I guess the counter argument would be that the individual under scrutiny could decide to buck your system and deliberately do something completely out of character and unexpected by you, but I’m not sure how much value this thought experiment has anyway, given that we can’t know people nearly intimately enough to predict their every response.
No we can’t predict their response, and granted my question is full of potential ambiguities or areas where we can’t be precise, but I still think it’s interesting. It seems we assume free will while at the same time we tend to be locked into patterns of behavior. How do those 2 mechanisms interact? Is it still free will if you are only choosing between a small subset of possibilities due to these internal influences?
Randy, it seems to me that your OP is guilty of a very common fallacy concerning free will, namely, that if someone can accurately predict what you are going to do every time, that somehow proves you are not acting on free will.
Knowing that something is going to happen does not make it happen.
For example, there has always been the conundrum of new theology student who asks: “If God knows everything, past present and future, then God knows if I am going to Heaven or Hell, right?”
To which the experienced thologian answers “Right”.
At which point the student throws up his hands and says: “Then there is no point in my trying to be good or evil. It is predetermined.”
To which the experienced theologian usually answers like this: "You are in a plane flying over a wooded area containing two country roads. They meet at a blind intersection in the middle of the woods. There are no stop signs or traffic lights, or even anything to warn that an intersection is coming.
Below you, you see a line of about 10 cars on one road and 10 cars on the other. They are both going the same speed, which is about twice the speed limit, heading for the intersection, and both at excatly the same distance from it. The roads are wet and icy.
You have a pretty good idea of the horrible thing that is going to happen in the next few seconds. None of the drivers on the ground, (all of whom have chosen to act as they are acting) have any idea what is going to happen.
Does your foreknowldege of the probable consequences diminish their responsibility for their freely chosen actions?
“I” make choices based on my inate temperment and my values and on what I’ve learned ion the past. Of course there wil be consistencies. How exactly would a random output be more consistent with free will?
As to moral consequences … and leaving the theologic implications behind … let us say that the ethical consequences are appropriate for the self to bear, ultimate Free Will or illusury free will, either way. One can even argue that the ethical consequences must exist independent of any “absolute” morality and whether or not moral culpability exists, in order for society to exist. A die hard evolutionary psychologist would argue that they exist as a consequence of that which is most evolutionarily fit. A religious die hard evolutionary psychologist would say that such was how God determined it would go.
This would seem to be at odds with your earlier contention:
yet I see no acknowledgment that you have changed your mind.
I think you have it backwards. It is rigid thinking to state that because we don’t know something, that it is inherently impossible to know. This mistake has been made over and over throughout history. What seems impossible today often becomes possible tomorrow. In the 1950s, would you have thought it possible to build a device that could fit inside your wallet that would have more computing power than a machine that took up an entire building?
It is always a mistake to reason that because we can’t currently do X, that X is therefore impossible. So if you believe that by saying that X is currently not possible, but stopping short of saying it’s inherently impossible, that one is engaging in “fuzzy” thinking, then I guess I believe in fuzzy thinking. If the alternative to being “fuzzy” is to draw unwarranted conclusions, then call me fuzzy.
In your analogy, I didn’t create them. How can God be an innocent bystander in a universe that He created?
How about this analogy?:
I’m standing at the top of a cliff. I see a person walking on a road at the bottom of the cliff. I push a boulder over the cliff, knowing that it will crush the person when it reaches the bottom. Can I say that I’m not responsible for killing that person? I didn’t actually kill the person; I simply initiated a series of events that resulted in the death. The boulder was free to roll wherever the laws of physics took it, but I knew in advance where it was going to roll. If I initiate a condition, with foreknowledge of what the result of that condition will be, how can I say I’m not responsible?
First of all, I can’t get too deep into God since as you may know, I am a foaming-at-the-mouth atheist.
If I choose to roll a boulder over a cliff onto someone, then that is an act of free will. The point of my analogy was simply that an act of free will does not cease to be so simply because someone armed with superior knowledge of probable causes and effects (like the guy in the plane) happens to be able to reasonably predict the outcome of my free will decision.
Let’s try this, lowbrass: I do not know you, but I am willing to predict this: You see a little old lady whom you know is living on a little pension leaving a grocery store and she drops $20 from her purse on a dark street. Nobody would see you, lowbrass, if you just walked up and discreetly pocketed the money. But I am willing to predict the following. I am predicting that you would tell the old lady she had dropped it, and maybe pick it up and give it to her. Have I accuractely predicted your free-will action? Does my foreknowledge of your free-will action make it any less a free-will action?
