Free will is the ability for a human (or other animal? advanced computer? other entity? other intelligence?) to choose something related to, but independent of, that human’s life experience, and current chemical, and emotional, and physical brain state. The agent/force/entity/reason that makes the choice is …? It causes the brain to make the choice by…?
For example, here are two cups. Pick one.
The person (entity, etc.) chooses to pick one because of their life experience, emotional, chemical, and physical brain state, and because of free will. That free will is cause by …? And, the mechanism that it uses to tell the brain to move the hand to one of the cups is …?
Comparing freedom and free will is a category error. I don’t even understand how you got there, except if you’re conflating the philosophical free will that this thread is about with a more lay term. Saying “a prisoner has less free will” seems really out of place in this thread.
It’s true that a prisoner has fewer choices (fewer choices to make, fewer things to choose from), but they still decide “will I finish this lunch”, “will I play basketball or sit at a table when we’re outside”, “will I get out of bed now that I’m awake, or stay here a few moments longer”, etc.
I’m having trouble parsing that sentence, but, as I said, freedom and free will are different things.
Freedom: the ability to do what you want, when you want. You can have more or less freedom – billionaires have more freedom than I do, I have more freedom than prisoners.
Free will: the ability to choose a thing among several options, in a way not entirely connected to your physical brain, it’s chemical and physical make-up, and your personal history.
ETA: Those are my ideas for defining those in order to illustrate that they are different categories.
Yes, the point was not that there could be Free will there, the point was that it is restricted. It is the difference from the ones that are not in prison the item that I think has to be taken into account. I don’t think that that difference is imaginary.
In all of these threads on free will, this is the first time that I’ve seen it conflated with freedom. I honestly don’t understand the connection, but I don’t need to bog down this thread with that sidetrack.
I’m more interested in responses to my earlier post, about choosing between two cups.
I don’t see that that would depend on previous discussions, I noted that earlier that I did notice how the issue changes when one takes into account the limits in prisons, for example. Of course, very few do like to look at that.
But, Yes, freedom; particularly in philosophical and ethical contexts, is fundamentally connected to the concept of free will.
The concept of freedom is central to domains where human decision-making and actions, referred to here as ‘choices,’ play a pivotal role. Free will, which involves the capacity for genuine choice, has also been taken to be a necessary precondition for moral responsibility, given that individuals should not be held responsible for actions entirely beyond their control (Kant 2012/1785; Van Inwagen 1975; 2003; Clarke 2005; O’Connor 2009; Kane 2024; Pereboom 2001; 2024; Vargas 2024). However, scientific inquiry, which seeks to explain phenomena through causal mechanisms, often frames human behaviour in terms of processes incompatible with certain notions of free will. This scientific perspective frames choices as outcomes of lawful causal chains, whether fully deterministic or involving randomness. Such framing challenges traditional notions of freedom, human autonomy, and moral responsibility (e.g., Libet et al. 1982; Hossenfelder 2022; Sapolsky 2023). However, these perspectives from scientists frequently presuppose certain conceptions of free will and selection of concerns, while giving the impression that all possible valuable forms of freedom are eliminated (Nahmias 2010; Bayne 2022).
I have tried to convert these points into something more than circular arguments but I fear that only a background in formal philosophy will help me understand. Nothing in them addresses my contention that fully formed principles of choice are not a necessary requirement for later choices, since all choices and actions emerge from original thoughts that can only at first be partially formed. Mine are apparently a different set of axioms that those in Strawson’s philosophy.
Strawson.
There is an argument, which I will call the Basic Argument, which appears to prove that we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions. According to the Basic Argument, it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. We cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions in either case. …
I have encountered two main reactions to the Basic Argument. On the one hand it convinces almost all the students with whom I have discussed the topic of free will and moral responsibility. On the other hand it often tends to be dismissed, in contemporary discussion of free will and moral responsibility, as wrong, or irrelevant, or fatuous, or too rapid, or an expression of metaphysical megalomania.
I am not familiar enough with philosophy to take sides in this split, or know whether it is in any way meaningful outside the community of professional philosophers. My personal reaction is, as above, to dismiss it as wrong and reading through his paper does not change this.
OTOH, I heartily approve of his closing paragraph.
“Everything has been said before”, said Andre Gide, echoing LaBruyere, “but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” This is an exaggeration, but it may not be a gross exaggeration, so far as general observations about the human condition are concerned.
But I don’t see anything inconsistent with that, either. The only thing required really is that each choice you make is made for a reason—and if it isn’t, it’s hard to say how this could be said to be a choice at all. If you have toast rather than scrambled eggs for breakfast, but for no particular reason, then you might as well have tossed a coin, and what you ended up doing wasn’t ‘up to you’ in that sense.
Or perhaps you should spell out how choices are made, on your account?
I’ll go. My decisions are just selecting the most desirable action based on the information available to me, and that neither “most desirable” nor the information available to me are things directly under my control.
“Most desirable” simply comes from my neurobiology. I didn’t choose to enjoy a tasty slice of cake over being punched in the stomach; if it were up to me maybe the latter would be a better thing to enjoy because it requires no kitchen preparation or purchase of ingredients. But I don’t get to choose that.
And, in terms of the knowledge available to me, yes I can choose to study, listen and reflect, but that again comes down to biology and innate desires; I can’t just choose to know what dark matter is, for example. And what things the universe presents to me is also not under my control.
Take the dumbest decision of my life, and if you could put me back there, only knowing what I knew at the time, then I’ll make the dumb choice again, for precisely the same reason(s) I did the first time.
If someone wishes to claim “could have chosen differently” I’d really like to hear how that would actually work; does the preference change for no reason? It can’t be randomness because I’ve never heard a free will proponent happy to define free will as the result of quantum randomness.
Yes, I understood your post, and you probably put it better than me.
Honestly this has been quite refreshing. I’m used to being in debates where everyone agrees that “free will” is a clearly defined concept and if it doesn’t exist it means all our conscious decision-making is purely an illusion. That’s the initial framing of every debate I’ve been in.
It’s great that here on the dope several people are presenting the position that I also hold; that the very concept of free will is completely incoherent. And, that deciding what to do based on how you’re wired and what you know is the only meaning of choice that even makes sense.
All the components do, this is missing what the argument made of Emergence is:
From the “In a nutshell” video:
Emergence occurs at all levels of reality, and reality seems to be organized in layers: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, you, society.
Put many things in one layer together and they’ll create the next layer up. Every time they do, entirely new properties emerge.
One Atom can’t handle information, but many of them together can form a DNA molecule. Molecules are not alive, but many of them can form a cell, and cells are alive. With each jump up the complexity ladder the rules of what’s possible change. Completely new things emerge that are much more than the sum of their parts.
And here the reductionist view of the universe breaks down.
Talking about choosing the parts as if one should be the proper cause is, very underwhelming.
I know what emergence is, but that doesn’t explain how free will can act independently of the underlying substrate. Rewind time, and I’ll choose the same cup every time. Just like you bringing up freedom, it seems to not address the philosophical question of free will at all.
As I said above, we don’t really understand how choices are made due to our limited knowledge about the brain.
But that’s not relevant to my objection to Strawson’s infinite regress. However my choice is made, it is made with the full experience of my existence through the present, time T. I have made many such choices. Let the latest be arbitrarily labeled TP1000. That was based on my experience from my previous choice TP999 + Telapsed. TP999 was based on my experience from my previous choice TP998 + Telapsed. Which was based … on my earliest conscious choice TP0 when my brain had developed beyond reflex actions. What was TP0 based on? Whatever inchoate feelings I had had until then. TP0 may not have been an informed choice, but seeing the consequences of our choices is a major aspect of learning to be human and thus informs all later Ps at later Ts. A construction from zero, not an infinite regress of TP1000s.
How does moral responsibility enter if I had no principles of choice to draw upon? They were imposed by an outside force, my parents. Don’t hit. Don’t tug on hair. All the elementary basic particles of forming a baby into a child. Children do learn these; even if a few never accept them they learn to hide their actions to avoid consequences. They are completely responsible for their own morality (unless so impaired that any control is impossible, but I assume that’s a separate issue.)
If we reran time would I have made the same choice at TP998 just given my state of experience at the time? It is impossible to know, rather than a given. When evaluating choices, people process their past histories, preferences, consequences, and current environment. Without knowing exactly how the brain works on all these factors it is folly to insist that only one single answer could be spit out onto the punch card every single time. If we knew a thousand times more than we know now you might possibly be right, but saying so definitively has no foundation.
You’re saying that it’s great that several people have freely made the choice to hold an insupportable position? Or that they must inevitably have done so because of something something? I find that position the incoherent one.
According to Quantum Physics, all choices are possible until a choice is made, so determinism simply doesn’t exist in nature. Also, there are many examples of people “bucking the odds” and accomplishing things that determinism would say are impossible because they go against upbringing and environment. Look at Frederick Douglas, for example. He became an educated and eloquent orator when everything, according to determinism, was against him doing so.
I didn’t say so definitively, I was asking a question. If my choice is not a function of the state of my brain plus quantum randomness, then what?
Again, I don’t see why we even have grounds for suggesting such a phenomenon. We need to start from a clear definition and then suggestions on what concrete differences there is between a universe with free will versus one without.
This isn’t dark matter, where there’s empirical data that we must explain, so we know there’s a there there.
We have no reason to posit such a phenomenon, beyond “people have talked about this for a long time”.
Oh boy. Are we really at the level of arguing that lack of belief in free will means believing people have no grounds for taking any position?
I’d respond to this, but I’m currently choking on all the straw.
For thousands of years people accepted Euclidian geometry even though it manifestly did not correspond to the surface of the Earth. Then several mathematicians had the bright idea of changing one of Euclid’s five postulates to see if a self-consistent geometry would develop. More than one did. One of them, spherical geometry, proved to be exactly what was needed to sail across oceans and send satellites into orbit.
I’m replacing (or removing) your postulate of perfect repetition with one that allows for different outcomes. Does that lead to a self-consistent human geometry? I say it does; it exactly matches what we observe about human behavior and so leads to what “concrete differences there is between a universe with free will versus one without.” The one with free will is ours. Yours may match ours but you include an unnecessary postulate. The geometry works just fine without that complication.