I dislike your use of the term “pre-determination”, which is not synonymous with deterministic. I think “pre-determination” is inaccurate and perhaps inflammatory. The extent to which everything is pre-determined does depends upon the laws of physics and the nature of reality. QM (depending on how you look at it) is either fully deterministic or incorporates true randomness. If we describe our decisions as deterministic, that just means that we do things for reasons. There may also be a truly random component that means that things are not predetermined.
Next, if your semantic preference is to throw out the word “decision” or “choice” altogether when we realize that our choices are not in accord with our “free will” intuition, I can understand that. But I think it’s mistaken, because there clearly is an observed phenomenon of “choosing”, and we need a word for that phenomenon. It’s just a question of understanding the phenomenon correctly (it’s deterministic computation).
With respect, you claim to reject "magic, but then proceed with some undefined waffling here. Just how does this “free” “self” interact with the world, if not either deterministically or randomly? In other words, let’s imagine that we could run a controlled experiment where run history multiple times, with both the internal “self” and the external world in the exact same configuration, then adding small controlled differences. Under what circumstances would this “self” make a different decision? If the internal configuration of the “self” were slightly different, or the external world (i.e. the data input) were slightly different, then of course the decision might be different - that’s just deterministic computation, making a different decision for a reason. Another possibility is that “self” metaphorically rolls a dice, it generates a random output. But neither of these things comport with “free will”. So what else is there?
I appreciate Riemann giving me a specific definition from the no-free-will perspective.
I’m curious to see whether we converge as we compare notes or not.
I can see where, from one possible construction of “could have”, that might make no sense as a reasonable possibility. If we ignore what I said upthread about the figure/ground issue and the question of what constitutes the self, that is. For the sake of argument let’s go with the notion that “I”, making the choice, am one individual person. “Could have done otherwise”, if I understand correctly, is generally taken to mean “all other things being exactly equal”. Since we can’t easily set up a laboratory in which “all other things are exactly equal”, we generally have to go with a thought experiment. One such thought experiment is along the lines of “travel back in time to the moment of choice. Everything is, by definition, exactly equal. Is it possible for you to choose differently?”
Free free (ha!) (you know what I mean) to modify or correct me if I’m misrepresenting the no-free-will viewpoint thus far.
Let’s try some different thought experiments. If we can magically time-travel, we can with equal imaginative conjurings magically recreate the rest of the “I”-person’s context and then, into that matrix, toss the same person, except this time not the trapped-in-that-timeframe version but instead the version you’ve been having the “free will” conversation with.
“Oh, but that’s totally cheating. That version of the actor comes into the frame with different thoughts in the head! Including the thought that he or she is gonna prove Riemann and the other anti-free-will folks wrong!”
It may be less obvious that it’s cheating in the other direction to posit the exact same “I”-person in the exact same frame of mind with a head full of the exact same thoughts. But it is. Because that person, that actor, extends through time, and the choice that was made at THAT time IS what you find at the person-time coordinate you’re rolling back to. The thought-experiment, when set up this way, doesn’t test for whether the person could do, or might do, something differently; it instead tests for what that person DID in fact do.
OK, I myself will acknowledge that that paragraph isn’t the most clearly written paragraph I’ve ever put down. Let me express it again, but differently: you can think of time the way we actually experience it, which is where the future is undetermined and in front of you; and the present moment is where you choose; and the past is over and behind you, a record of choices you already made. Or, instead, you can think of time as a dimension and visualize “what exists at this time-coordinate” or “what exists at that time-coordinate”, but when you work with time in THAT fashion, what we think of as “action” – any and all action – is now a shape, not a verb. There is no “choose” because there is no “do” or “happens”. Instead we are examining a static nonmoving world of four dimensional objects. So the problem with the imaginary time travel scenario, coupled with the notion of the actor making the same choice or a different choice instead is that it mixes the two ways of conceptualizing time in a fashion that I am arguing is illicit and invalid.
I particularly appreciate that clarification. It does often seem to me that the anti-free-will folks are saying we are not making decisions (or not “really” making decisions) so I’m probably guilty of doing the straw-man thing and I’ll endeavor not to do so in this post.
