Free Will - Does it exist?

Great Debates
121

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
We can’t do anything else. In fact we can’t do.
[/QUOTE]

Sure we can do. Right now, I am doing. I have chosen to read the SDMB while eating breakfast. Yesterday, I chose to accept a job offer in Qatar because it pays piles of money and I’ll get to travel a lot. When I get there, I will choose to travel to Phuket and the Red Sea to go scuba diving. Later today, I will probably choose to have a slice of pizza for lunch. Being able to act on my desires makes me happy and satisfied. And so what if these desires have their origin in my heredity and upbringing? They are *my * desires, and striving to achieve them makes me fulfilled.

122

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Sure we can do. Right now, I am doing. I have chosen to read the SDMB while eating breakfast. Yesterday, I chose to accept a job offer in Qatar because it pays piles of money and I’ll get to travel a lot. When I get there, I will choose to travel to Phuket and the Red Sea to go scuba diving. Later today, I will probably choose to have a slice of pizza for lunch. Being able to act on my desires makes me happy and satisfied. And so what if these desires have their origin in my heredity and upbringing? They are *my * desires, and striving to achieve them makes me fulfilled.
[/QUOTE]

But none of these things could have been otherwise.

Your desires rooted in your heredity and upbringing are just the top level - dig deeper and you’re just a collection of atoms following an inevitable set of reactions and interactions.

123

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
But none of these things could have been otherwise.

Your desires rooted in your heredity and upbringing are just the top level - dig deeper and you’re just a collection of atoms following an inevitable set of reactions and interactions.
[/QUOTE]

This is all true. But if it makes a difference, I cannot interpret or understand my behavior in terms of atoms and molecules–it is too complex. I must understand my behavior in terms of beliefs and desires; human cognition is too limited for any other way of understanding our particular behaviors and choices. So even if I cannot regard myself as free, I must regard myself as an agent–a bearer of desires and goals and plans and values. Sure, these things were not ultimately chosen by me, but they make up who I am. It’s like a person being born tall and making the natural choice to play basketball. Should he agonize over the fact that he didn’t get to choose whether to be tall? No; he should just go play basketball and have fun. Why should the fact that I am determined detract from my enjoyment of the things I described in my previous post?

124

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
This is all true. But if it makes a difference, I cannot interpret or understand my behavior in terms of atoms and molecules–it is too complex. I must understand my behavior in terms of beliefs and desires; human cognition is too limited for any other way of understanding our particular behaviors and choices. So even if I cannot regard myself as free, I must regard myself as an agent–a bearer of desires and goals and plans and values. Sure, these things were not ultimately chosen by me, but they make up who I am. It’s like a person being born tall and making the natural choice to play basketball. Should he agonize over the fact that he didn’t get to choose whether to be tall? No; he should just go play basketball and have fun. Why should the fact that I am determined detract from my enjoyment of the things I described in my previous post?
[/QUOTE]

There’s no why - everything you’re doing, saying, wondering about, is ordained for you by interactions of objects over which you have no control - you’re just plodding through a script, unable to deviate. (As am I, in posting this).

125

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
There’s no why - everything you’re doing, saying, wondering about, is ordained for you by interactions of objects over which you have no control - you’re just plodding through a script, unable to deviate. (As am I, in posting this).
[/QUOTE]

That’s true. But I’m still going to enjoy my slice of pizza for lunch, and have fun fantasizing about the Red Sea.

126

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
That’s true. But I’m still going to enjoy my slice of pizza for lunch, and have fun fantasizing about the Red Sea.
[/QUOTE]

If that’s what’s going to happen, you can’t not do that. I’d say ‘Have fun’, but you either will, or not, regardless.

127

[QUOTE=begbert2]
I’m a smart puppet, thank-you-very-much.
[/QUOTE]
In a purely mechanistic worldview, you’re a puppet who’s programmed to think that he’s smart.

128

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
If that’s what’s going to happen, you can’t not do that. I’d say ‘Have fun’, but you either will, or not, regardless.
[/QUOTE]

Yup. I reckon so. But somehow it doesn’t bother me. The lack of control seems to bother you, though, unless you are just playing Devil’s advocate.

129

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Yup. I reckon so. But somehow it doesn’t bother me.
[/quote]
Of course. How could it?

It’s not the lack of control, it’s the fact that everything is rendered ultimately meaningless. There are no great or good people, nor any evil ones, because nobody is choosing or creating any of their actions.

130

I’ve barely skimmed through the thread so I apologise if it’s been tackled before, but I’ll present an argument for the first assertion below

assertion A: It’s irrational to infer we have no free will (NFW).

which is not the same as

assertion B: Believing in NFW is psychologically dissonant; hence it’s natural to believe in free will.

