I assume that at the time anyone chose their behavior, that behavior seemed right to them, which is why they chose it. And that therefore if I understood enough of the variables and complexities of their lives, it would become apparent to me why it was that that behavior was selected.
monstro seems to be leveling a charge at Free Willers, that they (we) use “free will” to argue that another person, of whose behavior we disapprove, have no excuse for their behavior.
The arrogance in that Free Willer behavior, to me, is not that they view these miscreant people as having free will, but that they have the gall to think that another person of free will who did something did not have sufficient good reason to do it, that their behavior is already known to be “bad” before they even consider the question of why they did it.
The reciprocal arrogance of Determinists is that they tend only to apply a deterministic model of behavior to the behavior of those same miscreants. They seldom analyze the behavior of people that they regard as admirable (and thus explain it away as having nothing to do with the person but only with the external stimuli) and almost never to themselves.
I assure you, I’ve done a lot of reading about free will apart from Sunday School.
I think my view of determinism is fully compatible with the definition you laid out.
Take a scenario where you have to make a decision. Let’s say you’re standing at the register in a store about to check out, and you determine that you’ve forgotten your wallet at home.
Say an alien entity create simulations of this moment of time in a holodeck. They kidnap you without you being aware and drop you in it. For all you know, you’re still in the store because their simulation is quite realistic.
Their initial hypothesis is that even when the simulation is set up exactly as it was in the real thing (the state of your brain is the same, the state of your body is the same, the environmental variables in the store are the same, the same cashier, etc.), the decision you make to deal with the forgotten wallet will not be fixed. They imagine that in Simulation Run 1, you will ask the cashier if she can hold your purchases so that you can go home and retrieve your wallet. But maybe in Simulation Run 2, you will drop your things and run out of the store in a blind crazy panic. They draw this hypothesis because they assume that humans possess free will (like they do!) and thus don’t have predictable decision-making.
So they are shocked to find that when they keep all elements the same, you make the same decision (ask the cashier to hold your stuff while you go home and retrieve your wallet).
So then they start to tweak some things. They run a simulation where your best friend is standing in line behind you and see how that changes your decision. They run a simulation where you have low blood sugar levels and see how that changes your decision. They run a simulation where you have a memory of being embarrassed by a store clerk after asking a simple request. And to their surprise, they see that your decisions vary from each simulation. Moreover, modifications to your mental state are the ones that have the biggest effect.
They are able to construct a model that predicts which environmental and biochemical variables influence your decision making. The model works so well that they can predict what you’re going to do when presented with any problem.
Do you think the aliens have determined (hehe) that you are a free will-possessing organism? Or will they conclude that your behavior is deterministic, just a bit more complicated than a robot or a cat?
So when I say that I can entertain the idea that there are “near infinite courses of possible events”, I can imagine that a near infinite number of simulation runs of the universe would provide a near infinite number of different outcomes–provided that the runs are different from one another. Determinists arguing from a quantum physics standpoint probably would say that this wouldn’t happen. I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. What I am saying, though, is that as long as the external variables change, then the decisions we make aren’t fixed. If the external variables remain the same, we will make the same decisions since our decisions are based on those external variables, not randomness.
To use another example, this one rooted in Sunday School, you can run that Garden of Eden simulation a million times and Eve is going to eat that damn apple in all of them if everything is kept the same. You’ve got to do something different–like show her the consequences of eating that apple–to alter her decision-making. She didn’t eat the apple because she was being “randomly willful”. She ate the apple for specific reasons seated in her context. Change her context and the situation plays out differently.
Aaand (referencing your sin from FW comment) there you go again, monstro.
Someone in your childhood church may have said those things, but that is not overall what those who argue that there is such thing as Free Will posit at all and, by definition, determinism, posits that people actually making decisions is not possible. No, it does not mean that some portion of behaviors in certain circumstances are predictable.
But let’s come back to earth from the lofty heights of the towers of philosophy for a moment. Because, returning to the actual op, they do not really matter.
Societies (and I include non-human social creatures here, whether they have sentience or not) have never required the notion of Free Will to evolve systems of rules and punishments for those who break the rules. The concept of “sin” is not begat out of “Free Will”; it existed probably before the first human had any concept of a god that cared about them as an individual at all. The concept that what is and will be is preordained, justifying caste systems and a host of evils, did not require philosophers to articulate the concept of predestination.
