The philosophical question of free will comes down to definition. How you define free will determines whether or not we have free will. You can make either argument, depending on which assumptions you are starting with. This does not, to me, seem all that interesting. I did like the analogy of the video though. If you start with the assumption that people have free will, then if you video someone throughout their day, when you play it back, do they still have free will?
The more interesting question is what effect does the existence or nonexistence free will have on our actual lives.
If someone is charged with a crime, can they claim that they didn’t have free will, and so had no choice? If they argue that, can the court argue that it, too, doesn’t have free will, and therefore, will punish him anyway?
I have yet to hear a definition of free will other than the one monstro poses that isn’t meaningless or fails to, ultimately, have any “there” there.
In your example above, you’ve reduced the issue to its most meaningless extreme while not examining what true cultural and individual impacts are of an understanding of “no free will”. “lah lah, I can do whatever I want because no free will” is not a real argument about free will. Society can still enact rules and structures
A major failing of our judicial system is that we punish people as if they have free will, while at the same time semi-acknowledging that personal biology and background play a huge part in whether or not a particular individual is going to have committed a particular crime.
Granted that there’s a huge selective enforcement issue also at play, poor and black people end up in prison at dramatically higher rates than wealthy white people (I know I don’t need to convince you of that; cite is for thoroughness). Do poor black people just choose to commit crimes? Is it just kind of a random happenstance? Of course not. I’m not going to unpack this super-complex example here, but suffice to say, there are economic and cultural factors at work, both in society at large, and within interpersonal and family relationships, that keep poor people poor. And then we turn around and imprison them for it. This is the moral tragedy of “free will” thinking. That people who do bad things are operating from the exact same set of inputs as the “good” people, and yet just somehow choose to be bad, and so deserve to pay for that choice.
Society has enacted this “free will” concept of justice and retribution, and clings tightly to it, while we see again and again that crimes and anti-social behavior correlates to identifiable experiences, past or existing trauma, and other contextual details.
In your example, I’d say both the criminal and the court are right to a degree. The problem is that the court (and modern society in general) is not ready to let go of the idea of free will and 100% culpability in favor of . . . something else. I don’t know what, and whatever it is would require massive cultural shifts.
Maybe there’s a world in which we identify the social contexts under which people are most likely to be anti-social and we focus on removing those contexts. Maybe there’s a world in which, because we appreciate that personal “choice” is a response to factors outside of our control, we don’t revel in prison rape and abuse and continue to refuse to address the issue, while building more and more prisons.
Any time we admit the truth that “because of X, people in this group are more likely to X,” we admit to lack of free will.
Free will seems to require a complete lack of context for everything, both personal physiological context and external context.
As soon as there is a “reason” why a choice was made, there was necessarily a judgment about how important that reason was, in relation to the reasons for not doing a thing. And what that judgment was based upon is a mass of background that is uncontrollable.
Why do I want the things I want? Why do I want some of them more than others? I don’t know, and I’m certainly not in control of it on any fundamental level.
Let’s step back from determinism for a moment and talk about how minds work - how they must work, based on observation of their behavior and outcomes. It’s my intention to make statements here that apply to any model, even ones with a nondeterministic universe and/or supernatural souls.
Minds demonstrate a reasonable consistency of state - they change, but not with wild randomity. It’s a flow from one state to another based on causes that drive it from one state to another; it’s not like static snow on a screen without a signal, where the random mess of static one moment is completely unrelated to the snow a moment before.
So the brain changes based on causes. These causes could be random, I suppose, but the reactions are not.
This means that, because brains aren’t static-snow random, that their previous states are in a sense limited by their prior states. The past matters.
If you have a preference one instant, you will have it the next instant, give or take logical modification based on a cause. (Possibly an internal cause and/or a cause you’re unaware of.)
If you’re experiencing an emotion one instant, you will still experience it the next instant, give or take logical modification based on a cause. (Possibly an internal cause and/or a cause you’re unaware of.)
If you are aware/unaware of a piece of information one instant, you will still know/not-know it the next instant, give or take logical modification based on a cause. (Possibly an internal cause and/or a cause you’re unaware of.)
We know all this because, as noted, minds demonstrate a reasonable consistency of state. And we know this is true regardless of which model of reality is right, because we didn’t derive this based on any model.
So. We know that the mind is in a given state at the instant of any decision-making, and that as the decision-making process proceeds things will not be changing wildly without cause. We know that the knowledge that in the mind is the knowledge that’s in it; we know that the emotions it is feeling are the emotions it is feeling; we know that its preferences and inclinations are whatever they happen to be. All of this is fixed at the moment of the decision, regardless of model.
Whence comes decision?
If choices are based on what you know, feel, and want, then they are based on your mental state - which is not random and at any and every given instant is fixed (regardless of model). If they are based on something that’s not what you know, feel, or want, like randomity or control signals from an outside god or something, is that free will?
As best I can tell, based on even a casual examination of how thought works and the fact that the mind does, in fact, have a state, I can only conclude that regardless of model, the decisions a human brain makes are determined by their mental state at the time. The only possible exceptions to this are if randomity overrides reason or an external meddler overrides reason. And in my opinion* those violate free will. (*Definitions of free will may vary. No warranty is implied. Use at own risk.)
