In the particular application of a material world, sure. But in terms of logic, it’s a phenomenon of making intelligible sense. It doesn’t matter whether you have physics or not: if you want to claim that something makes choices and is responsible for them, and that different people make different choices, some good, and some bad, and yet you cannot be bothered to explain why, I’m going to cry foul.
Again, this is just back to JThunder’s bit of illogic. The underlying origin of why arguments get made has no bearing on their validity.
I’m not asking for a scematic diagram, just even a tiny bit of information as to what you think it is, how it adds anything to our understanding of the making of choices, what new idea it offers to us. That is the BARE minimum requirement for us to even TRY to have a debate about whether or we have it.
But no one asked you to explain that. You went from almost trying to answer the question to veering off and answering a question about your elaborate metaphysical scenario where some people choose to be abused as children and others choose to be child abusers.
No. You cannot “know” that unless you can explain what Free Will is in the first place. You can’t assert that it cannot be explained by nature if you can’t tell me what it is, and you can’t assert that it must be supernatural either.
I might as well assert that there is a quality “Hoopharumph” that is necessary for morality to exist. I can then assert that unless the natural world is all there is, Hoopharumph couldn’t exist and hence there could be no morality. And then I proceed to continually refuse to explain what “Hoopharumph” is, what it does, how it plays into anything having to do with morality, etc.
Faith is a loaded word but not too far off. I believe that there is something in the universe that can be labelled an atom. I believe that I am a collection of atoms. I believe that some collections of atoms are similar to mine and can be considered other people. I believe that there are photons. I believe that photons can bounce off collections of atoms and strike our retinas. I believe that our brains receive signals from the retinas, process them and we call that seeing each other. I believe that collections of atoms can move together in such a way that when one collection “bumps” into another there are consistent rules that we can derive and call physics. These are all articles of my faith called physicalism and causality. And yes, it may well be arbitrary to have this faith.
The vast majority of my beliefs cohere nicely with each other into one big faith. Because of the high degree of coherence in my faith, it has a high degree of utility for me. I hold the belief that my pet is a cat. If I simultaneously held the belief that my pet was a fish, then my faith wouldn’t provide much utility for me when shopping for pet food. It wouldn’t be coherent. When I encounter other people that share significant parts of my faith, we can have useful discussions starting from our common ground. If he holds a belief that does not cohere to our common faith, we can debate it using our common faith as a starting point. The more we beliefs we each have, the more kinds of conversations we can have. It may be arbitrary to have this faith but it is not arbitrary for people of similar faith to start conversations there.
Delusional is another loaded word for you to use. I suffer the same illusions looking at the Game of Life or human behavior as anyone. I don’t call myself or anyone else delusional because of it. Within the faith of physicalism and causality, I am indeed making a compelling correct argument that free will does not actually exist. But we experience something we’ve labelled free will. So concluding that free will is an illusion provides the missing coherency in this faith.
Tell me, AHunter3… If I rejected physicalism and causality, if I adopted your undifferentiated universe faith, what kinds of conversations could we have? Which beliefs would cohere in such a place?
I just don’t know where to go from here. Any definition of Free Will you encounter you just dismiss with either “isn’t that just free will (no caps)?” to which I answer “no because free will isn’t real” to which you answer “but it happens and we can talk about it” and I got back to “yes it happens but it isn’t Free Will” and repeat. Or you respond to the definition with “Yes but you need to go one more step backwards” to which I respond “once I step beyond the natural there is no point in trying” to which you reply “c’mon give it a try” and I make up some weird dragon tale and you reply with “yes but that still isn’t it, you need to go one more step backwards” and repeat.
Any attempt at talking around the properties of this Free Will in an effort to piece together the elephant from all the parts you dismiss with “you haven’t defined Free Will, you can’t talk about it”.
The short story is that, although I recognize, appreciate and value free will (no caps) and can talk about it to no end, it still fails to satisfy me as it serves no ultimate existencial purpose. To borrow from GoL again (and trying to converge to the parallel argument that shares the thread with us), talking about gliders, puffers and spaceships is great observational science with predictive hypothesis possible and all.
