I think it is pretty clear that we have at least the illusion of choice, which is true even in those cases where we can determine that our body prepares for an action before it does it. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not assuming any particular mechanism behind it.
A question for you and others. The science fiction writer Damon Knight said that his subconscious, who he called Fred, made writing decisions for him and reported on them in the shower. Assuming he acted on those writing decisions (he said he did) were they an example of him freely choosing how to deal with a plot or character problem, or if his decision was in some way determined by his subconscious? In other words, do choices have to be made by the conscious mind, or can you subconsciously choose something?
My point was just that we should refrain from any hasty metaphysics. Sure, if you assume that any agent is just an automaton, it can only do what an automaton can do; but this conclusion then just feeds your own assumptions back to you. Rather, we might explore the logical gamut of what is in principle possible. This doesn’t tell us, necessarily, whether these possibilities are actualized—even if other notions of agent are feasible, humans might just be automata. But at least that way we don’t hamper our investigations from the start. In that sense, ‘itself’ or ‘Bill’ just denote, without any further implications than that.
I understand your position, but my point was just that it’s nonsensical to reply to
With:
I stipulate that another option would be that the determining factors of your choices might also be up to you, to which you reply that they are up to you, followed by claiming that they of course aren’t up to you.
A libertarian definition of free will would require that your reasons for making a certain choice are not reducible to anything external. Thus, they must be set by the agent. If that’s possible, then there is no issue with such free will. The BA shows that this stipulation leads to an infinite regress. If you then think that such a regress is impossible, that yields grounds to reject the libertarian notion of free will. But that is a conclusion that can only be drawn after examining the possibility of this kind of free will, so excluding it on principle is just circular!
All I’m pointing out is that the conclusion here is not as strong as it might seem, since accepting it would also make random events or the origin of the universe similarly impossible. So, is there a reason why we might think these things are impossible, while they actually aren’t? Yes: the fact that theoretical models can only account for the transformation, not the generation of information. Hence, whenever we try to find such models of instances of information generation—creation, randomness, free will—we find paradoxes, which then leads to the Münchhausen trilemma. But that only says something about our models of the world—that we can then take this for a conclusion regarding the world itself is then an assumption that can—and arguably should—be challenged. But without that assumption, the argument against free will runs out of steam.
And yet it does: as already explained above, no finite mechanism (e.g. a Turing machine) can produce random outputs, but an infinite one, a Zeno machine, can do so (by being able to solve the halting problem of ordinary TMs, and hence, enumerating an algorithmically random set). So if you want to give a mechanism, an explanation for randomness the way you insist on one for free will, you’re led to just the same infinite notions.
Sure, but this means that the basic problem we’re faced with must have some solution! Which means that if you point to that problem and claim it to be unsolvable—as you do in the case of free will—that’s just false: we know some solution must exist, even if our theoretical tools are not equal to the task of modeling it!
Of course there is. When something seems like X, the first hypothesis to investigate is that it actually is X. When it seems like there is additional, unseen matter accelerating stars in the galactic fringes, the first hypothesis is that there might be additional unseen matter doing just that. When it seems like we could have acted differently, then the first hypothesis is that we actually could have. Neither of these might be right—dark matter might not exist, rather, we might have to modify gravity—but discarding an option out of hand is just bad practice.
(As a side note, the term ‘explanatory gap’ has a fairly fixed meaning in this sort of discussion, indicating the failure of physical ist explanation to give a full account of mental phenomena; thus, I would normally take you to deny the existence of such a gap, while I think that it does exist, but simply shows the limitation of theoretical models.)
Yes, I’d agree with that. Indeed I think more than that we have the illusion of choice, I think we *do* have choice. I just don’t think that that choice is causally disconnected from the rest of the universe because I don’t think that makes any sense.
Personallly I define “me” as including both the conscious and subconscious, so there is no issue with calling subconscious choices choices. Which is why the various experiments showing a choice being made before participants feel they have consciously decided, while interesting, don’t make me feel more or less in control.
No; the choice (again, assuming the universe is deterministic, which I am not claiming) is the outcome of the state of the universe which includes you and your conscious thoughts.
Now, a counter-question: what does a choice that is not causally connected mean? How, for example, does an entity choose coffee or tea in a way that isn’t a product of their innate wants, memories and environment?
…which are, themselves, the inevitable consequence of the rest of the universe?
Here’s what it looks like to me: I exist. But the rest of the world that is not me also exists. And there is a distinction between me and not-me. At least, that is how I experience the world.
