Free Will - Does it exist?

Great Debates
381

I reject your new definition of illusory; things may be composed of or caused by other things and not be illusory. (For example: a car. It is neither fundamental nor illusory.)

The debate is whether the sense of self which we so obviously have has libertarian free will. Issues of the cause of the sense of self are only relevent to this topic if they also say something about libertarian free will - like, if our wills are caused by purely deterministic electrochemical processes, then it would seem there is no libertarian free will involved.

Of course, your ‘soul particle’ notion doesn’t itself say anything about free will; theoretically soul particles could be deterministic too. There’s nothing about ineffability that implies otherwise. No, the only arguments you offer in favor of free will are the fact that we appear to have it (which everyone readily acknowledges; however things are not necessarily always how they appear), a fallacious argument from ignorance, and your say-so. Unless you’ve made some argument I’ve missed?

I reject your new non-standard definition of the word ‘act’. Characters in a computer game act within their universes, yet are not considered to have free will.

And no, moving pictures made out of pixels are still a piss-poor and false analogy for real objects. You don’t get to slip that one by, no matter how often you try to.

How do you know? A thousand years ago machine-aided human flight “wasn’t possible” either. Is it impossible now?

Not by the usual definition of “fact”, which merely means it has a truth value. And you’ll note that they used the uncertain, hedging-their-bets phrasing, not me.

You mean, aside from all the hard, observational-based sciences, right? Or are you using a different definion of ‘philosophy’ now?

And what does that have to do with this cite? Even in hard sciences people can be wrong - which is why we have peer review and replication of results and such. Is this piece backed by anything that makes it more than idle speculation (like much of philosophy is)?

First sentence: true. Second sentence: false, and obviously so. (Parenthesis: I note your failure to recognize that the definition does not require the knowledge or cognizance to be correct or complete; any small amount of knowledge or cognizance will do, according to it.) Third sentence: true but deceptive: even if you are not aware of what it precisely is, you are still aware of the illusion itself.

More silly definition games. Address the actual points please, or don’t bother.

Prove it. Since it sure looks like a plausible provenace for consciousness (with scope for qualia, even!) to me.

a) The car moves. Objectively speaking.
b) ‘Implicit philosophy’? Yes; implicit inside your mind. There’s nothing implicit in the article that makes it correct or accurate in describing objective reality.

And can you linear-cascade one domino? No? Wow.

Your inability to recognize/understand emergence is not my problem.

I’m sorry, I can only explain the obvious so many times. Refer to previous posts, or common and readily examples in reality, to answer this question.

(And what the quark is “concerned with” is decidedly irrelevent to the issue. What matters are the actual effects, including ones that don’t cause the quark ‘concern’.)

Summarize your link, for the purpose of debating it in the thread, please. Or does it rely on the obfuscation of length and complexity to make its “argument”?

You’re arguing for a true self. That’s an ineffable indivisible unexaminable incomprehensible particle thingy. Or something that is sufficiently akin to one that you can’t tell it apart from one - in fact you can’t tell it apart from anything, since it is ineffable, unexaminable, and incomprehensible. (And let’s keep in mind that you’re the one who brought particles into this.)

By my read of you here, your argument is “I don’t feel like an introspective organic computer (not that I could say what that feels like)”, and the fallacious argument from ignorance, which boils down to you telling us to trust your say-so. Is that an accurate summation?

382

I can believe that free will exists.

383

For the last time, each quark of a car traverses its trajectory solely on the basis of the net forces impressed upon it, and there is no room for group identity to affect its activity. Emergence is invoked only because the mind perceives entities in space in groups, and modern scientific sensibilities seek to explain these groupings by positing vague group-related factors out there.

Coming back to the Game of Life, which is a cellular automata simulation, this is how Russ Abbott, a computer science researcher, describes it in the journal ‘Communications of the ACM’:

A human mind sees both the glider and its constituent cells. But is the glider as real as the cell? No. It’s one more level of abstraction beyond the cell. Our mind can trace out the motion of the glider, but it is an epiphenomena. The same is the case for a table, having no causal power, made up of quarks.

