In the interests of this thread not going down exactly the same road as all past threads on free will, I’m going to bow out of the current back-and-forth. I stand by my previous post.
I agree with you, man.
And I’m definitely not a nihilist.
The way I’m coming to look at it is that our choices in any given situation are constrained by causes and conditions, but we do at least have a range of choices. Or at least feel like we have a range of choices, which is good enough for me.
So this means there are choices some people can’t make, and choices they can. Thinking of it this way has helped me develop tolerance toward people with different worldviews, while still maintaining a measure of accountability for bad acts. It’s also helped me to develop more understanding toward myself when I do something that’s not altogether great for me.
Fair enough. I suppose the way these things usually go is mostly evidence against the proposition that people could willingly change their ways in the same situation.
Anyway, I suppose I might try and get things somewhat back on track by offering an answer to the OP. In the end, I think I agree with @Spice_Weasel above that it doesn’t really matter all that much. People say they care about the free will issue, but by and large, don’t seem to behave that way. We read books, watch films, and ride rollercoasters: all activities where the outcome is perfectly determined from the start. Yet, we still find value in them—hence, for something to have value to us, it doesn’t have to be ‘open’ to our intervention. We can, apparently, just enjoy the ride. Why shouldn’t that be true of life?
As for morality, that’s one place where I agree with the late, great Daniel Dennett. The question of whether a person could have acted differently in the same situation isn’t really germane to the issue, because there’s no such thing as ‘the same situation’. However, there are similar situations, and just as there is such a thing as a ‘good’ golf player even though in the exact same situation, they would either make or fail their swing every time again, there can be morally superior actions—it’s just that this isn’t decided by any single occurrence, but by a range of actions in similar situations. It then makes just as much sense to try and increase the ‘moral capacity’ of a person across similar situations as it makes to train a golfer.
So even if there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the issue, it makes fairly little difference in a pragmatic sense. There’s still value in life, there’s still ways to act more or less ‘good’, no matter whether future contingencies are, actually, up to you.
There may even be a sense in which you are the originator of your decisions, in the face of a determinist universe: for any complex system, it is in general impossible to predict its behavior without an explicit, step-by-step simulation. For a baseball thrown through the air, I can immediately predict its position at any time, using only the initial data, ‘skipping’ the steps in between; but even the three body problem does not admit such a solution in general. So any way of deriving your actions from initial conditions will include something computationally equivalent to you actually carrying them out—there’s no way of telling the story of your decisions that doesn’t include (a simulation of) you actually making them. So ‘you’ are a necessary part of your actions coming about.
So why do we seem to care so much? Ultimately, I guess there are psychological reasons. Some people feel comforted by the feeling of being an active architect of their destiny; others are mollified by the idea that neither they nor others could have acted any differently. There’s no failure in a world without free will, because there never were any options in the first place; likewise, others only act the way they do because they could do nothing else. That was also the view of Einstein: “I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.”
It has a HUGE effect on me and my existence, and most certainly DOES affect how I live MY life. In the one, I am a prisoner of my own states, basic drives, neuroses, and assumptions. That the holy horrors (thank you Neal Peart) here don’t terrify you but have nonetheless have led you into a state of passive apathy about your existence isn’t my problem. In the other a chance exists to jump OUT of the system and escape said dire determinism (even if the “random” determinism of QM) and transcend the base existence here. I certainly am not going to just sit back and meekly accept my fate, but keep on pushing until things finally give somewhere (or not, but at least I gave it an authentic try).
IOW I have very little interest in FW as a dry dissected concept laid out on a table somewhere to be endlessly bandied about over cocktails and smokes (and now in this era over electronic highways). I am only concerned about seeing if my seeming FW is an authentic thing and thus seeing if I can use it to get out of the materialistic traps (both the fundamental ones as well as the philosophical ones) that have been laid for me.
