Yes, and nobody is going to give me that time back, unfortunately. But I like to think that I got at least a bit of a cautionary tale out of it, reminding me to revisit my own assumptions before trying to spring the gotcha on others’.
If you have free will, and you learn that you do, would you live your life any differently than you do now? Doubtful.
If you don’t have free will, and you learn that you don’t, could you live your life any differently than you do now? No.
If you do have free will, but you’re convinced that you don’t…well, I suppose that could affect the way you live your life. So, don’t go down that rabbit hole.
As I’ve said before (in this very thread, in fact), we should talk about who or what “I” or “me” refers to before (or in parallel with) talking about what might “cause” me to choose Option A in any real or hypthetical circumstance.
I’ve spoken of my second-by-second sense that I consciously choose and I have said that that, itself, is either real or it is an illusion, and, if an illusion, it gives me nowhere to proceed (it makes my entire consciousness an illusion; it makes ME in my entirety, an illusion; even if I can’t falfisy that as a premise, I can’t DO anything with the premise either, since “to do” still situates me as a chooser of courses of thought and action).
So if it’s NOT an illusion, all these factors you’re positing as possible “causes of my choices” are part of me, part of the me that is doing the deciding and choosing. That highlights a different illusion, the illusion of individual separateness.
In short I don’t accept that I lack free will, but I accept that my Self is not merely AHunter3 the individual self who occupies one human body, is middle aged, American, etc, but is also a communal shared social self, a “we”, a conscious society. And more, if you want to include the physical components of input into my choices.
Which would make for a Pascal’s Wager style argument for believing in free will…
But the logic doesn’t quite check out, because of course learning that you don’t have free will influences the way you live your life if you actually don’t have free will. It’ll be one element of the causal determining factors of your behavior, such that your behavior will differ based on whether it’s there or not. So believing that you don’t have free will might lead to despair, or to relief, whether or not you actually do have free will.
Obviously I am taking this to be describing my position in an indirect / passive tone.
So firstly, what assumptions?
My argument doesn’t assume Determinism, or even Materialism. I’ve deliberately left everything on the table: from souls to gods, to illustrate that all these things are a red herring.
Secondly, I’ve asked the two most open-ended questions I can imagine about free will: what is it, and can you describe anything about a free will decision?
The fact that you consider these “gotchas” says all that needs to be said.
I’ll have a go at it, if you don’t mind.
Free will is where something or someone, at some point in the universe consciously did something intentionally, on purpose, and that’s the reason it occurred.
It is distinguished from illusions: if you can explain why it happened that way without reference to the consciousness choosing it, then you’ve “washed out” the role of the conscious decision-maker and we need not take it into account
I’m less clear on what you mean by “describe anything about a free will decision”, but guessing that you probably mean “describe one specific decision that was made of free will”, I will go with my decision to post this post.
But, in a deterministic universe, if you don’t have free will and you come to understand this, then you were predestined to learn it. Consequently, there’s no way you could have believed otherwise. Similarly, if you lack free will yet believe you possess it, that belief was also predetermined. In both scenarios, you can’t hold any belief other than the one you’re destined to have. Therefore, there’s nothing you can do to change it. Whether you feel despair upon realizing you lack free will or you are relieved in the delusion that you have it, those feelings were also destined.
Great, and “free will” under that definition trivially exists, and is the same thing as I was referring to as simply choice.
I chose to take a swig of pepsi just now because I wanted to quench my thirst and I enjoy the taste of pepsi. While that action was based on personal preferences, every rational choice is going to be. And no-one could have predicted what I was going to do without, essentially, replicating my brain / soul / whatever perfectly.
Agreed. That is a description of a real phenomenon. Of course it exists - how could it be otherwise?
But it isn’t particularly meaningful for it to exist.
Well, obviously, I can’t really know what your position is; I can only attempt such a reconstruction as to make your behavior most comprehensible to me. Since I used to behave similarly, I might think I have a good hope of doing so.
So you say you want the definition of free will. That definition has been supplied many times, in this thread and elsewhere: the ability to choose to do otherwise. But that’s evidently not satisfactory to you.
Rather, you want a
That’s where the assumptions come in. You want some story where one thing leads to another, one state of the universe follows its predecessor, such that what happens in this universe amounts to an entity making a willful choice that nevertheless could have gone differently. Well, here’s such a story: god chooses each successive state of the universe and brings it forth, and for each such state, could’ve chosen differently.
Evidently, that’s not satisfactory to you, either. You want those free choices explained in terms of something else, something that doesn’t just refer back to it as a primitive: you want to know how it could be like that, in terms acceptable to you. But no such story can exist; it’s, as you and others have been pointed out, logically impossible.