Given that this is, as best I can tell, how all minds have worked ever, I can only conclude that the definition of “choice” as used in modern parlance is compatible with this reality. This means, perforce, that when one talks about having multiple options to pick from, one is implicity but unavoidably deliberately ignoring the mind’s state when they assess the situation and say “There are multiple options.” They are saying that before the mind gets done with them there are multiple options; however once the mind and its workings are added to the equation only one option remains. You see that as a contradiction of some kind. I see that as the definition of the term “making a decision”.
And again, I believe that this is how minds work regardless of model - minds are, by nature, deterministic. (That’s what making choices is: determining what you’re going to do.) The fact that this works nicely within a completely deterministic model of the universe, well, if minds as I understand them didn’t fit within such a model, I would reject the model.
Depending on definition, consciousness may or may not be incompatible with determinism. For instance, the definition I would associate with “consciousness” is incompatible with physicalism (and by extension, physicalist determinism).
I am having trouble understanding you from here on. Are you rejecting the existence of other minds - is this a form of solipsism?
But then you get into consciousness as a species in a sociological sense. It is true that we personify groups of people as if the group were one person; I might say Britain eats Dutch bacon, or Britain can’t make up her mind about Brexit, as if Britain was a person. I think this is a feature of human thought and language, not evidence that Britain is a person. To say Britain “eats” bacon is to use an entirely different definition than one would use when talking about people.
Perhaps you could say the human race has a consciousness, but it would be a very different kind of consciousness than what I have in mind. Even using a more ‘scientific’ definition of consciousness, I just don’t see the patterns and structure necessary to compare humans/the human race with neurons/the human brain, which is to my knowledge the only reference on consciousness available. There are certainly patterns, as predicted and documented in the social sciences, but these patterns do not hold the confidence necessary for me to say it is a definite thing. Indeed, I think all laws of the social sciences to be heuristics.
But then you must realize that if the behavior of humans is deterministic, the behavior of the human race is also deterministic. That puts us back at square one for the free will question. You seem to recognize this:
But the bolded section makes no sense to me. You are saying the self is present in the whole situation, and I believe “self” in this sentence means the unitary consciousness of the collective human race. But what situation are you talking about? Does the “whole situation” mean ‘when the self is being acted on by the surrounding universe etc’? What does it mean for the self to be purposeful and not merely passively reacting, wouldn’t that be a rejection of determinism?
This is what I’ve tried to gleam from your final paragraph:
‘When assuming causal predeterminism, it can be argued that the unitary consciousness of the collective human race is without free will. The argument might go: if the individual human self has no free will because its actions are determined by circumstances in the immediate past, then the collective human self has no free will because its actions are determined by circumstances in the immediate past.’
I don’t think it’s a philosophically meaningless debate, although in practice, we simply assume some sort of free will exists.
The philosophical question is not whether society can do something, but whether society should do something, and in this case, why. For example, why should society punish a murderer who did not have the power to spare the victim’s life? Why should I praise the firefighter whose heroic actions were causally deterministic? Is there any culpability or responsibility if one has no power to choose?
I strongly disagree with you, in that I think this is an entirely different debate topic. That is not a question of free will, that is a question of nature versus nurture as resolved in Trading Places (1983), combined with a question about whether the ends justify the means (deontology versus consequentialism). The “biology” factor can be about free will, but we’re talking about determinism and the brain state at the time of decision, not any particular socioeconomic factors or the discredited theory of racialism. A comparison can be made to the justice system, but it would be made with regards to the insanity defense and not racism.
This being your intention, I will gladly point out some of the assumptions you have made.
It does not follow. Just because minds do not change with “wild randomity”, doesn’t mean every change in state flows from a cause. For example, a nonmaterial mind may change randomly for no cause, but still never change with wild randomity. How could you know? Nonmaterial claims are nonfalsifiable. This marks the first assumption: every change in mental state flows from a cause.
Also note that the causes themselves can be random or otherwise nondeterministic, regardless of whether the causes are physical or nonphysical in nature.
We must assume that the mind is nothing more than the brain, which rules out all of the ancient treatments on philosophy and many of the classical philosophical treatises. If you had said “the mind changes based on causes”, this assumption would be unnecessary. I think this may have been a Freudian slip, and I won’t include this assumption as I think it is unnecessary for your arguments.
This does not follow either. In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics there is a correspondence principle, and in probability theory we have the law of large numbers. Even then, it only follows that the function constrains the outputs when given random inputs. It does not follow that random inputs will lead to nonrandom outputs. Luckily that is the conclusion you draw.
The assumption here is that a sample average converges in probability towards the expected value.
I concur.
Right, but remember that the causes could be random.
It seems that you are defining “mental state” as “what you know, feel, and want” exclusively. This is another assumption.
This is another assumption, because we did not establish that your mental state is nonrandom. We said it was not “changing wildly without cause”, but we did not establish that one’s mental state is fixed at every given instant.
Undoubtedly, if that influence is both nondeterministic and is one’s self, eg: one’s nonmaterial soul, such an influence on the mental state would constitute free will. Were it God in the traditional sense, that would constitute free will (on the part of God; as in ‘God has free will’). Such a philosophy is non-deterministic by definition.
But you gave a rhetorical question, with an implied answer of “no”. In order to join your answer I will need to deny the possibility of a nonmaterial soul or any other nondeterministic self-influence on one’s mental state. This makes another assumption.