Still, the answer to every Why question about them is “because the four rules determine that it is so”. Rakes and Puffers aren’t Moral (event if we attached moral (no caps) values to leaving debris and creating spaceships) because they do not decide what they will do, they move on tracks.
I want to talk about Conway not about gliders. A preposterous idea for a little square of the matrix myself, I know. All I am saying is that Conway (if there is a Conway) doesn’t follow the four rules himself. After that, anything I say about him is outrageous speculation but I am confident in that if Conway is out there, he is more than just the sum of all the squares of the matrix and a something that doesn’t follow the four rules himself. Even if I don’t know Conway.
It could be that there is no Conway. That the GoL is all there is. Then we are just a piece of a game, fascinating as the game may be. Oh well, such is the GoL.
Well, I don’t disbelieve in any of the things you state (in the above post) that you believe in. I believe in some other things (some of which may appear, at least at first glance, to be incompatibile with the above beliefs) which are not among the things you hold to be so, as referenced in my posts that you linked to as well as in the body of this thread.
I don’t reject causality as “a valid description of how things work”, I only reject it as “the only valid description of how thing work”, and I embrace intentionality as a different but also valid description of how things work.
I am not a radical social constructionist, of the sort that believes that all meaning associated with a thing in the universe is attributed to that thing by social definition, but rather I believe the meaning exists in the interplay between the thing and the society that does the defining; the object is a participant and actually has characteristics.
But I am not an objectivist either, of the sort that believes objects contain meaning intrinsically, which is apprehended either correctly or incorrectly by society, because, again, the meaning exists in the interplay between the thing and the society that does the observing; the observer is a participant and can only experience the observed through interaction.
So would you care to discuss objectivity versus subjectivity?
Or, more fun for me, how about oppression? To have a theory of oppression, you pretty much have to explain how the oppressed are caused to internalize a belief-system about things which is not, in fact, true (unless we posit that the oppressed are fully aware of their oppression and are directly coerced by force into acquiescence, at any rate); that means we have to be able to speak of an understanding of social reality that can be either true or not true, accurate or not accurate; yet at the same time, we have to be able to speak of a social reality that isn’t comprehended automatically, so as to explain how nontrue perspectives can flourish.
Wanna liberate the masses?
Or we can continue where we’ve been going all along, but examine the implications and outcomes of determinism versus free will for theories of various sorts. Again I tend to gravitate towards the social. If a hypothetical baby-rapist from another social system says that the only reason you disapprove of forcible violent rape of little babies is that you were exposed to a social and cultural milieu that brought you to the point of perceiving this as a bad and wrong human behavior that should be stopped at all costs, and says that if you’d been brought up in his society instead you’d be a enthusiastic participant in babyrape, does a determinist have a ready explanation for why, or in what sense, one perspective is better than the other? Can you make any moral argument on any grounds other than “I believe this is bad because, well, I was exposed to a lot of social stimulus and context which has resulted in me feeling that way”?
Wanna do situational ethics?
Or we could do epistemology. How do you know something if you don’t know something as a consequence of materialism, objectivity, and causal determinism? What’s the process?
We can’t do any of that starting from here. It has little utility. And we can’t start here without coherence with the first place. And we can’t do any of the above until we find our common faith starting point. Your philosophy seems more defined by what it isn’t than what it is. Its hard to debate phantoms. Most of the above would be a hijack anyway. I’m here because I’m interested in debating free will in a physicalist causal universe. Your debate-ending bomb isn’t interesting to me. I wouldn’t enjoy shopping for pet food with an array of beliefs such as yours either.
the PC apeman, I hope you don’t mind that I rearrange your post as I respond to it, so that I can group like issues together a bit. I hope I’m not misrepresenting anything you meant by doing so.
Oh my no. I was just amused at how easily the old joke fit into our discussion and my example. Certainly not something I planned on.
