I do not find it necessary or useful to objectify the rest of the universe as some inanimate “thing” in order conceptualize myself as an entity of free will.
This, on the other hand, I do not consider to be so. The previous state is only “the cause of the current state” from one vantage point; an often useful one, I’ll grant, but not one intrinsically more correct than the one from which you correctly observe that until your mind makes the arbitrary division of a previously undifferentiated whole into this and that, event and next event, etc, no such division is just intrinsically sitting there. The Big Bang is happening, there was no time before the Big Bang, and I am the Big Bang, and i/we/it are here — for all practical purposes and for lack of a better way of expressing it — because we felt like it. That’s close enough to the spirit and intention of free will for me.
And did you choose this candidate of your own accord? I mean–beyond the fact the media did most of our choosing for us?
Well, from a purely materialist point of view FW cannot exist. It is physically impossible even if one tried the old tack of saying that “free will” is some kind of “emergent property” of biological evolution. This is simply a rehas of the fact that as Steven Pinker has said, the human mind is built for efficiency on processing stimuli for the most reasonable pathway to survival------not truth.
Other creatures we share the planet with are far more longlived than us and have accomplished more with less insight.
Now the thorny thing here is that these materialist explanations generally assume what they try and prove. A contradiction arises in that truth of such propositions (or ANY proposition) has to be seen for its truth, qua truth, not because the illusion or emergent property of the mind on some kind of autopilot “finds” this to be so. If the FW is an illusion (and some claim the mind is also an illusion, along with what we typically call consciousness), then you have no choice in any meaningful sense of that word about what propositions are true or not.
In other words, if FW is an illusion you can’t know it or demonstrate this one way or another. :eek:
I think you missed my point (but maybe not), which is that if one posits a non-physical entity or substance (that is, something outside of natural “laws”), then there’s no stopping the attribution of “free will” to it. It’s not a matter of whether it “makes sense” to you or me (or whether it’s palatable or not), for I can see where it makes as much sense to accept that we are “souls with bodies” versus “bodies with souls”. It’s a matter of begging the question. “Spirit substance” can have any qualities one wishes.
Similarly, if one posits that there is only a fully encapsulated, monolithic “I” or “me”, a clearly defined black box that maintains a strict separation between internal and external and whose internals act in perfect unison, then the mechanistic, deterministic viewpoint is an easy conclusion to reach.
Personally, I admit that I’m mostly in the mechanistic camp. However, I’ll also admit that it’s difficult for me to let go of the notion of free will. Perhaps I’ll have to settle for the idea that free will is an illusion and nothing more, but I’ve not quite convinced myself yet (as odd as that may be to say on this topic). Again, ISTM that the analogy to evolution – that there is a mechanism (or process) akin to natural selection – might be a productive way (for me) to think about it.
It can have determinants, or can be weighted by various factors, but (the version of free will I’m talking about here, which I’m not insisting actually exists) it needn’t. Free will of the uncaused cause type should also be able to act on whim - pure uncaused desire arising of its own nature.
But then if only action on a whim is free, then deliberative action is not free. That would be a huge blow for the free will advocate, as deliberative action is the kind we care about most, when it comes to responsibility. Think of how much worse your punishment for murder is if it was accompanied by premeditation (at least in the US)–then it becomes first degree murder, IIRC.
Only, I think, if you insist that action must only ever be wholly one or the other, but to clarify - what I mean by ‘whim’ here really means causal decision - doing something not because some pre-existing set of factors ordained it, but simply because we want to.
But this takes us back to the original question: why do you want to do X, rather than Y? Some people want to be doctors, others artists. Where did this desire come from? Now you have a dilemma: either you didn’t choose the desire (so it is just part of your nature, unchosen, and hence you aren’t really responsible for the actions which stem from it), or you chose it. But if you chose it, then we have to ask again, why this desire rather than another? Was there a prior desire which was the basis of that decision? The regress is on.
There is no way to be the ultimate author of your own character; that is like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Seems like you’ve just assumed your conclusion here though - that the thing called will cannot be an uncaused cause.
Admittedly, all that the folks on the free will side of the argument can do is the same - to say that yes, it can - the thing called free will can be the ultimate author of decision.
No, my problem isn’t with the notion of an uncaused cause. My problem is with an intelligent uncaused cause, one that is goal-directed, etc. If the self chooses, spontaneously, what governs what it chooses? Not ones beliefs and desires; that would be psychological determinism. Not the intrinsic nature of the self; that would also be determinism. So it seems the choice is without any sort of control at all. It is randomness. The libertarian keeps saying, “Oh, there’s a notion of indeterminism that isn’t probabilistic and isn’t random,” but as I posted above, no libertarian can give an account of this type of causation. It seems to me, since no such causation has ever been described, much less uncontroversially observed, the burden of proof is definitely on the libertarian. He has failed to discharge this burden.
No, and I thought you’d already conceded above that uncaused needn’t mean random.
If there is an uncaused cause, then it is, by definition, not beholden to any external factor (that doesn’t mean it is divorced from external factors, merely not obliged to be under their control).
