Determinism vs. Free Will: why care in the everyday world?

In My Humble Opinion
81

I made a decision today. So did you. That’s the “proof” that we are able to make decisions.

Not quite: it is possible to condition your desires, and, in fact, even your beliefs.

Please read what I actually said, and respond only to that. I said that the drunk driver chose to drink, and to drive, and to ignore safety rules. I said exactly the opposite of what you are accusing me of saying.

If you keep doing that, then discussion cannot go forward.

Another case. I never said I can make decisions “completely free of my biology.” Please stop making up shit and claiming I said it.

Yes. Decision-making often involves internal conflicts of this sort.

Some yes, and some no. Most of us who drive cars are aware of the “automatic pilot” effect, where we don’t consciously focus on details such as acceleration and braking. On the other hand, when we’re deciding whether or not to have a hamburger for lunch, we are very conscious of the decision-making process.

You’re stating an opinion, but not demonstrating anything factual. If you don’t believe you are consciously making decisions, then I don’t suppose there is any way to demonstrate to you that you are. Meanwhile, you have no possible way to demonstrate to me that I am not consciously making decisions, especially when I have done so a good dozen times in the composition of this reply.

82

I am starting to catch on that, for you, the term “free will” either means the same thing as “competent, of sound mind”, or else at a minimum has a whole lot of overlap with it.

For me, that’s a completely irrelevant factor, unless, I suppose, one so thoroughly lacked competence that one isn’t really a Self at all.

For me, the focus in a different place: whether I authored my behavior or if, instead, some other force is responsible for creating my behavior. Any questions of how compos my mentis is would perhaps implicate me as a nut (or a senile person or an impaired person etc) but I don’t conceptualize it as if there were a “me” and separate from “me” is this impairment. Impaired or not, if I’m causing my behavior that’s free will.

83

And there WordMan we see some of that confusion in progress. monstro somehow believes that a belief in Free Will means and only means a belief in “interactionist dualism, which claims that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality” (quoting the wiki article) which to my knowledge not a … heh … soul … has claimed in this thread, certainly not Trinopus. It is not the current mainstream Free Will concept.

Broadly all Free Will means is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. The contrast with determinism is that the latter posits that no decisions actually ever occur as only one course of events is possible.

Most who use the phrase Free Will are implicitly meaning that the conscious mind is making choices of volition and exclude from Free Will decisions that are not a result of that conscious experience. Thus to that use of the term Free Will means a sentient entity using the tools of its sentience to choose among possible actions.

As the Wiki article reviews a majority of philosophers are compatibilists maintaining “that determinism is compatible with free will”.

To my read the science clearly is against either pure state.

The nature of physical reality is that there are random fluctuations at its base and, as we know from chaos theory, the nature of massive nonlinear systems is that the smallest variation in start conditions can have massive impacts on end results. Laplace’s demon is an impossibility. Even knowing all the start condition and all the rules of the universe the demon (who would have to exist outside the universe) would not be able to predict end results. The all knowing demon could at best make probabilistic predictions of likely outcomes, but predicting precise paths? No. Perhaps from a vantage outside our reality and able to see time as just another dimension then what will be already has been and determinism could apply … but you have to go there for it to hold.

In the other direction of course the information processing systems of our brains makes many of its choices without involving our sentience, or informing our sentience after the fact of the decision being made allowing the sentience to create a just-so story of why it chose to do what it did. The wiki article Spinoza quote is pertinent here: “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Note however that it is as valid to say that “my” choosing to think about the color red caused certain cells to fire in certain patterns as it is to say that cells firing in certain patterns caused me to make a choice and to think of the color red. They describe the same events at different levels of analysis. This is something that we had discussed some in that Spinoza thread of yours WordMan: Spinoza’s parallelism of Thought and Substance. And of course knowing that sometimes sentience is less involved in making some choices than it thinks it is does not mean that sentience is never involved. Sentience is the best thought as the final executive captain level where the various subconscious level managers that may be wanting to decide in different manners present their cases and our Picard decides “That. Make it so.”

We also have predispositions, some stronger than others, wired in. Not all writ in stone and not all blank wax slates, but to various degrees.