If I agree to a number of assumptions listed above, I can join your opinion. For convenience, here is the running list:
[ul][li]Every change in mental state flows from a cause.[/li][li]A sample average converges in probability towards the expected value.[/li][li]Mental state is what one knows, feels, and wants, and nothing more.[/li][li]One’s mental state is fixed at every given instant.[/li][li]There are no nondeterministic self-influences on one’s mental state (such as a nonmaterial soul).[/ul][/li]
This last item in particular rules out all forms of libertarianism, which is by definition the only philosophy that allows for free will without a compatibilist definition of free will. Libertarianism lends itself to god-of-the-gaps style logic (magic), but it is still a philosophy.
It does not follow. You could very well leave the definition of choice alone and conclude that choice does not exist in reality. This is another assumption, which is that choice is the illusion of having the power to effect an alternative; when you say choice (your def.) exists, it is really the illusion of choice (my def.) that exists.
You didn’t bring the argument to full circle, because you did not make the jump from the “existence” of choice to the existence of free will. I must point out that free will implies “free” choice, and it is a misnomer at best to freely decide when one is given the illusion of choice. If you had made that jump you would rule out hard determinism.
In making your argument you ruled out by assumption libertarianism. You are one step away from dismissing hard incompatibilism and hard determinism out of hand. It is no surprise that you come across with a compatibilist vibe, because you have assumed the conclusion.
No, having extended the question to the whole gamut of universal physical determinism, I am no longer speaking merely of the unitary consciousness of the collective human race, but rather the consciousness of the whole situation. I’m saying we already know there is a consciousness choosing here. A causal-deterministic analysis would tend to say that the surrounding universe creates (or constitutes) the stimuli to which the entire species responds, and therefore that it is still a deterministic behavior. I’m saying that instead of that, the entire system (“external” universe and species as a collective set) is the self, or at least is not to be relegated strictly to being external to the self and then posited as the cause of a self that it is, in actuality, a component of.
I am still not fully understanding. Even if we designate the entire universe as a single holistic entity called “self”, thus removing any “external” factors, I may still cling to the notion of causality. It may be said that my arm moves because my self willed it to move, but I have not yet escaped the fact that my will to move my arm has a number of exact causes. Whether we extend the idea of self to envelope all possible causes makes no difference for the question of free will, if the chain of causality is unbroken. It can be said that the self presently has no choice as to its state, for the current state was determined by the previous state; that the self had no choice as to its previous state, for that state was determined by the state proceeding it; etcetera ad infinitum. There may be no end to the chain of causation, or there may be a single origin point at which a God or supernatural non-self being decided to arrange the universe, but either way it does not follow that the self has any choice or free will at any point in existence.
What I am saying is that the chain of causation effectively removes the choice. You will look at the current time step and say, there was no choice, it was determined by X. Then you look at X and say, there was no choice, it was determined by Y. The chain goes back forever, and it turns out you cannot point to a choice being made. ETA: Even if everything is self.
I think we’re talking past each other. There is no chain. There is no X that is separate from the locus of the choice. X and Y are part of the self that is making the choice.
ETA: that includes time as well as space. There is no prior event either.
Firstly, the phrase “Nonmaterial claims are nonfalsifiable” is nonsense. The claim “Ghosts are always able to pass through walls, and also they’re never able to pass through walls” is definitely falsifiable (and false). One can absolutely logic about the immaterial.
And one can determine that the mental state is not suffused with static by observation. As I noted random perturbation could be occurring within the mind, but it clearly doesn’t have notable effect. Emotions don’t change randomly, beliefs don’t change randomly, opinions don’t change randomly, knowledge doesn’t change randomly. These are observable facts about minds.
If you wish to assert that being nonmaterial means that the mind can’t have consistent state that doesn’t change randomly, then what you’re actually doing is forwarding a proof that minds aren’t driven by anything nonmaterial.
Yep, it was a slip. Sorry.
You misunderstand - I merely am stating that if the mind is being influenced by randomity (which is possible), that the mind isn’t allowing randomity to influence it randomly (so to speak). Any randomity that is influencing the mind is extremely limited in the effects it has on the mental state, to the point that it would be more accurate to say that mind is using the randomity in the way a computer program might use a random number generator, and only to determine cases where its determinations are so close to being a tie that random perturbations are the only difference between one choice being ahead and the other.
Again, this conclusion is based on observation of behavior - we know randomity is not a major part of human cognition because minds don’t act random. Or put another way, we know the mind doesn’t use many random inputs because there aren’t random outputs.
I should hope so!
Except, as you said, they can’t be, not to any significant degree, because mental states observably doesn’t fluctuate randomly. There could be a trivial amount of randomity being accessed to break exact ties, but the massive, massive bulk of cognition cannot possibly be based on randomity.
You’re affirming the consequent here (a fallacy). I actually make no such limiting assumption.
Okay there are two things here:
I totally did establish that the mental state is nonrandom, based on observation of how it behaves combined with your statement “It does not follow that random inputs will lead to nonrandom outputs”. Brain state observably doesn’t fluctuate randomly, so clearly randomity is not a consequential factor in its function.
In any given instant the brain state must be constant, because it’s a single instant. Even something that is fluctuating completely randomly will have a fixed state at each single instant. This part is actually axiomatically true - to say otherwise is to say that there’s no such thing as a brain state. (Material or not.)
Firstly, while it’s true that when you condition your statement with “if that influence is […] nondeterministic]” that that philosophy is “non-deterministic by definition”, there’s actually nothing about a nonmaterial soul that implies non-determinism on its own. A nonmaterial soul could totally be deterministic. Why wouldn’t that be possible?