You have also said that you see no problem with explaining qualia in physical terms. Well, a decade ago, David Chalmers presented a rigorous case on why there is a problem. Here’s are two essay-length expositions. And Chalmers isn’t a philosopher exchanging idle speculations with other academics. He was invited to write a paper onHow Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness? in the encyclopedic The Cognitive Neurosciences III.

Ultimately, the issue of free will involves at least deciding on whether the gamut of forces in current physics indicate a causal closure. Until consciousness is explained, rejecting the conscious sense of agency by appealing to a non-elaborated emergence among certain quarks, is premature, and begging the question. In any case, my argument wasn’t against no-free-will but against the acceptance of its inference. The philosopher I linked to earlier, suggests a similar but again not quite the same argument here. No, I’m not him.
/over and out

384

David “Zombie” Chalmers? Man, he’s so 90s! I prefer Dennett. More of a retro 80s feel, you know?

385

In Freedom Evolves, Dennett uses the Game of Life as a springboard for his attempt at refuting determinism (and thus working to establish free-will). I wasn’t very convinced, but I want to finish the book before going back and doing a more in-depth analysis.

386

's odd, I had Dennett down as a compatabilist - I don’t see him as being a-determinist as such. But I haven’t read Freedom Evolves yet, so he may be … evolving his thoughts on things.

387

I actually bought the book because of this thread, though I have to admit that I haven’t finished it yet. It’s not clear to me whether he’s making the case for libertarian free-will or free-will in the sense that it matters (I think that’s close enough to a quote). That is, we use the term “free-will” to mean something; in any and every case that we use it, it’s a meaningful concept and we actually do possess it.

Whether or not that equates with libertarian or compatibilist free-will, I have yet to establish. But his whole attempted refutation of determinism left quite a bit to be desired, IMHO. Again, I need to go back and give it a closer reading.

388

That’s be compatabilism, not libertarianism.

389

Yes, that’s my guess. But I can’t (yet) figure out why he spent so long attempting to establish a refutation of determinism. (And I do mean refutation, not just a re-definition that allows a relatively easy dismissal of sorts.)

390

Was it possibly just a refutation of so-called “hard” determinism? I don’t know, I’ve got the book on order now, though :slight_smile:

391

Well, yeah…I think so. Probably. But I’m not familiar with the different flavors of determinism, and I don’t want to attribute a position to Dennett that he doesn’t hold. When I finish it, I’ll go back for a closer reading. At which point, I do plan on opening a thread, and hope for your participation.

Unless you beat me to it, of course. :wink:

392

The game of life is not a very good analogy for reality as we know it - to the degree that it is a ‘simulation’ of a reality, it’s a simulation of a reality where all particles are immobile - and since a huge part of our definition of objects in reality has to do with whether the particles are remaining in proximity with one another (a collective behavior sometimes described by me as “sticking together”), the game of life cannot possibly be reasonably used to examine the question of objects in our reality. If we were to analogize the game of life to our reality at all, any reasonably assessment would define the entire grid making up the game to
be one single object. Any patterns that may emerge in the ‘life’ of the object’s component cells are no more objects in their own right than images on a television screen or patterns on the back of a chameleon are; and if those patterns have any consistency or systematic behavior to them, well that’s just another demonstration of emergent properties, within the object of the grid itself.

As for the quote you bolded, did you actually read the section you bolded? “But epiphenomenal though they may be, patterns are quite powerful.” Powerful how? I suggest it’s also causal power -the only kind of power mentioned in quote- they just don’t have the lowest level of causal power. Looking back at our line of dominoes, each domino’s fall clearly causes the fall of the domino(s) it hits. However, if you were to describe the sections of dominoes as higher level constructs, say, every five consecutive dominoes is a ‘run’, then each run’s fall also clearly causes the fall of any runs it hits.

Now, each run’s behavior can be described as being caused by the behavior of its component parts, but that doesn’t mean that the higher-level actions aren’t also causes and effects - in fact, they must be causal, since at the last instant of the higher-level object’s action effecting the first instant of re-action in the effected higher-level objects - that point of interface for both objects is composed of lower-level objects, having causal effects on one another. So, the collective sum of those effects -the higher-level effect- is clearly a sum of smaller causal effects. And therefore is itself causal in nature as well.

