This is flatly wrong.
This is like saying that because the 1000^1000^1000^1000th digit of pi is pre-determined, there is no need for any computation in order to find it.
If you don’t understand this point, then you simply don’t understand what determinism is.
Really? None of these make any decisions? (Well, maybe not animals and sleep walkers.)
If I really have to go, you can say that my trip to the john does not involve any decisions. But I can still decide left stall or right stall.
The advantage is the abiity to synthesize complex information, especially novel information–which consciousness no doubt enables us to do. Why isn’t that good enough for you?
Evolution produces a lot of “oopsies”, by the way. Perhaps all the mental illness we suffer from is a direct of consciousness. Perhaps if we had more consciousness, we’d be be imprisoned by indecision and never get anything done. Perhaps we’ve got just the right amount of awareness so that we can process information efficiently wiithout frequently falling into the abyss of our minds.
For all you know, our species may evolve towards less consciousness–less of this free will you purport we have. Whch would make complete sense to me. Earthlings apparently lacked consciousness for 4 billion years and managed to do just fine. Maybe we’re the embarrassing offshoot of Homo that’s going to die off in favor of a dumber species.
Free will is the premise that things behave according to their natures. Determinism is also the premise that things behave according to their natures. If I write a computer program that, say, calculates the first ten thousand prime numbers, that program will make many choices over the course of that calculation. It makes those choices on its own, according to its own nature (which nature of course I designed it to have), and the results of those decisions are of course predetermined.
If one wishes to argue otherwise, one must first have some other definition for free will. But the only other definitions I’ve seen for free will are nonsensical: Either one posits that our actions are determined by our soul or some such, or one posits that they’re the result of random processes, and either one makes us, not free, but bound to something other than ourselves.
I most certainly believe all of those groups–including animals–make decisions.
But most people deny free will to members of these groups. I think cognitive activity differs among these groups. But I don’t think it makes sense to lump these groups all together based on on the idea that they have defective “wills”…and that somehow their decision-making processes are more predictable than anyone else’s.
To me they mean basically the same thing, but both also mean different things in different contexts – which is kind of key here.
In the context of philosophy or some fields of neuroscience, IMO free will (or volition) is, to use a philosophical term, ontologically subjective – that is, it exists at all only in the subjective consciousness of the individual claiming to possess it.
But in a moral or legal context, free will is epistemically objective – that is, it can be studied objectively as a set of behaviors and we can make determinations about such things as a probable chain of cause and effect.
So if a person decides on a particular course of action, say he wants to acquire some money and decides to rob a bank, a field like computational neuroscience might posit that his mental state was such that, if precisely known, it made that particular response to particular inputs completely predictable and entirely deterministic. But if a judge asks, did you do this of your own free will (volition), he means something entirely different and epistemically objective: he might mean “were you coerced into doing this by some third party?” He might also want to know whether the individual was mentally competent to engage in the appropriate thinking and judgment to wilfully make such a decision. That is an entirely different meaning of “free will”.
Of course, if you prefer to use “free will” to mean the former concept and “volition” to mean the latter, you’re free to make that distinction, but I prefer to say that it’s context and not those particular word choices that establishes those different meanings.
I more or less agree, and I should have been clearer. When I say “treat everyone equally” I don’t mean that everyone should get exactly the same punishment for the same transgression, but rather I am advocating the principle that everyone should be subject to the same set of rules and judged according to the same criteria. It’s the absence of systemic prejudging – the ideal to which our justice system aspires but which it frequently fails to achieve.
I’m not sure I would go quite as far as you suggest in custom-tailoring the dispensation of criminal justice, but only that specific circumstances, mitigating factors, and the character of the individual should all figure in setting appropriate punishment. A story that I’ve told before …
I’m reminded of the story of a troubled young man with a history of violence who once tried to strangle a friend. Worse still, when he was at Cambridge he took a dislike to his tutor and tried to poison him. I would imagine the normal recourse would be automatic expulsion and a lengthy jail term for attempted murder. Instead, Cambridge officials put him on probation and ordered him to undergo psychiatric therapy. Instead of becoming a career criminal, the young man went on to become a renowned theoretical physicist. His name was J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he later became the scientific head of the Manhattan Project.