So yeah. I end up again that sentience and the experience of Free Will have been useful tools for creatures of a certain intellectual complexity, each emergent of the other, allowing for greater fitness and for cultural evolution in the context of such cognitive complexity. The choices that the creatures of that certain intellectual complexity make are not always preordained or predictable from start conditions and the experience of having choice and owning the locus of control is correlated with beneficial outcomes as opposed to the common (but not only) alternative of fatalism.

84

No, for me free will means having the ability to make decisions free from the influence of factors that aren’t under my control. It also means that if someone were to ask me why I ate the forbidden apple, I’d be able to accurately say why I did it rather than having to speculate (which we are all doing whenever we give an explanation for our behavior, whether we want to acknowledge it or not).

People liken having free will to possessing a “competent, sound mind”. But I would argue that you can have a competent sound mind and be under the complete influence of your biochemistry, genetic programming, and history–the same as someone who is without “competent sound mind”. The same as any child or animal as well.

So it sounds like you’re defining free will as an exertion of self? Anyone who has a self-concept has free will? Is this correct?

If you were to meet an android who used personal pronouns and spoke of making choices, would you say it had free will?

Your definition seems to be at odds with Trinopus’s. And I’d argue with most people who assert the existence of free will.

85

But this is the traditional concept of Free Will. The brand that is taught in Sunday Schools all around the world.

No, the Sunday School teacher does not use those high-falutin’ words when drilling into his or her charges their moral duty to be good. But that is exactly what he/she means. When a sinner sins, it isn’t because they were beaten so badly as a kid that they didn’t develop proper impulse control. It isn’t because they aren’t exposed to good role models. They sin because their moral core is rotten. They decide to side with evil (the seductive reptile whispering in their ear about the virtues of fleshy red fruit) rather than siding with good for the sake of good.

“WE ALL MAKE CHOICES” is a sentiment based on this reasoning. You can choose to be “good” despite all the factors around you that are compelling you to be “bad”, since you aren’t your environment. You’re supposedly above your environment, as a spiritual, soul-possessing entity. You aren’t a mere organism awashed in biochemicals. You’re superior to that thing.

This definition of Free will is not my own idiosyncratic definition. It is the definition that most Christians are inculcated with. Free will is what makes humans worthy of special treatment from God. Beasts are mere robots carrying out hard-coded programs, which is why God doesn’t get too hot and bothered when we sacrifice them and eat them. But humans can act in opposition to their programming, according to Free Willers. This makes humans more interesting.

As someone wisely pointed out upthread, all the smart technology we have at our disposal right now can do the same thing. Complex “IF THEN” statements were not invented by human brains. If we’re going to make it so that free will is that broad of a construct, then it is such a mundane thing that it doesn’t deserve to be debated. Yet the free will debate is centuries old. Why do you think that is? Do you think the Determinists are just being argumentative for no good reason?

I don’t have any problem if people want to talk about their evidence for volition. Because ultimately, volition is a feeling. I trust people enough to trust their assessment of their own emotional state. But when people talk about having free will, my ears perk up. Are they asserting the existence of something quite mundane, or are they are making a loftier assertion about how awesome their minds are compared to everyone else? I invite you to look at John DiFool’s posts to this thread if you disagree that the latter mentality exists.

86

Unfortunately monstro what you were taught in Sunday school and that was implied as Free Will is not, in general, what most are debating when the philosophical debate of Free Will comes up. Again, it is one possible interpretation of it, as theological determinism i.e. predestination is one take on determinism, and what is also drilled in certain other Christian denominations. Neither adequately represent the range of perspectives and of thought on the subject.

It may not be your idiosyncratic definition alone but it is not the one that most who are reading and thinking of the philosophical issue are considering and is not the one that posters in this thread other than you have been discussing. To my read anyway. I could be wong.

Read the wiki link if you want to know why some people find it interesting and complex and the range of concepts covered. You may be agreeing with the op and with me that end of day it aint so much so.

87

And yes I think you interpret John DiFool’s posts differently than I do, perhaps because you come to the conversation with a different understanding of the meaning of Free Will than I do.

88

AHunter seems to be defining free will as an exertion or expression of self-intent.

Trinopus seems to be arguing that free will is a gradient. A sober person who isn’t experiencing intense emotions or physical discomfort who was raised under ideal circumstances has maximum free will. But once that person has a few drinks, all that free will gets thrown out of the window.