Few of us humans spend much energy thinking about Free Will and predestination yet we are able to have empathy, compassion, and understanding that there are root causes for events, contributing factors to behaviors, events that are outside our control, and a societal need to hold those who break rules to account in order for society to functions … to various degrees.
Free Will or predestination concepts, articulation of “I think therefore I am”, did not come first, before people were forced to or decided to sell themselves for sex and others decided that was immoral.
I’m not as well-versed on the FW vs determinist debate as my sister (monstro), but from what I have read on the subject, the above assumption should be questioned.
On the surface it seems the behaviors that we choose are chosen because they seem better than alternatives. For instance, I decided to nurse a crying baby at 5a this morning rather than staying in bed another two hours while she screamed her head off. Or heading to the closest casino in my nightgown to gamble away $1000. Out of the infinite possibilities before me, I chose the one that aligned best with my values as a human being, and thus, my morality can be assessed by that choice.
But there is evidence that many times (if not always), we decide first and then our mind creates a rationale for it. In other words, we move through life making a million tiny (and not so tiny) decisions subconsciously. I assume that I made the conscious decision to feed my daughter in spite of the ungodly hour because of my parental values. But its also likely that when confronted w/ a certain stimulus (her cries), the neural instruction to feed her that is transmitted by my reptilian subconsciousness is so strong it prevents me from doing anything else except feed her. I assign my behavior to my values, when in truth, my behavior is a product of my stimulus-response-based mental programming. Programming that has largely been shaped by forces outside of my control.
If I had a gambling addiction, the choice between feeding my daughter vs going to a casino would actually be a question I would have to seriously entertain. Since I don’t have that addiction, it effectively means the casino option doesn’t exist. Neither does almost an infinite number of other options.
I’m not saying that all Free Willers do this. I’m saying that the believing in FW fosters this kind of judgment. And it frequently fosters it. Every time I hear some version of “WE ALL MAKE CHOICES”, it is coupled with condemnation and tongue-clucking.
FW is what enables us to divide people into “good” and “evil” camps. Good people choose good for goodness sake (not to avoid societal stigma, not to get a ticket to heaven, but because they want to good). Evil people choose evil because they don’t want to be good. If a person doesn’t want to be good, then it becomes easier to justify oppressive action against them.
I disagree a whole lot. Medical and psychological researchers don’t just study “miscreants”, but also people who are healthy and high functioning. The study of pathology is incomplete if you don’t have an understanding of “non-pathology”. Models aren’t constructed using just “miscreant” data. You have to data collected from a range of individuals to be able to pinpoint the correlations and risk factors.
I do agree that deterministic laymen can make the mistake of viewing individuals as if they are the group they belong to. But prejudice and stereotyping is not a logical conclusion of determinism. A person might have a suite of risk factors for psychopathy. But there is no rule that says you can’t mitigate the risk.
Again, I’m wondering why you are singling me out and not AHunter. My definition of FW is much more consistent with the traditionally and conventionally held view of FW than his is. Which is fine, since people are free to define terms however they wish (I suppose…). But I am finding it strange that I am being made out to be the iconoclast here. Do you think cats have free will? Androids? If you do, then you don’t believe in the traditional view of FW any more than I do. If you don’t, then you should be arguing against both AHunter and me. I really don’t like being singled out. I am feeling unfairly ganged-up on.
At any rate, there are determinists of many persuasions, just like (as this thread demonstrates) FWers of many persuasions. It doesn’t bother me to speak of people making decisions. I could speak of "results of biologically-engrained algorithms), but that would be pretty awkward. I could speak of “events” or “actions”, but those don’t always fit. So I resort to “decisions”. I don’t think this makes me a non-determinist, though. At least, not any more than you divorcing culpability from FW makes you a non-FWer.
Cite? I know we aren’t in GD, but I’m curious if my knowledge of the history jibes with yours.
I disagree. I see lack of empathy and compassion all around me. I can’t spend five minutes on the internet without seeing evidence of this.
Most of us have parents and family members who don’t give a flying fig about excuses since “WE ALL MAKE CHOICES.” Consider yourself a lucky person if you have never been scolded in this way. I would assert that you are in the minority here, though.
