Religious types debate “free will” vs. “predestination,” and argue over how/whether human free will is compatible with God’s sovereignty or omnipotence and omniscience.
That’s a somewhat different debate than free will vs. determinism, which is what this thread’s about.
You had no choice but to say that, you know!
I’m not sure how what is understood by the common man as free will can exist n a deterministic universe. Waiting for a perfect definition of all terms will be a while since, if Pluto can be used as an example, categorizing things precisely is apparently hard.
Seems like you explained it yourself pretty well there. Usually in this context, “determinism” means that it’s the result of physics, even if there is some quantum indeterminacy mixed in there.
For the definition of “free will” that the OP is asking about, otherwise called contracausal free will, that is incompatible with the workings of the brain being the result of physics. People who believe in this kind of free will think there is something more controlling your decisions other than the physical processes going on in your brain.
True. The argument that one didn’t have a free choice to make because it wasn’t made is sophistry at best. The question is why and how history happened not that it did. Would anyone direct that question to a lump of uranium and say that the decay of particular atoms was determined because those were the ones that decayed?
Then I’m missing something about the OP. If the universe is fundamentally random down to the quantum level, then there is no determinism. Obviously, that’s completely compatible with atheism.
I think this severely conflicts with the atheistic view towards God. It is like arguing that because the universe is so complex that is impossible to develop a unifying theory to explain everything in it, we may as well assume God exists."
Why should we assume that the human brain is too complex to be able to predict it’s decision-making? If there is too much randomness to account for, then should we not assume a stochastic model for human behavior than either a purely deterministic or a “free will” based one? Does a Free Will hypothesis strike you as especially parsimonious given our tendency to dismiss it’s existence in our earthly brethren (i.e. all life forms excluding adult humans who aren’t mentally handicapped, crazy, or intoxicated)?
I operate as if I have free will because an alternative operational mode is inconceivable. And yet I don’t believe in it’s existence, at least not in the current version of humankind. So I reject the notion that we may as well believe in free will. I think we do more harm than good by beating this primitive drum.
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I second RitterSport, KidCharlemagne’s definition of free will is in fact a compatibilist’s definition. It would appear that KidCharlemagne is actually soliciting libertarians such as Tolstoy (if you reached the very end of War and Peace); he was thoroughly religious but I don’t remember that coming into his discussion of free will and necessitarianism. God may have been mentioned in passing but it did not form a major part of his argument.
~Max
Causal determinism is generally considered in the philosophy of free will to be in accordance with Newtonian and quantum physics.
My definition is definitely not compatibilist. I’m not sure how you’re deriving that from my post.
I agree with JAQ. As an atheist it would never occur to me to say “why does god” anything, since I don’t believe in god. I believe in what I can see, and I can see that I get to make choices (i.e. free will). Other arguments in this thread about what constitutes free will make zero sense to me.
You wrote: “Let’s define free will as human action/feelings/thoughts being causally or absolutely determined as opposed to Daniel Dennet’s Compatibilism which essentially defines free will as an internal sense of choice.”
Compatibilism is any philosophy where determinism and free will both exist. You define free will human actions being determined. Perhaps you meant to write “not being causally or absolutely determined”, but as it stands your definition of free will actually invokes determinism, therefore it is compatibilist.
~Max
I’m an atheist. And I think there’s room for free will to exist through a juxtaposition of quantum mechanics and chaos theory (at least as I understand them). Quantum mechanics say that events at a certain scale can occur spontaneously and randomly. And chaos theory says that small scale events can have effects that propagate up to larger scales.
Atheist, and same here. There are so many factors that it is impossible to predict what someone will do in a given situation, (including oneself) so that looks like free will. Unless the mind in question is being simulated, it is also impossible to collect enough information to figure out what you are going to do and why even post hoc.
However we clearly don’t have totally free will, since people with phobias are blocked from certain actions.
The question is undecidable so I say the hell with it.
Some here have said that the human brain is sufficiently complex that free will is possible. Free will, from a Newtonian perspective, would outright violate the laws of physics (let’s forget quantum mechanics just for a minute). In order for there to be a decision via free will, some chemical reaction in the brain must have taken place that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise. If it was simply reacting according to known laws, then it wasn’t free will. I’m talking here about the very genesis of the decision, not the resulting chain of reactions (that may very well follow the laws of nature). But at that moment of free decision, some chemical reaction must have been stopped or started by something that violates the laws of chemistry.
