Another "Free Will" debate.

Great Debates
161

How have you demonstrated that it’s undetermined? Non-volitional != undetermined. It isn’t even really spontaneous.

You haven’t shown that what you call “original thought” is undetermined. You also haven’t shown how true spontaneity is distinguishable from randomness. That particular thoughts are unique to particular individuals has no more significance to the Free Will debate than the fact that every snowflake is unique.

You have an effect occurring within an individual. A thought is an effect, not a cause.

You haven’t demonstrated either of those things. What is your proof that thoughts are not determined? How could they not be?

Not until you prove that this input is neither determined or random or even show that a third choice is logically possible.

162

I should clarify this. Obviously thoughts can cause choices. What I mean is that thoughts are also non-volitional effects. Since thought is non-volitional then its own effects are also non-volitional. As long as something else is causing the thoughts then we still haven’t really found the “decider.”

163

That doesn’t seem like a very good definition. If I write a computer program that is designed to respond to a choice between two variables with different odds for each, and it makes that decision, I can’t avoid talking about the program. Yet I’d hope you agree that this is not free will.

The “I” certainly brings something to the situation - memory of influences past and current. But it’s no more than an elaborate program. There’s no part of the “I” that can choose to influence spontaneously; it can only react to influences. You cannot make a decision that goes against your influences; it’s impossible.

If you’re saying “free will” equals “ability to make a choice”, then humans, animals, and computers all have free will. But I tend to see the “free” as saying iit can be a, well, free choice, one that is unaffected (or even minimally affected) by outside influences. I think that will is totally made up of outside influences.

164

But I am satisfied that we have found the decider. It is the thing that you are tying to disprove. If something original springs from the mind then there must be something there to produce it.

Having been asked twice what this “free will” is I would say that it is the human capacity to generate our own causes in the form of original thought. That humans, in using the conglomeration of accidental traits that they inherited or have learned, are able to use those faculties to create an entirely new thought. A thought that various random and determined variables may have influenced but which cannot be said to be simply a necessary consequence of those variables. As to where free will came from, my answer would be that it evolved with us. We are the most adaptable animal on the planet and have taken the place over because we aquired this amazing trait. We don’t have to use only the tools we are given we can imagine and create our own because we are not limited to the precurser variables that the rest of the animal kingdom must settle for. We generate spontanious causes and then create the effect. Ta-da! free will.

You theory entirely ignores this trait.

165

And I previewed even.

166

Incorrect. The mind is just a locus for the event. You still have to demonstrate that either that the event is uncaused or that there is any difference between your as yet undemonstrated “spontaneity” and pure randomness.

What causes the thought? If it’s uncaused, what differentiates it from being random?

Non-volitionally – therefore not “freely.”

Yes it can. In fact, that is the only possibility.

Evolution is a determinant.

More complex variables does not amount to “free” decision making. It only means the process is more variable.

I’m not presenting any theory. I’m arguing against one.

The “trait” you speak of is not significant to the argument. It’s irrelevant that thoughts arise from variables. Unless you can “decide” what the thoughts will be, you’ve gotten nowhere.

167

Is that what you believe? Then according to your own reasoning, this belief must be either random in its origin or pre-determined.

168

Is there some part of the actions of these painting elephants that comes from their free will?

No? Then how do you distinguish what they are doing from what a human painter does? Sure they have some amount of training. They have supplies given to them. Someone is compelling them to do this activity. But given that environment (one that many human painters might share) how can you say from that point on the elephants aren’t expressing something creative and previously unseen? Or is it all random?

If there is free will at work here, then are we to assume that free will is a thing that can be acquired biologically through evolution? If it’s biological, how can free will be anything other than a chemical reaction? If a chemical reaction causes free will, how is it free?

169

It’s more an observation than a belief, but as far as my personal beliefs go, yes, they’re determined. So what?

170

If anyone has ever had more than one child, they pretty well have to understand that many of our choices have nothing to do with nurture.
On the other hand, it is also obvious that parents can have a large influence on the moral outlook of their children whether by acceptance or rejection. We are influenced by both nature and nurture, neither of which gives us any real control of our individual circumstances that are contrary to our perceived objectives.
And to add. I’ll bet most of us have made choices that we’ve come to regret. Changing circumstances, evolving maturity etc lends credence that our choices are driven by extraneous circumstances, genetic predisposition and culture that makes each of us unique as to how we respond to an impulse.

This extends to the ultimate anti-social serial rapist killer like the Green River guy. I don’t feel any anger against him other than the need to protect society from him.
He lost the way to function socially with the rest of us and determined that his need to rape and kill superceded his need to get along with the rest of us to his own ultimate detriment. i don’t blame the families of his victims, but I do believe that they would be better off and accurate if they looked upon this killer as no different than a wild grizzley bear who developed a taste for human flesh.

