The point is, your definition of free will involves the wants being traceable to the self and no further. But it is trivial to see that many of my wants exist for evolutionary reasons, traceable to my neurology and therefore genetics. This isn’t “influence” it’s the actual source of the want.
Very obviously I feel like my choices are entirely my own. It’s exciting and fun to think I could just take a plane to Rio, right now.
Rationally though, I know that desire exists for reasons and there’s a reason I had that thought right now. Basically, a reason-less decision makes no sense.
…in fact, this is madness; you really think that skeptics of the free will concept believe we make easily-predictable decisions based on “Og eat now!” or something?
Lots of people writing something doesn’t make it well-defined. If it were well-defined we might have a stab at guessing how free will interacts with the physical brain to e.g. select coffee or tea.
You’ll get no argument from me about free will possibly not being a coherent concept. We can put labels on all sorts of incoherent things and convince ourselves it makes sense to discuss them. What are the geometric factors of a four sided triangle?
I used to get “life force” arguments from creationists all the time, but now that we can take bacteria apart and put them together again I think the life force concept is pretty much falsified.
I’m about the furthest thing from an animist there is, which is why I said “rest of the universe.” It makes sense to distinguish our internal states from our external inputs, just like in state machines. And influence can range all the way from obvious limitations due to natural laws to pure determinism.
What do you mean “responsible for one’s mental state?” Some of our mental state is determined or at least influenced by other parts of our bodies - hunger, thirst, sex, tiredness. It makes social sense to try to influence the actions people take based on these states (pull over at a rest area if you are sleepy) but is the person responsible for being tired?
It’s the definition that’s basically presumed in this discussion, if you want to see it elaborated, see the post where I quoted Strawson. And it’s obviously incompatible with determinism as usually understood, since there, even the data at any point in the distant past (which I am obviously not responsible for) suffices to fix my mental state.
I don’t know where you get that from, or what you haven’t understood about my example, so I don’t know anything else to do but repeat myself—there are obviously influences from your past, your genetics, your experiences and so on that shape your preferences, but won’t completely settle any given choice. That much is true even in an indeterministic universe, where one might then appeal to objective chance to settle the matter. If you can imagine that—i.e. being served a range of options with different probabilities—then you can imagine instead of blind chance adjudicating between these, simply choosing one by a process of literally making up one’s own mind.
Then why not entertain the simplest hypothesis that, in fact, they are?
I don’t even know what that’s supposed to straw-man. But obviously not.
Well I mean you said it’s well-defined, I just pointed out that it’s also very common.
I just mean that there are factors that determine the choice between two alternatives that must be up to the agent making the choice. All of those bodily states and whatnot obviously have their influence, but that doesn’t mean they determine the choice fully (otherwise, why would we experience different options as open to us?). Again I think the chess analogy is a good one: there is a constrained range of possible moves, possible futures, given by the rules of chess and the current position; likewise, the laws of physics and the causal past determine a range of possible futures. In an indeterministic universe, the future is to a certain degree open; one might hold that the universe throws dice behind the curtain to determine a future, or that at least in some cases, an agent makes a genuine choice that also could’ve gone otherwise.
Your definition is a moral definition, that you should be responsible for your actions, whoever “you” is, and whatever is causing “you” to take those actions (independent free will, determinism, whatever). It has nothing to do with this conversation, really.
Now, the rest of your posts may explain why you’re ignoring your own definition, but taking that definition as a starting point, there’s nothing to disagree with, whether you are on the FW or determinism side.
Explain to me, without a wall of text, what that has to do with independent FW or determinism. You’re making a justification for punishment or praise based on someone’s actions that’s independent of how those actions come about.
I am not sure if you’re debating in good faith with this kind of response yet again.
You defined free will like this:
…so I have been pointing out that some wants are clearly biological in origin, and therefore traceable to the genetics I was born with. Not influenced by externalities but actually originating in externalities. Humans do not en masse choose to be afraid of heights or social ridicule. This seems to present a problem for this definition of free will that requires the wants themselves to come from the agent and not be traceable any further.
Your responses have repeatedly been to say that the universe influences our choices. That’s not addressing the point at all.
I didn’t say it was “well-defined” I said your definition was “at least coherent”, but then I proceeded to explain how I thought it was pretty vacuous and falls apart as soon as we try to ask any questions about it.
‘Responsible’ in the sense of ‘having brought about’. There’s nothing about morality in there.
If determinism is true, you (any agent) aren’t responsible for your mental state. If on the other hand, you are responsible for your mental state, which in turn determines your actions, then your actions originate with you, making them free.
And I have been pointing out that that’s not in any conflict whatsoever with my model. My biology makes me not want bananas, so I don’t eat them. Wanting isn’t all or nothing; you can have various degrees of preference between different options. Then, you choose one of them. It’s really, really simple.
So it’s not ill-defined, so it’s not true that most of the writing on free will is an incoherent mess.