None of these definitions seem to jibe with your definition of free will.

So why are you singling me out?

89

Actually my understanding of what they are saying is Free Will and mine are fairly congruent.

But I will leave you be.

90

This is essentially correct, as regards my opinion. Alcohol, strong emotions, peer pressure, and other things can influence a person’s decisions, sometimes contrary to what they would decide in the absence of these distractions.

People holding a discussion in a red-painted room argue a bit more loudly and angrily than people holding the same discussion in a blue-painted room. Their behavior is influenced (but I would not say “controlled”) by their environment.

91

I dunno if I would agree with that second sentence.

I posit that people do make decisions. Just because they aren’t conscious of their decision tree does not mean that people don’t make decisions.

Personally, I don’t believe that only one course of events is possible. But if the state of my brain doesn’t change from one simulation to the next and I’m confronted with the same dilemma (eat the apple vs. orange, go left versus right, kill the intruder vs. not kill the intruder) and the same environment, then yeah, I’m gonna make the same decision in all those scenarios. Why wouldn’t I? But if there are subtle differences in those scenarios (varying levels of hunger, varying levels of fear, varying levels of education,etc.), then my decisions will be more variable.

So I believe there’s almost an infinite courses of possible events. But an individual, at any given junction, isn’t choosing from an infinite number of options. Their choices are limited to the particular scenario they are presented with. And because people are rational creatures, those choices are going to be predictable and thus not stochastic. For instance, why would I ever choose to go left when that takes me away from my destination?

Free will, by definition, defies prediction. The moment we can create a good model that predicts what you’re going to do, then you aren’t free to act any way you want. You are no different from a computer.

92

Not a self-concept. My kitty cat may not have a self-concept, or at least not akin to the kind we tend to form. But I suspect my kitty cat does things because he wants to do them.

I can never know whether the android has free will. But if the android does have free will, the android is conscious and does what it does because it wants to do it.

That’s entirely possible. I didn’t grow up with a lot of exposure to the concept of “free will”. I was heavily exposed to various forms of determinism in school and in my own independent studies. Social determinism. Biological determinism. The determinism of the particles-and-energy-and-momentum physics people. All those forms of viewing everything as having been caused by prior conditions in such a way as to render the overall picture as a sort of giant mechanical wind-up toy. I latched onto the phrase “free will” because when I first heard that two-word phrase my reaction was “yeah, that”. Which is different from being swayed by some huge tome of an essay on the subject of “free will”. For all I know, I’d disagree with the fundamentals of whatever-the-hell constitutes classical free will. What I do know is that I am in fervent disagreement with all forms of determinism. I am declaring that there is a component of the reality in which we are immersed that I describe as intentionality. not an illusory thing or some kind of echo caused by something, but a cause in and of itself OF the reality in which we live. And that I, personally, am definitely a participant in that. (By extrapolation and observation, so are you, but I can’t be sure of that, not having direct access to your experiences).

93

I’ve heard the phrase “intentional stance” used; is this similar?

I confess, at this point, I do not understand intentionality and the intentional stance. I suspect I would agree with them (and you) but I need to find out more.

re hard-core determinism, I know people who insist that radioactive atoms do not decay “at random,” but have some kind of mechanism so that their time of decay is fixed. Some sort of fuse or timer that counts down, and then the atom pops. These people are essentially rehabilitating total Newtonian determinism. (I think they’re full of prunes, and that radioactive atoms decay entirely randomly.)

94

I do as well. Whenever I study my cat’s behavior, I imagine myself being studied the same way.

Most people think my cat lacks something that I possess by virtue of being human. That “something” is free will. Because cats have no way of communicating “I”, people assume they are without consciousness and thus really are no different from a furry robot.

But I think that’s an arrogant assumption.

How do you know that other people have free will?

And I would argue that without being able to test whether your actions are caused by your conscious intentions, then your “intentionality” should not be taken at face value (except to be polite).

I mean, for 99% of stuff, it doesn’t matter what a person’s true intentions are. But before I’m going to judge someone as an evil psycho killer, I’d like to know if they intend to be an evil psycho killer, or whether there is something about them biologically that could explain their behavior better than sheer “willfulness”. Because this understanding will help me figure out what’s the best way to prevent more evil psycho killers. “Intentionality” doesn’t point to social solutions as far as I can tell.