When I first heard about Pascal’s Wager, I was dissatisfied with the assumption that one has to “wait” to “go” somewhere for one’s “rewards.” I instead came up with John’s Supposition, that one could bring heaven into this plane in the here and now, and not have to worry about rewards or punishments (or oblivion) in some hypothetical future place or state (or non-state). At this point in my life I believe I have done exactly that; my life has been so full of uncanny twists and turns that to list them here would take me the rest of the day. At the very least I see myself able to do things that most everybody else in the world doesn’t appear to be able to pull off. But it is difficult to get into any further detail because I value my privacy and don’t want MY life laid out on the dissecting table either.
But the details don’t matter. Tl;dr, just keep pushing, don’t give up, don’t give in, see what gives.
Your examples are all activities that were planned/designed by someone else, for us to experience for our enjoyment. Should we think of life the same way? Does this encourage us to think of our life as something we are passively experiencing, and to judge it by how much we are enjoying it?
What makes a good life? When we come to the end of our lives, what criteria do we use to decide whether our lives were good or worthwhile or meaningful? Is it based on input (what we experience, what has happened to us), or output (what we contribute, the difference we make in the world, what we do to/for other people), or some of both? And can our belief or not in free will affect our answer to this question?
I don’t think that’s the salient bit. I was merely illustrating that there are things that we derive some form of value from about whose unfolding we have no power at all. That doesn’t necessarily entail them being created for our benefit, it’s just a counterexample to the claim that for life to have value, we need to be in the driver’s seat, so to speak. Watching the northern lights is also a show about which we have no influence, but still can derive tremendous awe and pleasure from.
Of course, there are also things we have no control over that are absolutely crappy. And the experience of having our choices stifled—of coercion—is something that typically makes for a crappy experience, no matter whether they were ‘genuine’ choices or whether it was inevitable that your intentions were thwarted.
Life, on that view, isn’t inherently better or worse than life in a universe with free will; my point is just that not having free will, in the last consequence, doesn’t necessarily make life bad. The free will denier in a deterministic cosmos can have a grand old time, and the free will advocate in a world with genuine choice be abjectly miserable. It’s largely an orthogonal matter.
Problem is that as all free will arguments, that doesn’t logically hold together. You keep using deterministic, cause-and-effect concepts and language in order to say that free will is somehow more desirable, but if determinism is false then those don’t apply in the first place. Concepts like “pushing” for something, “using” things, and similar language all presume cause and effect hold; determinism.
If there is no determinism then it doesn’t matter if you push for something, want something, or try to achieve something because in a world without cause and effect nothing you do or think has any effect on your thoughts, actions or the results of either. Things “just happen” for no reason. Reasoning and memory don’t even exist in the first place, just one thought succeeding another with no connection between them because one thought causing another is deterministic.
If that doesn’t resemble the real world, well that’s one of the problems with free will; it doesn’t fit the way the world works at all, even as vaguely defined as it is.
Are you suggesting that if ours is a deterministic universe, your measly personal squad of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms are going to break free from the pattern set by the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in the entire observable Universe, like a rebellious teenager thinking they can outsmart the universal parent with a gazillion more atoms, and somehow develop free will? Well, good luck with that cosmic quantum rebellion! It’s a bold move, but the odds are not in your favor.
I’m just going to follow my script, smoke a little weed, and enjoy the show.
I wanted to give a different answer, but apparently, the universe had other plans.
But that’s what you are. It’s saying you are a prisoner of yourself. Damn me for enjoying coffee, I’ve made myself drink this coffee that I am now enjoying!
I do the things I want to do, based on my best understanding at the time. Expecting me to not do what I want to do is like expecting me to know more than I know.
Of course some would dispute “that’s what you are”. Perhaps there is a soul, a spirit, whatever?
And I would ask, and have asked many times, how is that different? What does conceiving of a non-physical element bring to the table in terms of decision-making?
Apparently the answer is that it explains how there’s free will…as long as no follow-up questions are allowed.
Which does raise an interesting philosophical question.
In the book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari asks the question: what if we could choose what we want?
