As advertised. And tbh, by Page 4 of this thread, there are more than too many proffered/proposed/supposed definitions already in play; I very seriously doubt that an explanation of my personal definition would prove welcome, and I am certain that I would not find it worthwhile.
But here’s an exegesis that’s perhaps not unwelcome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOyQhgM1FU
fnord
I for one have reached the conclusion that any arguments about free will should start with the definition of free will the person is using.
That way people can argue that everyone else is using the wrong definition of the term, rather than arguing whether we have the stuff, which at least would be a nice change.
The device I’m on doesn’t have its sound plugged in, so…
Yes good point.
Any time there is a phenomenon with significant unknowns we should be wary of ruling out possibilities. Even if I agreed that free actions need to thread the needle between not being deterministic and yet based on past experience / understanding, maybe there is such a mechanism that no-one has conceived of yet.
(And even if I thought this was threading the needle between p and !p, while in formal logic these are the only two possibilities, empiracally things can often be more complicated than that.)
So I will update my stock response on free will:
Bullseye! I would say the bell curve is a probability distribution and the output “produced” is a normally distributed random variable. But remember, it is impossible for a deterministic process to create a random output without any random inputs. The best you can do within the bounds of determinism is a pseudorandom number generator. Your function/machine must have random inputs, or it must be non-deterministic.
Of course: the structure of the function shapes the distribution; or if we are talking about a physical machine, the structure of the machine does so. If we are talking about the mind and the brain, the structure of the brain itself constrains the possible events the mind can effect, and the possible “choices” the mind can make. The mind cannot effect a physical event that contradicts the laws of physics, or we would adjust the laws of physics. The brand of libertarianism I laid out depends on the laws of physics allowing reality to unfold in a number of physically valid ways; a function that accurately describes a physical brain will allow for multiple solutions. That is an assumption on my part.
If you wish to call the structure of a machine a “deterministic factor”, I won’t stop you. For me that is a medical term, but I have no problem adopting your terminology.
Looking back at my [POST=21830722]post #146[/POST], I see that I accidentally used chaos/chaotic in two different senses. Sorry about the confusion.
This should have read “madness” instead of chaos.
This should have read “irrational” instead of chaotic.
Here I meant “deterministic, but impossible to approximate and unpractical to predict” instead of chaotic.
I understand that by “nonchaotic” you mean “not equiprobable” or “in the shape of a bell curve”, but seeing the word nonchaotic threw me off.
Very well.
If you mean to say the original input is random, I agree.
If you mean to say the original input is necessarily equiprobable over some arbitrary domain, I disagree. A function which outputs random variates according to a normal distribution (a normally distributed random number generator) needs not uniform random variates as its input. Sure, that is one way to do it, but the function could also transform an existing normal random variate, or it could build a normal distribution off of multiple independent but identically distributed random variables.
The output of a function with a normal probability distribution is a (normal) random variate. To me that is a form of random. If you want to use a different definition where “random” means “uniformly random” or “equiprobable”, that’s very fine and all, but then you can replace my usage of “random” in this discussion with “nondeterministic”.
Correct me if I am wrong. You appear to assume that the only primaeval form of nondeterminism is equiprobability; in your opinion other probability distributions are the result of some “deterministic process” which permutes the primaeval equiprobability into some non-uniform distribution.
In reference to physics, you would admit the possibility of stochastic wave function collapse, but only if such stochastic events are ultimately determined by pure equiprobability.
This necessarily precludes those souls I was talking about, and free will as I understand it, and God for that matter (but God is already out of the picture in this thread). The brand of libertarianism I was and am describing depends on stochastic wave function collapse within the brain being the result of the non-deterministic but non-equiprobable will of a nonmaterial soul.
As I imagine it, that soul can pick and choose between options it is given. Those options are determined by physical constraints, namely the physical structure of the brain. The soul would make decisions with or without regard to the inputs presented to it (bodily signals). It is influenced by such inputs, but it is not controlled by them. You cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the soul will choose by looking at the inputs. Even if you know all there is to know, the soul is a prime mover and cannot be definitely predicted.
