to determining whether such an entity-cause relationship can be described as one of free will, as in condition (2) from my previous post. What the physical mechanism is of being convinced of an idea, for example, is a question for the neuroscientists, but doesn’t seem to me to be of great importance to this discussion.
The basic idea: Physical determinism cannot give us the types of answers we are looking for in many causal questions. There are, in many cases, several ways of answering the question “what was the cause (as in causal, not goal) of event X?”, and that the question of determinism or indeterminism is irrelevant to the most meaningful answer.
The idea of determinism is one of causal sufficiency. That is, we say a universe is deterministic if and only if complete information about the state of the universe at any given time (along with the laws of nature) is sufficient to derive all subsequent states of that universe. I hope this definition is unobjectionable.
The second point is that determinism “works” only on the smallest pieces of the universe. Suppose we are observing the early stages of the evolution of life on several planets (or several environments, or several aquariums in a laboratory, etc.), and we want to know whether the life on any of the planets will evolve any certain features, say, eyes. Deterministic calculus cannot address this question directly. We would have to shift perspective to observe the individual atoms (or whatever the basic components are) that make up the universe, run the calculations to advance time by a sufficient amount, then regain our original perspective and observe the results (perhaps some planets had evolved eyed life forms, while others hadn’t). Determinism can only provide us with causal answers when we neglect our higher level concepts and focus only on the smallest physical units.
Now suppose we ask the question, “Why did eyes only evolve on some planets? What accounts for the inter-planetary differences?” Here, we are looking for answers not only of causal sufficiency, but also of causal necessity. The answer determinism provides, “Because of a prior state of the universe”, is one of causal sufficiency, and is useless in answering our question. To get a satisfactory answer, we must appeal to higher level concepts. Perhaps, on some of the planets, life evolved only in areas where little-to-no light reached, so eyes would be useless (that is, they would have no functional purpose), and thus there would be no pressure from natural selection to develop them. This type of answer, relating to the purpose or meaning of an object, is independent of the question of determinism, and provides us with information that a straight-forward application of determinism does not. Thus we reject deterministic sufficiency as the cause of the evolution of eyes, and accept the functional relationship between light and eyesight as (one of) the necessary conditions for the evolution of eyes.
So there are causal questions that cannot be answered in any sort of satisfactory way by an appeal to physical determinism. As life evolved its evolution created things that are used for something (eyes for seeing, legs/wings/fins for locomotion, etc.). The evolution of these things cannot be explained only by appeal to deterministic laws in the way that the formation of stars can. We must recognize that they have purpose or meaning. And so it is with free will. Humanity (and to a lesser extent, some other animals) has evolved a brain that is a highly tuned meaning creation and execution machine. The actions that we take, though fully within the scope of physical lay, cannot be fully explained without appeals to function and/or meaning.
In the terms casual conversation, I often think of it as being the difference between two statements like these:
I am a complex chemical reaction.
I am just a complex chemical reaction.
The second statement implies that there is nothing more to me than being a complex chemical reaction, that everything about me can be explained solely in chemical terms, and would lead me to an unnecessarily simplistic view of myself. I would not say that I, or you, or any life form can be fully described without appeals to purpose, function or meaning.
I think this post has gone on for about long enough. However, I feel compelled to point out to Apos that this thread was originally about free will being an “atheist’s God of the Gaps,” so any talk of an omnipotent creator seems to be beside the point.
Ok, I think I understand now where we are failing to communicate. When I say that Free Will is the ability to make a choice independently of the history that lead to it, I do not mean without regard to it. I meant not coerced by it.
In front of a choice of say A vs B, a mechanical being (one without Free Will) will “decide” A or B because the bouncing balls that lead to this choice will push the button for A or B. No choice was really made. The history that lead to the choice made the choice. A moral being (one with Free Will, as in moral vs amoral not vs inmoral) will see the history that leads to the choice, will know that the bouncing ball will choose A or B and then will have the choice to tilt the table to make the bouncing ball hit either the mechanical choice or the alternative.
The thing is that as I said in my previous billiards example, you don’t really tilt the table, you just change it before the shot is ever made and so it seems that the Free choice was just the natural choice. I willl come back to this in full at the end of this post.
For one, I haven’t yet said that there is a point to punishing this person. In a world with no FW, there is no evil and therefore no need for punishment. That said, the punishment might still occur even if it has no point just because the bouncing balls push the button for punishment to occur. It wouldn’t be random violence. It would be predetermined violence.
But that is not what I really believe. Again, see the end of the post.
Claiming a position is axiomatic is hardly the way to go about a debate. We have agreed, I think, that the perception of Free Will exists. That you feel it, proves that you are human but doesn’t solve the question of wheter it is real or an illusion. I feel it too (I “chose” to answer your post) but I just have no way to tell if it is the bouncing balls hitting the reply button or my Free Will deciding to do so (in accordance or against the bouncing balls’ choice)
I am not saying it is cooler. I am just saying that it is out of the scope of science. That there are no falsifiable hypothesis we can make about it and no tests can be done to obtain evidence of any of the alternatives being considered. I will agree with you that a GD can break free from science and ask you (again) to see the end of the post.
