That’s just putting off the question. How are your conscious thoughts one of the authors? That’s the question. The script analogy was only to show what it means for the choice to be inevitable. Inevitable means no alternative, right? It couldn’t be any other way.
If your conscious thoughts could change the outcome, they have some way to be different. What makes your conscious thoughts able to be different if the inputs are the same?
Because if the universe is completely deterministic, the same inputs should give the same output. You yourself used the word inevitable. So it is inevitable, and could be different?
[Snip]
No, the Skeptic is a character who had his actions and words dictated to him by whatever outworld process negotiated the written page. The Skeptic has no free will.
The Skeptic might have the illusion of free will, if we allow the fictional construct a reality in the book, but the character is constrained and the choice is not free.
I see “the illusion of free will” and “free will” “from the perspective of the Skeptic himself” as equivalent. Of course, from my perspective as an author of the book, the Skeptic is under my direct control and not a free agent at all.
Likewise a reader can flip the page back and forth as many times as he wants, and the Skeptic always follows the same script.
That wasn’t the question you asked. You were saying in your analogy that we are actors “just doing what the script says” and so I responded that in my view we are the ones also writing the script; the story cannot be written without your conscious thoughts. You’re not a passenger, you’re intrinsic to this.
This is the opposite of “putting off the question” btw, I am directly responding to your analogy. And the answer to this new question is as I am saying here: if your decision-making thoughts were somehow surplus to requirements we could remove them and the same events would play out. That’s not the case.
Yes.
And I think this is absolutely at the crux of things.
If I find myself in a particular scenario, I make a decision based on my experiences, my personality, my wants and needs. That’s my choice, freely arrived at.
Expecting to reverse time and see a different decision made is somehow expecting my choice to not be my choice. To somehow defy my own preferences or judgement. Why on earth would that happen?
If your experiences are a slave to circumstance,
and your personality a slave to experience,
and your wants a slave to personality,
and your needs a slave to either sin or God (or biology),
none of these can be the source of free will, as all are coerced by external forces.
This only follows on the assumption of hard determinism. Especially with your definition of free choice, which perplexes me. (But I think you adopted a different definition of choice for this particular sentence.)
If for example it turns out your personality channels a bit of fundamental randomness, such that there is a 1/1000 chance of you choosing tea just for the hell of it, I would expect you to acknowledge the random element doesn’t alienate your personality from your self. Therefore though your decision varies under the exact same circumstance, by your definition isn’t it still an exercise of free will?
And then if I deny the premise of physicalism it doesn’t make sense to turn back time - there is not necessarily a correlation (1:1 or otherwise) between physical and mental substrates.
Here’s the problem I have with your definition of “free” choice, or “free” will. Grant me the following premises for the sake of argument:
Given your personality, experiences, wants, and needs, you don’t have a strong preference for coffee or tea so you resolve to pick at random (flip some mental coins, eeny meeny miny moe, etc).
Randomness doesn’t actually exist due to hard determinism.
God resolves the coin flips that you conjure in your mind, thereby enforcing determinism.
God is a part of your self identity / His breath animates you and is part of what makes you you.
This scenario satisfies your definition of free will. The decision is entirely made by you. You haven’t defied your own preferences or judgement. There’s no internal inconsistency.
But this is the textbook example of what free will isn’t - a lot of people have a big problem if the choice is between salvation and damnation rather than coffee and tea.
As I’ve said many times: I don’t think that “free will” is a meaningful concept, so if you want to conclude free will is not compatible with <whatever>, be my guest.
I think free will is “not even wrong”: it’s never adequately defined. It’s an existential angst formed into a nebulous concept.
But if we’re talking about rational choices, then not only do the things you list not preclude choice, they are necessary for it. Even if we lived in a magical universe of souls, and gods, and whatever you like, if I’m making a rational choice, it’s going to come down to my character, my experience and understanding. A pocket of cause and effect regardless of however else that universe rolls.
Answered above; what we think of as “choice” is a pocket of determinism. It’s why people trivially reject randomness as not being choice. Implicitly, what we mean by choice is based on past events and personal preference.
Also, as I’ve said earlier, I think the balance of evidence right now is that our universe isn’t deterministic, but that does nothing to reform “free will” into something meaningful. Determinism is a complete red herring here.
I don’t understand how this answers my post. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand what you mean by a pocket of cause and effect. Suffice to say I think most people believe “free” choice implies some degree of freedom from a chain of causation. If I put a gun to your head, can you explain whether/why that deprives you of free choice in your framework?
Let me try again without muddling will and choice:
This only follows on the assumption of hard determinism. Especially with your definition of free choice, which perplexes me. (But I think you adopted a different definition of choice for this particular sentence.)
If for example it turns out your personality channels a bit of fundamental randomness, such that there is a 1/1000 chance of you choosing tea just for the hell of it, I would expect you to acknowledge the random element doesn’t alienate your personality from your self. Therefore though your decision varies under the exact same circumstance, by your definition isn’t it still an exercise of free choice?
And then if I deny the premise of physicalism it doesn’t make sense to turn back time - there is not necessarily a correlation (1:1 or otherwise) between physical and mental substrates.
Here’s the problem I have with your definition of “free” choice. Grant me the following premises for the sake of argument:
Given your personality, experiences, wants, and needs, you don’t have a strong preference for coffee or tea so you resolve to pick at random (flip some mental coins, eeny meeny miny moe, etc).
Randomness doesn’t actually exist due to hard determinism.
God resolves the coin flips that you conjure in your mind, thereby enforcing determinism.
God is a part of your self identity / His breath animates you and is part of what makes you you.
This scenario satisfies your definition of free choice. The decision is entirely made by you. You haven’t defied your own preferences or judgement. There’s no internal inconsistency.
But this is the textbook example of what free choice isn’t - a lot of people have a big problem if the choice is between salvation and damnation rather than coffee and tea.
This is true for “free will”, yes. And why, as I say, I think the concept is incoherent: what’s the alternative to cause-and-effect and randomness?
If a free will entity, in a free will universe chooses to drink coffee, can I ask it why did you pick coffee?
But yes, even though people try to define free will that way, it’s clear they have a more deterministic model in mind when talking about choices. This is why randomness is trivially rejected as a source of choice. Otherwise why wouldn’t free will advocates simply note that physics implies genuine randomness happens, therefore free will?
Yes, in the technical sense: all of our choices are constrained, even free will advocates would concede that. A gun to my head is just a much more constrained situation than others.
Of course in the colloquial sense, we would say I had “no” choice – when a situation is that constrained we basically say we are compelled.
Yep. I don’t think most people would include the randomness part as being part of the act of choosing, but yes, having indeterminancy is irrelevant to being able to choose. Deterministic universe, non-deterministic universe, my decisions are still the product of my character, experiences and the scenario I am in.
I can’t because your premises are inconsistent. One premise is that my mind is capable of generating randomness, and another premise is that randomness doesn’t exist.
And this is not me being obtuse; I genuinely can’t follow your point because those two premises seem to be in direct opposition.
Per my hypo, your mind isn’t capable of generating true randomness. “Randomness doesn’t actually exist due to hard determinism.” However, it is capable of choosing what it thinks is a random outcome. “you resolve to pick at random”. The mechanism is given as a mental organ that acts as a pseudo-random generator. “God resolves the coin flips […] God is a part of your self identity.”
If you find the concept of free will incoherent, how about we frame the question this way: Is there, at least potentially, an alternative to cause-and-effect and randomness? Is there something logically inherent in the concept of strict cause-and-effect determinism that necessarily rules out any alternatives other than randomness?
I’m not sure how useful this question is.
In a free will universe, you could choose to ask it that question. And it could choose how, or whether, to answer the question.
In a strictly deterministic universe, you could ask anyone “Why did you pick coffee?” if there were some causal chain that led to the effect of you asking that question.
And then (1) the actual reason that entity chose coffee, (2) the reason that entity believed they chose coffee, and (3) the answer that entity gave to the question of why they chose coffee would all be determined as the effects of causal chains. And there’s no reason those three separate effects would have to agree with one another, since they could be the results of separate causes.
I meant the concept of strict cause-and-effect determinism, not the existence of cause-and-effect determinism.
By analogy, the concept of acute triangles doesn’t rule out the possibility of obtuse triangles, even though a particular triangle being acute rules out the possibility of that particular triangle being obtuse. But the concepts of acute triangles, obtuse triangles, and right triangles together logically rule out the possibility that there could be a triangle that is neither acute, obtuse, nor right.
As you note in your attempt to define free choice, there is a necessary distinction between self and non-self. Positing randomness does not on its own guarantee a given random cause is part of one’s self identity.
There is no requirement that I predict the effect in order to make a free choice. If I defer to an external random process such as a true random coin flip, I have still made a free choice to defer to the external process. The same holds if I defer to an external pseudo-random process such as a coin flip under hard-determinism. However in my hypothetical, the process is not external and therefore the choice is not delegated.
Can you give me a concrete example or two of a choice that isn’t free? (Per your personal understanding of the terms in their philosophical, not colloquial sense.)
In answer to the first question: tentative yes.
I mean, cause-and-effect and randomness are very nearly exact opposite concepts, and therefore leaving no other option. But they are not formally X and not-X and I don’t like to rule things out prematurely.