I disagree. The universe has a focus on the smallest physical units because those are the units on which the governing physical laws operate. But, to be honest, I’ve forgotten where I was trying to go with this line of discussion. And I think that the introduction of the Game of Life has provided a much better basis for discussion anyway.
Excellent.
I can’t say that I have any issues with the definition provided. Though I think wording it like that might muddy the waters a bit, I believe that it is completely compatible with the definition I proposed back in post number 216: “[W]e 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’m not trying to promote the idea that non-reversibility disproves causality moving forward. I have maintained that determinism only tells us something about causal sufficiency, which is, at best, only half the causal story. To truly answer the question “what is the cause (causality–I think I’ve abandoned the motivational meaning for this part of the discussion) of event X?” we must also evaluate information about causal necessity, and perhaps even more information than that. None of this information weakens what determinism is. It only weakens what people think determinism is.
Also, a quick reading of the Wikipedia definition of necessary cause might leave the impression that it is discussing causality going backwards in time. This would be wrong. Necessary causes also go forward in time.
And this is where we disagree (unless you believe that truth is in any way determined by utility ). I would not hesitate to state that gliders are as real as the individual cells that make them up, or that dogs are as real as the atoms of which they are composed. I have nothing like a proof that this is true (though I think there could be such a proof), or even a particularly compelling argument. However, if you’re interested (and you seem like the interested type), I’ll provide a couple of the things I might appeal to.
The first would be patterns. A glider is just a pattern of cells in the game of life, and after every four ticks of the clock, the pattern repeats itself, displaced diagonally by a single square. Crystals are just regular patterns of atoms, and these patterns are intimately linked to the atoms themselves. If I recall my basic materials science correctly, different kinds of atoms make different patterns and thus differently shaped crystals. I can think of no reason for supposing that the crystals are any less real than the atoms themselves.
I would also appeal to the insensitivity to initial conditions of some systems or to necessary causality. For example, the behavior of a gas is nearly uniform across a huge range of initial conditions. If you were to rearrange the molecules in a balloon, the behavior of the balloon and its interaction with the air would be nearly identical. The same could be true of other objects, such as the sun. Perturbations in the atoms in the sun would be likely to have negligible effect on the rest of the universe. There is more informational and causal content in treating the sun as a star than as a collection of atoms.
As a quick aside, I’d like to thank you for posting the link to AHunter3’s other post. I’ve found myself agreeing with a lot of what he’s said in the thread, and am fairly surprised to see that our justifications are nearly opposite each other.
The two premises are:
(1) That causal sufficiency is not the entirety of causal information.
(2) That higher level (emergent) concepts are real, and discussing them is as valid as discussing basic physical units.
The argument beyond there relies heavily on evolutionary biology, which I can provide a sketch of here. You surely won’t agree, because we don’t agree on the premises, but you must be curious after this long. The first step is the realization that we cannot provide an explanation for the form living things take on unless we appeal to the function of their adaptations. Birds’ wings have the shapes that they do because those are the shapes that work (are functional). We can even use this observation to make predictions about undiscovered species (either living or extinct). But not only do adaptations do something, they have continued to survive and, in many cases, become more refined through evolution because they do something. For something to be made over and over and improved upon because of the role it plays sounds like as good a definition of its purpose as just about anything else.
The next large step comes again from evolution. As we look back at the history of various adaptations, we see that the function of the adaptation’s ancestors was often different than it’s contemporary descendents. For example, the ancestors of the wing (if we go back far enough) were legs or arms, not flying devices. So not only do adaptations have a purpose for their existence, but that purpose can change over time.
With this in mind, we turn to the human brain. Finding a specific function for the brain is difficult, because it excels at many things, but two possibilities are decision making and communication. The brain has the unique capacity to create, interpret and be affected by language. This makes the brain a product of both biological and cultural evolution. Cultural evolution, like biological evolution, creates meaning where the was none previously, but it moves at an incredibly fast pace. This breakneck pace is both caused by and reflected in our brains, which are able to continually create and change the meaning that is in the world.