But note what we’re talking about here: the impossibility is in coming up with an explanatory story. This doesn’t entail metaphysical impossibility, unless one adds a premise to the effect that everything metaphysically possible should be capable of being further elucidated with just such a story. It doesn’t take much to see that this is deeply implausible: if things were such, explanation would simply never come to an end, each explanatory entity would need further elucidation to be palatable. It’d be turtles all the way down.
So there are some primitive notions that need to be accepted in terms of which explanations are formulated. Think of these as the axioms of the system of explanation. Your axioms are whatever terms you would accept a proposed ‘how’ of free choice to be formulated in.
But whatever those terms are, they don’t in turn admit further explanation. Causality doesn’t; natural laws don’t; randomness doesn’t (indeed, any such explanation would just amount to randomness being non-random). Generally, any such explanation would just mean the dissolution of the concept being explained: of you had a further explanation of causality, then that means you have an account of how things happen that doesn’t include causality; so in the world where things happen like that, that they also happen causally would be impossible.
So effectively, what you’re asking for when you’re asking how free will could be possible, is for others to explain their axioms to you in terms of your axioms. Since this then removes any role for their axioms to play, you call them impossible. But this is only meaningful if your axioms, the primitive notions for which you don’t require further justification, correspond to the actual furniture of the world, if there even is such a thing (and it’s very much a live option there isn’t: the limitations we’re bumping here may just be limitations of our ability to tell stories).
That makes the only live options here either quietism—we don’t know how things happen, so all talk about that is meaningless—or egalitarianism: how things happen admits no further elucidation, so to ask for such is just to commit a conceptual error. Neither of which seems to be palatable to you, which means you must think that whatever way you consider things to happen has some better claim to truth. I don’t think you have grounds to do so.
Here’s the way I see it: In a deterministic universe, every particle interaction from T-0 (the Big Bang) to T-Infinity is governed by physical laws, theoretically allowing the future to be precisely predicted if all conditions are known. Think of it as a sequence already played out and etched in stone. There’s nothing any assemblage of particles (like your brain) can do to change this sequence. It’s a done deal. Every thought and decision of your consciousness is no different, because your consciousness is nothing more than an emergent property of your brain, whose particle interactions follow these deterministic laws.
So, in a deterministic universe, why do we feel like we have free will? Probably because that was the most likely evolutionary path for conscious beings, especially those with self-awareness, to take, at least for humans on Earth. Perhaps on our evolutionary branch, pre-humans with the feeling of free will outcompeted those without it. They tried harder because they believed their decisions mattered. In other words, the delusion of free will is the best pathway for our universe to unfold, and that’s the way it did.
I don’t necessarily believe we live in a deterministic universe, but if we do, that’s the way it makes sense to me.
Here’s the way I see it: approximately 12 billion years ago the only event that has ever occurred began to occur and all those particles you refer to are a part of it. It had no prior cause. I would not precisely characterize it as conscious so much as I’d say consciousness is a subset of it, so it’s definitely not less than conscious. It chose to be and it chose to become and diversify and we’re a part of it.
Deterministic causation is a useful tool and a model with predictive powers but it’s fundamentally an illusion. All the things that appear to be precursors of other things are really the same thing to begin with.
Right. I mean, I’m not sure that it has been clearly stated in this thread (I did ask for a definition many times with no response), but it’s true I don’t find that definition satisfactory, both because it is unclear but also because FW advocates typically add on additional requirements that aren’t part of that definition.
I chose to do X. If I had wanted to do Y more, or if my best understanding was that Y was the better course of action, then I would have done Y. So yes, in that sense, I trivially have the ability to choose otherwise even in a deterministic universe; if I had wanted to do something else more, I could have done it.
But FW advocates would typically clarify that they mean with everything the same – the same desires, the same knowledge – I could choose differently. And this is where the incoherence kicks in. I chose X for reasons. What happened to those reasons, did they vanish? Why would I value Y more when I actually valued it less?
I’ll stop you there.
I want any elaboration at all of FW decisions. If you don’t like how I phrased that question, feel free to rephrase it in a way that makes it atemporal, or acausal, or non-material, or whatever other way you want to try to describe free will.
If this is impossible, then again I would point to that as good evidence that this is a garbage concept.
Just a moment ago you said that your position used to be the same as mine, then you had a penny drop. Well, let’s hear it, please. I also want to reach that realization.
Instead of multiple paragraphs of excuses for why we can’t ask this or that question about free will. What can we ask?
My impression from that poster was that they don’t actually believe in causation, that one thing leads to another. Or, maybe that causation is just one way of looking at things; another way is that it’s all correlation or something. I found their posts to be so incomprehensible that it seemed either like nonsense or some very high level philosophical work.