Based on that, I think that it’s clearly incorrect to say that a table has no causal power. In doing so, all that you’re doing it partitioning off ‘aggregate causal power’ into its own category (which you refrain from naming), and then you’re saying that the one is not the other, when in fact, the one is the other, just more of it.

I don’t care who he is; that’s the fallacy of Argument From Authority you’re pulling right there. The issue at hand is his arguments. I’m not going to go out and buy a book just to refute your positionless position; so if you want me to address that summarize its relevent argument; I will however address the essays. The relevent part seems to be summarised here, quoted from the second essay (which is a sequel to the first):

Here’s my answer to the ‘something else’: Side Effect. I think the consciousness is not the function in question - the function is the calculation of decisions based on the weighing of all available evidence, including the current mental state. I think that what we perceive as consciousness is a secondary effect of that process occurring in a system which included its own higher-level calculation process amongst the set of inputs it’s constantly analyzing for use in making its calculations.

For all I know, some form of consciousness is occurring right now in my computer - how could we tell? I can’t detect any person’s consciousness directly but my own. I don’t actually expect that my computer has a consciousness, as it’s calculation processes are not self-aware enough (they don’t assess their own calculating state in use in calculations much), but who knows, perhaps it has some other sort of awareness, more in line with its type of calculation algorithms. Who can tell?

It’s not begging the question, I’m afraid; it’s just the non-fallacious behavior of making a best guess based on imperfect information. If you want to deal with fallacies, I’d suggest you deal with the Argument From Ignorance which makes up the core of what little non-reactive position you have.

(I don’t have time to read your last link here at the moment; if it’s not similarly answered be ‘side effect’, I may respond to it later.)

393

You should be glad you’re not him, because his argument is ridiculous. Deterministic world or not, one cannot control what’s true by personal belief alone, as any fool knows - yet his statement 6 says exactly that. Which kinda shows that he’s got a problem in his argument so blatant that no competent person would ever publish it.

The crux of his problem is that “ought implies can” is a moral theory that relies upon MFT. Essentially, it says that, if you can’t do something, then the term ‘ought’ doesn’t apply to the situation. It never is intended to mean that moral objectives trump reality though; it only falsifies ‘oughts’. Obviously. As his own example of the principle shows. So, if we use it at all in the argument, it could serve only to falsify premise 1, making his argument unsound.

(This is, essentially, Objection #2, which he totally blows his response to, and then tries to bury his flailing incorrectness in a suprlus of words. As he says himself, “This is sufficient for (2) to be true, for it is nonsensical to recommend the impossible.” - but premise 1 does exactly that, in a nondeterministic world where some people are clearly stuck believing wrong things. Ergo, his P1 is, by his own statement, “nonsensical”. Which generally means, ‘false’.)

So, his argument is unsound. Worse that that though - it’s blatantly invalid! Look at this:

From 7? That doesn’t come from 7! It would only come from 7 AND some other statement “determinism is true”, which he didn’t include, because the moron doesn’t even know how to form a proper proof. He’s like a child trying to use a hammer to pound in a screw - he’s got hold of a tool and doesn’t know how to use it. Pathetic.

Don’t bother citing him further. You’ve provided ample proof of his ineptitude.
It’s one thing to argue from ignorance that, since you personally can’t or don’t want to accept the evidence for materialistic causes of the sense of self, that you still have the latitude to leap to the conclusion of libertarian free will - that’s fallacy-riddled and evidence-impaired, but at least it’s a moderately coherent position intellectually speaking. This essay here, though, is just stupid. Hitching stuff like this to your wagon doesn’t help your position at all.

394

I’ve never read a Huemer article that I found at all convincing, but to call him “pathetic” and “inept” is… a stretch. To reply to your points:

I don’t know how you’re getting that out of statement 6. Statement six says “If determinism is true, then with respect to the free will issue, we refrain from believing falsehoods.” This doesn’t mean we make things true by believing them. Rather, it says that we don’t believe things if they are false. These are two very different claims.