But the soul does not make uniformly random decisions. Most of the time, its actions (physical events effected by the soul via the body) can be predicted with great accuracy based on history and the inputs it is presented with. This is because the soul is a somewhat rational agent. Even so, the soul has the capacity to act unpredictably. Therefore the soul may act randomly, but it does not flow from equiprobability. The soul is god-like, and within physical constraints set by the body it effects physical actions however it pleases. There are factors, but no set of factors fully constitute deterministic causation.
I identify the soul as self. I might be given the choice between strawberries and peppers, and although I usually want the strawberries, I am not necessarily bound to want them. Maybe I want to try something new one day, or just to pick peppers out of spite. In at least some situations I have it in my power to pick the peppers despite my history of choosing strawberries over peppers. There are enough opportunities for whatever magick that connects me to this body to effect the reality where I choose peppers, without violating any physical laws. This last part is in theory a testable hypothesis, but in current practice the brain is too complex and our understanding of it too lacking to build an experiment.
You do have to be able to examine the inner workings of something to test hypotheses that concern its inner workings.
The conclusion does not follow because I denied the other premise.
Much earlier, I said it was the structure of the brain. Perhaps the mind is also deterministic, but that is non-falsifiable and incompatible with my understanding of free will.
I think this demonstrates that we are not on the same page. I don’t think there is a mechanism “generating” the mind. My mind, that is, I - I act based on preferences and feelings, etc. But at least some of the time, I have the power to do otherwise, to contradict my own preferences and feelings, for no reason other than “just because I want to”.
I don’t have to have a reason to want something, but there are usually plenty of reasons to pick from. Preferences, feelings, and experience might prefer one course of action, but the other course of action is almost never without its own (if less preferred) benefits. I have the power to want and choose the alternative, and have done so often, even if it makes less sense to me, even if I think about the question for a long time instead of just “picking at random”. I may willfully cut short consideration of other options without a compelling reason to do so.
The theoretically testable hypothesis is that the physics of the brain creates a superposition of multiple brain states, one for each possible choice in every decision I make. The nonfalsifiable assumption is that a nonphysical consciousness collapses the wave function.
Or perhaps you meant to write “deterministic factors between the mind and physical actions of the body” instead of “the mechanism generating the mind”, where “deterministic factors” means the physical structure of the brain. In that case we may simply disagree as to how “extremely tamped down” the future is by the physical state of the present. See the previous paragraph.
Well, I said God-like and this is a thread about atheist positions. I continue to think you are using a different sense of the word “random” than I am, but I have already addressed that in this post. Maybe after this we can do a thread about God. Which reminds me, I probably should check on the religion thread because it may have been marked as read, too…
Nothing I wrote in that quote makes sense if “random” means equiprobable, and nothing in this part of your post follows if “random” includes souls or people doing things or wanting things without being forced to do so by the rules of physics.
People do act as if they have free will, on the macro scale. Some people will actually respond, “yeah, I believe that I have free will”. People often make one decision for so-so reasons despite a more rational alternative being available. They don’t have to play eeny-meeny-miny-moe to make a nondeterministic decision. What about the decision to continue considering options?
Nevertheless, my understanding of the current science is that the brain is too complicated for us to definitively follow any assumed chain of causation of any “willful act” from the body through the brain and back outside of the brain. And therefore we cannot functionally test or observe (or confirm) that such a chain of causation exists. I will admit that if such a chain of causation does exist, my position would become untenable.
Human behavior says little about the internal workings of human minds. Human behavior does not even prove that minds exist, we have to make that assumption. Instead, I thought we were going with your own mind, the one you have intimate (but incomplete) knowledge of. You think and do not act with wild abandon. The other premise is that the mind of one who thinks and does not act with wild abandon is functionally deterministic, and I reject that premise.