I will usually assume a poster is not purposely spouting nonsense, so I realized that I don’t have the philosophy chops to get whatever it is that HMHW was talking about.
In fairness, I think @half_man_half_wit is pointing out that, like freedom/determinism or mind/matter, causality is a more difficult question than it appears on the surface and it really isn’t trivial for a careful thinker to explain what it means to say, “X causes Y”.
Could be. Like I said, I can’t seem to understand what HMHW is saying at all.
I think this is an essential source of confusion for the conversation.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that if your information, situation, and opinions were exactly the same, somehow your choice would be different. I can see where you might think that.
I’ve been reviewing this thread, and I want to thank you for your continued contributions. They help me think, process, and evaluate my own position.
Let me step back. Let’s look from a nonreligious framework, since that seems to be where the conundrum remains.
Let’s posit that everything about our identity, self, soul, whatever is fundamentally an electro- bio- chemical process in the brain. Everything about our being is at the underlying foundation operating by the laws of physics.
We still have the open question of how this identity arises, how it operates that it has the ability to take inputs and take actions, i.e. make choices.
What does it mean to be a conscious agent?
And I don’t just mean humans. How does that apply to other mammals, or reptiles, or even insects?
Because I think the free will debate arises in part from trying to differentiate humans from “lesser animals”. We like to assert that they just work by built-in instincts, whereas humans think.
I think this is a flawed assertion. Everything we know about how our brains work shows that any distinction is in extent, not in form.
While I certainly don’t know what an insect experiences, let alone a plant or a some mold or a paramecium, I feel confident in claiming that mammals, especially higher order ones, display complex behaviors, personalities, and what appears to be the ability to make choices.
So I will assert that the question of free will, of it means anything, is about more than just the ability to make choices.
I think where free will resides, if at all, is about morality rather than mere decisions.
So maybe the question shouldn’t be about decisions, but about our inherent nature.
The religious framework is to assert that God didn’t make us good or evil, we have the “free will” to be either, to choose between those options.
So if we step back out of the religious framework, the assertion is that our inherent selves are not good or evil by nature, that we have the capacity for both inside us.
Free will, then, is just the open ability to do good or bad by choice.
This then immediately opens a whole new can of worms as we start to talk about morality, are good and evil actual states or judgements about decisions and outcomes, etc.
But if we go with this take, then the whole topic of a deterministic universe is irrelevant. The mechanism of identity and choice reside in whatever physics make up the consciousness. The essence of free will is just the assertion that our moral determinations are not mandated by the nature of our being, but by the formulation of that self and the cultural and social factors that shape our mental development.
No worries and thanks for a very well-written post that I also found quite thought-provoking.
OK but bear in mind that “souls” are normally defined as being non-physical.
My position anyway is that souls don’t actually help, so let’s continue.
Yes and it’s interesting because often the things that we consider differentiate ourselves from animals are things like logic and reasoning…which actually are the most clearly deterministic.
Agreed.
But it’s interesting that you drew this conclusion within the context of looking at animals.
Because animals, particularly higher mammals, often do have competing instincts on what we would call good and evil. And they do demonstrate compassionate or empathetic behaviours at times.
My own view is this: humans are a social species. But we aren’t that social. We’re quite tribal and more aggressive than many other primates. In the modern world, societies have done a good job of promoting cooperation and trying to make you feel like your tribe is “everyone”.
But we still have inner conflicts and/or want to find other humans to fight. This kind of conflict is what we call good and evil.
My belief though is that if we were to encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence, they likely wouldn’t be able to relate to this. Whether they are more communal than us, or more selfish, they might not feel this kind of inner conflict at all.
Again, if this were all that were meant by “free will” then I would absolutely agree that it is meaningful and exists. It isn’t what people typically take it to mean though, they usually just say “could have chosen differently”.
In general I don’t like trying to rehabilitate terms. Free will has a lot of baggage. So while I absolutely could define something like it that makes sense (as you have done), it’s just going to cause confusion if I use my version of free will in conversation. And also mean no-one ever acknowledges the issues with things like free will as a “solution” to the problem of evil.
I gave it when you asked:
Again, this is already where things are problematic. You’re assuming that there is some state of the world that corresponds to wanting something, which is then the reason for (in whatever way) bringing the appropriate action into being. This is a deeply mysterious story: there is no account as to how any state of the world brings another into being. You just choose not to look at this gap, and take that story as a given.
