Another "Free Will" debate.

Great Debates
221

For what it’s worth, in academic philosophy, there are at least two distinct conceptions of free will at play.

Libertarian Free Will is the power to choose in a way which is not causally determined. In other words, a choice to do X is free in the Libertarian sense only if both doing X and not doing X were compatible, causally speaking, with all the other causally relevant facts about the universe.

Compatibilist Free Will is the power to choose under circumstances in which the agent has the power both to do the thing chosen and to refrain from doing the thing chosen. In other words, a choice to do X is free in the Compatibilist sense only if both doing X and not doing X were actions that agent had the power to perform. My choice to eat pizza is free only if I have the power to write my paper instead. It need not be causally possible for me to write my paper instead, rather, it just needs to be that I am the kind of thing who, under relevantly similar circumstances, would have the ability to write a paper rather than eat pizza.

Compatibilists believe the existence of free will is compatible with the existence of a completely causally determinate universe. Libertarians believe the existence of free will is not compatible with the existence of a completely causally determinate universe.

I’ve usually been a compatibilist, but I am flirting with Libertarianism these days. More accurately: I am flirting with the idea that the existence of free will is compatible with the existence of a causally indeterminate universe. Some people (for example, on this very thread) object that if choices are indeterminate causally and therefore “random,” then they are no more “free” than causally determined choices would be. Why punish a coin for randomly coming up heads rather than tails?

In response to that objection, I would ask, why not punish a coin for randomly coming up heads rather than tails? Clearly: because the coin can not learn. But what if there is a physical system which includes in its makeup some very complicated configuration of random factors, and which is capable of learning? In other words, it is capable of undergoing an adjustment in the range of outcomes that can issue from its random constituents. Mightn’t it make sense to punish this complicated system for, so to speak, “randomly coming out heads?” i.e. comitting a crime or whatever?

On such a picture, I would identify the free will with that complicated system of random factors. A quark temporarily popping up randomly in my brain and nudging an electron out of its orbit (or whatever) is my choosing this or that action. That random popping up of an event is me. (In other words, it is me doing something.) Yes, as I’ve said, it’s random. But its random within parameters, and it is a random part of a larger system out of which we can make perfect moral sense.

I kind of like this idea. There’s a big problem that comes up when people with fundamentally different moral world views try to discuss things with each other: They find themselves at a loss when trying to reason morally with each other, and instead must negotiate in terms of strength and rhetorical art. The rationality that seems constitutive of my agency and my moral value is not something I can necessarily share rationally with others. It is, at its base, ungrounded, because it is the ground for all thought for me. This fact is well reflected in the picture of the freedom of the will which I’ve just sketched out. Eventually, when you come down to it, when you examine yourself and your choices, you come to something that seems fundamentally “ungrounded.” Rather than despairing of finding a coherent will at the base of your rationality, I think you should just identify yourself with those ungrounded elements of your rationality. (Even while recognizing that these ungrounded elements can undergo change themselves!) Similarly, rather than giving up on finding a coherent will at the base of my physical makeup, I think i should just identify myself with those ungrounded elements of my physical makeup–those random quantum events, say, or whatever else they might be–should they indeed exist. Those random events (random within parameters, embedded within a representational biological system) are my will.

I’m just arguing that this is a possible way things might be. Should things turn out to be causally determinate, I’m happy to defend a compatibilism as well. Its just that I don’t think the objection against Libertarianism which turns on the notion of randomness works as well as most have thought.

-FrL-

222

I didn’t answer your questions because the bulk of my post (excepting the last paragraph) was in responce to the PC apeman.

It can provide some answers to higher level questions only when the results of the theorem are interpreted in terms of the higher level concepts. Determinism does not give us these answers by itself.

Yes, choices have to be made in some way, and I never challenged that. Nor can I find anyone who does. From the Stanford Encyclopedia on Philosophy entry on Free Will:

There are several others, as well as more in the entry on Compatibilism. I provided a rough working definition in my first post (which I later expanded on):

I don’t see, in any of these, the requirement that the decider be free from the influence of himself, which you seem to take as the one and only canonical definition of free will. Can you provide a cite that this is the case?

I provided only one deterministic answer, “Because of a prior state of the universe.” This fails as an answer because it teaches us nothing new, and because it closes off all discussion. After all, because of a prior state of the universe" is an equally acceptable answer to many questions: Why do we have two hands? Why did World War I happen? The eye evolved (or more correctly, continued to evolve after the first steps were taken) because it had a useful function–because it served a purpose, collecting light to detect distant objects. My point is, if we concern ourselves only with the units of determinism (atoms, electrons and what not), this purpose will not be seen. We can only see this purpose if we take our eyes off the atoms and look at the larger structures they make.