And this is how we get to free will. As we grow and age, we are continually creating new meaning, and modifying the meaning we have already found in the world. Although there are causes for our actions in the smallest physical units and in the deep past of the universe, these are not the causes (still talking about causality) that matter. The causes (causality) that matter are the causes (a little bit of both) we adopt or create for ourselves.
As I said, this is just a sketch (against which I’m sure you have vehement objections) of a view of compatibilism that has been heavily influenced (to greatly understate it) by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. If you have any interest in a much more in depth analysis, I posted about two book in my first post in the thread (#171). Freedom Evolves is shorter and deals exclusively with the argument for free will, while Darwin’s Dangerous Idea has more on the nature of function and purpose in the universe. Considering that you stuck it out this long in the thread, I thought it might be something you were interested in.
Necessary or sufficient, all causation moves forward in time. The difference is only important if we’re trying to traverse a causal chain backwards. Complete causality is still our base assumption isn’t it?
Truth is a problematic concept as you can see from my recent exchange with AHunter3. Look at the gliders again. As they “move” across the screen, do they contain the same cells? No, the cells don’t move. Cells cannot move in the GoL universe. If we are seeing moving cells, how can they be real in that universe? The gliders exist as a group of moving cells only in our brains. It’s a trick.
If I wanted to describe a glider to someone, I might call it a wiggling collection of cells that moves diagonally through the GoL universe. Or I could explain that there is an array of unmoving cells that change from alive/black to dead/white and back again according to rules that 1) Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, 2) Any live cell with more than three live neighbors blah, blah, blah. The idea of a glider is our inaccurate shorthand notation. Inaccurate but useful.
Dogs are a slightly different story because they are in a different universe. All the dog atoms are real. They can and do move about. They stick together in a consistent predictable way as they move. But we perceive more about them than that. They’re what we call alive. They’re mammals. They can be playful or threatening. They have historical context. They have properties that are not intrinsic in the constituent atoms. There’s very little about atoms that relates to what we think of as a dog. Where does that “dogness” exist? It’s a bunch of inaccurate shorthand notations that, like glider movement, we’ve encoded in our brains. These notations are beliefs and they cohere and emerge in a way that a “dog” makes sense to us. (See post #262 above for more on beliefs, coherence, and truth.)
What is free will? It’s a concept that exists only in our minds, not in an actual universe where events can only be determined or random. The idea of free will doesn’t cohere with such a universe unless we add ideas like emergence to bridge the gap. But free will is still a belief, it’s not real.
We’ve started over. How do we decide, without the benefit of any input, which causes to adopt or create for ourselves? I’m guessing you’ll say that we do use inputs. But you have to disregard them if you’re describing the part of the decision that is actual free will. The apparent free will seems to be balancing inputs and making decisions but all that is just a trick of the brain.
Doc (do you mind being referred to as Doc?), looking back I see that I’ve skipped a lot of your post. I hope I’ve hit the most important parts. But if there’s something you’d like addressed I’ll be glad to do it tomorrow. I’m off to bed. G’night.
First of all, I’m a little confused by this retelling of our discussion? Isn’t that you admitting that I was right about free will being real? Doesn’t that constitute getting somewhere?
And yes, the argument does have a roadblock that we can’t seem to get past. That roadblock is you coming up with an intelligible definition of even an overview what “Free Will” involves in the process of making a choice. Doing that is a necessary pre-requisite to ANY of the claims you want to make about various things having it, or what must be true about morality, or whatever. We really CAN’T proceed very far without it.
I’m not sure you really understood what I was asking though. Everytime I’ve asked you to explain how choices are made, even in the most abstract sense, and even without the bounds of natural law constraining your explanation, you keep presenting some scenario in which something “chooses” X, but you never say how. That “choice” always swoops in, as if out of nowhere, with no explanation. But that’s exactly what I want you to address! My contention is that ANY “how” fatally undermines the concept that choices are not determined by SOMETHING (either be it ones present nature, or random elements playing a role or whatever). You seem assert that there is a principle “Free Will” that does something special and different, unlike those things. So what is it? What is it doing?