The premise of determinism, of functional determinism, the fundamental assumption of physics, is ultimately a generalization of directly observed phenomena. On account of the fact that we cannot directly and passively observe the very small, physics is imprecise. Here we entertain the idea that there exist certain ambiguities in the laws of physics, namely when and how wavefunctions collapse. And the libertarian says, it is a non-material soul which induces the collapse, by making nondeterministic “decisions” based on “free will”.
You seem to counter by asserting that this non-material soul, if it exists, must necessarily abide to some sort of physics, either uniformly stochastic or deterministic. This assertion functionally rules out libertarianism. You can either back that up, which I believe is impossible with deductive logic, or add it to the list of assumptions necessary to support your argument.
Well yes, there’s that. But I don’t think that counts as free will because, as you said, the mind doesn’t care.
Free will implies that I could in fact choose and want to eat the glass. It’s not like this is simple enough to build an experiment. There are too many variables to control for. One of the possible outputs would involve eating broken glass, eg: me eating broken glass (what happened to the peppers?) to prove a point.
Now, there are reasons for me to pick the strawberries. I like strawberries more than broken glass. I am told that eating broken glass is painful, and all the indicators are that it will be painful.
There are also reasons to choose the broken glass, mainly spite but also principle and curiosity. In most situations I would still choose the strawberries, but I can imagine certain situations where I freely choose to eat broken glass. It should be possible to eat thin glass if you first chew it into sand. Don’t try this at home, kids.
If you did a blinded experiment, I doubt anybody who understands the choices would eat broken glass. But what does that prove? In real life, people aren’t always blinded as to the consequences and interpretation of their choices. I hesitate to extrapolate any finding from a blinded experiment of human behavior to human behavior in general.
Perhaps you and I have a different understanding of physics. You probably know better than I, as I haven’t been formally educated in these matters. But my understanding is that the brain state is in fact a “Schrodinger’s preference”, meaning that it is most accurately described by a quantum wave function. There are, to my knowledge, three major ways of interpreting this: one, some magical entity (an “observer”) determines which classical state is real; two, all possible classical states constitute distinct realities; three, there is only one reality underneath the wave function but we do not/can not have the information to describe it.
Further, my understanding is that the third interpretation is largely discredited, the second interpretation is unpopular (but less so recently), and the first interpretation is widespread.
I don’t think those are laws to begin with, certainly not in the mathematical sense. I have already said that there are circumstances under which I might eat hot peppers instead of strawberries - to disprove your point, for example. Certainly I have it within my power to eat broken glass, under certain circumstances, for the same reason. You could take this to the extreme and ask if I would mortally harm myself or others to prove a point - absent some extreme circumstances, the answer will be no. But I can attribute extreme limits to the “deterministic factors” that I do not identify as self, the same way that two dice cannot usually come up with thirteen dots, even if I arranged them by hand instead of “rolling” them.
And this arranging of dice by myself is a very good analogy of the nondeterminism or randomness that I speak of, in contrast to rolling of dice as you seem to think is the only possible form of randomness or nondeterminism.
When we talk about the mind retaining state and preferences, there is no occasion to say that there is some mechanism that determines how such properties exist. Preferences change over time, for example. And mental state only exists so far as we stipulate that it exists. There is no evidence for the existence of a mind, or its relation to the brain, except what we stipulate. I am here refusing to stipulate that there is any fully deterministic mental process, while also refusing to stipulate that the only mental nondeterminism is based on some mechanical permutation of uniform randomness. You point to the rational behavior of humans as evidence that their minds are either deterministic or functionally deterministic; I say that the same evidence only establishes that their minds are for the most part rational.
Or so we hope I am.
I think this stems from a misunderstanding between us over the definition of “random”, with either you misunderstanding what I mean or me misunderstanding what you mean.