It is not on point to criticize him for including this line in the proof, whatever you think it means. For the line is said to follow from three premises. The thing to do, then, is to argue either that it doesn’t follow from those premises, or that one of those premises are false. Just to say “6 is blatantly false so the argument is stupid” misses the point. 6 may seem blatantly false to you, but philosophy types are in part up to the business of making what seems “blatantly false” to many not so blatantly false. If you’re going to reject an argument because it’s conclusion is just “blatantly false” then while you’re welcome to do so, you’re not in any sense engaging with the philosophical issue. But in any case, you do subsequently go on to engage in a diagnosis of the argument.

“Ought implies can” does not rely on MFT. Someone who doesn’t think MFT is true can still rationally believe that “ought implies can,” but would be commited to understanding the “can” in that principle to denote something other than physical possibility. I believe there are accounts of what it means for something to be “within one’s power” that do not rely on a notion that what is within one’s power is physically possible. On such accounts, to be within one’s power it has to be such that it would have been physically possible in certain very similar circumstances, but that does not imply that it is actually physically possible.

This points to the correct criticism of Huemer’s argument. He is equivocating, but not on “should” but rather on “can.” Sometimes (ex line 3) he uses it to mean physical possibility, and at other times (ex line 2) he uses it to mean “within one’s power” possibility.

Huemer deals with this point in note 3. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just tack on a “Suppose determinism is true” line at the top–that would have made things simpler–but he does show how certain “supressed premises” make his argument strictly valid in note 3.

-FrL-

395

He uses it expressly to turn P4 from “I believe MFT” to “MFT is true.” But, P4 could be any belief X, and the logic would still work (once you put in his stupidly missed premise). P4b: I believe that the earth is flat. 8b: That the earth is flat is true. P4c: I believe that helicopters are made of cotton candy. 8c: That helicopters are made of cotton candy is true. And, perhaps most tellingly: P4d: I believe not-MFT. 8d: not-MFT is true (aka MFT is false).

When you have a proof that can be used to prove literally anything, it’s your first clue that it’s a broken proof.

Yes; this particular obvious flaw I pointed out here was not the problem itself but a symptom - an indication, and a pretty large, obvious indication, that the argument was crap. One so large that any reasonably intelligent formulater that was even vaguely aware of what he was doing would never have overlooked long enough to release to the public, I shouldn’t think.

As far as I can tell “ought implies can” is a moral line of thinking; moral lines of thinking are dubious when applied to determinism. Regardless, by my read of it, and by the way the argument uses it, “ought implies can” isn’t meant to be used in an argument directly anyway - it’s actually false if you do. It’s really a guide not to make statements like P1, where you say something ‘ought’ to happen, even if it might not be possible. You ought to save an imperiled person’s life. Of course! A fine sentiment. But it doesn’t imply that you can save their life.

Wouldn’t it be the case that in a deterministic world, everything that is physically possible for you to do is within your power, and vice versa - because there’s only one possible outcome? The only thing that is physically possible must also be in your power, because it’s the one thing you actually end up doing in any given scenario. (Which means of course that this is the only thing you “ought” to do, as well - rendering “ought implies can” pretty darn meaningless.)

As far as I can tell what’s happening is he’s grossly misusing “ought implies can” while completely ignoring both its meaning and the context in which its supposed to be used (except when he’s describing that very meaning and context, just prior to ignoring it). I don’t know that he’s equivocating though - perhaps he really that cognitively dissonant.

I didn’t get as far as reading all his notes before feeling compelled to respond to his crap. Regardless, “suppressed premises” and leaving out hunks of your argument (perhaps because they’d underscore how stupid it is?) is bad, fraudulent logic. If he doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to correctly and accurately lay out his argument outside his notes, I don’t know why I shouldn’t think he’s an idiot. If you can’t use logic right, you shouldn’t use it at all. It’s not like this is the modal ontological argument, where you’re dealing with hard to understand concepts or something.

396

Do you think that the nature/nuture debate can be disentangled from the free will debate? I think so.

397

Are they? I’m not so sure.