Secondly, the entire argument to this point was repeatedly pointing out the readily observable fact that humans simply don’t behave in a random way. They simply don’t. The mind clearly doesn’t make choices randomly, so it’s clearly not being jerked around by randomity in any significant way. That’s pretty much the point.
If your position is that non-material souls must be significantly driven by randomity, then I see that as you arguing that humans can’t possibly have non-material souls because humans clearly aren’t significantly driven by randomity. But that’s you saying that - at this point I’m leaving open the possibility of a nonmaterial souls - they simply have to be mostly or completely deterministic, to match what we observe.
[quote=“Max_S, post:129, topic:838240”]
If I agree to a number of assumptions listed above, I can join your opinion. For convenience, here is the running list:
[ul][li]Every change in mental state flows from a cause.[/li][li]A sample average converges in probability towards the expected value.[/li][li]Mental state is what one knows, feels, and wants, and nothing more.[/li][li]One’s mental state is fixed at every given instant.[/li][li]There are no nondeterministic self-influences on one’s mental state (such as a nonmaterial soul).[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
[ul][li]By observation.[/li][li]This flowed from your misundertanding.[/li][li]This flowed from your fallacy of affirming the consequent.[/li][li]This is axiomatically true, being pretty much the definition of a “state”.[/li][li]Not any significant ones anyway. By observation.[/ul][/li]
YES! That’s exactly my point! I’m arguing that by observation of how minds work at an external level we can conclude with certainty that libertarian free will is nonsense. That’s exactly what I’m arguing.
So-called libertarian free will is the argument that our choices are made in defiance of our mental state. It argues that the important part of our choices is the part that’s made for no reason whatsoever - if you are eating strawberries because you like strawberries the libertarian argument says that that’s not you eating them of your own free will. Only if you spastically flail about and randomly shove the strawberries in your mouth is that a freely-made decision.
Libertarian free will is stupid. It’s a stupid reaction to panic about the fact that minds might exist in a deterministic universe, when any sensible person can see that minds function in a deterministic way anyway.
And libertarian free will doesn’t presuppose magic - that’s what nonmaterialism offers, but libertarian free will doesn’t have anything to do with nonmaterialism. A non-material mind could be fully deterministic and the libertarians wouldn’t like it either; all they care about is that decisions be made without being determined by your mental state. Which, again, is stupid.
What I’m saying is that your definition of choice doesn’t match with the common definition of choice. By the common definition of choice it’s entirely possible for choices to be made deterministically.
Choice, by the common use of the term, is when there are multiple options to choose from and one of them is chosen. This absolutely can be done in a deterministic way, and the fact that there were multiple options being considered was no illusion.
My argument is that claiming that a given mental state has to be able to end up preferring more than one outcome simultaneously is a nonsensical way to define “choice” - it doesn’t match up with reality.
I am dismissing nothing out of hand; I am examining the way minds work and based on those observations concluding that certain definitions of “choice” and “free will” must be wrong, at least if they’re trying to describe the reality that our minds clearly are operating in.
Oh, and:
I dismiss “illusion of choice”, based on observed evidence.
I dismiss libertarianism, based on observed evidence.
I dismiss hard incompatiblism, based on observed evidence.
I am totally cool with hard determinism, based on observed evidence. (Though I’m also cool with randomity existing, keeping in mind it clearly has little influence on mental function.)
I am totally cool with compatiblism, not because I assumed the conclusion, but because observation of mental behavior reveals that minds work in a way that is compatible with hard determinism.
If you do not reject the notion of causality, please join me in the thought experiment:
My arm moved.
Why did my arm move?
I willed it to move.
Why did I will my arm to move?
I chose to will my arm to move.
Why did I choose to will my arm to move?
If you keep asking “why?” I suspect you will have to look into the past and therefore establish a chain of causation, even if everything is self. There can be more than one reason. Would you care to continue the introspective dialogue, or point out where you disagree?
In order to be falsifiable, a claim must be open to refutation through physical evidence. Assuming you cannot directly or indirectly observe ghosts, the above premisses are contradictory but not falsifiable.
First, the only mind I can actually observe is my own. I assume the existence of other minds but I cannot observe them; I can only observe their physical brains and only then in the hypothetical. We can mark the existence of other minds as another assumption made.
I agree with you that mental states are stable - based on my own memory, my own emotions do not change with “wild randomity”, nor do my beliefs, opinions, or knowledge. I agree that the mind “is not suffused with static”. The part I disagree with is that all changes in mental state flow from causes. You say this is supported by observation, but I don’t think it is. I will admit that there are some changes in mental state which have causes.
For example, take the seemingly random sensation of numbness in my left pinky finger this morning. Sensation is a mental phenomenon, but in this case, it had a physical cause: an overtight wristwatch band. My understanding of anatomy is that the tight band applies pressure to the wrist, which compresses the tissue in and around Guyon’s canal. This in turn restricts blood flow in the little arteries supplying the ulnar nerve with blood. The neurons, starved of oxygen, switch to anaerobic metabolism which produces less ATP. With insufficient ATP, the nerve’s ion transporters eventually malfunction. This causes the neuron to send the wrong signals up the nerve and to the brain. Exactly where, when, and how this produced a sensation of numbness in my mind is unknown and possibly unknowable without making further assumptions. I could design an experiment where I intentionally over-tighten my wristwatch band to induce an experience of numbness, to reinforce the hypothesis that tightening of the band causes a sensation of numbness. I won’t do so because I am already confident that the hypothesis is true, and I don’t want to risk nerve damage. Nevertheless, the conclusion drawn is that tightening of the band causes a sensation of numbness.