The OP wanted to know why FW vs. determinism matters in the real world–as opposed to the lofty ivory tower of philosophy. It matters because, IMHO, whichever philosophy one leans towards determines (hehehe) how compassionate a person is and open-minded they are about social remedies. I don’t discount that people can believe in FW and be full of compassion and kindness and love, etc. But in the hands of the average person, it is used as a cudgel. Deterministic approaches aren’t nearly as backwards thinking, IMHO.
From the way you worded it, you seem to be attributing a different degree of… something…authenticity? identity? …to the conscious mind than to the entire mental process of the person.
The person is still deciding (“first”) and then creates a conscious rationale for it which is not the original reason. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a reason. There’s no reason to privilege the conscious rational mind. In fact the process you described is exactly how human minds work, even those of scientists in the laboratory: we recognize patterns in a preverbal moment, get an “aha” moment whose emotional content is the keypoint of realizing we have fit something into place, then post-facto we abstract that into words, expressing it to ourselves in the terms that the conscious rational mind utilizes.
It’s the emotive preverbal self that is the primary locus of free will. (That’s why the kitty cats and other beasties are also creatures of free will).
Do bacteria possess FW too? At what point on the evolutionary tree do you surmise that organisms developed free will?
There is some inconsistency in your argumentation. You admit that you can’t know if robots or other people have free will–that you can only speak for yourself based on your own experiences. But here you are, granting FW to kitties and other beasties! So are you saying that we all possess the potential for FW, or that we are all creatures with free will?
Those aren’t the same thing in my book. Even as a determinist, I can allow for the possibility of FW. I don’t see evidence of it and I don’t know how we’d prove it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in humans or some other lifeform.
I don’t have any cognitive comprehension of the notion “choose evil”. If one chooses it, one has selected it as “good”, or at least “better than any perceived alternative”, on some level. That which is evil to one’s self is, by definition, bad for one’s self.
Socially shared notions of some established code of good and evil are just that: socially shared notions. I acknowledge that some people do abrogate their responsibility to make their own assessment, but even then they do so mostly on an abstract conscious level and on another level they are still making their own assessment of what the best thing to do is. ETA: there are no “evil people”; their existence is a social myth. There are some confused people, but we always need to be careful even then in assuming we know which ones they are, as it might be us and not the ones whose behavior we find disturbing.
I may have overstated the lack of sociological interest in why upstanding citizens and heroes and leaders do the things that they do. (I still think most of the focus of deterministic theories are to explain “deviant” behavior though). I’m a sociology type myself, having done the social studies majors and having pursued a PhD in Sociology for awhile.
For any theory of the individual within society to parse for me, it has to explain the sociologist who is studying the individual within society; it has to provide a cogent framework for the sociologist to understand herself, and in erasing her intentionality and allocating only externalia as the cause of her people-studying behavior it fails catastrophically to do so. The moment one’s motivations in any endeavor become fully understood as not one’s own (not chosen by the self), that delegitimizes them, it strips away identification of the self with the endeavor. (If you can cause someone to comprehend that the reason they want to buy yonder Gizmo at the store is not because they need it or would find it useful but because they’ve been enticed by the advertising, you will typically cause them to opt not to buy it, because you’ve delegitimized their sense that they want it).
I do think there’s a convergence zone. If, in the determinist’s search for the exact set of stimuli that cause me to (let’s say) believe in social equality for all people, that determinist ends up putting the unabridged total of my life experiences from start to finish onto the plate as “the stimuli”, then yeah that “explains” my choices and my beliefs and my opinions and my actions. But then we’re back to the figure-ground issue: I caused the sum total of my life experiences just as they caused me; they are the “outside surface” of who I am, they are me, and as such that’s where my cognition and awareness and, yes, free will, reside. So on that level of granularity, both determinism and free will are accurate representations. If you decrease the granularity, the free will experience is the experience that we have. We are not capable of experiencing ourselves as the dependent result of stimuli over which we have no control; as we even approximate it, we become despondent, miserable, depressed, incapacitated by it. Whereas a reduced-granularity sense of self, one that just does a vague wave-of-hand in the direction of “yeah my experiences make me who I am” and assumes the conscious self is a legitimate self making choices, not only works fine for everyday purposes, it is intrinsically self-legitimating. It is our truth about our own experience, and it is the correct and accurate and viable understanding of what we do.