I don’t understand how you get from a decision made based on preferences to a decision made deterministically. Preferences are not what we have been calling “deterministic factors”. If you were to look at a deterministic timeline, there is no such thing as “preferences”. There are causes, and there are effects, and literally nothing bears relation to any event except as a cause or effect. Deterministic means it is possible for me to predict with perfect accuracy and precision exactly what will be done in the future, much like a devil replaying a film, or reading a book, who can simply look ahead a couple minutes or paragraphs and see into the future. There is no provision to say, the story may change based on the character’s preferences, because in a deterministic sense the character has no agency, his fate is written in permanent ink, as far as the devil is concerned, he does not exist except as a character in a book.
That may be fine with you, and under a different set of axioms than those of libertarianism it may be fine with me, but it still does not follow that clear preferences indicate the property of determinism. I could add an assumption of mental determinism to the list, but you have rejected that before.
What does follow is that the existence of determinism is plainly incompatible with libertarianism. That should be a surprise to neither of us, as the definition of libertarianism is the presence of free will coupled with the absence of determinism.
So, in direct response, I dispute that preferences clearly cause people to act in certain ways. Preferences are mere suggestions. As a counterexample, preferences can be contradictory and can change over time. I might prefer to continue sitting in a comfortible position, but I also prefer to drink water when I feel thirsty. I might prefer if our country allocated so much money to so many national programs, but I might also prefer that total national expenditures are less than national revanue. Preferences can get complicated very quickly, and it is impossible for anyone except yourself to know what preferences factor into any particular decision. Even thinking about my own actions, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the preferences were considered before or after the act, or which preferences (if any) carried the day. Your take away is that preferences cause people to act, like the downward force on one side of a lever causes the other end to press upward. My take away is that preferences cause actions just as much as advisers cause executives to make decisions - it is not an absolute law of nature.
I have a sneaking suspicion that you may think, if not preferences then surely something - some mechanism, some law, some thing - must cause people to act so orderly. I cannot refute such an assertion, except to say it is as groundless as, and incompatible with, libertarian free will.
I’ve said it a few times in this post, but I think you used the word “random” in a different way than I would. I don’t see a contradiction between a nondeterministic entity making a rational choice. It is true that rational decision making is usually deterministic, and usually corresponds with “preferences”, but it is also true that humans can and have acted both rationally and irrationally, and even rationally-until-they-think-about-it-after-the-fact. The soul can choose to act rationally, and praise be the soul which does so, but it has the power to do otherwise.
~Max
Noise is random by definition. As in not a signal.
But I think this only debunks simple determinism. Say you had a computer which measured internal noise (or the decay of an atom) and branched depending on the result. That program would not be deterministic, but it certainly does not imply any sort of free will.
Whatever free will means.
Dennet’s definition makes more sense. In order for free will to be determined in any way, one must first show what is doing the determining. And so far, nobody has.
Noise can result in a deterministic system, it doesn’t have to be fundamentally random. In electronics, noise can be just what we use to denote things whose generation is sufficiently opaque, that to us it looks random, even though at rock-bottom it might result from deterministic processes.
As an analogy, think of rolling dice on a craps table. For most purposes, you’d say that the results are random, even though they can be fully described with classical (deterministic) mechanics. It’s just that the process of rolling involves so many variables where a slight change makes a large change in the result, that if we’re just looking at the large-scale result, we say it’s random.
IC feature sizes are now small enough to get into quantum effects, and so are inherently random. And my example of a switch built around radioactive decay is - unless you think that radioactive decay is somehow deterministic.
Max S, I’m gonna distill our exchange down quite a bit, because it’s getting kind of big.
It’s become clear that the ‘randomity’ you talk about is actually this ‘soul’ thing you’re positing. As best I can tell, the soul things you’re positing have the following properties:
They don’t behave randomly in actual practice. Virtually no eating of glass occurs. You attribute this to the soul being a “somewhat rational agent”.
You maintain that the souls are still somewhat random though, because that serves the end of allowing your definition of free will. Glass eating might happen, any second now!
