I disagree. The absence of free will does not equate to fatalism. It does not mean that we should just hopelessly accept everything as it is, it does not negate value systems. There are still good acts and bad acts, there are still better and worse social systems.
I grant that it is existentially confusing to realize that in a sense we are not really “free” to change anything. But equally, the illusion of free will is just the way our minds work, and it probably evolved because it leads to better decisions, even if those decisions are ultimately just deterministic computation.
So I see not reason to infer that we should just give up and stop trying to make good decisions, whether it’s about mundane everyday matters or about changing things that are wrong with the world. We just shrug off the existential crisis and continue using our brains the way they were designed, accepting that the illusion of free will is not something we should “fight” moment to moment, it is just part of the way our minds work.
So I see no contradiction in saying that:
(a) the fact that there is really no free will means retributive justice is morally unjustified;
(b) we should therefore strive to reform the criminal justice system.
I think a good analogy is that of eyesight. When we study how it works, we find that the notion that our vision operates like a camera is misguided. In fact, everything is heavily processed by our brain - optical illusions show that (in some ways) we cannot really trust our eyes, we do not really see much of what we think we see. But, of course, our visual system evolved this way because, in general, it allows us to interact with the world effectively. So nobody concludes that we should stop using our vision the way it was designed, even if we know it is largely an illusion.
“Free will” is not synonymous with volition. Ignoring the compatibilists who choose to just redefine the term, free will is the notion that we could have done otherwise in given circumstances (modulo random effects such as QM). Free will is a logically incoherent concept, and does not exist; nor could it exist in any conceivable universe. It is not an empirical question, because the concept is incoherent.
A “decision” is computation, a combination or deterministic and random effects (since there are no other kinds of effect). The evidence is that we make decisions unconsciously, and that after the fact our brains construct an illusion of conscious deliberation. So it’s true that the illusion of 'free will" deliberation contributing to decisions arises as part of our consciousness.
However, our strong intuition of internal free will does not correspond to any actual phenomenon. We never get to re-run history twice to experience the hypothetical could have done otherwise, there is no evidence to support the notion that we could have made the opposite decision. It is purely illusory. On the other hand, consciousness itself is not illusory. It obviously corresponds to a real phenomenon that we experience. It’s a subjective mental experience, and we aren’t remotely close to understanding it, but unlike free will it’s certainly something that happens.
That’s the existential confusion that I was trying to talking about in that post. When we realize that free will does not exist, we could collapse into paroxysms of existential angst. And many of us have probably done so, periodically!
Ultimately, we could say that things like “should” and “strive” mean nothing at all; or, we can keep the words and just accept hat they must mean something a little different than we had previously thought.
My view is to embrace the illusion of free will, and any accompanying “striving” (even if that too is illusory); and perhaps a sense of “should” as a guide to my decision making (although I don’t think the absence of free will negates the idea of moral values, some things are still better than others). But anyway, why fight it moment to moment? That’s just the way our brains work. And, apparently, our brains evolved that way because these illusions produce better decisions, even though we may now be aware that those decisions are ultimately just deterministic computation.
People who haven’t thought about this much will eventually chip in on this thread (as they always do) with some version of a tired sardonic joke about how this whole conversation is a result of deterministic processes, so that either
(a) it doesn’t matter anyway; or
(b) the premise must be wrong, it obviously can’t be deterministic!
Neither of those things are true. Just because the conclusions are counterintuitive or existentially challenging does not mean that the premise is wrong. And it takes a whole lot of careful thought to figure out one’s attitude to the world in light of the understanding that our internal intuition of free will is not real.
Riemann, all of your responses include suggestions that assumes that free will exists yet you are claiming it doesn’t. All of those suggestions are meaningless if free will doesn’t really exist. You also seem to be making the common mistake of assuming that you have free will but other people don’t.
Have to disagree. I know I have done things differently in very similar circumstances, so that I know that I have some measure of choice.
(“Exactly the same” circumstances can never exist, so that question becomes moot.)
Besides, as I always ask in reference to determinism, where does the information come from? If we are only acting according to situations that pre-exist – if we’re just pool-balls skittering around a very big table – then who did write the Harry Potter books?
This, at least, is enough to explode pure Newtonian (pool-ball) determinism. But how do more modern forms of determinism answer the question?
Nobody disputes that with different inputs (or a different internal starting configuration) a brain can produce different outputs. That’s not free will. You cannot infer that more than one computational output is possible from precisely the same inputs. You have absolutely no experience that you can point to in order to demonstrate free will. There is no phenomenon to explain. All you know is that in each case a certain set of conditions resulted in a particular output from your brain, and you have no evidence at all that you could have done otherwise.
No, this has nothing to do with undiscovered laws of physics.
Things either interact through cause and effect, for reasons, of they act randomly. What other kind of process can there possibly be?
Even if (say) we postulate mind-body dualism, let’s say an immaterial “soul” where the purported “free will” resides - something that is essentially magic. How does this magic interact with the world, how does this magic operate? Is the magically entity generating output in response to changes in input? If so, that’s determinism. Or is it generating output randomly, without regard for what’s going on in the material world? Neither of those things are free will. And just what else is there?