Harari (who is gay and grew up in IIRC Jerusalem, exposed to the Orthodox community that obviously doesn’t approve of that) imagines a world where you can undergo a medical procedure to rewire your brain to change your wants, desires, personality, etc.
If a young Mormon man, uncomfortable with his homosexual orientation, goes to a doctor in order to undergo this operation - is that an example of his true self overcoming “the weakness of the flesh” and therefore becoming more true to oneself? Or is it an example of internalized homophobia brought about by an oppressive religious worldview causing him to turn away from his so called true self?
Harari then asks, what if when he reaches the doctor’s office, he is struck by the handsome appearance of his doctor, and on a whim decides to undergo a different operation - instead of hacking his brain to change his sexual orientation, he now wants to hack his brain to prevent himself from being uncomfortable with homosexuality?
Did he have a moment of weakness that caused him to abandon his deeply held beliefs, thus becoming less “true to himself”? Or did his true nature win out over that internalized self hate imposed by an oppressive religious worldview?
First - great reference!
Second - I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of the conclusion. I’m not apathetic about my existence at all, nor do I just sort of let things passively happen to me.
As Nietzsche said,
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax
That about sums it up for me. I tear things down that don’t work and build up the things that do. It’s a pragmatic and flexible worldview. My life is an act of creation. In this context, the very idea of free will is just a tool. It’s not like any of this is provable, otherwise this would have been a short thread. So if free will makes sense in one context but doesn’t in another, I’m not really bothered.
Not a day passes where I’m not trying to change something about my behavior. I have found that free will in this context can be counterproductive. Guilt or “I should have dones” don’t help people make important changes. So when I can say, “Well, I did that because I was conditioned to do that” then it’s not such a big drama and I can then focus on my intentions leading to skillful action. Likewise, when someone does something shitty, I can also say, “They did that because they were conditioned to do that” and it’s not so personal.
In a way, letting go of this idea that we have absolute control over what we do can open us up to making better choices.
Weird.
I don’t think this is true. Extremely complicated concepts are brought up all the time with no prior context. Before I heard of black holes I had no concept of gravity that extreme. But once it was explained to me in basic words, the idea was easily enough grasped.
Just because I don’t know the 40 or 50 words used by indigenous peoples for snow, doesn’t mean I can’t understand a particular condition of snow if explained to me in the words I do know.
Indeed, one might ponder the significance of the decision-making entity in shaping our perception of reality…but does it really matter to your mortal life? Whether it is the collective sum of particles within our brain, yielding its emergent consciousness, or an external force such as a deity, a cosmic artificial intelligence, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even hidden variables within QM, the outcome appears identical.
Our experiences, or qualia, seem consistent regardless of their true nature or the mechanisms behind them, at least during our earthly existence. The implications for an afterlife, if it exists (a big “if”), remain a distinct and speculative matter altogether.
Don’t fight it; it’s a fight you can’t win. You can’t will free will to exist if it doesn’t. Deterministic/non-deterministic, free will/no free will—a good meal and a fine bottle of wine tastes just as good whether you will it freely or not.
This seems to be saying that unless determinism is true, all bets are off. But that’s clearly not the case. For one, under most interpretations, quantum mechanics is an indeterministic theory that nevertheless underlies a largely predictable macroscopic world. A lack of determinism doesn’t mean that everything is a coinflip; a 99% probability is still indeterministic, but there’s clearly a better way to bet, and trying to shape probabilities towards a desirable outcome is exerting a nontrivial influence in an indeterministic world to get it closer to what you want it to be. (That’s why, for instance, the house consistently turns a profit in games of chance.)
And even in ‘totally’ indeterministic settings, prediction needs not be impossible. Consider a large grid of cells, that can be either black or white, and where, at each timestep, one of those cells randomly selects its state. If we initialize the whole grid as all white, and look only at its overall ‘color’ rather than at each individual cell, it’s simple to predict that it will evolve towards a grey state, and even calculate a timeframe for it to do so.