You think it’s very important to consider the souls to have no internal logic, laws, or mechanics. Enough so to assert that things that cannot be directly observed cannot be studied, despite 90+%* of science being the study of unobservable things via indirect observation of things they impact that we can observe.
The argument that we cannot conclude this because we cannot observe the souls directly, besides being absurd, is somewhat reminiscent of the notion that because we can crack people’s skulls open and only find an inert gray sponge in there that clearly isn’t doing the thinking, something else must be doing it. You can’t see neurons processing, so it clearly isn’t happening, therefore the heart is doing it or maybe pixies or whatever.
Suffice to say, I reject this. If something is behaving in a “rational” manner, it clearly is rationalizing. Now its rationalization my not be perfectly logical, leading to “irrational” or “mad” behavior, but there’s still a rationalization process occurring. If there are souls, then those souls do indeed function and calculate and remember things and make assessments based on opinions in a very systematic and mechanized manner, because that’s the only way to get they “output” they produce (not to mention the thinking experience).
So, putting aside nonsense about souls being ineffable, where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with a decision-making process that references remembered data and new inputs and calculates responses based on them. This decision-making process might be taking place in a meat-computer brain, or it might be taking place in an ectoplasm-computer soul, but either way it’s definitely happening. Where it’s happening doesn’t matter in the slightest, as far as the free will discussion goes.
What does matter is the answer to these two questions:
Is non-rational randomity based on no stored data and no new inputs being included as a factor in the rational decision making process?
If randomity is permuting the results of decision making, how is that a good thing?
My personal answers to these questions are 1) No, irrational based-on-nothing randomity is not a significant factor in human decision making, and 2) it wouldn’t be a good thing if it was.
If you will permit me, I will rephrase the question with my own terms. Is nondeterminism a significant factor in the decision-making process? If so, is that nondeterminism always based on new physical inputs or data?
I say yes then no. I assume that nondeterminism is a significant factor in the decision-making process because to my knowledge, we do not have a deterministic theory that describes the decision-making process and I personally find it morally reassuring to use my theory of nondeterminism.
I do not assume that significant nondeterminism in the decision-making process is always based on physical inputs or data, because I believe there is no way to prove that it is, and as stated before I find my theory morally reassuring. Nevertheless nondeterminism by definition cannot always be “based on” (determined by) physical events.
If nondeterminism is a factor in decision-making, how is that a good thing?
Well, I don’t think this is a question that advances the debate. Our respective systems of morals are based on our understanding of free will. It doesn’t make sense to justify free will based on a moral determination of “goodness” when the moral system itself assumes the existence or nonexistence of free will.
Personally I like to go about thinking my idea of free will is moral. Nondeterminism in decision-making is free will, and free will in decision-making is usually desirable to decision-making without free will. But I recognize that if free will did not exist, or if nondeterminism did not amount to agency (eg: was based on equiprobability), I would adopt a different moral standard, and have a different response.
But I will remind you that my opinion as to the existence or nonexistence of free will is like that of an agnostic regarding the question of God. I’m not convinced that free will as I describe it - souls and such - does or does not exist, but for admittedly arbitrary and perhaps practical social reasons I go about life as if it does exist. My question to you is this: are you convinced that free will as I describe it does not exist? Is the basis of your conviction an argument of induction? Of pragmatism? Am I perhaps ignorant of some logical truth?
~Max
Basically, yes.
I will admit the possibility of nonphysical processes, but I assert that it cannot be proved or tested. Within this black box of nonphysicalism I assume some of the nonphysical processes are nondeterministic. Still nonfalsifiable, in my opinion. Then I assume that some of the physical outputs - which we can theoretically observe - are also nondeterministic. That’s falsifiable and therefore my theory of souls is technically a scientific speculation.