223

ok, since that was me with the fat pointing finger, I feel I must address this.

My problem is with atheists (in the sense that they refute a supernatural being) but have no problem believing they are more than chemical reactors (that they can make choices free from the causality chain of nature).

I am perfectly happy with atheists who are content with being nothing more than a chemical reaction.

I am also happy with theists who believe themselves somehow free to make choices unrestrained by their chemistry.

It is the disconnect that I have trouble with. (I guess I would be very confused with a theist who believes himself a chemical reaction, :dubious: )

224

When I replied in agreement to your observation, in [URL=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=8104388&postcount=205”]post 205, I did not consider myself agreeing that this incoherent notion represented “free will”, but I do agree that it’s an incoherent notion. (I considered it to be a really elegant encapsulation of the silly-ass rendition of “free will” being offered up by those who are arguing that it doesn’t exist.)

I don’t use the term to mean what you wrote in that post (quoted in my reply to you @ above link).

I know you can’t speak for Diogenes the Cynic or anyone else joining you in the position that you’re taking, or vice versa, but I’d really like to know where you folks are going with this. Is there some pro-free-will school of thought to which you folks are responding in which people are making the claim that free will exists and that it enables them to choose what their will shall in fact be? (And they aren’t participants in a Monty Python skit or referring to someone’s Last Will and Testament when they speak of being able to choose what one’s will shall in fact be)? And they’re serious, and taken seriously by someone somewhere?

Or are you instead advancing the claim that any ordinary everyday claim to free will somehow collapses or expands to this ridiculous claim? (I don’t see that at all).

I’ve heard definitions of “free” that focus on “freedom to” and I’ve heard definitions of “free” that focus on “freedom from”, but outside of some of the weirder mutterings of Sigmund Freud I haven’t come across many people whose notions of “freedom” incorporate “freedom from being encumbered by my Self”.

Have we somehow cycled back to the foreground/background, item/context problem again, without explicitly bringing it up? The only sense I can think of in which the “content of one’s will” would be something whereby “you don’t get to choose it” implies a problem for free will is if we assume that something other than the person of whom we speak does “get to choose it”, a notion that only make sense within the confines of the flawed notion that the contents of one’s mind are a product of, and caused by, one’s context in some (imaginary) fashion whereby one’s identity is not also and simultaneously causing that context. And since that isn’t so, the contents of one’s will are not caused by something “outside of oneself” but rather by the perpetually ongoing interaction of self to context, which is, as I’ve said, who one is, not something other than who one is.

225

Why should there be a problem with this? Can’t you imagine a perfeclty rational person arguing both that there is not a good reason to believe in disembodied supernatural persons, while also arguing that there are good reasons to believe that there exist choices made independently of natural causality?

I don’t see a problem with this either. Seems to me a theist could very well think of herself as a purely physical created being.

-FrL-

226

The problem is simply that many of these discussions are flatly incoherent. What information is being conveyed when someone says that something has the “ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire.”

Take that apart.

Selecting a course of action makes sense when viewed as a system as a whole: a coin flip selects one of two outcomes. But of course, coins don’t have desires. But what exactly does adding in desires add to the equation? Desires are in this sense not that different from physical facts. Coins land heads or tails in response to some physical facts about how they are flipped, while people choose various options depending on what sorts of desires they posses?

So where is the insight there? How is choosing any different with “free will” than without it?

No, you’ve missed the point. I said right from the outset that there is a common and perfectly legitimate usage of the term “free will.” It is, however also a fairly trivial and uncontroversial one. The sort of Free Will we are talking about in this thread is a much stronger claim, because it purports that things like morality cannot exist without it, or that atheists are hypocrites if they believe in it, because it for some reason requires the supernatural to function (in what way, no one seems prepared to say).

Well, it might do that because it answers all questions that could possibly be asked in as much detail as there is possible to have.

It does teach us something new: it tells us exactly what factors working in what way caused the result we are interested in. How is that not informative? It’s virtually the definition of informative!

Well, not vaguely in that form. Every question will have a DIFFERENT prior state of the universe behind its explanation, so there’s nothing particularly lazy or insufficient about it.

You are simply misusing the term “purpose.” Purpose is something a SUBJECTIVE being has FOR something: it is a judgment, not an intrinsic objective characteristic. When we say that the eye evolved, what we really mean is that we are interested in what sorts of forms developed and then persisted for long amounts of time. But that’s just a particular pre-occupation that we have, because we happen to be interested in how things got as they are. However, there’s nothing objectively special about that perspective. It isn’t the purpose of eyes to help creatures survive, it’s simply that those that had them happened to do better at it given their particular situation.

Again, purpose is a judgment made, not a fact observed.