If I do not have free will, then everything I do, every decision I make, every thought I have, can be entirely traced back causally to not-me. If there is nothing that originates with me, nothing that is not ultimately the inevitable caused result of not-me, then in what way do I make choices? How can I be responsible for anything?
Not impossible, unsolved. There are of course lots of things we don’t fully understand yet, and pointing at such things is the last refuge of the woo peddler (not accusing you of such, just pointing out the bankruptcy of such reasoning). We have evidence of e.g. the universe existing, it’s not the same at all as positing a phenomenon with no need to even exist.
To your credit, you have defined free will; that it is the origin of the will and must come from the agent, and not be reducible to external causes. It’s still a pretty vague definition, but it is more than most free will proponents manage.
But we can at least start to ask questions about this will: do zygotes have it? How does it interact with neurochemistry? Why do biological entities like humans have wants that appear the result of evolutionary advantage?
No-one claimed as such. Randomness is just a seeming property of the universe. Yes, this potentially leaves an explanatory gap (or at least the possibility of things like non-local hidden variables) but that’s not the same as concluding it requires an infinite Turing machine.
It’s interesting that you bring up Zeno because I would have thought this would clearly highlight the flaw: just because I can model motion as a Zeno infinite regress does not mean that’s what the universe is actually doing.
Double-disagree
Firstly, no, not being able to explain something does not entail an explanation existing. Perhaps it can never be explained. It just “is”. (NB: I don’t like when people use “just is” in place of an explanation. It’s not an explanation. Explanations allow us to make useful predictions or inferences. “The universe just is” is the suggestion that maybe no explanation is possible).
Then, in terms of free will, I disagree that any problem has even been outlined. Some people feeling like there’s a thing that should carry that label is insufficient.
X in this case is just the feeling of having made a choice, which I don’t dispute. The philosophical hypothesis of a want that is not the product of prior causes is not only baseless but not even something the hypothetical person can even articulate into something coherent.
Right. I don’t get to choose my wants; I don’t get to choose to enjoy the taste of this over that. And I don’t get to choose my innate attributes. My choices are ultimately the product of these things.
I don’t hate it – I’m doing what I want to do, what I think is best. But if God were to ask me: “Why didn’t you do better” I’d ask her how she could expect anything other than what happened?
Well there is still the hard problem of consciousness; I can be in agonizing pain and that’s only being experienced by me. Even cutting my brain open will not reveal that experience. However, all evidence is that this is causally connected to everything else.
If, in cutting into my brain, you accidentally cut out a chunk, it will have a corresponding effect on my consciousness. Because it is apparently a neurochemical phenomenon.
I can’t really answer your last couple of questions, since I don’t agree with the premise of a hard distinction between me and not-me. Also, are you going to answer my question from the previous post?
I’m not at all sure I can, or even that I understand them. But I’ll try to say something.
I don’t know how choices are made, or how free will would operate. But just because I can’t explain how something would work doesn’t mean that it doesn’t. That would be the Argument From Ignorance fallacy.
And if you’re asking “How” meaning “By what mechanism?” that may well be question-begging: assuming that it must be mechanical, that it operates according to some (causal, deterministic) mechanism.
If you ask me to choose between coffee and tea, I’m almost certain to choose coffee, because I don’t like tea. But I still could choose tea. In my mind there’s a difference between “I wouldn’t choose tea” and “I couldn’t choose tea”—at least, it feels like there’s a difference. I may not have any desire or reason to choose tea, but I still have the option to choose tea anyway; I have the ability to make choices that go against my desires and inclinations.
In fact, this is arguably the basis for morality: our ability to choose to do what we don’t want to do, to go against our wants and preferences, in service of some greater good.
(And yes, this leads us into the swamp of “but then you actually are choosing what you want, because you want ‘the greater good’.” But in that case, does “doing what you want to do” have any meaning at all that isn’t just circular? Wouldn’t that make “Doing what you don’t want to do” a logical impossibility?)
I’m not sure why you went on so long repeating what I said back to me. I just laid out the possibilities - I made no assumptions about any of it.
There are some things that are impossible to solve - the Halting Problem, what lies beyond the event horizon, for instance. They are very different from things that are soluble but which we haven’t solved yet, such as the origin of life and the universe. That’s where the woo peddlers come in.
The question is whether we can distinguish us having or not having free will. It is clearly unsolvable now, we might find it theoretically unsolvable. That does not mean free will exists or does not, it just means we don’t know and may never know. The person on the other side of the event horizon might be wearing a purple shirt, nothing impossible about that, but we’ll never know.