Believe what you may, it does not follow from the premises unless and until you assume that all of nature is governed by determinism. Until you make that assumption, your “absolute certainty” seems to be an unsubstantiated generalization from the physical world unto the nonphysical.
When I say random I mean nondeterministic. Just forget the word random since this seems to muddy the waters. I find it well within the limits of my imagination for a person to make a decision with deliberation, data processing, memory access, cognitive processing, thoughts, opinions, and yet still the decision is not based entirely off physical/nonphysical state. That’s all I mean by “random” or “nondeterministic”: the decision is not based entirely off state.
It is possible for me to imagine this within the context of physics by assuming that the brain is, at the moment of making a decision, in a superposition of multiple physical states, one for each option.
Well, yes, sort of. Some of the process happens physically and we can observe it. So long as there are gaps in the science I reserve the right to speculate a vector for a nonmaterial soul.
All of that I will admit. But I do not conclude that, therefore, the souls necessarily act deterministically. I do not conclude that the “output” of souls can be determined independently with exact precision based only on their physical input.
~Max
Nondeterminism, by definition, is not based on inputs or data. If inputs or data are determining the outcome it’s not nondeterministic.
This question is actually the heart of the debate, because it pins down what definition of “free will” one is using.
Ever since idiots got hold of the discussion in ancient days, free will has been erroneously associated with unpredictability. In a very literal sense this is saying that madness is better than sanity - it’s saying that “we do things for reasons” is a worse thing than “we do things for no reason whatsoever”. This is in fact an inversion of the original free will concept, where people claimed that having free will meant the were in control of themselves, and weren’t under the control of external gods or fates. Nondeterministic free will is about not being controlled by your self, and saying that you only have free will when your fate is out of your hands.
It’s very hard to have a sensible discussion of free will when people are equating the term with nondeterminism, because when people talk about free will in real life they never, ever mean nondeterminism. Consider morality: a person controlled by nondeterminism could and would occasionally decide to randomly murder people, right between bouts of glass eating. This is somehow the moral approach? Honestly if people are creatures of randomity we can have no moral positions at all, because we’re not in control of our actions: random coin flips are.
Yeah, no. I long ago realized that free will, whatever it means, cannot mean nondeterminism, because that leads to a whole host of stupid conclusions. So I thought about what it actually does mean, and that led me to a compatablist conclusion. Free will is when your decisions come from yourself. And since your self is based in a real thing, then the state of that thing determines how you act, not fates or randomity. That is free will.
I’m not sure how you’d prove that some output is truly random or not if you don’t know where it comes from and how the output was generated. Nonrandom processes can produce seemingly random output, and random output can, by pure chance, look extremely organized.
Human behavior is manifestly nonrandom, in that people do things for actual reasons. This is obvious. However it is indeed difficult to prove that random perturbation doesn’t occur on the edge cases - where things are very close or absolute ties, perhaps a subatomic coin flip is used break the tie. Or perhaps some deterministic rule is used, like keeping a vice president around to break ties or something. it’s hard to say from an external perspective.
This is the point where I make a morality-based assumption - to whatever degree that randomity controls our actions morality cannot exist, and since I think it makes sense to treat people as creatures accountable for our actions it makes sense to dismiss the possibility that randomity could have an impact on one in ten thousand of our decisions. Even if it were happening it clearly has so little of an impact (since ties are rare) that it may as well not be happening anyway, so I presume that it isn’t happening at all to stave off people jumping on it and trying to run it in for some kind of rhetorical touchdown.
Right - it’s entirely possible that there is a negligible amount of random perturbation in the human decision making process. And this perturbation cannot possibly be significant or important, or humans would be so random they wouldn’t be able to get through the day without eating glass or murdering people.
If I want to posit randomity in the brain, I just assume that quantum level stuff is providing random perturbations. Macro-level superposition strikes me as unlikely to the point of silliness so I don’t go there, and it’s not needed anyway, should a person wish to abrogate responsibility for their actions by blaming randomity.