Here, I think is where the self and the figure/ground stuff smashes into your idea of determinism. Once again, tell me if I’m misrepresenting here, but what I understand the no-free-will folks to be saying is, essentially, “Consider A to be the actor who makes decisions and choices. Consider B to be the entirety of the context in which A operates. B is the cause of the decisions or choices made by A. A is passively reacting to the stimulus of B”.
Is that pretty much it?
• I disagree that B is the cause of A’s choices and decisions.
• My disagreement is rooted in the fact that A’s choices and decisions are the cause of B, hence the division of the entire picture we’re looking at into A and B is indeed a figure/ground error.
• When I say that A’s choices and decisions are the cause of B, I should quickly clarify that I do not mean that A’s choices and decisions are the exclusive cause of B. But the effects that the various actions of A have on what B actually is are not dismissable. B is what B is, to some extent, because of A, and therefore it is spurious to ignore the sense in which the identity we call A is intertwined in the environment we call B. Or, to put it another way, the direction of causal deterministic operations is not from B to A, but instead from each to the other.
That’s the formulation that I referred to as a “sillygism” last time I waded into one of these threads.
The fact that I have reasons for my decisions does not mean that the reasons are the cause of the decisions. The decision is the outcome of the interaction between the reasons and the “I” that is making the decision. Again, you’ve drawn a verbal picture of all the components of “context” that the decision-making actor is responding to, but you’ve left out a component: the actor, A, who is also being taken into account by A.
Really, I think the fault for reinforcing this misconception lies with the no-free-will crowd, since some do express our position as “we do not choose”. And I think it’s terribly misleading to say that. We all mean the same thing - the observed phenomenon that is commonly described as “choice” is deterministic computation, it’s not “free will choice” in the ill-defined magical sense.
I think this seems somewhat tangential to the fundamental point. But if anything, I think it’s the PRO-free-will crowd who want to cling to a volitional “self” as something concrete, well-defined and independent. The no-free-will position is simply that our brains are not magical, they are evolved computing machines that obey the laws of physics; and that could-have-done-otherwise “free will” is a logically incoherent idea.
The Libet experiments and subsequent work often come up in these discussions. There is good evidence that we make decisions unconsciously, and a measurable time later construct an illusion that conscious deliberation participated in the decision. In any event - we don’t understand the nature of consciousness, and our intuition about decision-making is completely wrong! But, in principle, I think the nature of the conscious self is really orthogonal to the question of could-have-done-otherwise free will. Whether a decision is made consciously or unconsciously, it’s still not magic - it’s deterministic computation.
Again, it would NOT be the no-free-will crowd who would seek to delineate a volitional “self” in some strict way. All we’re saying is that there’s a brain with a bunch of stuff going on inside it, interacting to varying degrees with the rest of the universe according to the laws of physics - i.e. thinking is deterministic computation. Somehow, that brain generates an internal conscious sense of “self” that we don’t fully understand. But the fact that we don’t understand consciousness does not render coherence to incoherent ideas like could-have-done-otherwise “free will”.
I think your no-free-will position is reasonable, logical, and consistent. But I don’t think there’s any way of proving (or disproving) it without some circular reasoning and/or appeal to ignorance. It looks to me like you’re a priori ruling out free will by calling it “magic,” which begs the question.
I’m not really a part of the conventional / traditional “free will” crowd, as others have already noted.
I am strongly and fervently a proponent of the existence of deliberate and volitional choice, but I don’t buy into the notion of the discrete individual that seems to populate the conventional “free will” perspective. (I’ve never met that discrete individual but whoever it is, they seem to be fans of Ayn Rand or something).
Well yes, but only by choosing differently. Hence, the sort of thing that’s usually imagined there—‘rewinding’ the universe and redoing the choice—doesn’t actually hold water, since all that you get then is the system making the same choice again—which of course leads to the same outcome, that should not surprise anybody.
I think my proposal above includes just about as much ‘could have done otherwise’ as is feasible—and indeed, needed for genuine free will that includes genuine responsibility for one’s actions. If neither outcome is logically mandated by the state of the universe, and the answer to the question of how a given outcome was arrived at necessarily includes the agent realizing that outcome (i.e. there are no shortcuts), then I think the only reasonable conclusion is that the agent making that choice is what brought said outcome about. How much more free could anyone want to be?