We do know that our choices are to some degree influenced by the rest of the universe, we have experimental evidence of this. Again, the real question is whether these influences give us more than one choice.
For coffee versus tea, there have been some cases where a bonk on the bean switches a coffee lover to a tea lover. (Not that exactly, but definitely a change in preferences.)
No, impossible: the exact same problem that’s claimed makes free will impossible exists here, too. If you don’t want to take the dogmatic horn (randomness or the universe ‘just is’, which would then make it equally fair to say that free will ‘just is’), but insist on an explanation, you’re stuck with an infinite regress. If that dooms free will, it dooms everything else just as well.
Then one can claim the same of free will. Either you do insist on an explanation—which leaves you with infinitary notions in both cases. Or you don’t—which means you should accept free will as a brute fact, too. But taking randomness as given while expecting an explanation for free will is just inconsistent.
Not an explanation, but a solution: the problem that we can’t explain how the world came about doesn’t entail that it can’t possibly have come about, since well, here it is. But then again, the problem that we can’t explain how free will works, that is, give a finite mechanism for it, similarly doesn’t entail that it doesn’t exist, since we can point to a case where we likewise can’t give such an account, yet where, evidently, the world remains unbothered by this failure of ours.
No, it’s the feeling that one could have acted differently. There’s clearly no need for such a feeling: we could just come out of every choice feeling like we did the only thing possible. If that leaves our behavior the same, then that wouldn’t make a difference to selection pressure. But we do feel like we could’ve acted differently. The simplest explanation is then that we actually could have.
And anyway, even if there were no evidence for free will, it would still be an interesting question whether such a thing would be possible. And since we know that all the obstacles it appears to face are actually overcome in the world, we can conclude that yes, it is a live option. Whether we have it then would be a different question.
What I am trying to get at is that, since free will is ill-defined, it’s unclear what it’s even bringing to the table. People lament that we don’t have free will in a Deterministic universe, so it’s valid to ask how would free will work in a whatever universe?
Indeed, in some ways this thread has followed the standard pattern. People start by suggesting that there’s no free will in a Deterministic universe. Then, when the possibility of our universe not being deterministic because of quantum randomness is raised, that’s dismissed as clearly not being free will – so the whole thing of raising determinism was a red herring, as in itself it makes no difference either way.
This should be the point, in my view, where people should ask: If I can’t conceive of a universe with FW, does the concept itself make sense?
Again, even if the universe is deterministic, your choices remain the fantastically complex result of billions of calculations, almost entirely introspective.
This is what we mean when we say your choice is the product of your innate desires, memories and environment.
We are not saying that humans are venus fly traps. Of course you can pick a different drink today, tomorrow whenever, but your reasons for doing so (“I just wanted to try something different”, “I wanted to prove I have free will” etc) are going to also be traceable to your inherent character and life history.
The question in my view is if we can even talk about free will as a coherent concept and what it’s even claiming to explain.
Otherwise, ISTM like debating the nature of the “life force” that underpins all living organisms. I have no reason to believe there is such a thing. It’s not a known phenomenon that we are trying to explain.
You’re talking about the universe as if it’s the holy spirit.
The universe is everything, including your body and brain. Even for people who believe that there’s some “free will” thing that is somehow separate to that, would consider the notion of the universe “influencing” choices to be massively underselling it.
I appreciate your dedication to this, but at this point, it seems like you’re arguing with people who say “There’s tons of evidence for God, so it’s up to you to prove it doesn’t exist.” As you say, independent free will is not even coherent in a physical universe with physical laws, but somehow, you’re still on the hook. I think it’s up to the others to explain how independent free will can exist.
And, there’s lots of evidence that it doesn’t – drugs, brain damage, and tons of cognitive psychology experiments all show that the state of the brain is what determines choices.
I’m really not sure what more you are expecting here than what has been provided over and over again. In my very first post in this thread, I’ve (1) given a concise definition of free will: “to be responsible for one’s actions, one ought to be, likewise, responsible for one’s mental state determining these actions”—i.e., what one does is up to oneself, and not anything external. Nevertheless, every other post in this thread complains about how free will is ill-defined, a gambit @Mijin even returns to after acknowledging my definition some 200 posts later. Then it’s ironically claimed, often in the same post, that free will is incoherent—a fair feat of analysis if there isn’t even any clear concept of it!