I don’t believe there are gaps that are producing a significant and controlled perturbation of the signal - I think we’d have noted such an overt breakage of the laws of physics by now.
Remember, you’re not talking about a gap where nothing happens here - you’re talking about a gap where a sentient external entity is physically manipulating brain state on a massive and constant level. That strikes me as the kind of thing that would show up on a MRI.
Let’s tackle this first. What is nondeterminism, in the context of a function? I say a nondeterministic function is one in which the inputs do not always determine the outputs. Here is an example.
Let function f mapping the set of natural numbers to itself be a function represented by f(x) equal to a single natural number within the domain of 1 to x inclusive, valid when x is a natural number greater than or equal to 1.
That function is nondeterministic, in that the value of f at 3 cannot be determined any more accurately than “it’s either 1, 2, or 3”. You may observe that attempting to write out the function value is impossible because the definition is essentially incomplete. The following is invalid as the right hand side is a set and not a single natural number:
f(3) = {n|n ∈ N, and 1 < n < 3}
Nothing in my definition of f(x) can tell us whether the value of f at 3 is either 1, 2, or 3. But what we do see is that the value of a nondeterministic function is partially based on inputs, even if the output is not determined by the inputs. That’s all I mean by nondeterministic.
It is true that we could say f is a random variable, but it does not follow that we know the probability distribution of f.
~Max
I don’t think you have that right. I think there is a critical difference between “we do things for reasons”, which I generally agree with, and “reasons determine what we do”, which is how I characterize your position. Those two statements are compatible, and both of them are incompatible with “we [always] do things for no reason whatsoever”.
But the central question with free will is whose will is it? For me, it’s the soul’s will. I identify the soul as self. For you… well, we’ve already gone over how we both think the compatibilist definition of free will is a cop out. “Reasons” cannot possess willpower, and I doubt you identify “reasons” as self.
I don’t see the difference between absolute predictability (determinism) and fate. As such, this so-called inversion of the concept of free will is not an inversion at all, but rather a conundrum. If free will is unpredictability, is it still my will?
I resolve the conundrum by assuming that my self is my soul, and my soul is a nonphysical god-like prime mover. I provide the window for dualist interactionalism by assuming that the soul constantly collapses quantum wave functions in the brain. It’s a pretty good deal if I say so myself. I get to continue to wonder what happens after death, about ensoulment, personhood, etc. and for the most part my views “fit in” with those of the society I live in. It’s compatible with almost every moral system under the sun, with our legal system, with either major political party, and even with religions. To my knowledge, it’s compatible with science and logic, too. All of this, and I only make a couple far-reaching assumptions about the basic order of the universe.
Well, I think you’re wrong about other people, at least libertarians. I mean, the definition of libertarianism is free will without determinism. There’s only two kinds of free will: libertarian free will and compatibilist free will. Minus the quantum stuff, I think I’m presenting the standard view of free will. It’s a big world out there and maybe we have different exposure.
I want to stress again that I identify the soul as self, and reject that the soul acts “randomly” (without free will; equiprobability in decision making). I do in fact believe that souls have the capacity to issue commands to suddenly murder others or eat glass. I’ll double down on that any day. I further believe that souls have the ability to control their own commands at all times, except where they are restricted by physical factors such as brain injury or disease. This is compatible with the soul acting nondeterministically. This is the bedrock of my moral system.
Having rejected or resolved the “conclusions” you mentioned earlier in that post, I do not join you in embracing compatibilism.
I bolded the end of your post because I agree with it. I think we may disagree in that I nominally believe my soul is my self, and that my soul is real even if it is not a physical entity.
As always, I look forward to your response,
~Max
The heck? I think that compatiblist free will is the only model of free will that is coherent and reflects both the common use of the word and reality. “Cop out” is not how I’d describe it. Was this a typo?
