I don’t know about you, but I see evidence of my “not free will” all the time. I make a myriad of decisions every day without thinking about them first. Hell, sometimes I don’t even remember making them.
I wake up with thoughts swirling in my head that I did not consciously put there. Those thoughts are connected to my mood through mechanisms I am not in control of. And my initial mood no doubt sets the stage for all subsequent thoughts and moods.
Sure, like you I experience the sensation of free will quite frequently. But I also experience the sensation of not having free will–like when a brilliant idea pops into my mind out of nowhere or when I catch myself in the midst of a habit I am trying to train myself out of. So which sensation is the most accurate one? I don’t know. I am not in the right vantage point to know. But I can offer a reasonable hypothesis that explains both phenomonen: I don’t have free will, but because I have some awareness of my cognition, it seems as if I do. And sometimes I can see through the illusion because of that awareness.
I can also say that I author my choices without using the loaded term “free will”. I made the choice to cross the street at the crosswalk this morning rather than between blocks. But I can’t say that choice was made through free will since I cannot know with absolute certainty why I made that choice. I can tell myself a reasonable-sounding story, but that is all it would be.
I don’t think that the universe - or our brains - developed as they did such that they could be understood by us at this point in time. I can say, “I don’t know” without buying into a particular fairy tale.
So, do some respondents actually believe in strict determinism? Every thought and action of everyone is predictable? Do you envision yourself an automaton? When confronted by a choice, do you make an effort to simulate choosing?
That’s the question that’s been bugging me my entire life. The one I go yes and no but still and if; equivocate about and just can’t seem to find a satisfying answer to. I’d describe my position as “very probably not, but I really really want to believe it exists, and in any case the strictly deterministic causality systems in play are opaque enough that you might as well act as if we were real people”. That is to say, I fundamentally believe humans are meat engines strictly shaped by a combination of nature & nurture, that any “choice” we make is really predetermined from that combination and we only rationalize it as a decision post-factum, and that if an omniscient being knew the exact organization of every bit of matter in the Universe at the moment we were born they could predict the minutest aspect of our lives.
But since no such being exists and I lost my fucking phone again, why won’t I just put a beeper on it or something ; then yeah, sure, free will exists for all intents and purposes.
The fact that some choices/mental states occur without apparent intentionality does not establish that NONE are intentional.
Yeah, there are tests when MRIs show that the brain fires to make a movement, BEFORE the brain fires to apparently DECIDE to do so. Doesn’t necessarily establish that every thought/action is like that.
I believe in strict determinism when it comes to cognition. Humans don’t spaz out and do things randomly; they make choices based on their preferences. Human brains are all about collecting and assessing data, including internal data, and coming to conclusions based on that. There may be a random element that determines extremely close ties, on the rare occasion that they occur, but I don’t believe that that’s necessary - a “the first choice in the list wins” approach or something similar is equally possible.
And what on earth do you mean by “simulate choosing”? If you are given two options, and you pick one, you have made a choice. The approach you used to make this choice, be it deterministic or not, doesn’t matter; a choice was still really made.
The three body problem is still deterministic unless the universe is fundamentally random. Even if it is fundamentally random what is the mechanism of choice?
Believers in free will tend to be big believers in the notion that people can rise above their shitty circumstances and be “good” as long as as they work hard enough. So you can cry all you want about abusive parents, schoolyard bullies, learning problems, and lack of role models. If you will yourself to be good, you will always good. So don’t point fingers at anyone but yourself.
I don’t think this mindset is only found in theists. But I think it is a very common belief among theists–particularly those who believe that Hell is waiting for bad people. Because what loving God would fling a soul into a furnace for all eternity for being programmed the wrong way? Since God is the ultimate programmer, what sense would this make? So it is important to assume that all sinners choose to sin on their own free will. No one or no thing coerces them. They deserve whatever punishment they get.
An atheist may believe there are perpetually bad people–people who will always choose to be bad no matter how much love and nurturing you give them. But I think an atheist is far more willing to concede that this person is broken for biological/psychological reasons rather than spiritual reasons. The atheist will go to a medical label before he or she reaches for the “evil” one. So even though both theist and atheist may espouse a belief in free will, the two likely implement the idea differently. Instead of telling someone struggling with bad habits to “try harder” or “pray more”, the atheist is more likely to suggest solutions that alter one’s programming (therapy or medication).
In this way, it is possible for someone to be a free willer in thought but a biological determinist in action.
One possibility is to reject other minds, and hold that free will is the path through a quantum multiverse chosen by a nonphysical being - a form of superdeterminism.
So neither the word “choice” nor “preferences” implies any volition? The preferences are preloaded into the machine, and the choice is merely a switch flipping predictability IRT input?