Furthermore, also in that post, I’ve (2) given a concrete mechanism implementing it. Taking Strawson’s BA for essentially sound, that mechanism is necessarily infinite—no finite sequence of steps can traverse the regress. So if you think that such infinitary means are impossible, then there is no free will in the sense as previously defined. But (3) if this is a problem, then it is a problem wherever new information comes into existence: no finite mechanism can provide this. Randomness, the origin of the universe, anything of that sort either ends up in regress, dogmatism, or circularity, thus (4) the argument against free will is just an instance of the Münchhausen trilemma. Theories are essentially transformations of information, given e.g. by a certain set of axioms, equivalent to computations—and thus, can’t account for the creation of novel information.
Consequently, (5) the problem with free will is just an artefact of the models we create. The universe exists, despite there not being a possible model for its creation; random events happen, despite there being no finitary mechanism for their occurrence. The problem that argues against free will thus is known to have a solution—even if we can’t construct a model of that solution.
Hence, there is a clear-cut, well-defined notion of free will that depends on capacities that are present in any universe in which there is, e.g., genuine randomness. You might disagree with any aspect of the above, but it does express a consistent view: the universe could well work like that. We might yet find that it doesn’t, or that while the capacity in principle exists, it’s not realized in humans, but the arguments on the table don’t settle the matter.
But of course, (6) what evidence we have—the experience of being able to choose differently—argues for its presence, in the same sense that the excess gravitational pull argues for the existence of dark matter. But evidence may be misleading; it’s just not usually a good idea to throw it out on ideological grounds. (And as for the evidence against free will, nobody argues that external circumstances can’t reduce our freedom; but they just reduce the options on the table, perhaps down to one, not our capacity of choosing between all that are available. Although it might even be possible to reduce or eliminate the capacity of choice, without this indicating that there is no such capacity in the first place, just as one could eliminate the capacity for speech by lesioning the right brain area.)
All right, calm down.
I was trying to thread a bit of a needle there, because what I was trying to say was:
Give you credit for at least trying to define free will, whilst continuing to say that most people debating in this topic do not and cannot do that.
Give my opinion that I think your definition doesn’t actually add much. If my self is the origin on my will, and it is not traceable to externalities like genetics, where does my fear of heights come from, and why do so many other humans have it? More to the point there is still no reason to even posit the existence of such a thing.
So: most of FW topic = incoherent mess.
Half Man Half Wit’s definition: at least coherent. But at the “life force” level of explanation at this point.
I believe quantum indeterminacy may scale up meaningfully into neural decision-making, though many mainstream physicists currently avoid bridging the two due to a lack of empirical evidence. Still, if future research points in that direction, it could drive a nail into determinism’s coffin.
The universe plays dice at the subatomic level, and those tiny quantum flutters might sneak through ion channels in your neurons, get amplified by the brain’s intricate circuitry, and blossom into full-blown decisions—like whether to fire up your 1920s Style Death Ray, or just chill.
This built-in uncertainty would blow up the idea that everything’s preordained—but it’s not just dumb luck, either. Your hunches, memories, and quirks could tilt the odds, biasing which possibilities get amplified. In other words, your brain doesn’t just roll the dice—it loads them with your personality.
You’d have agency. Not even an advanced supercomputer could predict those quantum states without collapsing them, so your choices would remain yours alone.
Free will might not be an illusion—it might be a quantum jazz jam, and you’re the soloist.
Why would you think that externalities have no impact at all? It’s like a chess game: the rules together with the past, i.e. the current position, determine the possible moves one could take, between which the player must choose. Likewise, your genetics, your experiences, your history, your abilities, your preferences and all that gives you a range of options available to you, between which you can choose. Your past, preferences, genetics, whatever may mean that you prefer pizza to salad eight times out of ten, but in every concrete instance you can make a free choice between these options.
I mean, maybe our experience just differs, here—maybe you don’t feel like you could just as well have made a different choice in any given situation. I certainly do, so the possibility that this impression is simply veridical is at least on the table. And if there’s a coherent concept capable of accounting for this, why shouldn’t I go with it?
I really haven’t supplied any particularly original definition here. Even Strawson takes himself to be articulating nothing but the common wisdom on the subject, i.e. the definition that is most commonly assumed in the literature. And that’s simply not a particularly contentious point: the possible notions of free will have been refined and made precise in a large body of literature. That it’s somehow ill defined in general is simply false.
It has occured to me to wonder whether some of us have the experience of having free will and others don’t and that’s the source of much of the conflict in discussions like this.
This isn’t the definition of independent free will, or useful in comparing FW to determinism. (I’m sorry, I’m in the middle of a few things, so I haven’t read the rest of your post). If that’s your definition, it’s not incompatible with determinism at all.