In my opinion, the free will argument shuts down examinations into the “why” behind human behavior. A more deterministic view allows for one to say something more sophisticated than “WE ALL MAKE CHOICES!”

I don’t know physics–especially quantum physics–well enough to argue determinism from that standpoint. But I do know biology.

95

i stepped away during an interesting part.

monstro - it sounds like your description of Free Will, by definition, includes the “…and feel like shit about ourselves because of our sins.” part of it, correct? When you boil FW to “WE ALL MAKE CHOICES” (I will stop typing that in caps now ;)), you see it being used as a stick.

I see the sin part as a layer on top of the fact of FW. I see FW as much more complex than a stick.

DSeid, yes, in the debate between Harris and Dennett, DD referred to himself as a compatibilist, and SH as a pure Determinist. The tension between the two long-time friends and atheist compatriots had gotten thick on the topic.

I appreciate your further context upthread. Yes, I sound like a compatibilist in that I see D and FW as existing factors, and then focusing on their use in the everyday.

Yes, that parallelism of Thought and Substance from the Spinoza thread feels relevant here. It feels like the paradoxes at the heart of all great Inquiry will always be outside our grasp. And that’s part of what’s going on with this timeless topic.

One of these days, I will start an inquiry thread about the three levels of Reality we seem to experience - Matter, Thought, and Forms/Numbers. I can’t figure out what I can’t grok, but the existence, however illusory, of these realities in my Consciousness are the basis, I think, of my “compatibilism.” My subjective Thought, and ability to conceive of Ideals define (??) my Agency in the Material World.

Another time. My noodle is baked for now :wink:

96

You’ve sketched the standard argument against free will. It has two forks:

  1. If our choices are determined then our will is not free.
  2. If our choices are random then we have no will.

If accepted, this means free will isn’t a coherent concept.

I never saw why choices are incompatible with determinism, as some have claimed in this thread. Outcomes would be determined, but the choice must still be reached. Choices don’t fall out of the sky, as they would if choices weren’t part of a chain of cause and effect. Brains are choice making machines. Some decisions are so difficult you need ever more complex brains to solve for the best outcome, especially since you’re in an arms race with other brains. Forget breakfast foods or fashion choices. Do you support the rebel faction of the tribe or stick with the ruling faction? The losers end up with their skulls caved in. Your genes are riding on this. Good luck.

Compabitilism is the dominant position among philosophers, but they don’t embrace free will as far as I could ever tell. Their position is basically “you’re free to make the choices available to you.” This could also describe a chess playing computer program. I don’t think this scratches the itch of people who want humans to be special instead of just another collection of matter obeying the usual rules of physics.

Negative psychological effects of determinism were referenced. I always thought that was an odd reaction for subjects, since by their new understanding their behavior was as determined before they believed in determinism as after. But it doesn’t prove anything either way, just as if believing in atheism made people act immorally wouldn’t disprove atheism.

97

That that is what “determinism” means? It pretty literally is the textbook definition of it. See for example the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry:

When you state that you “don’t believe that only one course of events is possible” and that you “believe there’s almost an infinite courses of possible events” you are literally stating that you do not agree with the determinist view.

Your position, if I get it right, is in fact more a reaction against the interactionist dualist version of Free Will that you learned about (not by name) in Sunday school than anything else.
FWIW to me the cat and android example are more interesting than “Free Will yea or nay?” “All is predetermined yea or nay?” Sentience and the ability to have intentionality are very likely matters of degree and different versions but we have no metric by which to judge it in others and as has been pointed out by several several times in this thread our own experience may sometimes even be lying to us about our own, directly observed, intentionality. Likely a newborn baby’s experience of Free Will and sentience is different than a two year old’s whose is different than a ten year old’s and different than an adult’s. How would an alien sentience that looked and behaved differently than we do be able to know if we are sentient or not, if we have Free Will?

But that has been GD fodder before and is farther outside the realm of IMHO than this thread already is!

98

Yep! Our species is prone to a lot of homo sapiens chauvinism.

I don’t, not from direct experience. I can’t know for sure that anyone else is genuine conscious and aware. I can’t prove I’m not in the matrix. I have to extrapolate and put a lot of confidence in the meaning of patterns in other behavior that I recognize as analogs of my own, just as I do with the cat.