Free will: I do what I do because I choose to do it.
Viable (granular) determinism: The unabridged sum total of all my experiences that have caused me to be who I am caused me to choose to do what I do.
Nonviable (less granular) determinism: My group identity in some category or class or other discernable variable, or some set of variables or specific and finite set of stimuli caused me to do what I do.
I believe we have free will only because of the large amount of data we process that steers us toward our decisions. After a while it becomes so finite that it could only be described as free will. A person with less life experiences would have less free will. Determinism picks things a part to a level beyond being rational. The same answer would go for consciousness, you can only split a hair so many times before it is no longer a hair.
First, I wonder whether there’s any actual evidence for or against this claim about a correlation between belief in determinism vs. free will and level of compassion.
But the claim that you’re making here (and that is alluded to in the OP) seems to be pretty much the same as that which is described more fully at the following link I found (which I disagree with, and I’ll explain why): Free Will vs. Determinism as the Core of Political Disagreement
Here are the two big problems I have with this guy’s assertion.
First, he posits a dichotomy where there’s really a continuum. I strongly believe that the reality is a combination of #1 and #2, and that keeping that balance in mind leads to much better results than focusing exclusively on either extreme. A pure belief in #1 could naturally lead to fatalism and personal irresponsibility, since there’s nothing a person can do, no choice they can make, to change their circumstances.
As per the fundamental attribution error that I mentioned upthread, I think there’s a tendency for people to err in what you would call the “free will” direction when evaluating other people’s situations, and to err in the “determinism” direction when evaluating their own.
But second, I think he (and maybe you) are really talking about external vs. internal locus of control rather than determinism vs. free will. The latter really is a dichotomy. Either everything people do is completely determined by the prior state of the universe*, or they have some ability to exert their will and decide between different courses of action.
And in the former case, it doesn’t make sense to talk about our “fundamental responsibility” or “moral obligation,” because we literally could not have acted (or even believed) otherwise than as we did. If free will is an illusion, then so are moral obligations and responsibilities.
*(with possibly some randomness thrown in at the quantum level, but that’s not us making choices)
Yes, I single out consciousness from the subconscious when talking about free will because I believe free will requires intentionality, awareness, and volition. You need these things to make a meaningful choice, right? These are properties of the conscious mind, not the subconscious.
But in my example, the reason I’m hauling myself out of bed to nurse my baby rather than sleeping in isn’t because I’ve weighed the two choices and consciously determined her well-being comes before my desire to sleep. Rather, it’s because millions of years of maternal instincts are instructing me to nurse in response to her hungry-cry. Because this instinctual instruction overpowers other competing messages floating about in my head, I really have no choice but to feed my baby. So can you really say I’m “choosing” to feed her rather than sleep in? Not in a meaningful way, in my opinion.
Of course there is. My brain is controlling my heart beat right now. It could decide to stop at any time. Is this free will in action? If not, why not, if as you say we shouldn’t privilege the conscious rational mind?
I think most people would disagree with you that animals have FW. Conventional wisdom is that animals are slaves to their instincts. When someone is attacked by a tiger, we don’t question the tiger’s motivations and morality. We say it’s a tiger being tiger. But when a person does something like shoot up a church full of people, we don’t say that’s a man being a man. We assume that people are uniquely equipped to rise above their biological and psychological inclinations, in a way that animals are not.
It feels like this thread is digging in, when my fundamental question about how to accept my perceived reality of FW and D in the everyday would head in a different direction.
monstro, you yourself acknwledge upthread that you feel agency. At that point, isn’t that enough? The questions becomes how to use that feeling. Using it to define sin is one use. There are others. I wonder where the discussion would need to go to resolve otherwise.
Yes, I hesitated to respond to anything you wrote in this thread for quite a while because almost invariably my interactions with have you reacting like I am somehow picking on you.
Again, I read AHunter’s take on FW to be roughly congruent with my understanding of it. He is not defining FW as something divorced from cause and effect. I also see him as working hard to understand how others may be meaning something different than he is by the term. To my read he is not telling other posters what they think; he is explaining what he thinks and trying to understand the other perspectives expressed. He is not telling people that what he believes is “irrefutable.”
I do not see your definition of FW as “much more consistent with the traditionally and conventionally held view of FW than his is.”
Now my take has been that FW is something the sentient mind does but his point just made is something that does give me pause to consider. Sentience is just the tip of the iceberg of how minds work. Is FW defined as what gets decided there with intentionality by the self or not? I think I define FW as that and I do not think that AHunter would say that I am wrong to and that that is not what FW means even though we conclude differently.
If your experience is that exposure to the concepts determinism results in people having more empathy then I cannot argue with your experience. I do not see that and see determinism more often used as post hoc justification for what inequalities and to justify the lack of feeling any personal responsibility to work towards a more perfect world. I look at history and see both perspectives being used to justify the haves position over the have nots and inequality beginning long before Big Gods moralizing religions with concerns over the fate of our everlasting souls ever emerged. YMMV.
As far as “Societies (and I include non-human social creatures here, whether they have sentience or not) have never required the notion of Free Will to evolve systems of rules and punishments for those who break the rules.” I will reference you to wolf packs and lion prides let alone non-human primate groups that have clear rules that are followed and enforced.
The idea that some behaviors are “wrong” predates humanity.
As for “The concept of ‘sin’ is not begat out of ‘Free Will’; it existed probably before the first human had any concept of a god that cared about them as an individual at all.” I’ll reference you to thesetwo reviews on current thinking of early religious development. The original god concepts are thought to not likely be about individuals.
I doubt the Hazda spend much time pondering Free Will v Determinsm. Gods caring about what we did was not required as part of the birth of humans living in groups following rules or for the birth of supernaturalism.
Unrelated to this thread both articles are interesting reads btw.
My carpal tunnel syndrome has been acting up so I’m not up to writing at length, but I did actually want to step in to briefly address the main question in your OP.
FWIW I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and did a senior seminar on free will and determinism. I’d say that if your goal is improve your ability to make good choices then exploring this issue will probably be of little value to you. I’d suggest looking into practical reasoning instead.
I think you may be overestimating the importance of this debate to philosophy. Many philosophers hold a compatibilist view – that is, free will is compatible with determinism and it doesn’t have to be just one or the other. I suspect there are also many philosophers who don’t find the subject very interesting to begin with. For those who are interested, one big reason is that it may help us to better understand how the human mind works and indeed how the universe works.
The feeling is “enough” inasmuch as 99% of my actions go.
But when I’m experiencing problem? And not a trivial problem like whether to eat the apple or eat the orange, but something major like suicidal urges or self-destructive habits? I let go of the “I think therefore I am” stuff and try to examine the factors that are leading me to my outcomes (or decisions, pick whichever one works for you). I go to the doctor. I ask the people around me to give me insight into my actions and behavior, as they see it from their vantage point. I don’t sit around and wait for my “will” to get right. I try to change my context, because only then can my decisions change.
I don’t find a need to keep “I think therefore I am” in the forefront of my thoughts. The sense of agency happens quite naturally, without me trying. But I DO have to remind myself that I am biological organism that is governed by chemistry and physical laws. That is NOT natural or automatic idea, so that’s why I’ve spent so much time arguing for it.
In essense, “I think therefore I am” is only useful if someone is suffering from an existential crisis. If a person is not in such a mode, I fail to see why they have to “do” anything with it.
I’m telling them that their claims are not provable. And they aren’t. You can’t tell me that you know you have FW but Person X or Animal Y or Android Z doesn’t, unless you have empirical, objective evidence. Which no one in this thread has offered up. Logical proof is still an integral part of philosophy, is it not?
It is irrefutable that there is no objective empirical evidence of FW. If this were the case, there would be no debate here.
And that is fine and great and everything, really. But I disagree. A whole lot.
I see people defining FW so that it fits a worldview that isn’t all that ridiculous. And that is fine and great and everything too. But listen closely to what people who argue from literal and metaphorical pulpits say about human behavior and you will realize that their ideologies are not speaking to a FW of volition (“I feel as if I’m affecting change, so that’s good enough for me!”) No. It’s a FW where humans have the power to make change that is not predicated on their genes or environment. And this is the definition of FW that I find objectionable.