Well, yes. That would be the exact same impasse we would reach if we tried to debate my concept of “Hoopharumph.”
Well, I think it serves every purpose of explaining, for instance, purpose: we are beings who have values and purposes for things. We have identities and we see ourselves as defined as people by these things. There is nothing illusory about any of this either, as some seem to believe. In fact, it’s quite possible that any sense of identity or responsibility really, in the end, REQUIRES that we be talking about this sort of free will.
I think you are seeing things via reducing rather than building. Yes, there is an underlying substrate explanation that can be traced back to the four laws. But simply stating the four laws is not enough to predict or view the gliders, puffers, spaceships, or even the Turing complete computers that can be built. And puffers are not like gliders: they do different things. Both may be based on the same “natural” laws, but they are not the same and we can’t talk about one and pretend we understand them all.
The fact is, even with free will, we DO have values, and values are the basis of morality. And we make choices based on those values, and judge the acts of others based on them. As far as I can conceptualize, I don’t see any other way for it to make sense to talk about us choosing based on moral values, and hence making moral choices. Take away the determinism, and you don’t have freedom: you have nothing at all.
But they do - indirectly. Our intentions aren’t just instinctual - they’re also bred from months, years, decades of knowledge, experience and interaction and our environment. Even if you boil it down to randomness - the randomness is random and our brains are flexible enough to interpret that randomness and make decisions seemingly to our benefit. I think I could make the argument that this flexibility and adaptability = “free will”
Of course free will is real. Real as gliders and puffers. It is observable, measurable, predictable (to a point), it has consequences. And yes, we are making progress in that we are coming to at least agree on the terms we are using. But if free will is the noise the engine makes, I want to know if there really are pistons.
Do you have one? I mean one that you would agree to discuss even if you don’t believe there is such a thing?
It is impossible for me to define Free Will when I don’t think there is such thing.
Well, all I am saying is that IF this is a deterministic universe (or even chaotic with true randomness) AND IF there is something beyond free will (no caps), then that something has to be beyond nature, supernatural, inexplicable to natural laws and to science.
What that something would be doing is effecting matter in a way that is neither causal nor random. To borrow a term from free will, we could call it Volitional but that is just a name for something we don’t know (call it oopharoomph if you want, but using a term from a similar effect on free will seems to make life easier)
Excuse me for opening a new tangent but:
free will (no caps) is sufficient if you do not believe in a God and an afterlife. But if you do believe in Divine Judgement, then you are not ultimately responsible for your moral (no caps) choices in a deterministic (or chaotic) universe as they were the inevitable outcome of natural laws.
Indeed, which is PRECISELY why theists need this nonsense concept that they cannot explain to keep their God from looking like an irrational, bizarre monster.
Isn’t this just the equivalent of saying “if there is something supernatural, it’s supernatural”? But as I’ve said, if you can’t tell me how the problem is any clearer or easier to solve in a supernatural sense, then you can’t claim that resorting to the supernatural is worth doing, or has any meaning.
I’d answer by saying “What you call ‘your electrons making you do it’ is (part of what constitutes) your doing it. If what I’ve just said has the suprising consequence that part of what goes into your doing something extends back in time before you formed the intention, then I’ll bite that bullet. To put it another way: Okay, so your electrons ‘made you do it,’ but unfortunately for you, I don’t want electrons behaving that way, so I punish thee in order to discourage it from happening in the future.”
Frylock, you are more than welcome to jump in. This is by no means a private argument.
I agree with your sentiment. I would hand out death penalties for parking violations and let God handle the sorting. It would sure make for a quieter place down here and it is not like we have a shortage of people on Earth. But that is not the point. Can a person be called responsible for choices that he was predetermined to make from the beginning of time?
I think (but can’t claim totally firm conviction) that the concept of responsibility has as its purpose the singling out person(s) who should be praised or blamed for particular states of affairs. Meanwhile, I do not think that praise or blame, to make sense, requires that a person could have done otherwise than what s/he did in any deep metaphysical sense. So I have no problem with counting someone responsible for an act even if I were to think that, metaphysically speaking, there was no way for him or her to do anything else.