‘Feelings’, of course, are perfectly valid observations—indeed, they’re the only observations that, strictly speaking, we ever make. It needs a further commitment to a strong metaphysical thesis, such as that our feelings have objective correlata in some outside world, before we even can start to talk about anything besides ‘feelings’.
Complexity is an important issue here: once a system crosses the barrier of universal computation, there will be aspects of its behavior that are logically independent from some appropriate collection of facts about that system, and which can only be determined by explicit simulation—which in the end is nothing but having the system behave in a certain way, or something computationally equivalent to that (a ‘virtual copy’, if you will). More sometimes really is different.
Not everything that is non-empirical is nonsense. Mathematics isn’t, logic isn’t, and neither are ethics and aesthetic—but you’ll find neither a mathematical theorem nor an aesthetical judgment under a microscope. Done right, metaphysics is as much of a well-defined a priori science as mathematics and logic are.
Half Man Half Wit has already pointed out your error here but I’m going to point it out again because somehow this notion did not penetrate your understanding in the previous four threads where this was discussed. Repetition seems necessary.
As has been pointed out in those previous threads: the MWI is a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. So YES, if our universe actually does work in this fashion (which it might not…), it would in fact mean that every action, in every world, since the “dawn of time” has worked out strictly from “previous actions” according to the laws of physics, specifically, the fully deterministic evolution of the universal wave function.
I don’t know what is so mysterious about this, but you can review previous threads if you need. For determinism defined in a fairly simple fashion, see this post. For an explanation of how the MWI qualifies as a deterministic interpretation, just look at the previous GQ thread you personally participated in. Or for a slightly friendlier explanation, look at the post that prompted that General Question to be asked in the first place. There are even posts from further back talking about the nature of deterministic systems using computer programs: Game 2.0 and Game 2.Q giving a faux-quantum explanation of how apparent “randomness” (whatever that word is supposed to mean) does not necessarily imply that the world is non-deterministic. The entire point of all of these posts is to make clear either the nature of a deterministic system, or make clear the possibility that quantum processes could actually be the result of a deterministic system.
We don’t “know” for certain that this particular interpretation is true. It might not be. But anyone who is interested in this topic should know that when we’re talking about the MWI, we’re talking about a fully deterministic system. There is no switching here. There is no equivocation.
If you have questions, then you can ask questions. Questions is good.
But what you shouldn’t be doing is making assertions like the following:
This is wrong.
Look back at the Game 2.Q faux-quantum post if you want an example of how worlds can diverge from each other in a way that might seem “random”, when in fact it’s a fully deterministic process.
You are not the arbiter of how other people use the word deterministic.
By wilful child I meant the three year old, standing six feet from you, while you’re emphatically telling him, “Do NOT put that in the VCR!!!” Who then, looks you square in the eye as he coolly pushes his peanut butter sandwich into that VCR.
That child’s environment has been 100% focussed on him abiding Mom. He knows it’s wrong. He doesn’t have peer pressure or societal pressure yet.
That right there, looks a lot like free will to me. (Sorry I wasn’t clearer!)
That’s a complete non sequitur from what I said. I did not remotely claim that everything non-empirical is nonsense. I said that could-have-done-otherwise free will in particular is nonsense. And in any case, the reason for involving the word “non-empirical” was simply to point out that ill-formed nonsensical hypotheses are not empirically testable.
The fact that (for example) mathematics is both non-empirical and not nonsense has no bearing whatsoever on the issue. Your logic here is equivalent to: “They laughed at Galileo, therefore the fact that they are laughing at me means I must be a genuis too!”. Need I bring up Bozo the Clown? The burden is not to observe that there exist some non-empirical things that are not nonsense. Of course such things exist. The burden is to give a coherent account of could-have-done-otherwise free will.
I think this is a deeply misleading statement, based on two entirely different meanings of the word “feel”.
If we say I feel happy then of course that feeling is “valid”, in the sense that it is something real. We are describing an internal emotional state, something that as neuroscientists we may not yet fully understand in a precise way, but something undeniably real.