Ok, here we go. This is my unfalsifiable explanation for how a “soul” can have Free Will in a universe that is either deterministic or peppered with randomness but with no internal volition.
It does not explain how this “soul” makes its decisions. Only how those decisions can be manifest in our natural world.
Imagine a game of chess where both players can undo their plays indefinitely and as far back as they want (even after checkmate). It is clear, of course, that neither can win this game. Rational players would recognize this and just shoot for an “acceptable” draw. This would be silly for actual chess but for our analogy it is just perfect as life is not a zero-sum game. What constitutes an “acceptable” draw is up to each player and doesn’t have to be the same for both. There may be some “desirable” draws for a player that are not “acceptable” for the other player. There is no point in attempting those either, of course. In the end, the final board position will be one that is acceptable to both even if not particularly desirable to either. It will still be the best possible outcome for each player.
Each player is still making and being responsible for each of his moves. Each move is his best move and the one that leads to the final outcome he has chosen. A player cannot shift responsibility of one of his moves and claim he is making it because a move the other player made as he could have preempted that move.
The history of the match, of course, won’t show any of the “undo’s”. It will show only the actual executed plays and appear as a perfectly normal game of chess.
I am hoping you can translate this to our natural world but please let me know if something is not obvious.
For someone to be responsible for a moral choice, that choice must be made without any hindrance and with full knowledge of the circumstances and the consequences. That is hardly possible for our natural minds who are limited by their natural components which follow predetermined laws (with or without chaos mixed in).
I believe our “wills” are eternal (not limited by time in length or direction), omniscient (fully aware of their circumstances and the consequences of their possible actions) and free (capable of choosing their actions in virtue of their desired consequences, in knowledge of but not hindered by their circumstances).
The very laws of physics and the initial state of the universe are decided by every one of our moral choices. The universe is being continually created so that its natural laws lead to the choices we make. Although our bodies (brains and minds included) are clockwork, they are clockwork designed to do what it does and so we are responsible for what it does just as we are responsible for the alarm clock sounding at the set time even if we are not directly actuating the alarm.
I tried my hardest to keep this short but I can elaborate in most of the points if you need further clarification.
I submit that those supposed answers are ill-defined. I note that you go on for quite some time here, and yet, you never actually answer any of my questions, which should be simple to answer if free will is a coherent or important concept.
So what? If true, it can give us the exact answers to those higher level concepts too. None of this seems to get out of the bind that choices have to work in SOME PARTICULAR WAY, and if so, they cannot be “free” from their own determinants.
You’re not making any sense here. Determinisms various answers you give here all make perfect sense. None of them have anything to do with anything having “meaning” or “purpose” outside of what given subjects might happen to find meaningful or to have a purpose for them.
You’ve completely and utterly failed to demonstrate that.
Er, why? These statements of yours don’t seem to arise from any internal logic from the flow of your arguments. You just started asserting them out of the blue.
Determinism can account for meaning and purpose: it does so by accounting for beings who have subjective experiences of those things. There isn’t any other coherent usage of those terms: “meaning” isn’t something that floats around in space, it’s a JUDGEMENT made by a particular subject.
We EXPERIENCE purpose and meaning. We don’t need them to explain ourselves unless someone had a purpose in creating us that way, in which case THAT being experienced purpose and meaning.
Nonsense: that idea is not only relevant to the usage and history of the claimed concept free will, but it is the one proposed by those claiming that atheists are somehow hypocritical. Heck, just singling out atheists implies that there is some better explanation to be found in theism.
More importantly, I asked for a definition of free will. You’ve completely avoided the question. No one seems prepared to offer one. They just want to keep tossing this term around and just pretending that they are explaining something about how choices are made, and hoping no one will notice.
Hang on, now…just who the bloody hell appointed you the definer of definitions? It’s you who can’t win a debate just by changing the definitions, and it’s you who are using the term in a ridiculous fashion not kin to how I’ve ever heard anyone who believed in free will use the term.
No, because I don’t use my height to make decisions in the first place.
You say: AHunter3 does not possess free will, because if he possessed free will he could freely will himself to will something other than what his will wills him to will, and he can’t do that willingly.
What you’re doing is begging the question. Kind of like saying “If God is so danged powerful and almighty, how come he can’t make a boulder he can’t lift, huh? Huh?”
We’re not begging the question. We’re pointing out the incoherency and paradoxical self-reference of the idea of free will, not creating or defending it.
I use “cause” not in the sense of causality (the kick caused the rock to roll), but in the sense of “motivation” or a “goal” (to die for a cause). Rocks, so far as I know, are incapable of taking any sort of action “on its own;” the rock lives in a fatalistic (not deterministic) universe. Let me try some examples: