Which is why reason is a better (less loaded) term in this context.
Is there a reason that a free will entity freely does something?
If so, these reasons are going to end up pointing to something external:
I didn’t choose to like the taste of cheese, it’s a property I just have. I can choose whether to have a cheese sandwich right now though, and it would be based on reasons like enjoying cheese but also wanting to lose weight. And they’ll be a reason for prioritizing one over the other in this instance. Note that I don’t need to assert there is no soul, or the universe is deterministic, or anything of the sort; all that is irrelevant to this kind of reason-based description.
If not, then it’s just a random bolt out of the blue. Or at least, it’s an unreasoned action. Which most people don’t really think of as choice.
As I have repeatedly asked you to define what you mean by a “reason” I don’t don’t feel compelled to fill in the information.
How would you define free will?
As I already have. The lack of determinism allows for a future of an uncountable number of choices. Although these choices are constrained by physical restraints - I cannot fly or travel through time or make a rock too heavy for me to lift - the world is open. That is why the future is not predictable in fine grain. It is often grossly predictable. I might drive to work along the same route each day, but I also might make a sudden decision to stop at a bakery and pick up doughnuts for the gang. Or pick up an AK-47 and slaughter them all. Neither God nor randomness is involved. Choice is, and that choice is the basis of free will.
How would an identical universe and identical memories make a different outcome, in a non random way? For what reason would it be different?
Answered above. The future is open. All possibilities exist except those that are constrained.
How do entities in a universe with free will by definition choose between coffee or tea?
Nobody knows. That is a matter of consciousness and interior brain function and we have barely a clue.
Who, or better what, is doing the weighing? Our brain? Our conscious brain or our subconscious brain or both or something else? What is this “reason” you keep using? Are all actions explainable by a conscious reason? How does the autonomous nervous system fit into that? What is the “reason” we run or scream or faint? Are those actions not part of free will? If so, do you consider them determined? Why should we separate a conscious decision to scream with an unconscious decision to do so? Define the parts and the workings and the constraints.
Talk about bad smells.I can’t use “free will” in an argument about “free will” vs. “determinism” in which no alternative is given? Nope. Not going to happen. English doesn’t work that way.
When? Show me when, prior to this post, you’ve asked me that question even once.
Meanwhile this is the first time you’ve invoked this definition. What a strange interaction.
Perhaps you are getting confused with another thread where you may have made claims like this?
Anyway, I think this attempt at a definition just illustrates how bad a concept this is. It begins with saying what free will isn’t (which immediately lots of people, e.g. Compatibilists, would of course disagree with) then the rest is sloppy at best … just pure quantum randomness could give an unbounded number of possibilities. You mention choice, but as something that free will “allows”, rather than explaining how free will *is* a choice.
We don’t know that. The universe might be deterministic and therefore predictable in principle (but not in practice of course).
No you haven’t answered it. Saying there are n possibilities, or even infinite possibilities, is not an answer to the question of for what reason an entity, if the universe were somehow reversed back to the same state including their memories, would make a different reasoned choice.
Well we can ask the person, right? In our reality we can say why did you pick tea, and they can answer “Coffee is too bitter for me” or whatever. The problem is, such answers give a big clue about how choice actually works, and this is why it’s a problem for spooky free will.
I am simply using it in the normal English way.
For what reason did you skip breakfast? To get to work on time
For what reason did Pheidippides run all the way to Athens? To tell the assembly they had won the battle of Marathon before they could be misinformed
We make choices for reasons. And some of those reasons are more important to us than others.
Hence why if a god put my brain back into some past environment, and my brain state was exactly the same as it was then, I’ll make the same choice for the same reasons.
Just in case you’re wondering if anyone is following all of this, I’m reading all of your posts and you’re making the points that I tried to make better and clearer than I ever could.
I disagree. In a world without determinism there would be no choices, and even if they were they’d be pointless. If effect doesn’t follow cause then there’s no way you could have a mind cable of making a choice in the first place, and even if you somehow did it wouldn’t matter since their choice wouldn’t affect their behavior or even their future thoughts.
You also wouldn’t have a world that looked anything at all like ours; you’d just have an endless sea of chaos filling all of space.
What it really comes down to is that people intrinsically don’t like feeling helpless, with a minor in being uncomfortable with the idea that nobody is truly responsible or to blame for their actions, and the cans of worms that opens.
Though I also get the feeling that multiple conversations with multiple understandings and unspoken definitions are occurring every time and every place this topic comes up.
Heh, I wonder: could the determinist position be summed up in that old saying, “Yeah, and if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle”?
Something else I just thought of: if the thoughts and perceptions of severely mentally ill people were completely untethered from reality and completely random, would that be an approximation of free will?
Thanks RitterSport, that is genuinely good to hear because as I say, I’ve failed to land this plane before.
The framing of “free will vs determinism / fatalism” is really strong and it’s hard to get people to consider the possibility that it’s (at best) a false dilemma. Let me be clear: I am quite willing to have my mind changed. But that’s not going to happen with people just repeating old assertions, I want to hear what the clear definition of free will is for a start.
Another vote in favour. I tried to articulate what I think your stance is but not as well. I’m glad it’s you responding to your thoughtful opponents and not me.
Everything you say is perfectly clear and sensible to me, but then again, I already share your views.
However, I don’t find it too surprising, because like you I have also struggled to communicate these ideas. I wonder if there is some kind of underlying “prerequisite” - you need to already accept X before arguments on Y will click for you.
I don’t think phrasing it as “choices based on options” really is any different than “free will”.
First, I will attempt to define the term “free will”. That term is used to describe the difference between being able to choose and being constrained by God’s will. In other words, is the path of the universe predetermined by God, with every element controlled directly by him, or do humans truly have the option to make choices?
So if I say “choices based on options”, the question still remains is the universe predetermined?
And predetermined does not mean guessable by God, it means God sets what the answer will be. In other words, without God, is the path of the universe set, unvarying? Or are choices real?
To use an analogy, is the universe a novel written by an author where the characters think they are making choices but in reality the author made the choice? Or is it more like a “Choose your own adventure” where the reader character at least has the option to make a choice in what happens next?
Now I will preempt that the analogy is flawed because I am inserting the reader instead of the book characters, but that’s not really the point. The point is the story can be different for each reading.
Free will is just the traditional way to say choices aren’t constrained, that the person actually makes the choice, not God or the universe dictating what the outcome of the choice will be.
But again, saying free choices doesn’t skip the fundamental philosophy question, because it doesn’t answer who makes the choices and how they make them.
The premise of the conundrum is trying to explain something of the nature of what determinism means.
But I agree, the whole topic is really just an unanswerable mess. Until we know what consciousness actually is, how our identity works, and what makes us think we have an independent self that is making choices, we can’t really say what determinism brings to the table.
Because the issue is that if our biochemistry controls every detail such that one can talk about resetting conditions back to exactly the same in every detail and the choice must necessarily be the same, then it feels like you are saying choices are not being made any more than turning over cards from a shuffled deck is making a choice over which card comes next. No, that is set by the card order. We might not know that order ahead of time, but if you reset conditions exactly the same, the same result occurs.
That’s a problem the same for humans if every condition is theoretically definable such as to reset conditions the same.
So maybe it is that assertion that is the nonsense that makes the philosophical question seem meaningful.
I say that we perceive an experience of a self. We therfore presume that is true of other humans. We perceive the experience of choosing. That means we think we have the ability to decide otherwise.
And that is why people are ultimately accountable for their actions. If it isn’t true, if it’s all just an illusion and we’re actually all just characters in some elaborate novel, then it doesn’t really matter. But since we are characters in the novel, we don’t know it’s a novel, so we act as if our choices are ours.
Yes, I certainly feel as though I have the ability to make choices. Right now, I have the ability to choose whether or not I post this reply, and how I word it if I do. (Well, not “now” for you reading this, but my “now” when I’m composing it.) There are a number of reasons to post it, and a number of reasons not to, but those reasons don’t force me to choose one way or the other.
So I assert, based on my own experience, that either I have free will or I have the illusion of free will.
And the fact that people, including some in this thread, insist that free will is an incoherent concept or that they can’t understand what it means, makes me wonder whether some people have that experience but others do not. Or even whether some people actually have free will itself and others do not.
I believe I have free will. If in reality I don’t have free will, then I have no choice but to believe I have free will.
If I didn’t believe I had free will, I would think of life as something that was happening to me, and I think that would entail fatalism or nihilism.
And, as you say, the issue is tied up with issues of consciousness and identity and having an independent self. Free will means that I am making choices, but that must mean that there is an I that is somehow separate from the rest of the universe. Which, again, my personal experience tells me is true (which means either it really is true or it’s an illusion). Cogito ergo sum.
I have the same exact subjective experience you describe, of course; and would call it “the illusion of free will”, because I cannot conveive of a mechanism which would separate my decision making from prior causes and thus be truly “free”.
Bringing God into the matter rules out free will even more, since an all-knowing creator god directly contradicts the universe being anything other than purely deterministic. Such a god means that everything was planned and known by that god before the universe even existed, including every act and thought humans have ever had.
In such a universe there’s no true choices or moral responsibility for anyone but the god, its clockwork creations are just going through the motions it built into them when the universe began. If you scratch your nose, it’s because God decided you would scratch your nose at that particular moment billions of years ago.
Thanks for attempting to define free will, but this serves to illustrate about how incoherent the concept of free will is.
For most of this thread we’ve had no definition at all, and now we’ve had two attempts at defining free will, both of which are largely about what free will isn’t, that are not consistent with one another, and both of which are persuasive definitions. It’s a definition being written with a particular conclusion in mind. (although, contrary to that link, I am not accusing anyone of defining anything in bad faith)
But secondly it doesn’t really get us very far. I mean, I could say that a deterministic universe populated only by chess-playing computers, but that has no god, is free, according to your definition: those chess computers are not constrained by God in their move choices, right? Of course you might quibble that those computers are “choosing”, and then we’d start to debate what we mean by “choice”…
The net result of all this being that the definition of “Free will is choice not constrained by God” becomes “Free will is free will not constrained by God” because “choice” needs to incorporate the desired properties of free will, and this is obviously circular.
@Irishman, I agree that “free will” in religious debates has traditionally meant “not constrained by God” and that is a useful definition for those kinds of discussion. I think your post was illuminating for that reason, and thanks for posting it.
This isn’t really that kind of discussion, though, right?
And, to others, I agree that we have the illusion of free will – I don’t feel constrained by physics and chemistry when composing this post. That doesn’t mean that I’m not constrained by physics and chemistry, though.