227

Ahunter, I and I think Dio were responding to the kind of Free Will that was introduced as being hypocritical for atheists to believe in.

The strong form of free will is a pretty common debate point amongst theologians and philosophers and while I’m surprised that you might not have heard of it before, I guess I can understand how you might find this debate strange or artificial on our part if you had not.

228

these choices that are independent of natural causality, what are they then? random? supernatural?

That’s one weird god that creates an amoral creation. Not that I pretend to understand the thoughts and the purposes of gods but why make humans and not make them free? Why would this theist think anything of this god? He isn’t a moral being.

229

Call it supernatural if you like. But the choices aren’t disembodied supernatural persons. So I can think there is no such thing as a disembodied supernatural person while still believing there are supernatural choices.

You said in a previous post you could understand an atheist who thinks he is just a chemical reaction. I can understand that as well. But most such atheists will still argue that talk in terms of moral values makes sense, and many will even affirm that moral statements are true or false.

It is not easy to demonstrate that just because something is a chemical reaction, moral predicates do not apply to it. I don’t see why someone couldn’t (perfectly rationally) think that there exist certain chemical reactions to which moral predicates do apply. And such a person may well point to you and me as examples of such reactions.

Well, anyway, why not?

-FrL-

230

That’s exactly what I have a problem with. Why is it silly when someone covers his ears and says “supernaturalsupernaturalsupernatural” when asked about the origin of the universe but it is ok when someone else does it when asked about the origin of spontaneous choice?

Invoking the supernatural is akin to picking up your toys and leaving the playground. You just abandon the rules and step out of the discourse of science. Once the supernatural is invoked, theories stop being falsifiable and there is no science. Any theory is just as good as the next.

The choices of a chemical reactor may appear moral or inmoral once you abstract them from their ultimate physical causes but there can be no responsibility if you are just rolling on tracks. It is just an illusion of morality.

231

Well Sapo be confused. Be very confused. :slight_smile:

I am a pantheist actually. I believe in God-who-doesn’t-give-a-shit, or more accurately in an incomprehensible God that is the multiverse-that-always-is-has-been, or at least emergent of it in the same sense that “I” am emergent of the function of my neurons/glia et al. And I believe that I am a bag of chemicals and reactions that has a complex pattern such that it defines what is “self” and “non-self” and has developed the ability to have enough of these processing self-refential strange loops such that that referenced sentient “I” has emerged. A requisite part of that sentient selfness is the experience of free will. Sure, on one scale of analysis, every action is determined by the net result of what has already occured. But at the scale of the self, the self is still playing that out as making unforced choices upon reflection.

Apos Sure, you can define Free Will as that which occurs totally independently of any determinents, be they random or not, be they physical or “supernatural” and of course you’ve then defined Free Will away. By definition nothing is “free”. Talk about trite. Talk about trivial.

A coin does not have sentience. It does not reflect. Sentience and reflection require the experience of free will. It not only exists as much as “I” do and in the same sense that “I” do, it is required for that “I” to exist.

As to morality well I am of mixed mind. I am a prisoner to my nature and I believe that there are moral values that ARE Right and Wrong, even as I also recognize how moral values are selected for and evolve both biologically and culturally.

232

It looks to me like your problem isn’t with Atheists who believe in free will but with Scientists who believe in the supernatural.

There’s no logical connection between not believing in God and believing in supernatural choice, but there is a logical connection between believing all effects have causes and believing in the supernatural. The latter pair constitutes a contradiction, while the former pair does not.

As I said, it would take a lot to make this correctly plausible. Certainly, I can not call a train “just rolling on tracks” moral or immoral for doing so. But for all I know, given certain very complicated kinds of tracks, with certain very complicated machines rolling on them, moral predicates make sense.

To make your point, you’d have to show that morality would be an illusion no matter how complicated a determinate system might be.

Look at the following argument:

  1. It is true that John should not steal.
  2. John is a chemical reaction.
  3. Therefore, there exists at least one chemical reaction to which moral predicates apply.

Our hypothetical theist accepts both premises, as well as the conclusion. You do not accept the conclusion. If you grant our theist premise 2, then you have to deny premise 1. To deny premise 1 is to say “It is false that John should not steal.” This is the same as saying “It is permissible for John to steal.” How could you defend that? (I mean how could you defend it for arbitrary “John”'s, of course. Bringing in possible “John”'s stuck with sick wives and too poor to buy medicine, and so on, would be irrelevant to the point we’re discussing.)

-FrL-

233

As I see it, it’s a way of determining which sorts of entities have moral responsibility, using the presence or absence of desires as the determining factor. I’m not saying it’s the right answer, but it seems that we need some reason that we can put people on trial but not falling rocks. As for the difference in choices, one possibility would be whether the determining factors in the choice have been made by an external agent, or whether are internally motivated. For example, whether you have a gun pointed at your head or not.