This is what I mean when I say that “free will” is not an empirical question, it’s simply an incoherent concept.
I don’t think anyone is claiming a specific mechanism for how it works but people certainly don’t understand everything and may not even have the capability to. See quantum mechanics. Even Einstein didn’t buy it but it is real. There is something making “choices” that we truly don’t understand. I am agnostic on the subject so I can’t claim which side is right but I don’t think anyone else can either at this point.
“And it takes a whole lot of careful thought to figure out one’s attitude to the world in light of the understanding that our internal intuition of free will is not real.”
That sentence is a complete contradiction in and of itself. The first part requires free will to figure out why we don’t have it.
It does not require free will to use a brain - to reason, to make arguments.
If you think free will exists, give a coherent account of it.
As for the rest - I’m describing how I find myself interacting with the world after the realization that free will does not exist. You may think that is pointless. Perhaps you are right. But your underlying problem with the whole thing seem largely to be a fallacious argument from consequences. You seem to think that since the absence of free will precipitates an existential crisis, that implies that it must exist. Not so.
I don’t deny the difficulty, but I think one must first think carefully through the idea of whether free will exists on its merits, and then deal with consequences, even if it turns out they are devastating.
Please explain what observable phenomenon you think corresponds to the operation of “free will”, something that cannot adequately be explained as deterministic computation.
Nobody is seeking some startling new mechanism when there is no observable phenomenon that requires explanation. “QM is weird” does not grant coherence to incoherent ideas.
Making choices, especially difficult ones. Whipping up one’s gumption and sticking to that diet. Swallowing your pride and not snapping back when a co-worker says something stupid. Taking that night course in accounting, and actually doing the homework.
Those are choices we make. We don’t make them absolutely freely; there is a cost. They take an effort.
This is one of the reasons I don’t buy determinism: if things were determined, why would evolution bother giving us a gigantic decision-making machine? Everything would be tropisms, like insect behavior, and we’d get along just fine.
(That said, I actually believe a lot of mammalian behavior is somewhat tropistic, especially our more violent emotions such as rage and terror.)
We’re in a grey zone, partly free and partly hard-wired.
But nobody seems to be able to demonstrate that our choices are completely determined, and that our volition is wholly an illusion.
(And, again, why? Who is being deceived? Why make up the illusion of an operator, in order to…what? Trick the operator? If he isn’t able to make choices, why in the hell bother to deceive him?)
You have completely misunderstood what “no free will” means.
Nobody claims that we don’t make decisions. Of course we do. Evolution has given us a massive analysis-and-decision-making instrument inside our heads, something that has been hugely advantageous for our species. “Free will” does not mean “making decisions”.
The point is that this analysis and decision-making is simply computation, not ill-defined magic. And, given a set of inputs and internal configuration, that computer will only produce one output. The idea that it could have done otherwise, i.e. that the exact same configuration & data could have generated a different decision, is an illusion - and that is not an observed phenomenon.
Hon, I just definited it as synonymous with volition. And I was the one who suggested defining our terms. Feel free to explain what you mean when you say free will and I may or may not agree that what you call free will doesn’t exist, but “completely wrong” doesn’t belong here. So far we’re only defining terms.
(Several people have already asked “so how do you defend the notion that it exists?”; we haven’t gotten that far, we’re still defining terms).
Babies, drunks, people with damaged amygdala probably possess free will. Based on my understandings of the limitations of brainwashing and hypnosis, yes, brainwashed and hypnotized people possess free will. If, hypothetically speaking, neuropsychologists could drill holes in your head and stick electrodes into your brain in such a way as to completely externally coerce what you do, what thoughts occur inside your head, and how you feel, then you now, finally, have a situation where there is not free will.
You also no longer have a Self. And that’s important. There is no consciousness who is able to observe and resent the situation. Anyone see Get Out? There you had the terminator line between free will and its absence, with consciousnesses that could observe as if from afar and could formulate opinions and attitudes but could not direct behavior.
As for robots, only the robot can know for sure if it possesses free will; from the outside all we have is the claim. Lest that sound like a different standard for the robot, I should point out that that’s true for all you fine folks as well, I don’t know for sure that you possess free will, although I assume you do via extrapolation (I harbor the belief that you are people in the same sense that I am) but I only have direct experience of my own self as a self of free will.
I would argue we don’t make them freely at all. Everything we do results from the coercive forces of thoughts+feelings–and these things are not under our control. We are simply aware of them…and not even totally. So we stick to a diet not because we want to stick to a diet, but because we’ve been programmed with the notion that being fat is bad, and this idea bothers us a whole lot more than the inconvenience of a diet. We refrain from snapping at the mean coworker NOT because we don’t want to snap at the coworker, but rather because we have been programmed to be afraid of the ramifications of snapping at the coworker. We do the homework not because we want to do the homework, but because we want the sense of satisfaction that comes with earning an A.