Free will tells another story, one where what I want is just what I want, without being made so by any compelling power of events in the universe besides itself. As an illustration, suppose you find a slip of paper that says ‘have pancakes’. So you have pancakes. Later, that slip of paper slips through a tear in the space-time continuum and appears where you originally found it. What is the reason for that slip saying what it does? There is none beyond that it does. It could’ve just as well said ‘have waffles’. But it also isn’t random: nobody flipped a coin to determine what it says. It says so because that’s what it is, it’s part of its being, so to speak.
If we accept a causal description otherwise, then that slip is a source of causal power, but not a sink—it is not caused by anything beyond itself, but causes things beyond itself. The will, in a universe with free will, is similar: caused by nothing beyond itself, but causing things in and through itself. That doesn’t make it somehow unbound from the rest of the universe: consider a situation in which your past had somehow conspired to you having the preferences of 60% waffles, 40% pancakes, and you choose pancakes. You’d probably consider this to be a biased random event, maybe some atom in a neuron randomly de-excited and the effect got amplified to increase that neuron’s firing rate, or whatever. On assuming free will, you wanted pancakes, so that’s what you got.
This is obviously an imperfect analogy—I’m not saying free will involves temporal loops. But to shoehorn it into a causal narrative, something has to give. Another way of achieving much the same end would be a process completing infinitely many steps in a finite amount of time—the end result of such a process is not determined by its initial conditions, yet is perfectly definite. But again: this is just an approximation within an overall causal narrative. It’s much simpler to just say that you chose pancakes because you wanted pancakes, accepting the self-determination of the will as a primitive notion.
Yes, I understand your argument, it just isn’t as compelling as you believe it is. This insistence on some elaboration, some analysis of how it could be that there are free will decisions is positing an implicit backdrop of ‘how things come to be’, which then is what makes exactly that analysis impossible: no matter what set of ways for things to come to be you accept, unless ‘free will’ is already included among them, if you analyze free will in terms of them, there won’t be anything left over. But that’s the same for all the other ways of how things come to be, too! Randomness is an easy example: suppose somebody only accepts causal stories, then randomness is just impossible—there is no step-by-step process such that its outcome, then, is random.
By being mute about what sort of ways for things to happen you accept, you’re not being more general in your discussion, you just refuse to open up your own preconceptions to the debate. Saying that you want ‘any elaboration at all’ of free will is saying that you have some other notion of how things happen, but then you wish to have that swept under the rug. But whatever other notions those are, they are just as impossible to further justify as free will is, because they are the terms in which such justification is formulated! So you end at circularity or regress—the Münchhausen trilemma.
Again, I’m not specifically about free will. The same problem applies to any other set of fundamental concepts that are supposed to give an accounting of the unfolding of the world. Sorry for the circumlocution, but whenever I use more definite vocabulary, you seem to think that I saddle you with specific views on determinism or natural laws—but I’m not; those are completely irrelevant. But you clearly have some views, some notion of what story would be acceptable to you—otherwise, you would not ask for an ‘elaboration’ of free will—and whatever those are, are just as problematic. The way to get the penny to drop is to make them explicit, and then subject them to the same scrutiny you apply to free will.
Well, I don’t really have fixed views on causation. I’m really just pointing out that all explanation for how things happen either bottoms out in circularity, infinite regress, or accepting some particular primitive notion as just ‘given’. People in this thread being critical of free will tend to accept some other notion as given, and dismiss free will because it leads to circularity or regress. But that’s a double-edged argument—it can be equally well wielded against whatever notion they hold to be given.
Historically, we have been through very many rounds of this. Al-Ghazali, in the 11th century, considered the notion of causality to be so obviously incoherent as to necessitate God’s mediation in bringing every cause to its effect, something he chooses freely. This line of argument was taken up by Nicolas Malebranche in the 17th century, in the West the most famous proponent of occasionalism. Hume in the 18th century observed that we actually have no evidence at all of causation, calling belief in it a ‘mental habit’.
We just tend to sit on the other branch of the tree, these days: we accept a story of the world in terms of natural laws, of cause and consequence, and in these terms, no accounting of free will is possible. And that’s all well and good! We just shouldn’t expect of the universe that because free will has no place in our favorite story, it necessarily must oblige.
[quote=“Half_Man_Half_Wit, post:239, topic:1000940”]You’re assuming that there is some state of the world that corresponds to wanting something, which is then the reason for (in whatever way) bringing the appropriate action into being. This is a deeply mysterious story: there is no account as to how any state of the world brings another into being.[/quote]That’s not true at all, physics is well developed enough that there’s a very detailed account as to how past states lead to future states.
Also, if there’s no cause and effect that’s not “free will”, it’s chaos and disassociation. In such a case there’s no choices, no decisions and not even any perceptions or memory; just disconnected things that “just happen”.