It’s not a postulate, I even included quantum randomness. It’s a question, not an assertion.
I am merely asking the question of what free will is, and how it is suggested to impact the decision-making process?
Taking us on excursions into What the bleep do we know, and how humans came up with spherical geometry speaks volumes as to the (lack of) coherency of this concept.
How? What’s the mechanism for a physical thing like a brain somehow doing something different given the exact same initial conditions? And, whatever it is, how do “you” control it, such that “you” have free will?
I don’t know what morality has to do with free will, but it’s a fact that humans (and other animals) have moral instincts built into our brains.
Nurture was against him, but perhaps his nature, his inborn abilities, made his success at least somewhat predictable.
As for emergence, (I can’t find the right post to quote) the issue is not whether new properties emerge (they obviously do) but whether new the new properties can be predicted. A transistor cannot add two numbers, but a number of transistors wired together in the proper way can. Nothing magical about it.
And the experiment of rewinding time and repeating a decision is not possible even in principle, which is why I think the concept of free will is unfalsifiable. You can only say we will or will not make the same choice depending on whether you believe free will is real, so I’d say anyone coming down one way or another is begging the question.
OK, well, let’s at least posit some mechanism by which free will could happen, because other than assuming some non-physical soul that still interacts with the brain somehow, I don’t even understand how there can be “free will” in principle. What, other than the brain and body state, could possibly be choosing?
Depending on what you mean by this, you may be begging the question. When you ask “What’s the mechanism?” it looks like you’re assuming there must be a mechanism—i.e. that it happens mechanically, deterministically.
I have no position on quantum randomness, but I note that serious scientists posit quantum processes in the brain. If that is true and meaningful for cognition, neither of which we know now, that destroys the possibility of always getting the same result at a particular time.
I also note that you have not examined anything I said but simply brushed it off. I bring up geometries because I need some way toward an analogy of what you and Strawson both did: assert something to be true and then build your case on it. I assert that both of you are wrong about that thing and therefore your cases are unsupported.
Here’s another analogy: please address it. Humans by your reckoning are black box computers who will always spit out the same punch card for the same inputs. I say humans are more like AI. They may spit out anything from a given input, including hallucinations, and starting from the same input may produce different results. I see that also addresses @RitterSport.
And in fact real, non trivial, computers don’t spit out the same answer all the time. Maybe if all the conditions were held the same they would, but that isn’t possible, and it is less possible for the more complex brain. Do cosmic rays affect the brain? They affect computers, and the brain doesn’t even have parity checks built in.
I’m not making this up, I saw one memory error correlated with altitude, which is something we stored for many of our servers in the field.
I’m making that assumption based on the fact that every other thing in the universe operates that way.
That’s not free will. Random quantum fluctuations and random cosmic rays are not what people mean when they say that they have free will and use it to make decisions.
Then that is, indeed, begging the question. You are assumiung determinism.
Ok, sure. On the other hand, I think it’s up to the people proposing something other than how the rest of the universe works that should propose some other thing.
Does a plant have free will? Yeast? An amoeba? A worm? An octopus? A dog? When does determinism fail and <whatever> come into play?
Truly random events like quantum fluctuations and cosmic rays are the only way I can imagine that a human mind, or indeed any mind, can produce a ‘choice’ which is not determined by the past history of that mind. Maybe random events of this kind really do allow ‘free will’. If the Many Worlds interpretation is correct, maybe random events allow minds to produce a range of different outcomes in different timelines. This would seem, on the face of it, to reduce the capacity to make free choices; sometimes you want to go left, but a random cosmic ray makes you go right.
But just maybe, if it were possible to compare events in multiple worlds which were different from each other because of random events, then you could find that in a majority of timelines the mind could make a decision which is consistent with its goals and desires. A majority report, if you will. Perhaps free will is a statistical artifact, which works most of the time, but not always.
I find that the most interesting question is - what is choice and will anyway? Rocks don’t have will, or choices, or goals; neither do cloud systems, waterfalls or stellar nurseries. But human minds do, and even ants and so on down the line make choices, based on their past experience and evolution.
Expecting this capacity for choice and will to be ‘free’ seems to be asking the wrong question.
It does not act independently, the point is that every time you go up on a layer, entirely new properties emerge. Like Societies and free will.
Yes, this is I agree with. Certainly humans and other animals make choices. Making choices is not “free will”. Making choices that is not totally based on experience, evolution (and chemicals, etc.) is what I think people are claiming is free will, if I understand it correctly.
I have explicitly said that choices are based on experience. The only difference is that I do not agree that a rerun would automatically produce the same output. You asked for a mechanism and I gave you the example of an AI, which may give a variety of output to a given input. Insisting otherwise is to assume that the brain is a fixed computer and most recent research indicates that the brain is not analogous to a computer. (Yes, AI comes from a computer but is not the same as an Excel spreadsheet. One hopes.)
OK I’m going to try to re-rail this trainwreck and summarize the whole thing.
The free will debate is normally framed like this: that either the universe is Deterministic and we just have the illusion of choice, or there’s free will and we actually do have choice. The OP and thread title of course follow this framing.
However, it’s also usually the case that quantum indeterminancy is dismissed as being inadequate as a mechanism of free will.
Why?
Because the whole point of free will is culpability for actions, and it’s hard to see how just some coin-flip type events at a quantum level makes a person more (or less) responsible for murder, say. Or, for theists, how it absolves God of responsibility for evil in the world.
If people in this thread want to claim that quantum indeterminancy is absolutely enough for free will, then great, I am happy to say that definition of free will is possible. Heck, I’d say it’s more probable than not because we currently think that our universe is not deterministic.
But in the classic framing, libertarian free will is what is being postulated. And not only could things be different if time were re-run, but in a way that means you are more culpable than in a pure deterministic model, then I continue to say it’s an incoherent mess. Libertarian free will makes no sense because what even is an input that is neither based on a past state nor randomness that somehow impacts a rational choice?
(@Exapno_Mapcase I am not ignoring your post #146 but hopefully you see how this post addressed it, if you don’t think so I am happy to respond directly)
To be clear, I think you are ignoring all of my posts if you believe that I have advocated for any position you mention in this post.
In post #146, e.g., I make clear that quantum indeterminacy is not involved anywhere in my thinking except possibly as a rebuff to yours. Your next paragraph indicates that you don’t understand what quantum states in the brain might mean, which undermines your argument.
In any number of posts I clearly reject libertarian free will. While I stand by my statement that there is nothing about the world that prevents humans from making a range of choices at every decision point, I say specifically that choices are determined by prior causes and that we are all responsible for our moral choices. I don’t know - or care - where that casts me in the philosophical world but since I’ve been loudly shouting those beliefs in nearly every post, labeling me with that epithet is insulting. If you are working under the belief that the only possible views are libertarian free will and determinism, that’s an indictment of all formal philosophy.
I’m done talking to you.
Hopefully others will appreciate that post 156 was just aimed at clarifying the different positions in this thread, not even tagging any position to any names.
Cool with me. It was fun coming up with analogies that illustrated my thinking and frustrating that nothing was returned except endless repetitions of the same assertion. I had hoped for better.
I know, but it demonstrates that a test for free will is impossible even in principle. Even if you could set up a situation where the states were the same, and got different results, it might be from an invisible input like a particle hitting a neuron.
We might as well be arguing if beings who live beyond the event horizon wear purple pajamas.