If that definition of FW is objectionable to you, then we’ve been arguing for no reason. But if you think that you, just because you say you can, have the ability to defy a deterministic model that is constructed using genes+environment, then you are arguing in support of something that is based on feeling but not reason. Theories that are based on feelings aren’t convincing to me.
You’d have to ask AHunter3. If he has no problem saying an android or a kitty (or maybe even a bacterium–he never answered me on that) have FW, then I’m guessing sentience isn’t a prerequisite for FW in AHunter3’s use of the term. He has also said that someone who is intoxicated still possesses FW, which is at odds with the commonly held use of the term. If sentience isn’t required, consciousness isn’t required, and sound mind isn’t required to display FW, then I’m seriously struggling to define what it means to have FW, in your view. Does my car have FW? Surely at some point it becomes a meaningless concept if everything that can affect change, whether in accordance to its programming or not, has FW.
In another inception of this thread, a poster said he was comfortable saying that his several-month old grandkid has FW now that he is showing signs of understanding cause-and-effect. But he was doubtful that my cat, who shows the same signs, has FW.
So it really sounds to me like it is the people who assert FW that need to work on a consistent definition. It makes for a needlessly complicated debate if at every turn, someone can accuse of me using the wrong definition and then argue something that is fundamentally no different than what I’m arguing, except that they think their argument opposes the deterministic position. And it becomes even more frustrating when people gloss over the differences “on their side” just so they can argue against me, even though those discrepancies are not trivial as they are at the root of the thing I’m arguing against.
You seem to be belittling your “self” in this scenario.
The entity that is your mind makes the choice to go to your doctor, to choose the one that works with you, to ask for insights and to be open (or not open) to them, to not wait around for your “will” to get right, to change your context.
Those are choices your self makes using your sentience because you realize that you have the freedom to will yourself to use your accumulated experiences and wisdom to make choices that will help you. To the degree that you may respond “those choices were constrained by by biology and my chemistry and were not a result just of my will” the FWers here would mostly respond, well your biology and your chemistry are you, just described at a different, always parallel or at least constantly circular, level.
No, I’m acknowledging that my self isn’t just the “self” I recognize. It’s not just my identity or my “I am”. My self is my entire context.
What was the trigger for this cascade of events?
The answer is: Something not contained in me. Something OUTSIDE of me. Perhaps I watched a documentary movie about mental illness and it taught me something, thereby eliciting a change in my brain.
Maybe someone yelled at me for putting myself down, and the resulting emotions triggered the cascade.
Maybe I caught a whiff of the fragrance my mother used to wear when I was a baby, and that triggered the cascade.
Whatever the trigger was, it wasn’t me. And without that trigger, my outcomes would be the same.
When you flip a light switch, is the electrical system making a choice? Or does the switch initiate a cascade of events that result in an outcome?
My position is that I don’t know. When I’m speaking about experiences informally, I’m fine with saying I made choices. But in actuality, I don’t know if that’s the best way to phrase it. And I’m 100% okay with this.
I disagree. Because it’s not like I spent any time deliberating–not really. I remember a time when I was quite adamant about not taking meds. I’d read about the pros and cons, because I’m the type of person that likes to research the pros and cons of various positions. I’d listen to people telling me about how beneficial they are, because I’m the type of person who listens to personal experiences. But I was still adamant about not taking anything. And then one day, I wasn’t resistant anymore. I don’t know how that happened, but I know I didn’t make a choice for that it happen. Just like any other preference, it just came into being. I’m guessing all the information I was exposed to for all those years combined with the misery I was experiencing finally culminated in my subconscious mind letting go of the negative valence it had attached to medication. But this is just speculation.
And to be honest, I feel like equating self with all biology and all chemistry is what FWers do to “win” the argument. It makes sense for a determinist to define “self” as the sum total of the parts of an organism, including its history and environment. But FWers makes a big to-do about consciousness and volition. If FW doesn’t require these things, then all organisms have FW. If all organisms have FW, then why did John Difool call me out for having a simple monkey brain, like that was supposed to mean something terrible? Why does Trinopus believe that FW is a property of being human, if all biological processes are evidence of FW?
You believing that all these disparate notions of FW are essentially the same thing is kinda giving me a headache.
So are you saying that we all possess the potential for FW, or that we are all creatures with free will?