171

I never seem to be able to get into one of these discussions before they reach several pages in length. But I’m going to put in some of my thoughts. First, some preliminaries:

I do believe in free will, but not in libertarian free will. I am a physicalist, and as such I believe that free will is an entirely natural phenomenon. I believe that Daniel Dennett has painted a picture of a naturalistic free will that is largely correct (or at least on the right track), but certainly not the complete and perfect truth. His books that I draw the most from are Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Freedom Evolves. In terms of this thread, I suspect that I basically agree with Apos, that our disagreements are largely semantic in nature. Free will is not a binary concept, there are gradations of free will. Nor is free will a “black box”. Its mechanisms can be explained without destroying its meaning. The problem of defining “free will” can be rather tricky. If you’re looking for a complete list of necessary and sufficient conditions for a creature to have free will, you will not find it because it doesn’t exist. I would like to make a couple comments that will, I hope, explain some of the points listed above.

On “The” definition of free will The notion that we must respect the ancient definition of free will in these discussions seems absurd to me. We have inherited countless terms from generations before us that function perfectly well for our colloquial discussions and as a basis for our scientific investigations. Concepts such as matter, light and heat are centuries old, but they remain useful because we have modified our theories on what they are and how they work. We have not needed to discard the terms along with their antiquated theories, nor have we felt compelled to declare that heat is an “illusion” when we discovered that the fluid caloric does not exist. Why should free will be any different?

So what is free will? It is (roughly) the prerequisite to moral responsibility, the potential for being praiseworthy or blameworthy. Free will is the capacity to act in the interests of your causes (to borrow a term from Pábitel), and to have causes that are your own. The exact mechanism through which we make causes “our own” is quite opaque to me because I lack the knowledge of neuroscience necessary to understand it, but it does not need to be opaque. The ability to describe the structural changes that take place in the brain is not a refutation of the functional significance and meaning of these changes. For a bit more on free will, we must turn to the next subject.

On the Infinite Regress of Will I would like to motivate discussion on this by way of analogy with another infinite regress (this is in one of Dennett’s books that I listed, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment, so the argument is not verbatim):

All dogs have a dog for a mother.

Thus, if there are any dogs now (and there are), there must have been an infinite number of dogs in the past (this dog had a mother dog, who had a mother dog, who had a mother dog, who had a …). But there can’t be an infinite regress, so we clearly have a problem. Traditionally this type of regress has been stopped by positing the existence of a first dog, a dog that did not have a dog for a mother–an act of special creation. However, our contemporary thought has moved beyond this necessity. We now recognize that the concept of a “dog”, or of any species, is somewhat fuzzy. As we move backwards in time, we will see dog ancestors that are clearly not dogs, and we will see dog ancestors that seem to straddle the line between “dog” and “notdog”. The great insight of Darwinian evolution is not that it’s difficult to draw the line distinguishing the two, but that it is impossible to do so. Thus, we find our way out of an infinite regress with no need for supernatural explanations.

Libertarian free will is the classic attempt to stop an infinite regress with an act of special creation, but we no longer need to use this sort of solution. We, as humans, have gained our free will through the gradual accumulation of design through countless generations. And we, as individuals, have gained our free will through gradual accumulation from our clearly non-willing pre-natal selves. Yes, it’s natural, and yes, that means that it’s not perfect, but so what? Nothing we deal with is perfect, but that certainly doesn’t call into question its very existence. A naturalistic account of free will can get us everything that we want from the Libertarian account, with the advantage of being real.

This post has gone on for long enough, so I will submit and see if anything I said makes any sense at all, or if this is too much of a hijack for this tread. Thanks everyone.

172

But when we act in the interests of our causes, our choice is not free; it is dictated by our causes. If I eat ice cream because I like ice cream, my choice of eating it is based on my influence of liking ice cream. In this case, my sense of taste is controlling my choices. If it were a truly free choice, it would be free of all influence. And we can’t have a gradient of “freeness”, either, because we always act in the interests of our causes, even when our interests to do something different could be almost as powerful.

Free will, for me, would be the ability to act against the overall interests of our causes, which we can’t do.

173

I don’t see how any of this alters the view that the subsequent state of our brain is based entirely on the previous state of our brain and the environment around us. Maybe you weren’t trying to alter that view, but I don’t see any new information regarding the infinite regress.

If what you are saying is that “free will” is merely the physical process our brain goes through in it’s decision making process, which is completely determined by evolution, experience and current environment, then ignore the previous paragraph.

174

In other words, according to your scenario, the only reason you have those beliefs is because your brain is wired that way, right? In other words, your “logic” is purely the results of the chemical processes within your brain, plus whatever sensory stimulus you might have received, right?

And according to that same scenario, the perception that your logic is accurate is likewise nothing more than the result of these processes and stimuli, right?

175

That depends. If I can explain away the behavior of the program by referencing you — just you and your specific actions as programmer, not every detail of the computer program’s context in the universe — then it would appear that it’s behaving that way because YOU PROGRAMMED IT TO BEHAVE THAT WAY and in that case, nope, no evidence of free will here. But if there were no “you”, just a behaving computer? Or even a “you” but you’ve actually programmed the computer to program itself, and to make choices in how it programs itself that are so thoroughly sensitive on specifics of the computer’s situation, then we may have a computer exhibiting free will. (And you get the credit for creating it). Or did you think the AI efforts were about something else?