That leaves quantum phenomena. Generally such phenomenum is considered random, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it isnt, and that our brain can control it in some way, endowing us with free will. Since you presumably believe in evolution, do you believe that chimpanzees have free will? If so, do you believe it ends somewhere as we get to more primitive organisms? Where would it begin? Somewhere along the line there must have been a genetic mutation that caused free will because you either have it or you don’t. That means there is some protein somewhere responsible for free will.
Do any of these possibilities really make sense to you?
It makes no sense to give the benefit of doubt to the argument that violates the laws of physics as we understand them. See my post directly above for details.
I don’t believe in free will, especially since there is strong evidenceof reflex actions being taking without the involvement the cerebral cortex that are later rationalized by being a conscious choice. But I’ve made a conscious decision ignore all of that and to pretend I believe in free will in order to get on with living my life. Of course I recognize that I had no actual control over that conscious decision.
I don’t believe that’s true with regard to QM. If you check the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you’ll see that this is true at best only if “nothing ever interrupts Schrödinger evolution, and the wavefunctions governed by the equation tell the complete physical story,” an interpretation hotly disputed by many.
To echo what I said earlier, people are trying to use words to develop new science, instead of using math. This never works.
I see your later posts, which are a wonderful example of using words to create pseudoscientific nonsense. First, you can’t ignore QM randomness. Second, the output of a reaction, even given known laws, may be random or non-predictable. Nothing about free will is prevented or forbidden because we must work within the laws of physics. Or have you a solution to the three-body problem in your back pocket you’re not telling anyone about? Third, you provide no definition of free will that makes it possible to know if other beings than humans have it. That’s because you also have no definition of consciousness, which, as I keep saying, you need before you make any statements about free will. Nothing in your argument makes sense at all.
Atheist here: I’m of the opinion that most of the confusion in the free will debate comes from badly-defined terms, which spring directly from the fact that the free will debate started as a religious discussion.
In religion, “free will” means “God isn’t determining your choices and actions”. The presumption is that in the absence of free will God, or the gods, or the fates, have tied magical puppet strings to you and are consciously manipulating events toward an end that they have determined should happen. Free will, on the other hand, means that you make your own decisions, which results in you at least partially causing your own outcomes.
Then you add atheists into the equation and they take God out of the equation, that puts a giant hole through the definitions. By a straight read of them the answer is “obviously we have free will; God/gods/fate isn’t determining our actions because there aren’t any God/gods/fate to determine our actions. We must be making our own choices because there’s nobody else to do it for us”.
Of course, this makes atheism sound better than theism, so we can’t have that. Therefore we have to change the definition where atheists are concerned so that atheism sucks again. Well, that or the theists were so incredibly stupid back then that they really came up with the following stuff by accident:
To make atheism suck, or just because atheism really confused them, the decision was made to define “physics” as “god”, swapping that into the definition.
Given a definition of “physics isn’t determining your choices or actions”, atheists have no choice but to honestly answer “Of course physics determines our actions; everything is physical and determined by physics.” (Theists, of course, pretend that their brains are powered by magic which gets around this.)
The thing is, though, that definition is stupid. The real issue with free will is whether you’re somebody else’s puppet. But in the atheism model, the “physics” which determine your actions are your own body. By any non-idiotic interpretation of the situation, your body, your brain, is you. That’s what any sensible compatibilist approach boils down to: noticing the obvious fact that, physical or not, our bodies don’t have puppet strings sticking out of them. We say that free will is compatible with determinism because deterministic physics were never the problem to start with. The problem was God - external forces outside of us reaching inside and controlling us.
Atheists don’t have that problem. Our brains are physical organic computers, which are demonstrably mostly or entirely deterministic in function. They control us, providing a will that is free of outside control. And that’s that.
Doesn’t free will require some sort of agent that makes those decisions, though? Quantum mechanics and chaos theory may make the outcome uncertain, but it’s still not decided by any agent. I don’t have free will to turn left instead of right just because an electron is a wave and a particle, and my brain is super complicated.
KidCharlemagne, what I got from Bryan Ekers is that, due to complexities, etc., it looks enough like free will that you may as well treat it as such, not that there were actually any extra-physical forces acting on the brain.
I think you misinterpreted my example. An atheist may say, “Hey, theist, if there is a god, why is there evil, etc. Huh?” and that’s when the theist responds with the free will argument, or goes there by herself to understand why a tri-omni god would allow, say, the Holocaust. The other refuge is the mysterious ways one, of course.