Well, when you figure out how this all works in a physical universe with physical laws, and why it only applies to people, or maybe all living animals, or maybe sufficiently intelligent beings, let me know. I think the onus is on the people stating that there’s some sort of “you” separate from your brain, body, and chemical state, to show how that’s possible, just like the onus is on believers in God to show that there’s some sort of non-physical being that has some effect on the universe.
It was explained already; it is an emergent property. As others explained, and the video from Kurzgesagt summarized, the physical world give us cells, the collection that makes us comes from the physical world, it is not magic.
Not what I see as a relevant demand, surveys do show that it is complicated. Sure, there is a significant number of religious people that do like free will, but as it was found oud:
It seems to make intuitive sense that those who are religious are more likely to endorse free will than non-religious people. However, although it may be surprising that religious people have stronger endorsement of determinism than those who are not religious, we believe that this could be due to the fact that religious people have a tendency to believe in God’s omniscience. Therefore, it is possible that those who are affiliated with some organized religion understand causal determinism to be divine determinism and endorse the idea that God’s will causes the future.
While I see some demanding that there should be a definition that they can then hit like a strawman, in reality supporting a bit of free will as I see it, does not mean that therefore we have to support a god.
There was a lot of determinism involved when people thought that kings had a divine right to rule.
Again, that is just your opinion. The issue here is that your position presupposes that nothing will change definitions or that other conclusions are not valid.
Otherwise, we would also get stuck with the issue that freedom (besides Free Will) is also an illusion, because that item also was in the cross hairs of many that follow some definitions of determinism.
If by free will you mean that choice is influenced and/or determined by your internal states, but only influenced and not determined by the inputs to you, then I think free will is a thing. Kind of. If your internal states are determined by your inputs and genetics, then I can see someone arguing your choices are not free.
We experience different options open to us, but the question is whether we just consider them open when they really aren’t.
You may be familiar with the principle of anchoring, where a choice is influenced by being exposed to a number before you make the choice, even if the number has nothing to do with the choice. My daughter and I did an experiment with a class of experienced engineers where they 100% fell for this. We did it for three different classes over three years. I’m sure they all would have said they had a choice, but it was quite constrained.
I don’t think chess works. No argument that we have many potential paths - the question is whether your next move is truly free or determined from outside factors.
But you just defined free will as being reliant on wants that originate in the self and are not traceable to outside causes.
So it is not sufficient to just handwave this and say the wants are partial or something – by your definition, doesn’t that entail some actions are not free will e.g. given that bungee jumping is incredibly safe, the only reason I have for not doing it is my abject terror. So, if I’m invited to go bungee jumping and decline, was that not a free will decision?
It was great having you in this thread. Not just because you agree with me, but because you also want to get to the meat of this; this free will thing only lives on because some people don’t want to answer question (or even ask questions) about their position.
Yes, that’s indeed a question, and I don’t pretend to be able to settle it. I just want to make the case that, metaphysically, the option that we do make genuine choices is at least on the table, and not to be excluded a priori.
Again, suppose that your predispositions, genetics, history, irrational convictions, whatever, mean you have a preference of salad over steak. That doesn’t mean that your choice is fully determined in each case—you may have a 90% preference, but in any given case, you make a genuine choice between the options. It is this choice being made that I’m talking about. In a way, it’s just a different interpretation of the probabilities at hand (whatever they may be), from a measure of relative frequencies to one of personal preferences. Thus does not repudiate the importance of biology, past, or whatever; but as long as those factors leave open different possibilities for the future, as they should be expected to in an indeterministic universe, there is an opportunity for genuine choice, and it’s there where free will comes in.
Sure! Even a probability of 100% can still be a free decision—after all, it would be irrational to consider a choice free only if it every once in a while goes against an agent’s preferences. If anything, that would make them less free!
(Indeed, even a deterministic universe may not be a total no-go, here: facts being fixed doesn’t mean that the act of fixing them wasn’t a free one. If I ordered pizza yesterday, the immutable fact that I did do so doesn’t mean that I didn’t act freely. Likewise, on a Humean conception of natural laws, where they are set fixed only from a 'god’s eye’s viewpoint outside of time, the evolution of the whole universe may be set in stone, but composed of acts performed freely. The recent The Rigor of Angels discusses this very well, but it’s beyond the scope of the discussion here to go really into the fine details there.)
Remember when I accused you of debating in bad faith? After I typed that I thought maybe I was being too harsh, but here we are again with the same deflection to the same point as if nothing happened at all.
The definition of free will that you cited said that the wants originate in the self and are not traceable any further. Period.
But some wants (in my view all of them, but let’s start with some) are clearly traceable to biology. If the only reason I choose not to join my friends for bungee jumping is fear of heights then that would seem to present a significant problem for this accounting of free will. At the very least it needs to be amended to say some of the wants are not traceable further, and then how that works exactly in situations where biological wants are paramount, is it still the same “amount” of free will?
What about if there is a scenario where I make a complex, reasoned decision but all the pro and cons just happen to be wants that originate from biology, was that decision free will?
If you want to say it’s irrelevant where the wants come from, and the free will part is completely within the selection mechanism, then fine, but that’s a different definition of free will from the one you’ve been advocating.