That’s of course an artificial example, but it’s not unrealistic; in particular, the second law of thermodynamics works pretty much in this way: any random change to a system is overwhelmingly more likely to lead to a higher entropy state, so overall, systems will tend to increase their entropy. And that (and the rest of statistical mechanics) is enough to find many intriguing ways to make our will known in the world, such as building steam engines powering great industrial processes.
On the other hand, a completely deterministic world can be one in which will is acting freely: take the occasionalist story, where everything happens does so through the will of some deity. That deity could make it so that the world is indistinguishable from a perfectly Newtonian cosmos, while nevertheless retaining the ability to do otherwise, if it wills so. It’s like the weaver creating a tapestry: just looking at the product, you might think that the pattern determines its own continuation; but the weaver could have deviated from it at any time—perhaps creating a different pattern corresponding to a different set of ‘natural laws’.
Not only does it make no difference but there’s no way to answer the question either way. That’s why the debate is so heated.
I don’t think you understand @Babale. I think what is intended is more of a “proto-language”, one that doesn’t have the word “gravity” or “radiation” or “horizon”. It took a long time for the concept of “gravity” to become something to need to explain versus something that just happened.
It would be difficult to actually prove or disprove my remark. How could you assess if someone with only proto-language has any notion of wondering about why things fall?
Regardless, if a proto-language is so simple it doesn’t have abstract concepts, how does one then discuss those concepts? Or think them, really, i.e. express them to yourself?
Right, that’s why I specified that for the language to be primitive enough we may have to go all the way before sapiens even existed and use the language of some other hominid.
I agree with your whole post Tibby, but there is still some degree here of 1) assuming “free will” as a concept makes sense and therefore 2) lamenting that it is something that we may not have.
Right now, in our universe, you find yourself in particular situations and you make a decision based on your personal preferences and best judgement, and what is most important to you.
Now God clicks his fingers and it’s a free will universe.
What’s the difference? What’s changed?
Do you have no preferences now, so no reason to prefer being kissed by your partner over having chilli rubbed into your eyes?
Do you have no limits on your knowledge now i.e. you’re omniscient?
I guess having more than one best judgement is the most obvious reading, but what does that actually mean?
Let’s say given the option of going to college or travelling the world you went for college, and in the free universe, “Free Tibby” chooses travel. Why does his best judgement differ from yours? It can’t be something you were unaware of (which would mean the scenario is different, as Free Tibby has different memories and/or knowledge). It can’t be something that you would consider more important than the reason you picked college (that would be changing a characteristic of you, and the whole point of free will is supposed to be that the same character could make different choices). And it can’t be randomness (which free will advocates don’t consider to have any relationship to freedom (which I’d agree with)).
It essentially can’t be, and what I am trying to illustrate is that the issue is with the concept itself, nothing to do with empirical facts about e.g. whether our universe is deterministic.
Epistemologically speaking, non-deterministic processes are indistinguishable from deterministic processes.
I for one take the position that determinism is incompatible with free will. Therefore, I must conclude that free will is epistemologically indistinguishable from an illusion of free will. It is vulnerable to Occam’s razor, for instance, unless you are predisposed to think of free will as a “simpler” explanation.
~Max
^^^ yeah, this. One puts a certain amount of energy into considering overall situations and determining what one’s priorities, principles, default beliefs and attitudes, etd, are, so that one can use them as a guide for making decisions in specific events and circumstances.
Convince me that it’s not really “me” making those conclusions and that I am but a passive reflexive response system driven entirely by external situations and I’ll probably throw up my hands and say “Who gives a shit, then? If I’d been born into a different context and subjected to a different set of external stimuli, I’d reach totally different conclusions”.
If you folks who embrace determinism as The Truth in this matter have a different take on what it means to be determined by external causal prompts, you aren’t explaining that part very clearly. (Means to whom? What “you” is there for anything to have a meaning to if you’re right? Isn’t your set of conclusions about free will utterly determined by stuff you’ve been exposed to and had happen to you, and you didn’t reach those conclusions as the outcome of any evaluations your mind has independently made?)