Fair enough, but as I read it, the original objection was that free will was supernatural, and therefore illogical, not that it is illogical regardless of it being natural or not.

It gives us a list of everything. It does not tell us which factors are important, or which factors had no influence on the result, or what changes might have changed the result. It does not tell us anything not in terms of the basic physical units. These questions are not superfluous, they are a vital part of knowledge.

Not so. Things are either causally sufficient or they aren’t. One state of the universe can “explain” any number of events, provided that they all happened after that state. The initial state of the universe could explain ALL of the events in the life of the universe equally well. If you only want to consider certain parts of the universe, then you’re taking a big risk. Open systems are, as a general rule, not deterministic. Though I’m sure you could find some exceptions to the rule.

I don’t see why purpose must have a purpose-judger. Life forms have sub-components that do things, and these components have continued to exist over time precisely because they do things. It’s not that the creatures just “happened to do better.” They did better because of the adaptations. It makes perfect sense to me to talk about a reason for the existence of successful adaptations, because they gained reasons after promoting the continued existence of the creatures that used them.

234

For the rcord, I’m talking about Libertarian Free Will and I guess I should have specified that in the OP (I know I’ve done so in previous debates). I think compatibilism just begs the question. The statement that you have free will only if you have the ability to choose one thing over another is just saying that you have free will if you have free will. It basically assumes that such a power exists (it doesn’t, it only seems that way) and ignores the paradoxical regress that I’m talking about. You still can’t determine your own will without requiring a will to determine it (and will to determine THAT will and so on…). It’s like trying to decide what your next thought will be before you think it.

As for “punishment,” well, even though no individual has any true accountability for what his will makes him do, there is still every reason to impose cultural sanctions on those who do harm. It’s not about moral accountability, really, it’s about protecting the stability and emotional well-being of the larger community. The community does this by effectively loading the variables in such a way as to affect their determinant effect on the will of its individuals. We can say that their will is not “free,” but we can also work to influence that will by dramatically increasing the attractiveness of certain choices over others.

“Morality,” may be subjective and “punishment” may only be a culture construct evolved to protect human communities, but there’s nothing wrong or illogical about that. It’s only logically problematic if you think that “right” and “wrong” have any objective meaning outside our own subjective and cultural contexts.

This stuff really has greater implications for theists than for atheists because it throws all kinds of theological underpinnings into question.

235

The self doesn’t follow its will; the self is its will.

-FrL-

236

No. The self merely posseses a will. The same way it posseses skin or hair.

237

Compatibilism says you are free inasmuch as you have the power to do otherwise than what you actually do. The compatibilist has to answer the question “what does it mean to have the power to do something,” and that turns out to be a very long discussion.

I’m still not following your regress argument. You said “you can’t determine your own will without erquiring a will to determine it,” but I don’t understand why a free will would have to be the will of a self who can “determine (its) own will).” Why can’t it just have (actually, “be”) that will without having to determine it?

-FrL-

238

I can grant you that way of using the language. But on that usage, the important question isn’t whether the self is free of the will. Perhaps the self is a slave to the will. Fine. But we’re talking about “free wills,” not “free selves,” on the usage you’ve stipulated here.

-FrL-

239

This is a leap where your argument finds no traction for me.

Just because the calculation is lengthy and complex doesn’t mean it doesn’t directly answer the question.

Determinism says everything is in a causal chain. Asking why some causal chains do no exist is interesting but in no way weakens determinism. Nor does it add any substance to apparent free will.

Despite the full stop in the first statement you are implying that there is more. There is no more. The need to appeal to purpose, function or meaning does seem to be the heart of the matter. Those things are human inventions. We created them, cling to them, and fear digging deeper lest they be exposed as ghosts.

240

I am not familiar with it. I can’t in all honesty claim to find the concept TOTALLY foreign, but I’m not at all sure I’d go along with their formulation.

“Hypocritical for atheists to believe in”? Only, I would think, for those atheists who embrace an absolutely deterministic universe. And not because they’re atheists, only because they are radical determinists, whereby every portion of the contents of one’s mind (including one’s “will”) are physical states caused by a chain of physical processes preceding the moment in question.

As I stated in the first of those two linked posts, my decision to embrace the use of the term “God”, and consider myself theistic, was precipitated by a discussion about causality (and determinism — a form of radical SOCIAL determinism in this case); but I didn’t feel then and don’t feel now that it was imperative that I do so. God only knows the word “God” is more often used in a much sillier and less profound (babytalk / Sky God) sense, and a superficial study of Calvinism or Hinduism can disabuse one of the notion that theologies are intrinsically entwined with free will perspectives.