But let’s think about it the other way. Mental events can cause physical events, at least to an interactionalist dualist. I could think to myself, ‘in two seconds I will touch my left pinky to my left thumb’, wait two seconds without changing my mind, then touch my left pinky to my left thumb. The hypothesis here is that my thoughts caused or at least contributed to my fingers snapping. Although the mechanism of thoughts is unknown and possibly unknowable, the mechanism of the somatic nervous system is better understood. In short, I believe your brain sends acetylocholine down the spinal column and ulnar nerve to the hands where it depolarizes the muscle cell membrane, which releases calcium into the cytosol, which feeds the cross-bridge muscle contraction cycle and ultimately causes the pinky finger to touch the thumb.
[SPOILER]A nerve signal, or rather multiple signals, originate in the upper motor neurons of the primary motor cortex, which release acetylcholine into the synapse between the upper motor neuron and the first alpha motor neuron of a long chain of alpha motor neurons. This chain relays the signal (acetylcholine), out the brain stem, down the spinal cord, along the ulnar nerve, and to the various neuromuscular junctions in the hand - the small space between a nerve ending and muscle cell. The muscle cell contains nicotinic acetylocholine receptors at this junction. When two molecules of acetylocholine bind to those receptors, the receptor opens a non-selective cation channels. The subsequent rush of sodium cations coming in quickly depolarizes the muscle cell’s plasma membrane. Some potassium cations trickle out but not enough to balance out the sodium influx. Once the membrane is depolarized, slow-acting voltage-gated potassium ion channels across the cell membrane start letting out potassium, which activate fast-acting voltage-gated sodium ion channels. Within the space of a few microseconds, the muscle cell’s membrane is depolarized, repolarized, hyperpolarized (the potassium channels take time to close, too), then repolarized again. This quick fluctuation in voltage spreads across the cell membrane at about 5 meters per second, and activate voltage-dependent dihydropyridine receptors in the muscle’s transverse tubules (extensions of the cell membrane that reach inside the cell). These open calcium selective cation channels, and are mechanically linked to ryanodine receptors on the attached sarcoplasmic reticulum, which is basically a calcium repository. Calcium cations flow from the sarcoplasmic reticulum into the cytosol.
Now, skeletal muscle cells each contain what looks like a bundle of smooth red licorice sticks called myofibrils. Each myofibril is divided along its length into many equal segments called sarcomeres. Each sarcomere is made of thick myosin filaments and thin filaments (actin, tropomyosin, and troponin), and they are arranged in a pattern so that the thin filaments form a cup shape on the left and right sides of the thick filament, sort of like your hands holding each end of a pen. Calcium ions in the cytosol bind to troponin proteins on the thin filaments, and the troponin changes shape, causing adjacent tropomyosin proteins to unblock myosin-binding sites on the actin protein. These bind to hook-shaped myocin proteins in the adjacent myocin filament. When the myocin binds to actin, it releases inorganic phosphate, which causes the myocin to “pull” against the actin in what is called a power stroke. The sarcomere shortens about 10nm. Then ADP is released and the myocin remains bound to actin (a cross-bridge) until another ATP molecule from the cytosol binds to the myocin. At that point, the myocin head detaches from the actin site (the recovery stroke) and hydrolizes ATP into ADP and inorganic phosphate, and waits until another myocin-binding site becomes available. This cross-bridge process occurs on both ends of each sarcomere in each myofibril due to the increased calcium concentration, thus causing the muscles in my palm controlling my pinky finger to contract.[/SPOILER]
What I can’t say is that, based on observation, thoughts are always caused by physical events. Certainly physical events can cause sensations, as demonstrated by the wristwatch band giving me a sensation of numbness in my pinky finger. Certainly thoughts can cause or influence physical events, as demonstrated when I thought to touch my pinky and thumb together, then did so. I cannot say with certainly that thoughts are caused by sensations, because the mechanisms of the non-material mind are unobservable and possibly not causal. I cannot observe that tightening my wristwatch band necessarily causes me to touch my thumb and pinky finger together, although there is a logical reason for me to do so (to test whether my finger is numb). If you were to ask me why I picked my thumb instead of the table-top or some other object, I would not necessarily have an answer and might resort to post-hoc justification, or just say it was the first thing that came to my mind. But what process, if any, determined what came to my mind? It is certainly not wildly random, but I could not say whether or not my thoughts are a little random, with consequence.
It may be that there is a physical explanation, but the current state of science does not come close to explaining the physiology of an individual thought. Indeed, science often works on the assumption that there is a physical explanation, and not a stochastic one unless we work in the correspondence principle. If you are unwilling to make the basic assumption of physicalism, I don’t think you can conclude that all mental states flow from causes.
I agree with all of this.
I don’t agree with this at all and have no idea how you got came to this conclusion. Random is not the same as equiprobable.
I might agree with you, if we define cognition as the physical behavior caused by the mind. But then all you’ve done is make a tautology. I had a different definition of cognition in mind, I won’t bother trying to make a good written definition but I would want “cognition” to include pure thinking, even the parts that are normally private and unobservable to others.