There is no way of knowing if the person who doesn’t stick with the diet, isn’t nice to coworkers, and doesn’t do the homework is being “willful”–meaning they’ve thoughtfully and objectively considered all the options, but they are still going to do what they want to do–as opposed to “carrying out instructions”–that is to say, acting in complete accordance with their internal programming. To any individual, these states will be experienced the same given the power our own cognition has to create our own realities.
Evolution doesn’t “give” us anything.
A gigantic decision-making machine is pretty dang useful regardless of how determinant the universe is. Are humans the dominant species because we have the ability to act “randomly” in defiance of a deterministic model? Or are we dominant because our programming is not quite as hard-coded as, say, a cat’s? Try to teach a cat that it’s bad for him to snap at a coworker and he just won’t listen. But a human can be reprogrammed quite easily. Sometimes all it takes is a five-minute meeting with HR to get them to switch to a different script. Maybe that’s what our brains enable us to do, and all the free will stuff is a story we tell ourselves so we can put even more distance between humans and the animal kingdom.
How do you know that our decision-making machine is all that impressive? It’s certainly superior to a cat’s brain, but perhaps our brain is quite primitive compared to other kinds the brains that live in the universe. Why should we presume that the human brain has evolved beyond deterministic constraints when we have no idea what such a brain would look like? For all we know, our brains aren’t structurally sophisticated enough to possess free will because way too much of our cognition occurs outside of our consciousness. But maybe those Alpha Centaurians have a brain that grants them 90% self-awareness (as opposed to our measly whatever percent).
If human decision-making isn’t ultimately bound by genetic, physiological, and environment variables, then what is the point of genes, physiology, and senses? (Hey, a crazy question deserves another crazy question! :)) We don’t have any evidence that there is any value to possessing free will, at least iin an evolutionary or ecological sense. I know I’d rather be the type of organism who always runs from the chasing lion rather than the kind of organism who runs to the chasing lion just for shits and giggles. But we certainly have a ton of evidence that deterministic variables are very important to organismal ecology.
Humans are the result of millions of years of evolution. Are we seriously supposed to believe that deterministic mechanisms magically stopped being relevant the moment the ape lost his hair and started walking upright? If it doesn’t trouble you that 99.9% of the organisms that are currently alive now are not endowed with the ability to buck their programming, I don’t understand why it would trouble you to round that number up to 100%, at least until we have more concrete evidence of anything.
No one is actually capable of operating their lifespan from an assumption that they do not operate as creatures of free will. When folks who deny free will speak, they very commonly indicate through their modes of speech that what they really mean is that it is useful to treat other people as if they had no free will.
I’ve read some convoluted descriptions of how you should
• understand that you do not possess free will (cuz it don’t exist);
• nevertheless comport yourself as if free will DID exist by continuing to evaluate things and make choices and develop opinions and so on; and
• reconcile these things by embracing the notion that pretending in this fashion is something we all need to do for umm Reasons
I suppose saying that it is silly to say that the unavoidable state of mind that we operate from that assumes we, the consciousnesses that we self-referentially designate as our Selves, are in fact making choices is an illusory state of mind is not tantamout to saying it is factually wrong.
I’m going to go ahead and steer the conversation towards the Self, itself. I think that’s where the action is.
monstro, for example, writes:
We, as selves, are not the individual detached specimens that we tend to think of ourselves as. I have a consciousness, and there is a distinct sense in which it inheres in this physical body ( :: points to it :: ) but that self is also in interaction with the context in which I operate. It neither causes me nor do I cause it, in a one-say street sense of causation, but instead the entire context in which I operate is what it is, in part, because of stuff that I did, in addition to being, in part, what it is because of stuff that you did, and for that matter you have had an effect on me and I have had an effect on you insofar as we are part of each other’s context. What that means for consideration of the self is that who I am is, in addition to being singular (me, this body and its brain), I’m plural (us, interacting, affecting each other) and I am superplural (the entirety of THAT WHICH IS, interacting), and somewhere in that complicated morass of interaction there is intentionality and deliberate action taking place.
Linear causation falls apart as a model because it tends to assume that the individual actor and his behavior is caused by the context as if causation there were a one-way street, the behaving person passively determined by the externalia of the context. That’s not so. The world in which I operate is no more the cause of me than I am the cause of it.
Yeah I can practically see the thought-bubbles forming. Some of you are about to say “There’s just one of you and you’re very very small; the entire context in which you operate has a helluva lot more effect on you than you have on it and you damn well know it!” Which is true but that doesn’t negate the point. It’s like gravity. The planet earth is attracted to me. So is the sun. In fact the entire damn galaxy is affected by my gravitational pull.
We – in other words, first person plural – as individuals each critique and interact and modify the ongoing matrix of interaction we call “society”. We affect it even though, yeah, of course, its effect on each of us individually is huge compared to our individual effect on it. That is a massively different assertion than to say that individuals’ beliefs attitudes thoughts etc are caused by society. Because it is true for all the individuals, one at a time, that each of them has an effect on the massively huge entirely of all of us.
Works the same way when you go to include not just the other peopel but the entire context.