And it’s also not the same as

assertion C: there is no free will

----Argument----
Reasoning, or cognition-at-large is the process of generating inferences, if any, when given some starting point, or stimulus. When reasoning, one aims to produce valid inferences and avoid invalid ones. This requires the power to do reasoning. If one concludes that NFW is the case, then that’s equivalent to concluding that one doesn’t do anything, including reasoning.

Any train of thought, verbal and non-verbal, like, say,

I need to find my pen. I’m looking at the table. I don’t see it. Hence the pen is not on the table. I should look elsewhere.

requires mental activity wherein one starts with the input (sensorium and goals) and generate appropriate mental response whether that is a motor program or cognition.

Now, any attempt at verification or validation of the appropriateness of mental activity would itself be mental activity, whose very sanctity is what would be under question. Hence one can’t validate the line of reasoning which infers NFW, since one can’t do anything. Hence, it’s irrational to infer NFW
----End----

To repeat, assertion A doesn’t conclude that free will, in fact, doesn’t exist. NFW may be the case, and the mental activity we are subject to, may for some reason or not, comport with our naive realism of our mental activity. But it would have to be taken on as a dogma.

131

[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
----Argument----
Reasoning, or cognition-at-large is the process of generating inferences, if any, when given some starting point, or stimulus. When reasoning, one aims to produce valid inferences and avoid invalid ones. This requires the power to do reasoning. If one concludes that NFW is the case, then that’s equivalent to concluding that one doesn’t do anything, including reasoning.

Any train of thought, verbal and non-verbal, like, say,

I need to find my pen. I’m looking at the table. I don’t see it. Hence the pen is not on the table. I should look elsewhere.

requires mental activity wherein one starts with the input (sensorium and goals) and generate appropriate mental response whether that is a motor program or cognition.

Now, any attempt at verification or validation of the appropriateness of mental activity would itself be mental activity, whose very sanctity is what would be under question. Hence one can’t validate the line of reasoning which infers NFW, since one can’t do anything. Hence, it’s irrational to infer NFW
----End----

To repeat, assertion A doesn’t conclude that free will, in fact, doesn’t exist. NFW may be the case, and the mental activity we are subject to, may for some reason or not, comport with our naive realism of our mental activity. But it would have to be taken on as a dogma.
[/QUOTE]

Actually, many people (like William Alston) have turned this on its head, and argued that since we don’t have voluntary control over belief, we shouldn’t understand correctness of reasoning in terms of following epistemic norms and being responsible for our epistemic performance, but should seek some other understanding of words such as ‘justified’, ‘rational’, etc.

132

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
It’s not the lack of control, it’s the fact that everything is rendered ultimately meaningless. There are no great or good people, nor any evil ones, because nobody is choosing or creating any of their actions.
[/QUOTE]

Well, there are good people and there are bad people, the same as there are good cars and bad cars, even though none is the ultimate source of its/his/her goodness or badness. And as has been argued earlier in the thread, our goal in each case is to ‘fix’ the broken models (although some people think it is better just to discard badly flawed models).

133

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Actually, many people (like William Alston) have turned this on its head, and argued that since we don’t have voluntary control over belief, we shouldn’t understand correctness of reasoning in terms of following epistemic norms and being responsible for our epistemic performance, but should seek some other understanding of words such as ‘justified’, ‘rational’, etc.
[/QUOTE]

Can you link to a reasonably short exposition of this counterpoint?

My question, while being ignorant of his argument, is, on what basis does he conclude that the conclusion of his i.e. seek some other understanding, is valid?

134

OK, a slightly different angle - if it’s true that free will is an illusion, why does everybody - even those who claim to accept that it is an illusion - act as if it is not?

135

[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
Can you link to a reasonably short exposition of this counterpoint?

My question, while being ignorant of his argument, is, on what basis does he conclude that the conclusion of his i.e. seek some other understanding, is valid?
[/QUOTE]

Gotta run, but I’ll try to find something when I can.

136

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
OK, a slightly different angle - if it’s true that free will is an illusion, why does everybody - even those who claim to accept that it is an illusion - act as if it is not?
[/QUOTE]
Just to be clear… Nobody is acting in the sense of pretending. (Sometimes words like that have unintentional and unconscious influence on our thinking.) We act/do with the idea of free will in the same sense that our ancestors acted/did with the idea that evil demons caused disease. It’s just a misunderstanding (ETA: or lack of complete understanding) of what’s really going on.

137

[QUOTE=JThunder]
In a purely mechanistic worldview, you’re a puppet who’s programmed to think that he’s smart.
[/QUOTE]
No; I really am a smart “puppet”, or rather “robot”, since I am controlled by my internals, not by external strings. (My decisions are influenced by my environment, but even the people who believe in magic free will would agree about that.) Describing myself as smart is a description of the quality of the workings of the various parts that make up me; that quality is inferred through observation, like saying a car is fast. There’s nothing wrong with describing the mechanism directly.