Sure; completely unlimited freewill is probably logically impossible anyway; even if I wasn’t restricted to behaving broadly within the framework of my character, I can’t choose to levitate and fly around the room. Choice within limits is still choice.
Right: Just because it can be known that something will happen, does not mean that it was necessary that that be the thing that happen.
I’m not sure the OP makes this mistake, though. These arguments that turn on causation usually are saying the will isn’t free because universal causation shows that no one could have possibly done otherwise than they actually do. The predictability of people’s actions illustrates this fact, but is in a sense a red herring. Predictability isn’t really what’s at issue, what’s at issue is the question whether people could have willed to do otherwise than what they are in fact going to do.
-FrL-
But at what point does free will kick in? Do our internal influences whittle away at the list of options and finally there is a small set to choose from at which point the “free will” function kicks in? That seems a little too clean and unlikely.
I haven’t a clue, but I don’t see any reason why we should assume it works this way, or indeed assume it works any other way.
Ah, but Valteron, you are tying Free Will into the thought process too early in the argument. Of course if you know something is going to happen, you are not causing it to happen. But it will happen, whether you know about it or not. I’m not claiming we can know the future. In fact I think it has been explicitly shown in this thread that due to the practical limitations of technology, we cannot. But known or not, the future is mapped out through the cartography of science, and human action is included on that map.
Well, let’s take a real-life example of a theologan who was presented with this conundrum, and had a much simpler resolution. John Calvin was a firm believer in infralapsarianistic predestination, as you probably know. He essentially answered the question thus: “Yes God already knows whether you’re going to heaven or hell. But if you do Good Works, and avoid Sin, you can try to prove him right in his decision to send you to heaven. Whereas if you shun Good Works and give in to Satan, his decision to send you to hell will - at the end of your life - be vindicated.”
Here’s where you lose me. I think you’re trying to conflate Free Will and Morality. If you check back over my OP, you’ll note I do not attempt to bring morality into the argument, whereas your greatest objection to the anti-free-will concept is the percieved suspension of moral culpability. Who cares what the person in the airplane is “responsible” for, or what the people in the cars are “responsible” for? If you can see the cars heading towards each other, and you can calculate their trajectory, you will know the outcome.
Let me parse your analogy, and correct me if I’m off-base here. The airplane observer is God or the Impossible Computer, or Laplace’s Demon. The drivers in the cars are individuals with free wills. The cars/road/forest/intersection are the individuals’ choices in life/execution of their free will. And the inevitable crash is the consequences.
The problem with your analogy is you still don’t leave any room for free will. Moral culpability, questionably, but not free will. There are no divergent paths off these roads. There is no possibilty of a U-turn. You’ve made the roads icy, so no matter how the last drivers react, the conclusion will be the same for everybody.
I never meant to bring morality into play in this discussion, but if you’re interested in discussing it, I think Calvin’s view of predestination is pretty solid. (Disclaimer: Agnostic Jew here.)
Brevity is the soul of wit.
I can’t speak for PBear42, but as a Free Willer, and a compatibilist to boot, I would certainly approach the question from the former perspective. I’ll even go on record as stating that the former is how the question ought to be approached. Good model-building forces you (the general you) to consider what is important in a description of free will, and to think of new ways these features could be implemented in the world as we know it. A good model can also answer, to the best of our ability, the question in your perspective. If it turns out that some important feature of free will cannot be implemented in the physical universe, or that the human brain does not contain any of the possible implementations, then it will be shown that what we experience as free will is not really free will.
I’ll turn the question right back on you: how can you allow for free will without such consistency? If there wasn’t consistency over time, no goals or principles upon which a person operates, in what sense would a choice have any meaning? As I see understand it, the fundamental question in the free will debate isn’t about determinism or whether someone “could have done otherwise,” it is about whether we can ascribe any (morally significant) meaning to the choices we make. These other questions arose as a result of the argument of that fundamental question, and somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the original goal, became entangled in the finer points of the argument, and grew to assume that these points were the goal. Since then our thinking has advanced, and I believe that we can find a path to meaningful choices through the use of newer concepts.