Sure, they MAY. But there’s a heckuva lot of territory between those two extremes. I don’t know of anyone who inhabits either of those poles exclusively.
Could the “insert miracle here”/infinite complexity argument apply to determinists as well? Explain to me me what combination of nature and nurture is responsible for each apparent choice - large or small - I make day in and day out. Aren’t you saying essentially that the choice MUST reflect some combination of my make-up and experiences?
This is the word problem. What do we mean by choices? What do we mean by a decision? What do we mean by not thinking about our actions?
Well, obviously we make decisions out of habit, experience, expedience, and convenience. But all those things are part of our history. They do not arrive by god’s carrier pigeon. You do a thousand things every day, or week, or year that are contrary to your normal decision path. Typing on a message board is an excellent example. Sometimes you type, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you say one thing but not another. Sometimes you delete a message, or phrase it a different way, or edit it after posting. Sometimes you make typos. I don’t ever want to make a typo, but I do. Does that mean I don’t have free will? Or does it merely mean my finger slipped, or I was thinking ahead of my typing speed, or that I momentarily forgot how to spell a word? Do I really have to accept that the universe of physical causes from the beginning of time *forced *my fingers to hit the wrong keys? Nuts. If the universe were determined we wouldn’t need spellcheck.
I like begbert2’s thesis. Free will is only a problem because people can’t handle the reality that they are responsible for their own deeds.
This whole “being good” is totally another herring of the reddish hue.
Look, if I’m the determiner of my own damn actions, then at any given point I do what I deem to be good. That’s the basis on which I decide my actions, and I’m the one who defines what IS good in the first place.
The archaic notion of “being good” assumes that God wrote down a bunch of moral rules and then you, being a “person of free will”, are either a good boy or girl and obey those rules or else you’re bad and chose to be bad, disobeying those rules. But if the rules actually do indeed apply to you, they are coterminous with your own sense of where your own best interests lie. Because if there are some external rules that you get measured against but which are not all about how best to serve your own interests, that itself conflicts with free will; it imposes a coercive force (of punishment, or judgement) upon you. (Or, if it doesn’t, the notion of “being good” disappears in a puff of irrelevant smoke, being neither about how best to serve yourself NOR about badass retribution coming your way if you don’t obey).
Always so pleasant. Nothing in your response makes sense at all either. I never said I was ignoring qm randomness. I mentioned I’d be addressing it later in the post.
Just because we can’t predict something doesn’t mean it’s not governed by physical laws. Chaotic systems may be difficult to model, but they still follow the laws of physics and certainly don’t appear to contradict them. Afaik, and I could very well be wrong, the three body problem can’t be solved with an analytic solution because it’s got 18 degrees of freedom and 9 differential equations - that doesn’t mean it’s not governed by known laws. But does it appear to violate them?
I’ve already said I believe the universe is causally determined and that Dennet’s definition via Compatibilism is not free will. We are biological machines. What we experience as free will is an illusion. On a Newtonian level, if we started the universe over from scratch with the same initial conditions and there were no quantum effects, we’d always make the exact same decisions.
Adding back quantum effects definitely leaves the door open for free will, but there is no evidence for it and brain scan studies show we make decisions before we are even consciously aware of them. The only possible reason one can believe free will exists given current theories and without invoking God is because you FEEL like it’s true and don’t like the idea that you’re a machine.
Rather than define consciousness which obviously exists on a gradient let me ask you - Do you believe simple bacteria is concious and/or has free will? And how about lay off the hostility when answering?
I did a quick google of Laplace’s Demon, and I don’t see how the Demon refutes any sort of free will except the nonsensical kind. Laplace’s Demon argues that if the universe operates deterministically then all outcomes are predictable if sufficient knowledge is available. And I agree. I think that people are fully deterministic, and that they would be fully predictable if a Demon (like, say, God) had full knowledge of literally everything about the present state of the universe.
The thing is, though, I don’t consider that to be a problem. Because, like I said, people manifestly make decisions based on preference. If you offer me choice between eating a fresh strawberry or a fresh ghost pepper, I will pick the strawberry 100% of the time. My decisions can be predicted if you know me well. But that doesn’t mean I’m not making decisions freely - only a complete idiot would say that free will means that your own preferences aren’t included in your decision process.
Just because your will is predictable doesn’t mean it isn’t free.
Define “volition”, please. M-W defines it as “the power of choosing or determining”. based on that, the word “choice” axiomatically implies volition.
Somehow, since I was using your word, I assumed you couldn’t find offense in it. Live and learn. I will in the future only state my beliefs without commenting on yours.
And I’ve said that I am agnostic on this. We simply don’t know.