In terms of the second question, thank you for giving me the chance to clarify my last post. The reason that free will is incoherent is not because it posits something beyond randomness and cause-and-effect; if that were literally the definition, I would have no issue with it. It would be a standard conjecture as yet unsupported by evidence.
The reason that it is incoherent is also because it is in the context of reasoned choice, which implicitly relies upon cause and effect. Furthermore, definitions like “could have chosen differently” are ill-formed: as I have been saying, there is no reason for me to choose something different to what I indeed chose. I both could not have chosen differently and would not have chosen differently.
And I think you don’t want to take on this problem, because it is a significant one for free will.
If a hypothetical free will agent says they picked coffee because they like the taste (as someone in our universe might) then that is injecting, at least partially, a cause and effect that the agent did not choose.
If there were no such reasons, then that’s randomness.
Of course this relates back to the original point: perhaps free will is a third way, one we haven’t thought of yet. But I would say to that, that the way this debate is typically presented is that it is considered a problem if our universe lacks free will, and if we don’t have it, then fatalism. And yet we cannot even define what it is.
Given a hypothetical universe, with free will by definition, we still cannot say how choices are made and how they are more “free”.
Then it isn’t random, and so the conclusion that follows is unsound. I don’t think this hypothetical is going anywhere.
No. I would say some degree of freedom is implicit in the concept of choice. Some scenarios and choices are more free than others. But there is no scenario where you have zero freedom that I would call choice.
The conclusion was that you would categorize the decision as a free choice and traditionally it would not be so considered. Are you saying you don’t see it as a free choice, or what?
As far as I can tell there is no option besides determinism and randomness, as demonstrated by thousands of years of very smart people trying to come up with one and always having to resort to handwaves about souls, free will, etc.
But that’s really the root of the philosophical question. Is all of life preordained, predetermined, never an ability to vary from a single cause to the full extent of every action and decision in the world, like billiard balls on a pool table? Are a person’s decisions, choices, whatever all set in motion and following a natural cascade, like dominoes in a row? We think we are making a free choice, but the outcome is as sure as flipping a 2 heads coin.
Or is human consciousness a creative source? Is it somehow its own agent?
I gave a suggestion earlier nobody seems to have picked up on, even to counter. I said something about preferences and desires being filters, not constraints.
I suppose this gets into semantics and definitions.
See below.
I think the assumption that personality is a slave to experience is not solid.
It is true our personalities are shaped by our experiences. But I feel like I have a natural internal identity that is at the core of my being, and this appears to be a common experience. That natural identity, or self, is the heart of who I am, that receives experiences and integrates them into my being. Subconscious effects happen as well, but my core identity is more than the sum of everything that has happened to me, it is something else.
Why do people’s personalities differ so much? Twins can grow up in the same household and still reflect different personalities from before they can talk.
I will admit this is a struggle for me. I’m a hard atheist, I reject christianity and ideas such as souls. My struggle is accepting that a person is just some sort of elaborate bio-chemical reaction in the wetware of the brain. Because it is unsettling, and because it seems hard to see how personality can be such a unique experience if it is ultimately a physics and chemistry reaction.
But if I accept that conclusion, then the idea of there being an agent that is independent of the sum of experiences becomes difficult to justify.
Okay, I see what you are saying. What I’m trying to propose is not that you throw all of that out, but that there might be the chance your personality would weigh all of those inputs and see something else, another preference, or weigh the values differently. Some way the decision could be altered.
But you appear to be saying that the same evaluation with the same inputs will always give the same result, just like a math problem or chemical equation. And that somehow is the definition of free.
My choice is my best judgement at the time, I both could not and would not make a different judgement.
e.g.
If you were to ask the Mijin of 1996 why he is going to a particular Uni, he could tell you, and explain his reasoning. He may even be able to say it was a very difficult decision between A, B and C but finally he went for C because reason.
I wouldn’t make the same decision now, but at the time, based on what I knew, it was the best option.
So get in the time machine as many times as you like: Mijin will either say the same thing every time, or, if the universe is non-deterministic, maybe there’s a random factor in there, but that random factor is not what we would typically call “choice”.
Well it’s not necessarily the same if the universe is non-deterministic, as I say.
But the choice bit does relate to a chain of cause and effect, because when we talk about choice it’s implicitly what we’re referring to.
e.g.
If a magical jinn in a fairytale world, chooses not to live in a lamp because it wants to see the world, well, “discomfort at being confined / desire to see the world” is a characteristic that the jinn just has that it didn’t choose. Being in a lamp is a scenario that it finds itself in based on prior events. And finally it has a particular level of understanding of how to get out. Based on all this, it makes its best judgement of what to do next. Sounds very cause-and-effecty, even though we’re talking about a magical reality…
This is why I stress that talking about lack of free will as some problem of our reality is a red herring; no-one has shown what other kind of choice there can be than the one I’m outlining.