Your computer-of-free will must program itself in ways that:

• cannot be predicted solely on the basis of examing your code closely and/or examining broad general aspects of the computer’s operating environment; if I can boil down a formula based on your code and a handful of simple variables and from that formula predict how your computer behaves / programs itself / etc, you aren’t there yet;

• aren’t random; noise doesn’t count.

• aren’t determined by **OpalCat[/b] (sorry)

but within those parameters you can have a computer with free will, and the AI folks are hoping to build one.

Don’t belittle the elaborate program.

Not part of my definition that says it could or should be expected to. This is DtC’s def, not mine.

One of the influences being myself: my own past, memories, biological predispositions, psychological predispositions, and the rest of the portion of my context that I call “I/me”. So there is nothing here except “influences”. Which influence each other. Were you going somewhere with this? Besides in circles? I am an influence being influenced as I influence other influences in turn and I possess free will insofar as my behavior is not a dependent variable of any finite subset of the rest of the influences at play here. That’s how I defined it, as you’ll recall.

And if I could, that would be the opposite of free will, not the event forming the case for it. I’m free, why the heck would I want to do something I don’t want to do? See how poorly that parses? It scarcely even passes as a sentence!

Unless you are disincluding “inside influences” (and I assume you are not; my current blood chemistry would be an “outside influence”, yes?), everything is an “outside influence”. I never defined “free will” in that fashion: of course nothing can “make a choice not determined by outside influences”, nothing can even freaking exist except as a consequence of “outside influences”! It’s like saying “all of the water in the swimming pool is caused by its length, because you can’t show me a single drop of water in that pool that has zero length”.

I’ve said it before in this thread and I’ll say it again: to reference and describe my entire context, including my past, my present, my surroundings, my biology, etc, and state that all this causes my decisions is perfectly accurate, but what you’ve referenced is me, it’s unique to me, and making the statement that all that causes my decisions is making a statement absolutely identical to this one: I chose to make that decision and did so of my own free will.

176

Are you sure? This is a field of interest that I read about quite a bit and program for artificial life/genetic algorithm/neural network, and everything I am aware of is completely deterministic (input->mathematical process->output) with the exception of the random inputs used to create variable environments.

177

As I see it, issues like this are caused in part by language, and in part by the old ways of thinking that we have inherited. I’ll start with the latter. Classically, we viewed the self as a sort of atomistic homunculus–a perfectly introspectible thing with no dimensions that would make decisions using its power of libertarian free will. Because we could not stop the infinite regression of will, we placed our soul in an impenetrable barrier where it could be immune to everything that could possibly influence its decision. This thinking stays with us today, and we try to externalize as much as we can to save our free will. We can even see this reflected in our possessive pronouns. These words indicate ownership, of course, but they also seem to imply that the owned thing is outside the thng that owns. This is fine for phrases like “our house”, “your clothes” or even “my hand”, but any physicalist should start to feel a little uneasy when we get to phrases like “my brain”. We can even push this with the phrase “my self”, which almost seems to imply that the self is separate from the self.

The problem is: how do we set the boundaries on the self? If we continue with the traditional method, we will continue to see neuroscience eliminate the self and free will. But what if we make the self bigger? Is there any compelling reason why our causes must be separate from our selves? If our causes (and other things) are internalized, then you are arguing that our free will is dictated by our free will, and thus is not free–clearly an argument that doesn’t make any sense. If our causes are internalized, then we can get something that is self creating, or at least as close as we can get in a naturalistic world.

I don’t see why we must insist on using only the strictest possible definition. We can talk about getting free coffee, even though there was a cost of time to receive it and drink it. If a free will is free from even its own influence, or from the influence of the chasm warning it not to walk off, then it is useless to us, and we have no reason to debate its existence. If I were to choose a definition of “free” for this discussion, I would look to something like these:
2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself b : determined by the choice of the actor or performer <free actions>
from here

I can see that I was not clear in my first post, but what I mean by the gradient of freeness is not the ability to act in our interests (though I suppose that such a thing might exist), but the ability to have interests that are our own–the ability to influence our own causes, or to adopt or make new causes for yourself. Our strength here is what separates us from animals and computers.

I think I can see what you mean, and my response is: so what? Why would we want the ability to act contrary to all of our causes? People debate the existence of free will because we believe that it gets us something we want, or need. If it doesn’t do that, then there is no point to debating it.

178

I’m not trying to challenge determinism, or anything that might be regarded as an “infinite regress of determinism.” I was challenging the regress of “all free wills are preceded by a free will,” i.e., the existence of a free will implies either (a) an infinite number of previous free wills or (b) and moment of special creation.

179

Consider the camera, which puts images on film with greater or lesser accuracy, based on the soundness of the particular camera. We may believe that:

  1. the camera lacks free will; and
  2. the camera’s images reflect a soundness of the camera’s machinery.

Similarly, a human mind may reflect the objective reality of the universe to a greater or lesser degree. This does not mean that the mind has free will, or that logic is somehow a faulty means of deriving an understanding of the objective universe.

Daniel

180

ok, got it.