Your question seems to boil down to “if there is an uncaused cause, what causes it?” - which is simply illogical.
I would recast my question as, “If it is uncaused, then what controls it?” A choice must be under my control for me to be held morally responsible for it (i.e., if my choice is the result of factors like brainwashing or manipulation by an evil scientist, then I don’t control my choice, and am not responsible for it). But I don’t see how you can reconcile controlling factors with indeterminism.
To reiterate, my problem isn’t with something’s being uncaused–my problem is with finding a notion of uncaused choice that has the features we want rational, deliberate action for which we are morally responsible to have.
But that’s not quite true, right? Or, rather, it’s an oversimplification: there needn’t be a single goal, governor, nor absolute control. Furthermore, randomness implies unconstrained possibilities (or, if “implies” is too strong due to its use in logic, substitute "gives the impression of’). Oh, and please note that I’m simply prompting exploration of this, not necessarily advocating against it.
In mathematical terms, you’re demanding a function, but ISTM that a mere mapping might suffice. I believe it’s a well-known problem in utility theory that assignment of value relations must produce an unambiguous and deterministic link between inputs and outputs. But that’s something imposed on the system to satisfy mathematical rigor, not a guaranteed reflection of reality. IOW, I think you’re begging the question: free will is either deterministic (in which case it’s not really free will), or it’s “random” (and thus not really free will).
But I’m not oversimplifying; I’ve stated at least once, maybe twice, in this thread that of course a single desire or goal doesn’t determine human action. But even if it is a constellation of desires, goals, beliefs, prejudices, attitudes and other mental states which yield a choice, the question arises, “Where did these mental states come from?” If they were chosen, then you are set off on a regress; if they were not chosen, then how are you responsible for them and the actions that issue from them, by the libertarian way of thinking?
Again, I don’t think this is true. Mental causation is too complex to be mapped; any system complex enough to map or mimic human mental behavior will probably be a neural network which is a black box, too complex for us to understand. But the question remains the same: however complex the system’s determinants are, you have to explain where they came from. Were they chosen? Regress. Were they not chosen? You’re not responsible for them. You can’t solve the free will problem merely by making mental causation more complex; the same problem arises whether mental causation is simple or complex.
And for the umpteenth time, all of those of you who are accusing me of begging the question by saying there isn’t an alternative to determinism, random indeterminism, and probablilistic indeterminism, I am still waiting for you (or ANY PHILOSOPHER AT ALL IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY) to describe such a notion of causation. The burden of proof is on you, since such causation is not seen in nature and has never been successfully described. The burden is not on me to disprove it (although I think the above considerations explain why virtually all contemporary philosophers have rejected libertarianism as incoherent).
You’re talking about things like when, “out of nowhere”, you suddenly get the desire to run to the 7-11 and buy a coke, right?
Of course, this “out of nowhere” business is just naive ignorance of your own thought processess. In actuality, your whim is actually dependent on pre-existing knowledge of what you’re whimming about, isn’t it? You can’t whim about coke without knowing what coke is. Plus, you have memories about coke, rolling around at the back of your mind. Right? You have some knowledge, and awareness, and memory, and you also have your thoughts conscious and subconscious milling around, when suddenly “out of nowhere”, you get your whim.
That’s a lot of business going on in there, that we know is going on in there. I don’t see how any rational person can think that the whim isn’t just an emergent thought caused by the wandering flow of your thought processes. It certainly isn’t uncaused, out of nowhere, since nowhere doesn’t know about cokes.
OKay, now this thread has become very interesting. Thanks posters for the education. it’s one of the reasons I enjoy the SDMB.
Pardon my clumsiness on this subject but it seems to me that it may well be that there is a complexity of cause and effect , evolution, genetics, subconscious tendencies etc, that “make our choices for us” if you will. What we see as choices and consideration is actually an interplay of complex causes and influences? Is that about right?
If I understand what Tris is saying and IMO it appears that we lack the ability to really understand this complex combination of cause and influences. We lack the proper perspective to put it all together so all we can do is speculate and embrace our favorite theory as we are doing here.
While we’re here and the illusion of free will is so strong we must operate within that illusion right? We have to go through the steps of weighing all the factors we are aware of and making a decision.
You’d have to weigh factors anyway; that’s how humans decide things. Absent the illusion, you’d just recognize that your opinions on things don’t change until you encounter external stimulai or complete some internal, conscious or subconscious mental processing that effects the deciding factors, and that your whims don’t occur until some similar shift of thought predicates them.
I just want to say I think this sums up the paradox perfectly, and I have argued exactly the same thing many times on this board, but for some reason it seems to rather difficult to get across to a lot of people what seems to me to be a very obvious point.
We all agree that you can do whatever you want, but the “wanting” itself can’t be self-determined without being random (or without being regressive).
The whim itself has to be caused by something and that something cannot be self-generated without being random. Will does not mean acting on desire. Will is the desire itself. The “whim” IS the will.
No. I’m talking about the notion of being able to decide to do something, apropos of nothing - to create action, as a result of desire to do so, and that desire being the fundamental will - the root, uncaused cause.