I disagree with you, but thank you for playing.
(One big problem is that there are two kinds of determinism, as used in physics today, and as used in philosophy forever. The two don’t mean quite the same thing.)
Heck, animals do make decisions, much like humans – at least the “higher” mammals and the social mammals. Dogs make decisions all the time; you can watch it happening!
This.
I am disappointed that this debate thread only offers a false dichotomy between free will and Determinism.
Where is the option for the growing evidence that free will is just what we view as our mind justifying the past actions of the events that have happened in the past, which may not be controlled by anything close to what we consider consciousness?
And it’s sort of a pointless concept defined as such isn’t it? And if you asked the random person what free will meant they wouldn’t give your definition. They would think of free will as having the ability to make choices not governed by physical determinism.
I think volition is free (hehe) from the baggage of free will. For me, volition is solely about what an actor perceives. If someone were to ask me if I robbed a bank voluntarily, I’d have no problem saying “yes”. But I’d also say “yes” if the question was, “Did you compulsively wash your hands as a response to your OCD?” Or “Did you kill your significant other while in a fit of white hot rage?” The whole free will thing attempts to distinguish these choices from other kind of choices. Even though they are all voluntary actions. I don’t see the point.
I’d add that people who believe in this definition of free will do so to distinguish their minds from other people’s/creature’s minds. Which is why I perceive a certain arrogance in the whole concept. We barely understand what’s going in our own individual brains. Why would we presume that we know what’s going on in someone else’s brain?
Yesterday when I was walking home, a cat was walking ahead of me. He came to the end of the block, glanced back at me, looked over at his right, and then jetted off to the left. On other days, that same cat has probably seen me perform similar actions. So why would an observer assume that I’m the master of fate, while little kitty is a furry automaton? The only thing I feel confident surmising is that I have more flexibility than the cat. Whereas maybe Mr. Cat probably only has two options at any given time (sleep/no sleep, eat/no eat/, poop/no poop, left/right), I usually have more. But having ten dollars over someone else’s two dollars doesn’t make me infinitely wealthy.
That’s easy: I don’t. I assume that the cat has a large amount of volition also.
Snakes, much less. Insects, none at all. But cats and dogs rival us for complexity of cognition and behavior.
This isn’t Great Debate stuff. This is GQ stuff. This is basic factual information. “Disagreeing” about this is like believing that the earth is flat. You’re free to do so, but it does not put you in good company.
I am having a strange feeling of deja vu…
Ah. Not a coincidence. A short search through the history, and I see you’re the same poster who was earlier having trouble on the topic of – what else could it be? – deterministic systems. You somehow believed that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was not deterministic. I gave you five different cites in that thread that showed otherwise. (This chart is the most obvious demonstration.) Not only did you refuse to read those cites and leave the thread in a huff, you added an extra level of ridiculousness by telling me to, and I quote, “Do some reading, if you want to learn.”
It’s not everyday that someone reaches such lofty heights of hypocrisy, ignoring multiple cites while simultaneously advising other people to read more. That was a special accomplishment on your part. I’m sorry to have forgotten it.
Now look.
I don’t particularly care about people making mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes, you make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. I’ve said some stupid shit on the Dope and been called out on it. In my better moments, I have admitted that I fucked up. And that right there is the key.
You made a mistake. You fucked up. It’s right there in the link. And instead of admitting that you fucked up, you are now in a new thread on the same general topic and you are… repeating the exact same type of factually wrong statements that you wrote about earlier. You’re making more basic mistakes about deterministic systems. I’m looking at the dates of that thread… and WOW. You’ve been doing this for a long time! Literally years! No wonder I forgot.
Apparently you’ve built up some internal safeguards to avoid admitting error. Here it is:
This is actually a controversial statement. Not everybody would agree. (I, in particular, would not.) But we can posit that this is true. We can posit that there is a scientific/mathematical meaning, and a philosophical meaning, and that they aren’t the same.
But here is a very important point: if you want to stick to “philosophical determinism” – which you haven’t defined, and in all likelihood cannot define, but whatever – then you need to refrain from making scientific statements. If you want to talk about evolution, then you’re leaving the purely philosophical realm and making a statement about actual physical processes. And to talk about physical processes, you need to have an understanding of “scientific determinism”. You were making a scientific statement.
