Sure it does. Arms, legs, eyes, a brain. Evolution gave us these cool things, and they even have a “purpose” – even though evolution itself does not.
I totally disagree. The whole process is pointless, if it cannot produce an actual decision. The vast investment of biological energy and resources could much better be replaced with pre-programmed, hard-wired behaviors. Such an animal would have a huge competitive advantage over animals that devote their big brains to making only a pretense of actual decisions.
Computers, relativity, the New York Stock Exchange, symphony orchestras, etc. It takes a really inventive mental system to produce such miracles.
The improve the quality of our decisions. They give us input, which we accumulate, evaluate, and use to inform our choices. The more we know, the better our decisions are. That, at least, should be obvious from experience. Educated people really do make smarter (and even wiser) decisions that uneducated people.
It was, of course, gradual. Animals got more and more control over their own lives in the course of evolution… Well, some animals. The social mammals have a lot of volition, and humans have just gobs of it.
I’ll agree with this, and I even agree with Riemann that it means that we might have acted differently in a given situation. There are times when a choice might go either way; to me, this suggests that, in the past, an event might have gone either way.
FWIW, I reject the “magical” versions of Free Will, where the soul (or whatever) is supposed to be able to make decisions that are not bound by physical laws. I believe that volition is purely a natural, material process, not much different from speech or throwing baseballs.
I very much believe that there are limits to it. There are decisions that we simply cannot make. We can also find our decision-making apparatus degraded, as by strong drink. Someone in the throes of severe clinical depression has less free will/volition than a normal person. A stroke might also impair the parts of the brain where decisions are made.
You aren’t adding any coherence either. Let’s say you have truly random quantum number generator that decides which TV show you watch or what you eat dinner if you let it decide. There is absolutely nobody in the world that can explain how that came to be.
The bottom line is that that people are just advanced apes. We can’t figure out everything. We can’t even see the entire light spectrum or smell very well. What makes you think that we can understand all of reality anymore than a dog in the grand scheme of things?
The problem with retributive justice is not that the perpetrator of the crime does (or did) not possess free will. The problem with retributive justice is that it is absolutely impossible to make a set of rules that define what is right and what is wrong, and it is insupportively arrogant to go around deliberately hurting people due to being so godalmighty sure you’re right and that they did bad evil things. (And yet we do it).
We all possess free will but none of us from the outside really has any business second-guessing the behavior of someone else as if we were the arbiters of someone else’s choices.
I assume each of the people on this planet, in their individual behavior, is doing what they believed to be the right thing when they did it. By “right” I do not mean “correspondence with some widely shared moral code” (it would in fact be an abrogation of their free will to assume they should abide by such a code instead of making their own assessments). I also do not mean “right for society as a whole” or “right for the greatest number of affected individual people”. What is right is what makes a person happy, the best choice for the choice-maker; realizing that doing what is right for all of us collectively is a sophisticated understanding of what makes one’s own self happy most effectively in the long term, it’s not a contradiction of self-serving behavior, and self-serving is how we choose.
There is room for arguing that most people whose behavior is harmful to others are people who don’t have a very good understanding of their own happiness. There is also room to differentiate between one’s own long-term happiness and what one wants right now, and to throw in emotional attention-span in for good measure. And Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and whatnot. But I don’t see any room whatsoever for arguing as if the body of human-generated laws and the enforcement thereof have any legitimate bearing on what is right and what is wrong, and then to continue from there and say “oh but those poor babies didn’t have free will so we shoudln’t oughta punish them”. I mean, seriously, folks, you’d be an apologist for the individual behavior of so-called criminals and yet not question the legitimacy and authenticity of the law-and-enforcement system as the arbiter of “should” and “shouldn’t”? I do find that amazing.