And I do identify “reasons” as self. Or more correctly, I identify there to be a deterministic process operating that uses non-random analysis of lots of deterministic state and inputs to come up with reasons to take one action or another, and then based on the reasons it likes best it determines which actions to take. This is a continuous operating process (think computer program) that manifestly, observably is how the human mind works. It doesn’t matter if it’s running on physical brains or on ghost brains, that’s what happening, and it’s manifestly a deterministic process. The process determines what to do, based on the data available to it and how it processes that data.
That’s the self. That computer program. The one I think is running on the brain, and which you would prefer were running on a nonphysical soul.
If free will is randomity, it is not your will, because it is not anybody’s will, because it’s not happening for any reason at all.
In “nonphysical god-like prime mover”, the only interesting part is “prime mover”, because that’s the part where you seem to be hinting at some sort of stance on how the stupid thing works. And that stance appears to be that all your decisions come from absolutely nowhere, and that your decision to avoid eating broken glass isn’t the result of some sort of calculated analysis of how glass isn’t tasty, but rather a ‘prime movement’, ex nihilo, based in nothing, that just randomly produces that same result that a mind with internal logic would.
Look, I get that you like the idea of an eternal soul. But whether you have a soul or not has nothing whatsoever to do with whether your thinking apparatus operates on deterministic logical thought or random ex nihilo prime movement. It’s not about what it’s made of or where it’s located or how eternal it is, it’s about how it operates.
‘Classic’ free will was neither libertarian or compatiblist. There’s a history to all this, you know, as it’s as I said - free will was originally a question of whether you were literally being controlled as a playing piece on the gods’ chessboards (a la the original Clash of the Titans) or whether people acted on their own, free of the gods’ control. That is not what the term relates to anymore, of course.
Libertarian free will is the result of the apparently deterministic view of reality scaring people and freaking them out because they erroneously thought that being predictable is the same as being controlled by an outside force. Determinism is simply the choice not to make such a stupid mistake.
It’s worth noting that the addition of souls doesn’t imply nondeterminism. A person could believe in deterministic souls. There’s nothing about being made of ectoplasm that implies that they don’t function in a consistent and reasonable manner.
Nondeterminism is a sliding scale. Once again, if your machine returns “5 +/- 2” (which is to say, anything from 3 to 7 with some sort of probability distribution), then the “between 3 and 7” part is the deterministic part, and the “nothing determines which number between 3 and 7” part is the nondeterministic part. I draw a distinction between the two. Why do I do this? Based on the concept of signal and noise in electrical signals, mostly.
People talk about computers using electrical signals: powered for 1, unpowered for 0. But in actuality the wires aren’t fully on or fully off - the ‘on’ voltage varies somewhat, and sometimes the lines aren’t entirely dead when ‘off’. There’s noise in all wiring, random (or seemingly random) perturbation in all of the electrical signals.
Of course, when we build computers we take this into account, and properly-made circuit will ignore the noise in the system. The randomity in the system is ignored, because we want the damn things to work properly, not spaz out and malfunction as minor surges disrupt the system.
So there’s signal - the part with intent and meaning. And there’s noise, which is the randomity. The two coexist, but can be conceptually separated: the signal is the part that’s good, the noise is the trash to the filtered out.
Nondeterminism points out that the noise is (maybe) there and claims that gives them free will. But noise isn’t will, it’s trash.
What do you think the word “compatiblism” means/implies? There is nothing about having a nonphysical soul that is incompatible with determinism.
Cheers!
You may or may not find this interesting: My kid when he was 9 said he was an atheist cause he didn’t believe God existed. I said 'you’re not an atheist, you’re too young."
“Well what am I?”
“You’re nine!!”
later he told me he believed in ghosts. I pointed out then you’re definitely just a nine-year old and not an atheist
Now I’m sure there will be people here to point out its entirely plausible to be nine, an atheist but believe in ghosts.
So what I’m getting here is that, in your opinion:
Nine year olds are unable to disbelieve in things, and thus believe in literally everything.
Ghosts are gods.