That’s not what I said. Are you familiar with the pigeonhole principle? The output of a surjective function says nothing about the domain of its input. I concurred with your statement that brains are in a sense limited by their prior states, that the past matters, and that is still the extent of my agreement.
I didn’t quote the rest of the paragraph, but maybe I should have.
The implication is that “something that’s not what you know, feel, or want, like randomity or control signals from an outside god or something” is different from “your mental state”. Otherwise your rhetorical question seems out of place. Maybe you are right and I am reading too much into your post.
We haven’t established that all mental states have nonrandom causes, nor that random causes lead to random outcomes, so how can you say the mental state is nonrandom a priori?
Regarding the observations you allude to, what observations? My allegory of the pinky in this post basically says I don’t always know why I think one way or another. Just a few sentences prior, you wrote “it would be more accurate to say that mind is using the randomity … to determine cases where its determinations are so close to being a tie that random perturbations are the only difference between one choice being ahead and the other”. I don’t agree with that statement and it sounds like you don’t agree, either.
You are mixing up “brain state” and “mental state” again, but without making any further assumptions I believe your statement does not follow either way. A brain state in a single instant might really be described with a wave function. If you subscribe to a hidden variable theory that’s fine, but it is another assumption to add to the list.
With a mental state, the rules are off - you can’t rule out the possibility of a nonmaterial “perturbation” affecting the mental state, and you can’t really pinpoint which instant such a thing occurred.
I have yet to be convinced, but it’s been an interesting debate so far.
Conversely, libertarians might assume your mind is influenced but not determined by physical actions. They would deny that every change in mental state flows from a cause. As I understand it, libertarianism empowers the mind with the godly power of being a prime cause. The mind is free to make a choice without any physical reason at all, even in contradiction to logic built on physical evidence; but this is unlikely, because physical things are influential.
Also, to like strawberries is a mental preference, and we could say “it caused you to eat strawberries”, but the Libertarian would say this is only a manner of speaking. The consumption of strawberries was only by the grace of the mind which had the power to reject both logic and the strawberries, and could have effected an alternate reality where strawberries were not eaten. It does not follow that the decision to eat strawberries is made without free will just because it makes sense.
Neither must the mind always have free will; I doubt any libertarian would deny that some of the time, the mind is unable to physically effect its decisions; and I’m sure some libertarians consume mind-altering drugs for the express purposes of forcibly altering the mind. Libertarianism is not necessarily incompatible with the concept of a mental disease restricting free will, either.
If by magic you mean antimaterialism, I disagree and assert that libertarianism does require antimaterialism. Libertarianism and antimaterialism are not the same, but it’s like the rectangle and the square: libertarianism is a form of antimaterialism.
When I said “hard determinism”, I actually meant the view that determinism is true and incompatible with free will. Hard determinism is mutually exclusive with compatibilism by definition. But I agree with you that hard determinists and compatibilists are using different words to describe the same thing. There is no real debate to be had between philosophers of those two groups.
I do not reject the usefulness of thinking in terms of causality but causality is like the flat earth model. I use the flat earth assumptions for most everyday navigation when I’m traveling – pretending that I’m on a flat plane with east over there, north hither, west thither, and south yon. I know it’s an oversimplification but it’s a highly useful one; thinking about the curvature of the earth and keeping in mind that east and west will collide or will disappear as I approach the poles doesn’t help me get to Huntington or Philadelphia, so I mostly ignore it, even though it’s true.
Ultimately though, no, we do not live in a causal universe. It’s an illusion.
You wanted it to
** nods along with you **
Somewhere between 12 billion and 15 billion years ago both space and time came into being; there was no “before”, and there was no prior cause. Even these sentences are of questionable construction (we almost lack the language to express it; “came into being” isn’t quite accurate). The division of everything that has happened over those 12-15 billion years into events is, like the flat-earth navigation thingie, a useful thing but those divisions aren’t intrinsically objectively “there”. We impose them, mentally, on what is the only “event” (see previous disclaimer about the limits of our vocabulary) that has ever taken place. We are a part of that event. So if I do as you say and look in the past, I do not establish a chain of causation, or at least not until I arbitrarily slice up the entirety into Event A and Subsequent Event B and pretend that one causes the other.
Is it time that is an illusion, or the existence of a “past” universe? If things aren’t as normally understood with some semblence of causality, what is real? Are you saying all of the states of the universe at different time-steps actually exist together? My current definition of free will presupposes the existence of time, so unless you reimpose such a notion or redefine terms, I will have trouble understanding your position.
There are ad-hoc explanations to be found in theism and deism, or in the alternative there are theories that “before” is the negative or imaginary of “after”. There is also the viewpoint that there is ultimately no cause, that the initial state of the universe “just is”. But if you do establish a chain by which, given the initial state of the universe, you can determine the state of the universe now, the implication is that the “universal consciousness” has no free will and never had free will. Aside from the initial moment (if that exists), every time you point to a decision or choice that seems to be free will, it can be determined from a previous state of the universe. Therefore the previous state of the universe absolutely constrains the freedom of the current state of the universe to make a decision, such that the universe is only free to “choose” one thing, therefore free will is not found in the current instant. This lack of free will extends back to the initial state of the universe, or if there is no initial state, it extends back forever.
There is another question as to whether consciousness can possibly exist if there is no distinction between self and non-self or the whole and its parts.
Sorry, I don’t understand the question. I think you’re assuming I was asserting something other than what I was asserting (?)… I stated that causality is an illusion. Time is not illusory, but the separation of time into “events” is an illusion.
