No, I don’t think there is any choice other than free will.
In answer to the OP: “There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny.” 
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side…
(So, that answers that. No free will. We are all bound to the force)
I’m prepared to dissent with you, but let’s define our terms first. What do YOU mean when you say “free will”?
I know what I mean when I say “free will”, but this isn’t going to be much fun if we mean completely different things.
Some people (on this very board, no less) consider free will to be a ludicrous notion because either you did something for a reason, in which case the reason caused your behavior and you weren’t free to do otherwise, or else you did something for no freaking reason, just an utterly random behavior, in which case you did not freely choose your behavior, it’s random.
There are many people who reject free will because they consider the entire context (social, physical, historical, cultural, etc) to be self-evidently the cause of all of our actions because otherwise we’re saying we’re operating in a vacuum.
Then there are the clockwork reductionists who describe the universe as a vast assortment of particles that have energy states and where the state of the universe at moment n is directly determined by the position and momentum of its components at moment n-1 so gee everything is determinism hence no free will.
I’m prepared to argue against these viewpoints but you’ll have to be prepared to consider that I’ve already encountered those perspectives and do not find them persuasive. If you’re coming at it from a completely new and different angle, I’m interested in becoming acquainted with it.
So far you seem primarily concerned with justice and “evil”. Be prepared to step back from the notion that any person’s actions can be described as objectively evil. If you really want to argue against draconian punishment (the death penalty for instance) or on behalf of forgiveness, I should warn you that I’m already onboard with those sentiments but have an almost zero-tolerance attitude towards folks who want to argue for a philosophical point “because they like the things that ‘believing’ it would let them conclude”. (Yes, I’m an anti-punishment moral relativist who believes in free will— get used to it!)
Wouldn’t it be fair, though, since you’re the one to insist on clean definitions, if you gave yours first?
It probably would be fair, yes.
I personally consider “free will” to mean that the agent in question has the ability to analyze criteria and, taking into account aspects of their internal state like current knowledge and personal preferences, alter its reactions based on the criteria and considered analysis thereof.
Many might consider this definition unusual, because among other things it’s completely compatible with determinism, but I like it because it’s seems to match up with what people actually mean when they say “free will”. Certainly “free will” doesn’t mean “acts randomly”, because people don’t act randomly; they act based on their thoughts and internal cognitive and physical state. Even if there do happen to be some microscopic random events occurring in the human brain, they certainly don’t significantly effect human cognition, because people aren’t spazzing out and randomly flailing their limbs everywhere as random urges overtake them.
So yeah - free will, by my definition, doesn’t decouple you from your preferences, opinions, and beliefs, and doesn’t require you to ignore these things to choose freely. Presented with a choice between a bowl of your favorite food and a bowl of bovine fecal matter, free will doesn’t mean you’re going to choose to eat the cow pie half the time.
Going back to the OP, I’d say that the fact that men commit more crimes than women doesn’t present any sort of argument that people don’t have free will. I’d say that it means that society, culture, capability, and opportunity have created situations where men and women assess their personal situations and options and beliefs and opinions, and as a result of their free-will type assessments of these inputs the men choose to commit crimes more often than women do, for various reasons.
For a person to be robbed of free will by my definition, they’d have to lose their ability to analyze situations (like say by being killed), or have their mental processes deliberately altered and manipulated by an outside source. The gold standard for this would of course be if a tiny man set up shop in there with a control panel and a steering wheel, but you could make a fair argument that a person can surrender their free will to a cigarette.
I don’t think there’s strong objective evidence for the existence of human free will. It certainly feels like 1) we’re consciously controlling what we do, 2) we are fully aware of the “why” behind what what we do, 3) we have an infinite buffet of choices to choose from at any juncture, 4) our contemplation of these choices occurs consciously, without any invisible weighting by our subconscious, and 5) our behavior isn’t predictable. But we have no proof of any of this. All we have is what our senses and socialization tells us exists.
Well, actually, no, we practice a huge amount of self-deceit in that regard. We make up a lot of stories, complete fables, for why we make certain decisions. There have been many (rather terrifying!) psychology experiments that bear this out.
We have some significant knowledge of our own “whys,” but we are far from “fully aware.” This is another way in which free will is limited. We are often our own worst enemies.
“Free will”, as I use the term, means that something occurred because a consciousness chose it. There may be another valid explanation for why that something took place, perhaps a deterministic one, but in order for free will to exist it has to be genuinely true that it took place because of the operation of a conscious mind making a choice. (It can’t be an illusion that that is the reason it transpired, in other words)
A synonym for “free will” is volition. The doing of something on purpose.
A fully deterministic model leaves no room for any of that taking place. (Unless the consciousness in question is integrated into “what does the determining”, at any rate).