IMHO, you’re making the mistake (and a classic one at that) of assuming that free will is a step in a process, rather than a description of a process. What you are arguing against is not free will, but the existence of an atomistic soul. Let me try to motivate this with an analogy.
For most of human history, it has been assumed that there was something fundamentally different between living and non-living things, because, after all, they just seem to be very different. One simple explanation for this difference is that there is something living things possess something that non-living things don’t, a vital energy. And so it was obvious that life and the vital energy are identical to each other. This is all well and good, until we start to look at the physical processes of living things under a microscope, we find that they can all be described perfectly well by the same chemistry that describes non-living things. But then, what work is left to do for life, the vital energy? Is life only an illusion?
Fortunately, such a crisis never manifested itself in history (at least, that I know of). Our scientists realized they were not showing life to be illusory, but were showing that the vital energy did not exist. Life remains as a perfectly valid descriptor of certain processes, without it needing to be a component of those processes.
I argue that, as the vital energy is to life, the soul is to free will. The soul was the seat of moral decision making, but modern science is making it increasingly clear that our moral decision making processes have no need for the existence of the soul. What features characterize a process with free will? I don’t know of anyone who claims to have a comprehensive list, but some factors might be: introspective ability and having a concept of self, the ability to learn from experiences and to alter beliefs and actions based on this, and the ability to communicate with others and alter beliefs and actions.
Perhaps a divergence from what you intended, but one that is, AFAIK, historically valid. Free will has been cast as a necessary (and sufficient?) condition of moral responsibility. As such, a proof of the existence of moral responsibility automatically proves the existence of free will.
I guess I get stuck on the low level details. Unless I can see a mechanism for choice other than deterministic processes within the brain, then one part of me thinks that we can solve the former problem all we want but we are just fooling ourselves. I am able to set aside that part of me that wants to know the mechanism, assume it’s there and try to figure out a model for free will that makes sense, but it will never be fully satisfying because the underlying question has not been answered.
Yes, I have a tendency to think in terms of low level details, steps and procedures (I’ve been programming a long time and I think it sends me towards that style of thinking by default).
But even if it’s not as simplistic as a step in a process, to say that it’s a description of a process does not shed any light on how it can exist within what appears to be a deterministic system.
That’s a good analogy. I have had those same ideas regarding life and have waffled back and forth between thinking things that are alive have something special about them vs thinking things that are alive are simply the successors to those sets of molecules that happened to come together as a group initially such that they had a tendency to replicate (those that had a tendency to replicate due to natural configuration would, of course, continue to exist while any group of molecules that came together that did not have a tendency to replicate would not continue to exist, even if they had interesting abilities to interact and modify their surrounding environment). But that’s an entirely different debate.
yeesh… Disappear for a day on one of these threads and you have a whole essay to read to catch up.
This seems to be as good a place as any to start, and I certainly agree with Mangetout. I assume by “internal influences” you mean automatic responses outside of the “will” that makes the final choice. I see no reason to seperate them, it would seem to me that many of the “automatically discounted” options are simply those that the will very quickly determines are poor choices of actions. For example, I could throw my laptop at a wall or jump off a two story building as a course of action, but those sorts of things are discarded by whatever makes my decisions (will, soul, brain, whatever term) as counter-productive. The argument I expect in response is “well, what determines “productive”, is it determined, escapable?”, to which I respond experience. As pointed out above, the idea of consistency, experience being incorporated into future decisions, etc. all seem to be necessary conditions and components of a free will, not evidence to contradict it.
It seems to me, because since the illusion of free will is so remarkably powerful that the burden of proof rests with the determinists; Occam’s razor would seem to suggest that the simplest answer given the evidence is the correct one… and since by all evidence I certainly seem to be in control of my actions, I have no reason to believe I’m not.
To tie that in with the debate of morality above, of course, the idea of free will comes with it the burden of assigning a morality to each action, something that people learn via culture, religion, experience, and metacognition over time
Actually, since you were quoting theology, that wasn’t clear at all.
No, that’s backwards. The person rolling the boulder is analagous to God, not the person presumably exercising free will.
Right, and my objection to your analogy was that a person in a plane who correctly guesses what is going to occur is not analagous to a god who created all the people and things in play, and has certain knowledge of all future events. God is not an innocent bystander who happens to be observing the universe. That’s why I don’t think your analogy works.
Did you create me?