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
It’s not the lack of control, it’s the fact that everything is rendered ultimately meaningless. There are no great or good people, nor any evil ones, because nobody is choosing or creating any of their actions.
[/QUOTE]
You keep forgetting that all the “strings” here are self-contained, and so the people are choosing and creating their actions. They just have internal parts that work together to make the decision. People can be good or evil, computers can be fast or slow, programs can be solid or buggy, machines can be reliable or faulty, buildings may be tall or short. In all these cases, things have actual properties. Regardless of the fact that those properties are dependent on the aggregate behavior of internal parts. Even if each of those parts may individually lack the properties in question.

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
OK, a slightly different angle - if it’s true that free will is an illusion, why does everybody - even those who claim to accept that it is an illusion - act as if it is not?
[/QUOTE]
Everybody acts as though free will is an illusion: they assess their reality and react to it in order to attempt to fulfil their desires. A roomba does basically the same thing, just with simpler and more easily understood internal ‘desires’ mandating its behavior.

138

[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
Can you link to a reasonably short exposition of this counterpoint?

My question, while being ignorant of his argument, is, on what basis does he conclude that the conclusion of his i.e. seek some other understanding, is valid?
[/QUOTE]

The conception of justification and evidential relations you describe above sounds roughly like a deontological conception of justification. Here is the criticism of such conceptions of justification based on the notion that beliefs are not ordinarily under our voluntary control. The basic idea is that a person can only be obligated to do something if they are able to do it. But since we have little or no voluntary control over our beliefs, then we cannot be obligated to believe anything in particular. For example, we cannot be *obligated * to infer Q from P, even if P entails Q, because inferring involves the formation of a new belief (Q), and we have no control over that. Thus, while belief and inference might be subject to some sort of epistemic evaluation, they aren’t subject to *that * sort of evaluation.

But there are substitutes for a deontological conception. For example, you could have a roughly teleological conception which would involve evaluating someone’s performance relative to a particular standard. Now, you can evaluate the performance of someone or something even if they are not responsible for that performance: a car and a person can perform well or poorly, and the car (at least) is not to be praised or blamed for its good or bad performance. But of course (one of) our epistemic goal(s) is truth, and so you could evaluate a person’s performance relative to how likely their behavior is to lead to the formation of true beliefs. Valid inference from true premises is an example of good performance; invalid inference, or inference using false premises, is less good. So there is no mention of how I ought to behave, or how I should infer: there is merely an evaluation of performance relative to a particular standard, namely, the achieving of true beliefs and the avoidance of false ones.

I favor this view, but it’s not the only alternative.

139

[QUOTE=begbert2]
You keep forgetting that all the “strings” here are self-contained, and so the people are choosing and creating their actions. They just have internal parts that work together to make the decision. People can be good or evil, computers can be fast or slow, programs can be solid or buggy, machines can be reliable or faulty, buildings may be tall or short. In all these cases, things have actual properties. Regardless of the fact that those properties are dependent on the aggregate behavior of internal parts. Even if each of those parts may individually lack the properties in question.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not forgetting anything - you keep talking about only the very top layer of the mechanism (the desires and genetic predispositions) - if there isn’t really any free will, then it goes all the way down to the atoms and beyond - your actions, despite their appearance of choice, are in fact ordained and mechanically scripted in such a way that - given sufficient information about the initial state - could have been computed fully in advance before you were even born - you’re just going through the motions.

Either that or if there isn’t such computable determinism, the mechanism is the same, but the variations in the script are just the result of a cascade of events tweaked by some random pop of an electron or some such.

Either way, you’re bound by your desires, your desires are bound by their chemistry; their chemistry is bound by its physics, and nothing you’re actually doing, or experiencing, is really in any way controllable by you.

140

It’s an interesting but ultimately pointless question. From our perspective there of course appears to be free will. Maybe the idea of cause and effect means that in some sense our free will is an illusion but so what? We can’t in any meaningful way step outside of this illusion. The only way that a lack of free will could be meaningful is if it affected our choices - but having choices preassumes the existence of free will.

Most important, neither free will and fatalism are falsifiable - there is no meaningful way to disprove either concept.

Anyway the idea that there is a simple dichotomy is false. Sure, maybe on the gross physical level everything is strictly cause and effect. On that level, things are strictly on the thermodynamic train to heat death too. But we still have at higher levels temporary local reversals of the thermodynamic arrow called life. In a similar way, at a higher local level we have decision making based on self awareness. The fact that lower level phenomena combine to form higher level patterns that are unique and interesting in no way is a contradiction of the existence of the lower level phenomena.

For example, you can make some simple rules for placing dots(points) on a plane. They appear somewhat randomly placed, but after enough iterations a pattern starts to form, maybe even complex shapes. The fact that the shape is formed by dots doesn’t contradict the existence of the shape.