I’ve also said that I do not see the connection between these two statements. I dislike the term “biological machines” because I think it’s intended to gloss over a enormous number of issues we don’t have answers to. Whatever we are is a product of multiple influences, both internal and external, that cannot be explained today. Brain scan studies are interesting, but cannot and should not at this stage be taken as evidence that the bottom level has been reached. Consciousness is the important problem. If we don’t have any idea what it is we cannot say that it exists on a gradient. It might, or it might be an emergent property that only a few select species have. Are emergent properties casually determined? If so, how?
My personal belief is that we are at the state physics was in 1900. We thought we knew everything, only to find that we knew only a few basics, and not the interesting stuff. Our knowledge of the brain and consciousness, whatever that is, is basic. The interesting stuff is still hidden.
I was framing the argument in terms of free will vs determinism and then proving free will by disproving determinism. While it’s a classical debate, you note correctly that a third answer is possible: random chance.
I will tell you what I infer from the statement “I have free will”.
I surmise that someone saying this means that they believe when they perform an action (i.e., make a choice), they are exerting their conscious will. They consciously deliberated the pros and cons of that action and consciously determined that they selected the wisest course. They didn’t just “randomly” act. They didn’t carry out that act like how an automaton, a puppet, or hypnotized person might carry out that act. When they give an explanation for why they performed that act, that is always the right explanation since they were fully aware of all the information that compelled them to make that choice and nothing external to their consciousness (i.e., their environment and biology) forced their hand.
Furthermore, I don’t assume they are merely taking about “volition”. You can be severely mentally impaired and express volition. A baby can perform voluntary actions (“Aw…look at him chasing after the ball! And now he’s throwing it like a champ!”). But we don’t grant babies free will. And if you have an IQ of, say, 50, most people aren’t going to assume you have free will. You can confess to committing a crime and there could be video footage of you gleefully committing it, laughing and everything. But your lawyer will be able to successfully convince others that that your ability to reason is so constrained that you don’t really understand what you’re doing and thus lack free will. Because we associate free will with high executive function.
I don’t understand a lot of what you’ve written here, to be honest. I think you’re all over the place. And I don’t think you’ve distilled begbert2’s thesis correctly if that’s what you think he’s been arguing. But I could be wrong.
Er, this is the first I’ve ever heard it hinted that babies and idiots don’t have free will.
And I wouldn’t expect (or believe) that most people would or even could give a right and complete explanation for why they do things. I’ve known way too many people to believe that.
I think your definition of “free will” is far, far more restrictive than most other people’s.
I really couldn’t say - I don’t know under what circumstances he thinks free will is “a problem”.
No, I don’t think of myself of an automaton. I think of myself as a biological organism–one ruled by the physics and chemistry–who operates in a manner that can be predicted through the prisms of psychology and neuroscience. Is science advanced enough where we can predict everything with 100% accuracy? Of course not. Is science ever going to meet that goal? Probably not. Does that mean we have free will? Of course not.
Am I supposed to be bothered by the notion that my behavior is 100% predictable? Because I’m not. Knowing I’m predictable doesn’t mean I’m not a very special person to those who know me.
At any rate, randomness <> free will.
Let me pose a thought exercise.
Pretend you are in a car accident caused by you being momentarily distracted while changing the radio dial. This accident intrigues an alien from an uber advanced civilization and the alien decides to recreate the whole scenario a hundred times–each run the same except with a minor change to a unique variable. And they place you (unknowingly) in each scenario to see if you make the same string of choices that led to the accident.
In Run 1, your bladder is halfway full instead of almost full.
In Run 2, the car temperature is 81-degrees instead of 75-degrees.
In Run 3, it is an overcast day instead of a sunny day.
In Run 4, the radio channel is tuned to your favorite song rather than your least favorite song.
In Run 5, you’re wearing loose pants instead of tight pants.
Do you think that your behavior is going to be the exact same as what you exhibited in the original scenario?
Or do you think that your behavior may be identical in many of the scenarios, slightly different in others, and maybe substantially different in a few?
Or do you think your behavior will be widely different in all of them?
Because when I hear someone making an appeal to free will, I assume they are arguing that they have the ability to operate however they want (the third hypothesis), no matter what variables they are operating under. If they make a stupid choice, it’s because they made a stupid choice. It’s not because they were under the control of environmental factors X, Y, and Z interacting with the biological factors 1,2, and 3.
As a determinist, I’m going to go with the second hypothesis. I believe if the alien collects enough data and runs enough souped-up scenarios (e.g., multiple tweaked variables rather than one), they will be able to figure out, with high accuracy, how you might behave in a future scenario. Just like a skilled scientist can predict with high accuracy how a laboratory rat will respond in a future scenario after studying it long and hard enough.
All of this seems rather noncontroversial to me. But YMMV.