Volition is a feeling. When we act in accordance to our conscious desires, we say we have committed an act of volition. But we have no way of knowing whether we are truly acting out a conscious command as opposed to acting out an unconscious command that merely feels like it was generated consciously.
At any rate, I don’t think most people use “free will” as a synonym for volition. I say this because most people reserve the term “free will” for sane, sober adults, while extending volition to anyone who isn’t in a coma. When determinists posit that criminals do bad things not because they are morally bad, but because they lack the ability to make better choices, they aren’t saying criminals act involuntarily. They are saying that these individuals operate on faulty programs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with their consciousness. The problem lies with their unconscious.
You’re going to have to flesh this statement out some more, because I am not understanding the leap you’re making. How exactly does a fully deterministic model deprive anyone of either a consciousness or a sensation that their actions are consistent with their conscious desires?
But doesn’t that just kick the can down the road? I mean, what is ‘choice’? Is it enough for there to have been a choice if a conscious agent has the subjective feeling of having chosen? Or does there have to be a genuine alternative option—a real ‘could have done otherwise’ under identical circumstances?
Furthermore, restricting free will to conscious deliberation seems in tension with current neuroscientific thought, e.g. the famous Libet experiments. I don’t think, as some do, that they challenge the notion of free will itself, but they do seem to build a strong case that choices are predominantly unconscious.
Do you mean ‘because of’ in a causal sense? If so, do you then believe in causal overdetermination, since you allow for there to simultaneously be a deterministic account?
The past, I think it’s fair to say, is fully determined. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any trouble in me saying that I ordered pizza yesterday on purpose, of my own volition. Why should that cease to be true if we’re not talking about the past anymore?
OP, if you’re going to throw out a term like “free will”, you need to define it. Otherwise this is going nowhere. There’s a huge gap between “life is inherently deterministic” and “our genes have no influence on how we think”, for example, so the classic definition of “free will” seems a bit… odd.
Not as I’m using the term.
• If we say we committed an act of volition but we didn’t, we’re wrong. I’m not talking about the feeling but the fact of volition.
• When I spoke of “consciousness” I did not mean to distinguish between conscious and “subconscious” or “unconscious”. I’m not a Freudian. When I refer to the conscious mind I am including any and all cognitive processes that are capable of thinking and/or feeling. I really should not have used “conscious” in fact. Asleep and dreaming, I possess the characteristic that I meant; a rock, presumably, does not.
Yeah, which is why I said it’s important & necessary to define terms. Drunks have free will while they’re plastered.
A fully deterministic model states that no one anywhere at any time is doing anything “on purpose” wherein the reason the thing got done is that they chose to do it. It says instead that anything that anyone does is causally determined by stimuli or by the location and momentum of things just prior to the event. That choice itself is an illusion. If choice is an illusion, there is no doing of anything whatsoever of one’s own volition.
I have DEFINED free will as the situation where the reason something takes place IS that an agent chose it.
How we know whether that is actually the case is not germane to the definition itself.
The problem there is “identical circumstances”. A whole lot of what one person might label “identical circumstances” could also be labeled “the self that is choosing”. Alan Watts pointed out the figure-ground problem with identity. In most free will vs determinism conversations, it comes round to this, a discussion of Self, or the need for such a discussion at any rate.
To say “free will” (or at least for ME to say “free will”, what I mean by it) is that THAT WHICH IS CONSCIOUS does indeed do things on purpose, that something somewhere is happening because someone or something that has awareness has chosen that it happen.
I didn’t mean to leave that impression, see prevous post of mine. I’m not differentiating between conscious and “unconscious thought”. I should have said awareness, perhaps.
I do not believe in causal determination or overdetermination as “the real thing”. I think a causal explanation of events has its useful purposes but it’s a lousy model for understanding our own behaviors. In examining our own, free will is the more useful model.
What do you mean by “the past is fully determined”? Can you unpack that? We can view the passage of time like a pencil or a ruler, with 7/20/2017 a few microns to the left of 7/22/17; “future” and “past” aren’t characteristics of the pencil (or of a part of the pencil), they are characteristics of the “now mark”. Or we can view the passage of time from the “now mark” in which case there is no past and there is no future: those are things that “were but no longer are” and things that “haven’t happened yet”. There is no “the past” in the sense of determinism vs free will.
The non-existence of free will may have few implications for the way that we go about our everyday lives and make decisions. But it has important implications for criminal justice. There is no justification for purely retributive punishment without free will.
But there’s no justification for condemning retributive punishment either. Without free will, the criminal had no choice but to commit the crime, but also, we had no choice but to punish him the way we did.
