It’s an effect. The cognitive processes of human decision making are determined by chemicals sloshing together in very complex and idiosyncratic ways to produce a “decision.” The individual has no control over how those chemicals will slosh.
Half Man Half Wit:
I believe in determinism. I believe in cause-effect. I believe the mind and will are subject to this. If you define free will as a state where you are free from cause-effect, then I will say that we do not have “free will”. If I define free will as the mind being subject to only those influences that come from the body (this includes the mind itself), then I would say that we do have “free will”. You make it seem like my definition is without logic or reason, but this would be incorrect. It is the most practically meaningful definition I have found, and many people who create our nations’ laws believe so as well. These definitions are the furthest away from beign useless, as you claim. Do you not believe that citizens should have legal rights, and freedoms, and liberty? What about concepts like legal responsibility? Clearly this is something that is being discussed in this very thread, so I would not jump and say that it is “useless”.
Some channels of input are okay, and some are not. Input from the body (senses) is okay, because the body is a part of the person. When the body affects the mind in this way, that effect is internal. The integrity of the mind is not being violated, nor being influenced *directly *by anything outside of the body.
While not following the above exactly, consider this (again): If I asked you to get into the trunk of my car, and you obliged, would you consider that - as a person, as a citizen in a country of laws - the same as if I broke your legs with a baseball bat and shoved you into the trunk myself? The end result is the same! The difference is far from “useless” as you seem to suggest.
Diogenes the Cynic:
Your argument about regression does not apply to my above definitions of free will. It’s inside the box when it’s inside the box. When the chain of cause-effect leaves the box, it’s outside the box. My views may be “wrong” given a different definition of “will”, “mind”, “body”, “free”, etc, but my views are internally consistent with the definitions that I specifically laid out for this purpose. Please prove otherwise, disagree with my definitions, or refrain from called me “wrong”.
I explicitly said that the brain IS dependant on determinism,* so please don’t suggest that I said something that I did not say*. To say that a person cannot be viewed as seperate from the outside world is incorrect because I can draw a line (actually, a 3 dimensional shape, but whatever) around the human brain, or around the human body. It doesn’t take much to separate the body from the outside world. I am *nowhere *claiming that the chain of cause-effect is broken at any point, merely that a *physical *seperation can be made. It is this separation that is relevant to my views on free will.
Well then, I guess we agree on brain chemistry, but slightly disagree on the definition of “will”. My definition of “will” is the process of the chemicals sloshing together itself. I don’t define the will as merely the final result/output of this process.
As for the other issue: This process of sloshing then affects future sloshings - and this is the reason why I DO believe a person/mind/will can in fact will itself to change, for example. When the chain of cause-effect leaves the brain… well, then it’s now an external source an no longer the “will willing itself”. But as long as the cause-effect chain is still within the brain, then it IS the “will willing itself”.
Yes, you are defining free will in the compatablist fashion, but I think that’s an unjustified qualification. Its intent is to preserve moral accountability, but it doesn’t really refute determinism (or avoid regression) in the bigger picture.
I believe the compatabilist view is the only useful one, outside of pure philosphical excercises. I would in no way try to refute determinism itself, since I am completely convinced that it is valid. I believe that determinism extends into the mind as well, of course. While certain people would suggest that this means “free will” doesn’t exist … when you pick apart their views, and what their issues are, you realize that determinism inside the mind isn’t really all that relevant. When people speak of “free will”, they often speak of what Americans often call “freedom”. They often speak of the ability to choose. “Choosing” and “deciding” is a process that occurs inside the brain whether there is determinism or not. Therefore I tell them that even if we are living in a deterministic world, “free will” (ie the ability to choose) still exists.
As I said in previous posts, if “free will” means “freedom from determinism and cause-effect”, then obviously there is no free will. But that doesn’t actually answer any of the important, meaningful, legal, moral, or ethical questions people actually have on a daily basis. Reducing and simplifying a question, down to the point where it is meaningless, is a waste of time (unless it’s a part of your PhD thesis).
Borzo – your definition of “free will” seems to be “the freedom to carry out one’s will”. It sounds like you are not familiar with the more usual sense of the term, meaning “the freedom to determine one’s will.”?
For instance, you say:
But the question of “free will” is generally one of whether or not those influences are causal in determining the state of your will. For example, if a physicist takes a look at all the atoms in your body and mind, calculates their trajectories etc and determines that your will will be X, then your will is not free – not only it is predetermined, but it is the result of nothing more than the “blind” and “dumb” trajectories of the molecules etc in your body and mind, just following the laws of physics. This is regardless of whether or not “the mind is subject to only those influences that come from the body…”
You say “more usual sense”. I disagree. Many people outside of a philosophy course view it (when asked about specific details in regards to their specific questions about morality, ethics, laws, etc) as something more like what I described in my posts.