The question of responsibility is, in my current opinion, a question of who is the (right kind of) cause of a particular state of affairs, and does not turn on a question as to whether that person “could have done otherwise” metaphysically speaking.
Well, that’s the thing, that it is not metaphysically speaking. The problem is that by law of nature, that person had no choice to do anything else. You are punishing a dropped penny for hitting the floor.
Sure the person had a choice–its just that the choice happens to be determined by events (I’ll stipulate) independent of that person.
He had a choice because he was aware that he had reasons to do this, and that he had reasons to do that, and he considered both options, and ended up thereby following the reasoning that led him to (say) the first option rather than the second.
As to your second point, I’m not doing anything relevantly analogous to punishing a penny, because people are far more complicated than pennies. Moral predicates don’t apply to pennies, but they do apply to people, specifically because moral predicates apply to entities which are complicated in a particular way to a particular degree.
Someone else in this thread argued that complicatedness is irrelevant. That person’s argument was roughly that, since a simple object can’t be held responsible for its actions, and since every complicated object is just a combination of simple objects, it follows that complicated objects can not be held responsible for their actions.
But that argument constitutes an instance of the fallacy of composition. A parallel argument would be: Since no subatomic particle is alive, and since all living objects are just combinations of subatomic particles, it follows that no object is alive. This is clearly an absurd conclusion.
“Complicatedness” might not be exactly the right concept for me to adduce here, but I do think something like this is right–or at least can be made perfectly fine sense of.
Basically, you are arguing that responsibility requires that it be possible (metaphysically*) that a person have done otherwise than he actually did. I am maintaining that responsibility does not require this. My argument is, basically, the trivial one that goes, “Why should it?”
What’s your argument?
-FrL-
*By “metaphysically” I mean that I imagine you do think we can sensibly say “John could have studied, but he partied instead,” but that you don’t think this “could have” establishes responsibility unless John, so to speak, “really” could have done otherwise. I am assuming that on your account, if he “could have” merely in the epistemological sense, or merely in the sense that he was the kind of thing that had the power to do otherwise had it wanted to, then he is not thereby necessarily responsible for his actions.
If the only point of punishment is that it takes revenge, then you might have a point, and in fact I think one of the clear lessons I take away from thinking about the issue of will and choice is that revenge, punishment meant only to hurt and cause pain is, in fact, very very evil. That is why the Christian God of Hell, the innovation of Jesus, is one of the most monstrous ideas ever dreamed of.
But punishment also has legitimate functional effects here in the real world. Even if you want to think of people as dropped pennies (which I happen to think is silly and reductive), a more legitimate analogy would be that the pennies come equipped with jetpacks that will usually fire if the pennies detect that they are about to hit the ground and get punished. In such a case, the punishment is a deterrent on the pennies, prevents many of them from doing the bad thing, and thus makes lots of sense to do.
Moral values are also expressive. When someone does something wrong, it may be inevitable that they did so, given their nature, but expressing to them our moral outrage is perfectly productive: even if you want to call them a machine or whatever, they as a human being are demonstrably responsive to such expressions. It’s part of the way we communicate and share and spread our values, and again, all of that is perfectly sensible.
This is also borne out by the way we treat the mentally ill. I think we can all acknowledge that the mentally ill aren’t responsible for their actions if the illness is severe enough, whatever the reason. But what is also obviously important as to why we don’t punish them is that they don’t have the capacity to recognize or understand our moral outrage or the consequences of their actions. In other words, that crucial element of moral expression finds no purchase with them.
). I would not hesitate to state that gliders are as real as the individual cells that make them up, or that dogs are as real as the atoms of which they are composed. I have nothing like a proof that this is true (though I think there could be such a proof), or even a particularly compelling argument. However, if you’re interested (and you seem like the interested type), I’ll provide a couple of the things I might appeal to.