This, for me.
Why would you say that? It’s here; do you have reason to believe it is here for any reason other than “it wanted to be”?
Yes, but that’s because all the states of the universe are the same continuous self; the splitting of things into Event A and Event B is something we do in our heads but it isn’t intrinsically there. Just as you can’t logically argue “You, AHunter3, do not have free will, you have to do what your self makes you do” – because there aren’t two of me, my “self” and the “me” that is determined by it – you can’t argue that the universe at Time A is the cause of the universe at Time B.
Falsifiable claims are just claims that can be proven wrong one way or the other. The term tends to be associated with physicality because the bulk of important non-falsifiable statements in common parlance are about things that nobody can show to exist, but the term is not limited to the non-material, and being nonmaterial doesn’t mean that statements about you are nonfalsifiable.
Being a theorized nonmaterial entity/object doesn’t make something immune from being logic’d about and even disproven, no matter how much people might wish that was the case.
Naah, my argument is fine with my mind being the only mind in existence. I’m only making an argument about all the minds that work the way that I observe my mind to work. If solipsism happens to be true, my argument is content to merely prove that my mind (the only mind!) operates in a functionally deterministic way such that free will and choice cannot sensibly rely on nondeterministic factors.
I mean, if I have the only mind in existence, then that’s all the free will there is to talk about, right?
Tell you what - I’m willing to be entirely unconcerned with cases where small random perturbations damage the stability of any part of mental state, because I recognize that logically it makes no damn sense to consider any introduction of randomity as an addition of will. It doesn’t matter if randomity is slightly screwing with your ability to make decisions, or if it’s slightly screwing with your ability to remember things, or if it’s slightly screwing with your ability to clearly read your senses. There could be small random perturbations all over the place - we just know that for most people (which is to say me, since as you say we’re all solipsists here) the amount of randomity isn’t sufficient to upend the entire apple cart. I mean, I’m not senile, not yet anyway.
And we are talking about damage here. In a discussion like this one where I’m not restricting myself to minds located in the physical universe, non-determinism only comes in one flavor: not determined by anything, be it physics, souls, or gods. Pure randomity. That’s what non-determinism means: randomity. Pure mindless randomity.
Since when are we talking about physical stuff? My argument is still intended to cover wherever the mind is living, be it a physical brain, some spiritual thing, or a curiously aware tomato. I’m extrapolating back from observable behaviors of the mind, so these conclusions reach back to whatever mechansim or medium is causing the mind.
Which brings us to your “the mechanisms of the non-material mind are unobservable and possibly not causal” comment. It’s nonsense. You seem to be presupposing that if you talk about a nonmaterial thing it can do any silly thing you want it to, but when you start talking about a non-material thing we can observe that ceases to be the case. And if this non-material stuff is causing the minds I’m observing the effects of, then the effects of the non-material thing in question are observable.
If I like strawberries, and I choose to eat strawberries because I like them, then whatever is making that decision clearly and demonstratively is working in a causal fashion. The magical ghost mind is holding the preference for strawberries, and that preference within the magical ghost mind caused the magical ghost mind to choose to eat the strawberries. That’s causation. Which means that minds operate in a causal manner, whether they are physical minds or magical ghost minds or some other kind of minds. Doesn’t matter what they are; we can plainly see that causation is going on.
I mean, sure, there could be some magical ghost randomity messing with the magical ghost mind, the same way that there could be physics-based randomity messing with physical minds, but in both cases the randomity is equally irrelevent to will, because it’s randomity. Randomity doesn’t have will by definition. (And it didn’t stop me from choosing the strawberries anyway.)
I’ve already conceded that randomity can crap around with with minds in various ways; while holding firm that any such randomity has minimal/controlled effect and can’t possibly add to will in any case. Whether the mind is physical or magical or whatever has literally nothing to do with it; I’m talking about how it observably works.
Yay!
And I have no idea why you thing I’m talking about equprobablity. I’m quite confident I never mentioned the term; I can’t even spell it.
In any case I’m willing to ratchet back my assertions about where randomity is in the mind - I’m willing to allow that there is a constant hiss of random static all throughout the mind everywhere, conditioned on the realization that its effect on cognition is contained and very close to nil. The static doesn’t wipe out the thoughts, it doesn’t erase the emotions, it doesn’t fuzz out the opinions, it doesn’t snow away all the knowledge and memories. Not immediately, anyway.
And of course it doesn’t contribute will, because it’s frickin’ randomity.
Dude, I’ve been trying very hard (and imperfectly) to keep the physicalness out of it. I’m talking about how minds observably work, regardless of where they’re housed. And when I define “cognition” I only mean “that thing that’s doing the thinking and decision-making that I’m clearly observing to be happening”. If your definition is incompatible with that, then I’m not sure what discussion we’re even having.
And that’s all the agreement I need, really.
The things that can influence your mind’s behavior are exclusively limited to:
Your mental state, which is a major factor in your subsequent mental states.
Randomity messing around with your developing mental state.
Things that are not part of your mental state, influencing it from the outside.
That’s the entire possible list. Anything you might mention: gods, souls, the enticing aroma of strawberries - those all fall into one of those categories, because A ∨ ¬A covers all bases by definition. (The randomity also falls under either A or ¬A by defintion, and I don’t particularly care where you put it, because it can’t possibly impart will anyway because randomity isn’t willful.)