I recognize that that’s what you’ve done, it just doesn’t seem terribly useful—choice, to me, seems scarcely less ambiguous than free will, and in fact, fraught with the same problems. It doesn’t seem that I’ve gotten any closer to what your idea of free will actually amounts to—it’s like if you used the word ‘flurb’, and I asked you what you mean by that, and you defined flurb as ‘a thing that glurbs’. Since I don’t really know what you mean by ‘glurb’, while you’ve given a perfectly sensible definition, it’s not one that helps me a whole lot—hence my asking what you mean by ‘choice’.
self.
How so? To me, ‘identical circumstances’ has a completely well-defined notion: all facts about the universe—or at the very least, all relevant facts—are exactly the same. How that could be labeled ‘the self that does the choosing’ is obscure to me; it doesn’t have anything to do with self, or with choice.
But must it be aware of making that choice? Because if so, then I think that Libet’s experiments pose a serious difficulty for your model, as our awareness typically lags behind our choices; and if not, then I fail to see the relevance of consciousness/awareness.
To me, saying ‘awareness’ would suggest even more that you’re proposing that an agent is exercising their free will only if they are consciously aware of their choice, so I suspect there is still some disconnect regarding terminology here.
And yet, you talk about reasons why something happens—which to me is all that’s meant by ‘cause’, at least in a broad sense.
The past being fully determined merely means that all the facts about the past are fixed; after all, that’s what poses the problem for free will in deterministic models: that all facts are completely fixed, due to following from the already-fixed facts within the present; hence, there is no opening for choice. There are no contingencies regarding the past, while most accounts of free will require future contingencies—things that may happen—which however are absent in deterministic models.
The point that since we don’t seem to have a problem with representing things as freely chosen with respect to the past, the same should hold for a fixed future, goes back to St. Augustine, IIRC, in his discussion of the apparent irreconcilability of God’s omniscience with man’s freedom (and thus, culpability for sin).
Many of us believe that the future is not fully determined, but is still open to possibilities.
One variant of this is the “many worlds” idea, of various cosmological stripes, where there may be several different outcomes to any decision. Maybe I’ll have pizza…or maybe I’ll have burgers.
This might also apply to the past: there’s a world out there where you didn’t, in fact, order pizza, but went out for sushi.
Time’s “funnel” still appears to point only one way: you can only “interact” (so to speak) with one past, but there still may be many futures open to you.
How do you establish that fact?
It is not “Freduian” to acknowledge that cognition emerges from processes that happen outside of our awareness.
You do understand that you have a rather unorthodox view of free will, right? In your view, anything that possesses a modicum of thought and feeling and movement automatically possesses free will. Not just “will”, but free will. So babies possess free will. Drunks possess free will. People with damaged amygdala possess free will. People who have been brainwashed or hypnotized possess free will. A robot who claims to have thoughts and feelings has free will. Compared to the conventional notion of free will, your definition is very watered-down.
Surely you would not judge the baby’s decision-making the same as you would a non-baby’s, or the person with no amygdala the same as the person with an amygdala. If you are able to concede that we don’t possess the same amount of this thing you’re calling “free will”, then this means you understand there are criteria beyond self-professed thoughts and feelings that determine how much “will” an individual has. Anyone can claim that they or someone else committed an act under their own volition and claim that they were free to make other choices. But for someone to actually know that they have this power, they need objective proof. Without this proof, all they have are their feelings.
The determinists argue that while there is no proof that we freely make choices, we do have plenty of evidence that when factors A, B, and C occur together, there’s a high probability that Person X will do Y. That is more parsimonious explanation than “Person X chose to do Y because that’s what Person X wanted to do”, since it does not require us to give any weight to the testimony of Person X, who isn’t a reliable narrator.
For someone to be able to convince me I have free will, they have to convince me that my decisions cannot be predicted based on variables that are outside of my awareness (like my hormone and blood sugar levels). Because if my behavior is that predictable, then I am indistinguishable from a computer program or a bacterium–two things that I hope we can agree don’t possess a will, let alone free will.
People act based on events that happened on the past. Alter any number of those events and re-do the scenario, and the resulting action may or may not be different. But keep the events the same and the outcome will always be the same. And this makes complete sense to me. To believe otherwise is to believe that a person behaves randomly, in a vacuum, without respect to anything in his or her environment, including the events leading up to the situation. I don’t think a fully deterministic model explicitly “states” anything about choices done “on purpose”. It just doesn’t assume “on purpose” is a meaningful variable.
Person X turns left not because that’s where he wants to go, but because his destination is in that direction. An observer sees a multitude of choices he could have made. But to Person X’s decision-making apparatus, there was only one the whole time. So he didn’t even have to make a decision or a choice. Now, ask Person X if he had a choice in the matter and of course he’ll say yes because people like to think they have freedom, and it’s easy to see all available the options after the fact. But if we know he’s always going to go left when he leaves the office building at 5:15PM, how much weight should we give his claim? We certainly don’t have any proof that he’s exerting any free will.