That is not a high philosophical claim about “free will”.
That is a scientific claim. A fucking ridiculous, completely incorrect, absolutely wrong-headed, deeply ignorant scientific claim. It is false on its face.
When you make a claim about biological processes, then you’re making a claim about science, not pure philosophy. If you’re making a claim about biological evolution, then you are necessarily making a claim about the physics underlying those biological processes. And then you run into the problem you made in previous threads, clearing showing that you do not understand this stuff at all. You’re already well on record having fundamentally misunderstood “scientific determinism”. It’s right there. You can choose to ignore your personal posting history, but anybody else can click on the link, read the whole thread, and see your repeated misunderstandings.
It’s fully possible that the explanations given to you in that thread were bad.
Poorly written. Hard to understand. Assuming a requisite base of knowledge that, unfortunately, you lacked. There is another thread where I’ve been over this in more detail with better explanations. This thread has a much better explanation. Ah! And I see that was you, too! For some reason I was thinking there was a small army of people who had trouble with this concept on the Dope, but really, it’s only you! But damn, you have MAJOR problems understanding this. Srsly.
It’s actually not all that hard. I can go through it again. I don’t have monstro’s patience with the “free will” topic in general, but I have a lot more patience with talking about determinism because it is well defined. It has a clear definition, which means that we can make statements about it that are clearly right, or clearly wrong. You? You make statements about it that are clearly wrong.
You have a chance to learn a new thing here. This is a thing you’ve been repeatedly mistaken about for, literally, years.
The alternative is to continue with your flippant “thank you for playing” ignorance. That’s a good attitude to have if you don’t want to learn anything new. But if you do actually want to learn what other human beings mean when they use the term “determinism”, if you are genuinely curious to learn why evolution can’t just skip ahead to the right answer, then that particular attitude is going to get in your way. As your posting history makes painfully clear.
I can’t quite get behind the reasoning in this article and many like it. They all seem to draw a line between our brains and some kind of conscious. This one even goes as far as to describe your brain as the entirety of your experiences plus those inherited from your parents. Yet somehow that does not constitute being a part of yourself. To me at least, my brain and me are one in the same. So a choice made by my brain is being made by me.
Hellestal, the idea that free will is illusory can be psychologically discomforting. It’s like proving to a religious person that his or her deepest beliefs are pure fiction.
Indeed.
But I’m not trying to make an argument directly related to “free will”. I’m not trying to make the argument that the universe as we experience is deterministic. I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing any longer. However, the poster above is making specific claims about how determinism works, and those claims are not particularly well informed. To put it lightly.
An analogy: I’m thoroughly not religious. But if someone claims to have perfect knowledge that god exists, I’m just like, okay then. But if that same someone claims that a universe without god is impossible because evolution without god would necessarily work differently in some strangely described way contrary to genuine evolutionary theory, well then, that’s when we have a problem. In that case, it’s not a matter of discomforting ideas. It has moved into intellectual and scientific laziness dressed up in philosophical clothing. This is something extra. There are plenty of other religious people who wouldn’t make that same category of mistake.
I agree. And this they are really making a decision - as opposed to just looking like they are making a decision - they must have some sort of free will. If not, their decisions would not be decisions at all.
Which leads me to speculate that the mental state we call free will evolved in stages like the rest of our and animal’s brains. Maybe some day we will find the free will module of our brain.
Would a computer simulation of our brain have free will? (Or as much as we have it.) If it did, what parts could we turn off that would make free will go away?
Personally, I believe that a full simulation of a brain would, indeed, have the same free will as the person it models…
re your second point, we have (rather hellish) evidence in the form of addition, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other infringements on our freedom of choice. These indicate (horribly) how willpower can be reduced by both exterior and interior influences. Stockholm Syndrome, and cult-member behavior, are two rather gloomy examples. The workings of advertising is, at least, relatively benign, but ads do affect our decisions, and thus need to be taken into account when understanding free will.
Just because a process takes time and is unpredictable before it’s finished doesn’t mean the process is non-deterministic.