A ∨ ¬A, yo. In that sentence I considered randomity to be in the ¬A category, because it totally is; random perturbations can’t be part of your mental state because they only occur as perturbations in the advancement from one mental state to another. A given fixed snapshot of a mental state doesn’t have chunks of ‘determined randomity’ sitting in it; the closest you could get is a chunk of the mental state that has a value that is completely not determined by anything about the mental state immediately prior.
A mental state, by definition, is a state. A state, by definition, has a state. Things that are random don’t have a state while they’re being random; they only have a state once they’ve resolved out to one outcome or another. Even if you have some kind of nexus of randomity it will produce an actualized outcome at some point; whatever its outcome happens to be at the moment the state is examined can be taken as the static condition of that part of the state at that moment.
Randomity, if it’s occurring, can only be perturbing things as you change from one state to the next. That’s literally the only place it can be.
Yeah, yeah, I messed up again. The problem is that I have a 100% certainty that brains cause minds which is burned deep into my consciousness, so holding this discussion without talking about brains is like talking about walking decaying brain-eating undead without ever saying “zombie”.
And the rules most certainly aren’t off - there is a rule that the thing that is causing the minds is causing the minds, and so examination of the behavior of the mind constitutes examination of the behavior of the thing that is causing the minds. Which means that while we can’t rule out various small perturbations, we can most certainly rule out that perturbations (rather than preferences) are a driving force of my will. Regardless of where that will is residing.
I love debates like this! :D:D:D
Actually in my experience proponents of libertarian free will never, ever talk about godly power or souls. Maybe because the don’t want to get laughed out of the discussion, but more probably because libertarian free will isn’t about gods, it’s about randomity.
As best I can tell, libertarian free will was created to operate completely within the framework of physical reality. Prior to physicalism people didn’t frame the free will discussion as one about how minds worked; they assumed that minds were magic soul things that worked by magic. The bigger concern was whether gods of fate were screwing around with us. So whether or not our will was free had nothing to do with how we worked; it had everything to do with what other things were doing to us, whether they were predetermining our futures for us.
The introduction of physicalism handily wiped away the concerns about being externally controlled because we clearly don’t have strings physically attached to our limbs. (They didn’t know about radio and the martian mind control beams back then.) Instead the big concern was that once the mind actually lived in the brain it seemed fair to wonder how the stupid thing worked. And since reality, by and large, seems to run on cause, what would it be like if our minds ran on causes. And they noticed that if minds ran completely on causes, then a given mind and thought process would cause the same outcomes each time, predictably. We’d just got rid of the fates controlling us, do we now have to worry about physics controlling out every move??
Predictably, people freaked out at the idea of being predictable; it’s long been thought that our actions would only be predictable if we were being externally controlled, and “physics”, being a giant universal thing, sounds a lot like a giant uncaring god puppeting you. (Well it does if you don’t think too hard anyway.) So some people came up with the idea of leaning very hard on randomity, because introducing randomity, non-determinism, at least reintroduces the idea of unpredictability. Which seemed to matter a lot.
Compatiblist free will is what happened when people said, “Wait a minute, this is stupid. The problem was never whether we were unpredictable; it was whether something else is controlling us. And our own brains aren’t ‘something else’.” And then everybody the world over slapped their foreheads, admitted they’d been being dumb, and then nobody ever discussed free will again.
A libertarian free will proponent most certainly wouldn’t say anything about the grace of the mind. Remember, libertarian free will argues from a presumed materialist framework where the mind is located in the physical brain and isn’t graceful at all. The libertarian would simply say “but thanks to random perturbation we could never have known that you would have chosen strawberries; it’s definitely possible that random influences on the deterministic parts of your mind could have caused you to eat that cow pie instead. Unpredictablity for the win! Woo!”
Libertarian free will, at its core, maintains that people’s future actions can’t be predicted, due to randomity existing in the physical world and perturbing the decision-making process. It’s not overly concerned with whether the alternative options make sense; it’s more concerned (very concerned) with always maintaining unpredictability. Since, again, that’s the whole reason it was invented: to preserve the unpredictability that determinism was threatening to take away. They mistakenly believe that free will = unpredictability and thus logicked that if free will means unpredictable and determinism means unpredictable, we clearly must be driven by nondeterminism because clearly we have free will. Nondeterminism! Randomity! Woo!
Or at least, that’s how libertarian free will was always explained to me.
Libertarian free will has always been explained to me as operating within a materialistic framework, every time I’ve heard it mentioned or discussed. (You excepted). It’s very very explicitly about randomity, not souls or whatever.
People discussing souls usually just say “but souls!” and stand there smugly, without bothering to acknowledge that we can totally examine the behavior of souls by examining the behavior of the people they allegedly control. They certainly don’t consider the fact that the souls’ preferences doubtlessly are a controlling factor in determining the souls’ decision-making processes; they prefer to pretend that souls have no moving parts, despite the fact that they obviously function somehow, and clearly aren’t random. (Again, presuming the things exist.)
Hmm, turns out upon doing further research, you’re right that that’s how that term is used. How stupid, using two terms about determinism to describe the exact same physical deterministic world with all the exact same behaviors and events at every level and having the separate ‘determinism’ terms designate differing opinions about something entirely unrelated to the determinism of the world itself (whether people have free will, specifically).
Okay, I’ll concede that I do indeed reject hard determinism. You were absolutely right about that and I was wrong.