I believe, as I mentioned to Dio above, that the will has the freedom to determine it’s own future will, irregardless of determinism. All I’m saying is that the mind can shape the mind. The will can shape the will.
If you take a snapshot of the mind at a point in time, A. Then deprive the mind of external input COMPLETELY until point B. At point B the mind will be in a different state that was reached purely through internal means. The brain just changed itself. It was deterministic, yes, but it happened. The will just willed itself into something else. *The entire cause-effect loop was internal. *
Does the fact that this purely internal process was causal mean there was no free will taking place? If you define free will as the ability of the will to will itself then there is clearly free will!
It is causal.
It is “free” in the sense that it is unconstrained by external forces (outside of the body). It is still deterministic. Guess it depends on what you mean “free”. Clearly you seem to explicitly mean “free = random”. What other option is there, exactly? In my view, in this case, the will *freely *gets to point X, without interference.
Those “blind” and “dumb” molecules are my will. Do the laws of physics have to be broken, however, in order for these molecules to have “freedom”? What would make these molecules MORE FREE, thus resulting in a 'free-er will"? Do they need to be random? Do they need to have complexity so that humans can’t understand them? Do they need to be manipulated by some outside force? My own very definition of “free” IS the freedom from manipulation by some outside force! Does that mean your freedom would be my non-freedom?
Why is it that the more I read this message board, the more I feel like we’re involuntary participants in the writing of the term papers of lazy students all over the world?
Borzo, I think the reason why your definition of “free will” (besides the fact that it is out of place in the context of philosophical discussions IMO – it’s taking the phrase “free will” a little too literally in terms of its colloquial usage) is not very useful it because the boundary between the body/brain and the outside world is entirely arbitrary. Anything that “disturbs your free will” in your use of the term, could be taken in as part of the mind/body and therefore part of your free will. It is unclear whether there is any logically consistent way of motivating where to draw the line between the “inside” and the “outside”.
In order to talk about free will, you need to define the “will”.
CONGRATULATIONS! Thanks to recent developments in field of neuroscience, by defining “will” you’ve also just defined the “mind”, and drew a nice circle around the human brain! 
I’m not making up abitrary definitions and boundries so that I can provide simplistic answers - you made the arbitrary definitions and boundries up when you asked the question.
edit: you in the general sense of all the people who keep asking this question over and over
I have to take a break, and so to summarize my views on “is there free will?”:
- if free will requires the absence of determinism -> no free will
- if free will requires the ability to make decisions -> yes there is free will
- if free will requires the ability of the will to will itself -> yes there is free will
- if free will requires the chain of cause-effect to never leave the will/mind -> no free will
The human brain does not work in isolation. It is part of an interconnected ecosystem of exchange of information between other parts of the body and its environment. Saying that you can draw a nice circle around the brain is facile, and is indeed almost absurdly arbitrary in the context of your definition of free will.
You are of course free to define whatever you want. The problem is that this debate is carried out in a larger context, within which ‘free will’ is most typically taken to imply the libertarian notion of freedom; your use of the term then easily leads to confusion. This isn’t a problem I have with you specifically, but generally with most versions of compatibilism: fundamentally, they do not address the issue most people have in mind when the term ‘free will’ is used; they address an essentially different (yet not necessarily less important) issue, yet persist in using the same term. A zoological journal would rightly reject your paper announcing the discovery of unicorns, if you defined unicorns to be horses – even though you are completely free to make that definition.
Just on a tangent, I like Dennett’s (I’m starting to sound a bit like a fanboy…) idea to phrase the issue in terms of expectations: a being capable to act contrary to any reasonable expectations about its actions is free in that sense. The idea being, that since the future is essentially unpredictable to all beings of limited reasoning capacity (in part because of issues Voyager mentioned), all that can meaningfully be reasoned about are expectations of future behaviour; but everything I could expect you to do, you could decide not to do. I would still not call this free will in the ordinary sense, but it is a concept that can stand in for it in all practical circumstances (legal responsibility, ethics, human rights etc.).
The same I don’t think is true of your concept, for the reason that no matter how you might draw a boundary around a person, their brain, mind, self or soul, it is always ill-defined. There are just too many ways to cross this border to effectively separate them in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones – many thing influence us that have not entered through our senses, but instead, enter physically (though of course what enters through our senses does so just as physically): chemicals, such as drugs, hormones – among them things the body needs for its everyday functioning, yet that can still influence behaviour, such as sugar, for instance. What is behaviour-manipulating or benignly behaviour-forming can’t be simply separated.
There’s also the issue that you can arbitrarily draw a box around anything, and call what’s going on inside ‘free’. Thus, basically anything can be considered to have ‘free will’ in this sense, and be just as deserving of the civil rights and liberties you mention, if those are to be derived from this free will concept. Of course, you could go and limit free will to humans, or perhaps sentient beings; but your concept of freedom in no way depends on sentience, so you would only impose one more arbitrary rule for what to call ‘free’.