Nothing is in a completely free state because there are always influences surrounding any choice in life and it is the relative power of whatever influences are motivating an individual that causes the resultant behaviour. For example, a prisoner will not be as free to act as he/she would on the outside world because of punitive consequences so it is the anticipation of rewards/punishments that act as a causal agency in this case. In ordinary circumstances, a person has learnt various behaviours that have in the past provided some kind of benefit to them and will have a tendency to form behavioural habits based on this. So, freewill is not really free but is based on a particular evaluation of positive and negative outcomes. That is not to say that a person cannot be persuaded to change their mode of behaviour if they are convinced the benefits of doing so will outweigh any perceived advantages of their current way of life and this is where freewill does have some meaning in that human beings are capable of change due to a conscious decision to do so. However, there still has to be the motivation to do so based on reward.
Actually, many worlds-like models are one of the few ways to guarantee an absolutely deterministic universe: whenever the question comes up whether A or B occurs, the answer is always ‘yes’.
And yet, it’s the theory of computation, deterministic as all get-out, that allows for something that comes as close to ‘free will’ as I think anything can.
But let me elaborate a little. Free will, the way I think about it, needs three components: independence, irreducibility, and intention. By independence, I mean logical independence: for a given choice, the universe must be compatible with each outcome—that is, knowing all the facts about the universe, I can’t deduce using logical manipulations whether outcome A or B occurs; both lead to a logically consistent universe.
This seems somewhat odd at first blush, but it’s in fact very common: a famous expression of this phenomenon are Gödel’s theorems, that every (sufficiently powerful) logical system contains propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved using the axioms; consequently, for a formal system F and a Gödel sentence G, both F+G and F+~G, the extension of F with G and its negation ~G, are consistent logical systems themselves. Other examples are the halting problem, or the digits of Chaitin’s constant, which in some sense encodes the answers to instances of the halting problem.
In fact, for the latter, the phenomenon takes on an instructive form: for any formal system F, and a given Chaitin constant, after a certain index, none of the digits making of the binary representation of the constant can be derived from the axioms anymore—they are logically independent. But nevertheless, they are clearly not random (in the sense of being arbitrary; they are random in the mathematical sense of having no pattern): since each Turing machine either halts, or fails to, each Chaitin constant has a definite binary expansion, that however cannot be derived from the ‘set of facts’ F.
In the same sense, I suggest that there may be events that occur, which however cannot be derived from all the facts about the universe at a given time.
This, of course, doesn’t quite give us freedom; but the converse—that for each choice, its outcome is predictable from the facts of the universe at a given point in time—would certainly deny it.
In order to make headway towards freedom, we turn to the notion of irreducibility, or more accurately, computational irreducibility. Roughly, what I mean by that is that for certain complex enough systems, their behavior can only be understood in taking it as a whole; there are no shortcuts, so to speak. So, take a ball thrown in Earth’s gravitational field: its curve is simply solvable, and the position at any point in time suffices to derive the position at every other point in time. This is thus a reducible system: we need not know what the system does ‘in between’, so to speak.
But not all systems are of this kind. For systems of sufficient complexity—which, suggestively, are systems at just the same level of complexity such that there are independent propositions about that system, namely the threshold of universal computation, which will be elaborated on when we get to the third requirement—any explanation of their behavior at a given point depends on the entire history of that system, in the sense that we can only ‘predict’ that system’s behavior by explicit, step-by-step simulation. But that’s effectively just the same as taking that system, or perhaps a copy of it, and watching what it does—that is, what the system does is an indispensable element of accounting for the system’s behavior.
Now suppose that such a system meets a point where it has two options, A or B, which are both logically compatible with all the facts about the universe at a given point in time. Then, when it chooses A, due to its irreducibility, any account of its choosing A will include the system making that choice—that is, there is nothing else but the system making that choice that accounts for the outcome A. This, I believe, is the truest notion of freedom that makes sense.
Now, I suppose someone will bring up the idea of ‘could have done otherwise’. Could the system have done otherwise, i.e. chosen not A, but B? This depends on what you mean: it certainly could have, in that both A and B are logically compatible with the state of the universe. However, whenever you ‘rewind’ the universe to a point before the outcome is clear, and ‘restart’ it, the system will always make the same choice.
This is not, I think, in conflict with the idea of freedom. The reason for this is that the state of the universe thus wound back includes the system choosing, and its making that choice in exactly the same way—and one should not be astonished that a system making the same choice in the same way will choose the same outcome.