On the other hand, if we say I feel that I could have chosen otherwise, that is something quite different. There may or may not be some degree of emotion attached, but it is essentially a truth claim based on intuition rather than logic. And the truth claim may be objectively “invalid” - i.e. wrong.
I think that you are essentially stating a compatibilist position here. You’re saying that nobody but a dimwit could think that the magical contracausal could-have-done-otherwise kind of free will exists, so let’s reimagine free will to mean something sensible, perhaps the degree of agency entailed in having a complex brain that computes things deterministically.
That’s all fair enough, except I think you’re wrong about the fact that it’s so obvious that could-have-done-otherwise free will is nonsense. I think this is exactly what most people mean when they say “free will”, and I think the vast majority of humankind believes in it. It’s fundamental to most religions and to our criminal justice system.
We might, yes; but to be quite honest, when I read your posts, I always have substantial troubles making out what it actually is you’re trying to say, what the actual meat of your proposal is. Hence, my earlier prodding, and my attempt to make things completely clear on my side in this post.
But the way you did at least strongly suggested that you think it is nonsense because it isn’t empirical; but quite clearly, it’s simply not an issue where empiricism is appropriate (whether an action was performed out of free will is not something you can find out with an experiment), so bringing it in is at best erroneous, and at worst intentionally misleading.
That completely misunderstands the logic of my argument. It would be more accurate to say that your claim was that everybody who is laughed at is automatically wrong, and me bringing up the example of people being laughed at who were right, which indeed suffices to disprove your claim.
Well, I’ve given such an account in my previous post. But really, at the bottom of it all, doing otherwise is just choosing otherwise; of course, you can’t choose otherwise if you were to just ‘roll back’ the universe to a prior point, but that, again, should hardly be surprising: ‘choice’, whatever it may be exactly, is some process within the universe, so simply replaying that process will end up with the same outcome—but introducing a difference there will yield a different outcome.
No, I’m saying that ‘could have done otherwise’ is misunderstood if you think it’s just rolling back the state of the world and then starting everything up again—because that’s just ‘doing things the same way’! This leads trivially to the same outcome. Yes, if I make the same choice, I make the same choice: nobody ought to be at all surprised by that, and it fairly obviously doesn’t tell us anything about whether the choice thus made was free.
No.
Both you and may I agree that it leads trivially to the same outcome.
Most of the rest of humanity (and I think at least half the people on this thread) disagree.
Well, yes, you are. You’re using the word in two different ways.
One of the meanings is Newtonian determinism, where everything depends on prior states, and so (for instance) World War One was determined from the beginning of the universe.
Some people still believe in this, thinking there is some mechanism inside a Uranium atom, telling it when to decay. The more conventional view is that the decay of the atom is random, unpredictable and not “determined” in advance.
Newtonian determinism suffers from an information problem: how is information created, if all the information in the universe is inherent in the universe’s origin.
There is another meaning, having deeper quantum-mechanical definitions, but that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re indicting free will.
Then I expressed myself badly, because this wasn’t what I was saying at all.
Some people on this thread have said that they think could-have-done-otherwise free will is an “open question” in some sense, imply perhaps that future research my shed light on it. The point I was making is that my denial of the existence of this kind of free will is not based on an interpretation of evidence. It’s based on the fact that it’s not a logically coherent idea at all. You can’t investigate a hypothesis (empirically or otherwise) unless you can state it coherently.
Yes, I’ve read it, and it’s interesting – but it’s exactly what is meant by compatbilism. You’re claim is that magical could-have-done-otherwise free will is trivially wrong, so let’s discuss a bunch of really interesting stuff that does happen in the universe, and call that free will.
I finds this simultaneously extremely interesting (the stuff that you are talking about) and extremely frustrating. You seem unwilling to believe that the vast majority of people do not (like you and me) accept, as a trivial point, that magical could-have-done-otherwise-in-an-exact-rerun-of-the-universe free will does not exist. So you just move on to something else, but you insist on calling that something else free will. And while this something else is extremely interesting, your choice of semantics is an immense distraction for the majority of people who have not yet accepted the “trivial” point.