Before we can start judging someone as an evil psycho killer, we have to examine the process by which we have come to think that being a psycho killer is a bad thing. Maybe it’s a good thing and we are horribly remiss in not being pyscho killers ourselves.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and I have reasons for thinking that being a psycho killer would be, for me at least, a bad thing. But I might think differently tomorrow — situations change, there are new understandings possible and I might understand more than I do now about the advisability of being a psycho killer.

If I’m going to “judge a psycho killer”, what I’m willing to actually do is decide whether me doing something to the psycho killer is or is not a good thing. Hmm, come to think of it, I may decide to kill the psycho killer. I may decide that would be a good thing. And now I am an [del]evil[/del] psycho killer. Make that good psycho killer. I’ll do it and feel good about it, or at least marginally more good than I’d feel not doing so, or so I think, or I wouldn’t do it. I might feel conflicted about it, to be sure. But it’s possible I’d end up deciding it is worse to not kill the psycho killer than to do so and thereby become a psycho killer myself.
AND… I’m seeing another interesting pattern here. When you are exploring this question of determinism versus free will, you’re mostly considering its effect on how you view the behaviors of others. And I am exploring it first and foremost as a lens through which to view my own behavior, although I’m inclined to formulate some supposedly universal axiomatic truths and see what models make sense in my mind when I extrapolate that to other people.

99

That’s a sillygism.

Unpacked, it means “If you take anything whatsoever into account when you make a decision, that something (and not you) is responsible for your decision”. (and if you don’t take anything into account you can’t possibly have any reason for your decision so it’s random and you didn’t ‘make’ it at all).

The main error is what Alan Watts once called the “figure/ground” problem. At any given time, any person or thing is entirely surrounded by a context, and just like the border of a figure in a drawing defines the figure but also simultaneously defines everything that is not-figure, the interface between the person (etc) and its context defines them both. Yes, of course the actor who makes decisions does so in a context and you could point to the context and say “this is why you did what you did”. But the context is only what it is because of the actor, to whom you could point with equal validity and say to the context “this is why you are what you are”.

Obviously each individual person-with-free-will does not create the entirety of their context. If it were true of one individual, every other individual would be causally determined by that one individual. But that’s not what I mean. The plurality or singularity of “the actor” doesn’t erase the fundamental of interactive causality. Just as the earth (and all the other people standing on it) are attracted to me thanks to gravity, at the same time that I am attracted to the earth (including all the other folks standing on it). As with gravity, we tend to discard the direction of attraction that is towards the one individual whose situation we are considering, because it’s miniscule, but miniscule isn’t the same thing as nonexistent. Hence, while yeah, DUH, of course I am massively more influenced by the entirety of my environment (physical and otherwise) than the entirety of my environment is influenced by me, I do nevertheless have an influence on it, and it is a causal influence, hence the direction of causality is always mutual and interactive.

I make choices. I do things on purpose, of my own free will, and I influence the world that surrounds me, shaping it as it shapes me in return.

100

I see the “sin” part as the logical conclusion of FW. If we humans 1) are endowed with the ability to consciously make choices, 2) these choices are not determined by external variables (which could then be used to construct a model that can accurately predict one’s behavior), then logically it follows that people can be blamed for the decisions they make. If they kill someone, it doesn’t matter that their testosterone levels were through the roof at the time of the crime. Free Willers will say that such a person had the ability to override this condition, yet they chose not to. And thus, it is perfectly reasonable to punish them severely and not bother with medical or behavioral interventions.

It seems to me that many in this conversation are trying to backpaddle FW so that the 2nd criterion isn’t all that crucial. But it is. Determinists believe that human behavior is “determinant”. Free Willers posit that they possess the ability to defy the Determinist’s models since their “will” is not governed by a rigid algorithm (like an android’s or a cat’s). To divorce FW from this part of the definition is to–as I’ve said repeatedly-distort the entire debate so that one side is made out to be a bunch of crazies. To me, that is unfair. I’m not arguing craziness. I’m not saying that people can’t make decisions. I’m saying that people’s decisions are not random–that they can be predicted because the range of choices available to an individual at any point in time is extremely limited. The notion of free will, whether the people who cling to it recognize it or not, stands in opposition to this.