If this is clear up to this point, I think we have a solid account of what it means for a system to be free. But that’s not something in any way connected to human beings, or other agents—quite simple systems can be ‘free’ in that sense. As an example, it’s known that in certain many-body quantum systems, the question of whether there is a finite gap in energy between the ground state and the first excited state is undecidable, or logically independent in the sense used above. But the quantity is in principle measurable; consequently, such a many-body system plus the measuring apparatus that outputs a certain value for this spectral gap (either finite or zero) would be a ‘free system’ according to the discussion above.
However, one benefit of the above is that we can immediately say when an agent, usually a system with free will, is, in fact, not free: for instance, when I fall within the gravitational field of the Earth, and my trajectory is just as certain as that of the stone above. This fits very well with intuition!
It’s here that intention comes in. Roughly, intention is my proxy for will: only systems that have intentions, goals, desires, and the like, can be said to have a will, and thus, if they fit the criteria above, to have free will. I will keep this somewhat brief, since I expect less controversy here, so basically, what I think is needed for intention is a certain kind of forecasting ability, imagination, if you will—the capacity of modeling the world as being in a certain state, in order to assess the desirability of that state, and take actions towards bringing it about. And what’s needed for that is basically a certain kind of computational ability, a capacity of modeling everything that might happen within the world, by means of some symbolic system—and this essentially boils down to universal computation by means of some symbolic language, for instance, mathematics or ordinary natural language.
Universal computation, here, basically means the ability to carry out any computation that can be carried out by some computational system at all. Many systems have this power, but among them, the one that interests us is the human mind—even if it only has that power in the limit of infinite time and resources, as, for instance, pen and paper.
So, now going backwards, we have the human mind as a universal computational system, which by computational irreducibility can never be ‘short-cutted’ such that every account of its behavior is essentially equivalent to an observation of its behavior, perhaps in copy, and about whose behavior there are undecidable statements: all of the ingredients needed for a free agent. An option is chosen in a way that is not further reducible to anything but that process of choice, is chosen in a deliberate way, and is not dictated by the instantaneous state of the universe; we’re not going to get any more free.
And evolution “gave us” a ton of shit that doesn’t have a purpose. And?
Why do you keep twisting the determinist’s position so that it sounds crazy? Of course our brains make decisions. Free Willers believe that people consciously make choices. Determinists believe that decisions are made unconsciously, and that they determined by a kabillion variables that have absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s “will”. The complexity of the human brain enables it to synthesize more pieces of information together than, say, an earthworm’s brain. So I would not say our brains are “pointless” just because we lack free will.
At any rate, do you think supercomputers are pointless? Do you think there’s any value in simply being able to process information quickly and being able store tons of it? If free will is the end all of decision-making, why do we even bother with computers in the first place?
Exactly! Why would evolution “give us” free will when for millions of years, pre-programmed, hard-wired behaviors worked perfectly fine?
Do you think the “vast investment of biological energy and resources” is going to our consciousness? To free will? Or it it more plausiable that we’re using these things for enhanced data storage, processing speed, and learning over the basic mammalian/repetilian brain?
“Pretense of actual decisions” makes me think that you don’t understand the determinist’s argument at all.
An animal that has to stop and think at every decision point is going to be the animal that gets eaten by the lion. The animal that has to be constantly aware of his environment and sensory input to make decisions is going to be the animal too distracted to do anything useful (anxiety suffers know this all too well). But the animal that can synthesize new information without even knowing it will be able to make a range of decisions given a variety of different inputs. Such an animal will have an advantage over the animal that only has the capacity to run a single program.
Now, the Free Willers will claim that the animal who can synthesize new information is the one with free will, arguing that the animal is making a choice to synthesize new information. But the Biological Determinists argue that’s bullshit, since 1) no one consciously synthesizes new information and 2) both computers and cats can synthesize new information, but we have no problem denying them free will. Learning happens “behind the scenes” when connections are formed between synapses. If the synapses can’t get it together for whatever reason, then you ain’t learning–no matter how much you “will” it to happen. The animal that can synthesize new information has a brain built for information synthesis. It is hard-wired for learning. It is NOT hard-wired for free will.