I don’t know - I may be missing your point. Perhaps the God analogy threw me off track as to exactly what it is you’re trying to say.
[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
I guess I get stuck on the low level details. Unless I can see a mechanism for choice other than deterministic processes within the brain, then one part of me thinks that we can solve the former problem all we want but we are just fooling ourselves. I am able to set aside that part of me that wants to know the mechanism, assume it’s there and try to figure out a model for free will that makes sense, but it will never be fully satisfying because the underlying question has not been answered.[\QUOTE]
We do have people working on both issues, but the fact is that right now, no one understands the mechanism(s) for making choices. Unless someone in the thread is working on the neuroscience, the best we can do is discuss different models, see if those models fit with what we do know about the brain and with the important features of free will, and (if you’re really good at modeling) produce predictions that might be used to guide the course of neuroscience.
The problem is that most people assume that determinism is a much stronger proposition than it actually is–most assume that determination automatically means causation. As I see it, the “free” in “free will” doesn’t mean freedom from determination, it means freedom from (external) causation, which is completely compatible with determinism. I’ll try to explain.
When we discuss causation, even under the simplest model, we are discussing at least two things: causal necessity and causal sufficiency. When we ask “What caused X to occur?” a proper answer must consider both types of causes (although there is no guarantee that either will be satisfied). For example, if we wanted to know what caused the evolution of eyes, there are probably an infinite number of sufficient causes, associated with small differences in the exact mutations that appeared, the distribution of life on the planet, etc. But they all have at least one thing in common: life evolved in a translucent medium. So a proper answer to the question might sound something like “the presence of light, and some good luck,” an answer which contains information on both types of causation (note, here “luck” should be interpreted as “a wide variety of highly diverging initial conditions”). Determinism, however, is a statement only about causal sufficiency (i.e., that any complete description of a state of the universe is sufficient to determining all subsequent states).
Furthermore, when we want to know about causal sufficiency, we generally want to know about minimal causal sufficiency, the smallest set of causes that suffice to produce the event in question. The truth of determinism gives us just the opposite, maximal causal sufficiency. Suppose that event C[sub]0[/sub] is a sufficient cause of event X. Now introduce event C[sub]1[/sub], such that C[sub]0[/sub] and C[sub]1[/sub] are not mutually exclusive. Then it follows that C[sub]0[/sub] + C[sub]1[/sub] is also a sufficient cause of X. For example, if being hit by a semi is enough to kill me, then being hit by a semi in July is also enough to kill me. Given this, there is no reason to favor C[sub]0[/sub] + C[sub]1[/sub] to C[sub]0[/sub] by itself as the cause of X, and good reason (simplicity) to do the opposite. Thus we would say that C[sub]0[/sub] is the (sufficient) cause of X.
Given these two issues, we have no reason to assume that the truth of determinism plays any role in how we determine the causes of an individual’s behavior.
Well, for some reason, the board isn’t letting me preview my post, so I really hope the coding works out.
Actually, Randy, I did not mean to bring morality into the debate either. I really should NOT have said “responsible”. I really meant that my superior knowledge of causes and probable consequences based on my position in the airplane does not mean that I am the cause of the upcoming crash. And the decision of the people in those two sets of 10 cars to drive at breakneck speed on a wooded country road that is icy is based on a decision of free will by those drivers, is it not? They have the option of slowing down, which might allow them to se the upcoming intersection in time.
Let me ask you, Randy, Agnostic Jew, the question I asked another poster. The little old lady in your neighbourhood who lives on a tiny pension, on her way home from the grocery, drops $20 from her purse right next to you on a park bench at night. You can VERY easily shove it in your pocket and nobody will see. You can even admit in this forum that you would keep it without feeling shame, since nobody knows who Randy really is. I am pretty certain that an Agnostic Jew would not be bothered by fears of divine punishment, here or in an afterlife, would he? What do you do and why? Your move, Randy.
If you add to your analogy that they might slow down, then the person in the aircraft does NOT know that they’ll collide. If my reading of your analogy is correct, then in order for it to apply to the discussion of free will, the drivers of the cars should be unable to change their course of action once they choose to set out on the road. The observer (airplane pilot, whatever) needs to come into the situation with the ability to predict accurately the outcome.
I’d pick it up and give it to her. Just because I have no free will doesn’t mean I should be a dick - see Calvin’s arguments.