I think your definition is useless (which I don’t mean in a derogatory, but rather in an impossible-to-apply fashion) in that it doesn’t provide a reliable criterion to separate free from coerced acts. What is an allowable channel of influence to you might well be considered an integrity-violation by others, and vice versa. For instance, I certainly believe that it is possible to use sensory stimuli to coerce somebody to commit an action that runs counter to his will, which you don’t seem to.
This isn’t really relevant, but I don’t think this example of yours is a particularly good one. What is being constrained here is not the freedom of my will, but my freedom to act according to my will; there’s an important difference: if my will is not actually free, it may still seem that way to me, and any decision based on this will seem like my own; if you physically impair me such that I can’t act some specific way that I might want to act, actions are imposed on me that don’t seem to be the result of my own volition.
I believe that the appearance of disagreement in this thread is just some confusion about how the words are used.
There are a couple of different meanings to “free will.” One is the compatabilist free will - the idea that if my decisions are not being coerced by an outside agent, then they’re free (that’s my understanding of compatabilism anyway). I think this is what Borzo is talking about. As far as I’m aware, no one denies that this kind of free will “exists,” it seems to exist by definition.
The other kind of free will is what I’ve heard referred to as “contra-causal” free will - the idea that our decisions are not merely the result of a chain of physical cause and effect in the brain, but that there is some “soul” or something which can make decisions independently of the physics of our brains. This is the kind that there can be some debate about, although it seems that here at the SDMB there is no one who supports it.
Most people on the street are shocked to hear that I don’t believe that their idea of this contra-causal free will exists. I think they just haven’t thought it through - like Dio here, I don’t think the concept is even coherent. But most people firmly believe that it does exist.
Is there anyone here who believes that we have this contra-causal free will?
The will and the mind are very different things. The mind contains the will in as much as it is consciously willed – but arguably most of the things we want never enter conscious examination. To define the will, one need not say anything about the mind; the will is simply the answer to the question: “What do you want?”
And as for the will determining the will, the classic problem with this has already been pointed out, and the requisite Schopenhauer quote provided (by Dio, IIRC): in order to will something, one must first have the will to will this; this leads to an infinite regress, and thus, to the impossibility of the will as a causa sui, i.e. an ultimate cause of itself.
No, I’m saying that I don’t know what people mean by free will.
Here are some extremes. If our choices are made by some sort of disembodied soul, totally free of outside influence, then we certainly have free will. If our choices can be exactly predicted in advance, then we don’t have free will.
But what if our choices are made based on external inputs which can never be measured in advance, so that they are not predictable? What if our choices are made based on external inputs and internal states which are hidden from all, and which are affected by our choices?
If I think anything, it is that whether we actually have free will or not be act as if we have it in the broader sense (understanding that our freedom of action may be limited by mental problems and the external situation.)
Kind of like the Deist God. Whether or not this God exists, the universe is the same whether he does or he doesn’t.
Building on my last post, we can also consider the case where we can predict the action post facto given enough time, and the case where we can’t even predict the action post facto, because of hidden variables.
For your leeway argument, what about the case where things turn out differently based on effectively random events - say a cosmic ray hitting a neuron?
This isn’t free will in the sense that the soul (whatever that is) didn’t make the choice, but it is free in the sense that it isn’t deterministic.
But a cosmic ray hitting a neuron would be deterministic, in the sense that we mean when we say contra-causal free will doesn’t exist. It’s the result of a physical process. Unless the cosmic ray’s effects would be affected by quantum uncertainty, but that’s random and not free will either.
About your question of hidden variables - I think that for all practical purposes, we can never measure the state of the brain in enough detail to accurately predict what choices it will come up with. However, this is not really relevant to what we’re saying. It doesn’t matter that we’re practically not able to predict it; it’s that the brain’s output is a result of physical processes in the brain that we know are there, and we’re saying that we know of no reason to think there may be something else.
Yes.
I’d suspect that the position and velocity of a cosmic ray particle is covered by Heisenberg Uncertainty, so calling it deterministic is stretching that word way beyond any reasonable limits.
Which is why I can’t give an answer except in terms of a specific definition. If you define free will as requiring a mind totally disconnected from any physical inputs, a soul for example, you’ve pretty much defined away free will since no soul exists. If you define free will as being behavior more or less equivalent to what a soul would do from the point of view of everyone else, then you can accept it. While a physical mind is affected by external inputs, so is a soul. It is just not controlled by them. In other words, if you define free will as actions which are not even theoretically exactly predictable, I think you could say we have it.
My simulation of free will tells me that it is something not to get bent out of shape about.