None of those things require free will, though.
Educated people don’t posses more free will than uneducated people. They just have a more nuanced IF THEN statement. Uneducated Person is programmed with IF there is a kitchen fire, THEN throw water on it. Educated Person is programmed with IF there is a kitchen fire AND IF the fire is not oil/grease-related AND IF there is no fire extinguisher nearby, THEN throw water on it.
After the fiasco, the Intelligent Uneducated Person’s programming will change in light of the new information (“don’t throw water on a grease fire!”). But the Unintelligent Uneducated Person’s programming will stay the same. Not because they are more “willful”. But because their brain isn’t as malleable.
Isn’t all of what we describe as ‘wilfulness’, confirmation of free will? The obstinate child. The unrepentant killer. Those choosing things against their own best interest, biologically, physiologically, psychologically?
But a dog isn’t able to manipulate abstract concepts like we can, and can’t communicate them to anyone else.
The nature of fundamental reality would be an abstract concept. I think it’s likely that we won’t ever be able to get to that nature because of technological limitations where it just requires more extreme conditions than we can muster, but we don’t have any indication or reason to think that it would be beyond our ability to conceptualize.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. But I’ll assume you are.
Our language reflects our socialization. The notion of “free will” is tightly interwoven with western religious dogma and morality. So it’s not that hard to understand why we so frequently validate the concept despite not having any proof of it. If you hear “we all make choices” enough times in your life, you eventually start to believe it.
We also tend to be lazy and empathy-deficient. A child who misbehaves because he has abusive parents or a learning disability deserves special services and intervention, not punishment. However, it’s a whole lot easier to just call him “willful” and just send him to detention. But the thing is, sometimes punishing him actually does work–which then confirms to us that we were right all along to call him stubborn. But an even better outcome could be achieved by remediating the ultimate cause of his misbehavior. The tendency to default to “obstinate child” instead of “malfunctioning child” keeps us from coming up with better outcomes, IMHO.
Nope. I’m not even sure that such behaviors involve conscious choosing. Maybe such people are being controlled by their appetites.
Your “wilfullness,” I think, means stubbornness, or resistance to external influences. But that’s not all that’s required for free will to exist. Those who deny free will don’t deny that people make decisions, and they don’t deny that people sometimes make dumb decisions, decisions that go against their own self-interest. They just claim that those decisions are completely determined by, as Riemann put it, “a set of inputs and internal configuration.”
This is at minimum the fourth thread you’ve participated in which it has been pointed out that the MWI is fully deterministic. In some of those previous threads, it was pointed out directly to you. You even participated in a GQ thread in which it was pointed out directly to you the manner in which the MWI was deterministic.
It’s a matter of strange curiosity for me how many times you have to be told the same fact before you actually start paying attention to it.
Your best bet is to stop talking about the MWI and determinism until after you understand them. But in keeping with previous pattern, I expect you’ll have to be given this advice four or five more times before you start paying attention to it.
“And?” nothin’. What you say doesn’t contradict what I said.
Why do you keep twisting what I said to make it sound crazy? I never claimed that free will is the “end all of decision-making.” I emphasized, above, that the more knowledge we have, the better our decisions will be. Education is a very positive benefit.
Because knowledgeable decisions are better. We can try things, see if they work, and remember them, so we can do it the same way again. Or make even more trials and further improvements. Hard-wired behaviors don’t allow for that.
All of the above. Consciousness and free will (volition) are very closely related. Many people say they are equivalent; I don’t know enough to sign on to that opinion. But, yes, enhanced data storage, processing speed, and learning are adjuncts to will/volition. They improve our decisions.
I want to buy a car. I’m going to make a decision. If I spend some time boning up on Consumer Reports, I’ll make a better decision. But I am still making a choice; the review magazine is not making the choice for me. I’ll also ask my friends and family. These are all influences on my choice…but I still have that choice.
Arguments like that make me think that you don’t understand the volitionist’s argument at all. No one has said that we “stop and think” at every point in our existence.
I believe that we do consciously synthesize new information. It’s called studying, and we do it a lot.
I didn’t say they did. I said that education improves the quality of our decisions. With more information, we can make better and wiser choices, choices that better match our intents and desires. Knowing about the “Nigerian Prince” scam helps save us from succumbing to it.
The word has two different meanings, and it is unfair of you to switch from one to the other in this way.
The MWI is not an example of Newtonian determinism, in which every action is caused by previous actions, from the dawn of time. (ETA: If it were, then all “worlds” would be identical. There would be no “alternate” worlds.) The MWI is also not deterministic in the way meant by this thread, in which choice/volition are not real.
I don’t think they can but that’s not a central part of my argument. Even if people could comport themselves throughout their lives from the vantage point of a belief that they aren’t making their own choices, their belief that they don’t doesn’t make them right.
The thread started has been called upon by several of us now, to spell out his definition of “free will.” He hasn’t responded to ANY of us.
Without that, we aren’t discussing the thread subject, we’re just aimlessly throwing out unrelated notions about what the limits of human self determination might be.
Newtonian determinism means that if you take the state of the world at any given time, plus the laws of physical evolution, you know the state of the world at every point in time (in principle, at least, though as I’ve pointed out above, any such determination of the state of the world at another time essentially just boils down to watching a copy of the whole thing evolve, which turns out to be all that’s needed for free will). The MWI is deterministic in exactly that sense: give me the universal wave function at any given time, plus its unitary evolution, and I can tell you the wave function at every other point in time.
Now, in a given world, or branch, or relative state, you typically don’t have access to the full wave function; this means an apparent loss of information and hence, an apparent indeterminism. But that’s just a consequence of an observer’s situation, and not in contradiction with the underlying determinism—in the same sense, an observer in ordinary Newtonian mechanics could be barred from observing the full set of consequences of a given event, and consequently, loose information.
On the MWI, no choices ever occur at all, since choosing A entails not choosing B. The MWI’s determinism is of exactly that sort alleged to preclude a free will.
I guess the “no free will” position needs to be stated again, since it is being misrepresented ad nauseam in this thread. There may be other definitions of free will, but when people like me claim that free will doesn’t exist, this is always what they are talking about:
(1) Definition of free will: when I make a choice, I could have done otherwise. We all have an incredibly strong mental intuition that this is true. But note that this intuition is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. Could have done otherwise is not an observed phenomenon, we just feel that it is so. The only observable phenomena are the decisions that we do actually make.
(2) Nobody claims that we do not make decisions. That’s a ridiculous straw man. Of course we make decisions all the time, that is an observed phenomenon. But the point is that our decisions are simply deterministic computation, however complex. Our decisions are a result of reasons, and perhaps a random component.
(3) The existence of magically “free” will is not an empirical question, it is simply nonsense. If we propose some as-yet mysterious “free” decision-making entity within us, even something beyond our current understanding of physical laws, how could it conceivably interact with the world? It either generates its decisions deterministically, which just means for reasons; or it does so randomly. Neither of these things comports with “free” will; and what else is there, in any conceivable universe? Waffling about how weird QM or many-worlds might be does not address this question. In other words, the existence of the kind of magical “free” decision making that accords with our could have done otherwise intuition is not an empirical question, upon reflection this intuition is nonsensical and must simply be wrong.
Agreed. It isn’t a “choice” if it could only have gone one way.
To some of us, there’s a contradiction there. If there is pre-determination, then it isn’t a “choice,” but just a fulfillment of some kind of destiny, as if someone else wrote the script, and we’re just mouthing the words. If “we could have done differently,” then there cannot be (absolute) pre-determination.
Agreed. I specifically rejected the magical kind of free will. I believe our volition is purely material and natural, the result of electro-chemical activity, and, most certainly, influenced by the environment. I just don’t buy that it’s absolutely pre-determined by the environment. I think there is a conscious “self” that participates in decision-making, if in a limited and much-flawed fashion.
