I still maintain that it’s up to the people proposing some sort of extra-physical thing to provide the evidence.
There is tons of evidence for God (or gods) (lots written about Him, tons of people saying they’ve spoken to Him or felt His presence), but they still have to prove their case using physical evidence. I don’t see how that’s any different from people claiming there’s something making decisions that’s not precisely caused by the physical state of their brain and body.
The big difference is that most god claims are more specific than free will claims. A deist god is an exception. We have no reason to truly believe that such a god exists, but it is unfalsifiable. We have no real reason to think that free will exists, though we feel like we have free will - but I’ve been saying it is also unfalsifiable.
And the more reasonable deists, like Martin Gardner, say they believe in such a god because it feels right to them.
The only way I see the free will debate has practical consequences is whether people should be punished for doing things they are fated to do. But since at least some people make decisions based on the state of society and the possibility of consequences (and their decisions may or may not be free) a society with consequences for bad behavior works better than a society without consequences, whether or not it is fair for people who are determined to do wrong get punished. Psychopaths can’t help themselves, but they don’t get a pass. So our treatment of wrong doers shouldn’t really depend on our stance on the free will issue - if we even have one.
I really don’t understand how whether there should be punishment intersects with the free will debate. Punishment acts as a deterrent, which would affect someone whether they have FW or not, and it acts to remove bad actors from society, whether they are acting badly because of FW or because of their history, chemical/hormonal state, and brain structure.
I think @Der_Trihs, mentioned it a way up there, but some sort of non-physical free will is an argument against punishment, since it is apparently some mysterious, non-random force outside of the brain, and who knows how to affect that? But, a physical brain with memory and experience will know that its in a society were some acts are punished and be dissuaded from doing those acts.
I’ve seen many argue that if there is no free will then we should not punish murderers, since they did the deed based on the initial state of the universe and bear no moral culpability. In that sense of determinism punishment does not act as a deterrent, since you can only be deterred from doing something if you have a choice about whether or not to do it.
The response is often deterrence changes the state of the system to decrease the chance someone will murder, but of course applying the deterrent is not a free choice either.
I’m not advocating for any of these positions, I’m just repeating some of the arguments.
It strikes me that determinism is like the kind of time travel story in which no matter what you do in the past, it won’t change the present, since the flow of time means you’ve always done that. That’s why no time travel to the past story stands up under much scrutiny, unless you limit it to things with no impact on the present.
I’m not really interested in arguing against positions you don’t actually hold. I will say, though, we already know the universe is not deterministic. As I know you know, starting from the Big Bang again doesn’t lead to me writing this sentence 13 billion years later.
That’s not an argument for free will, though, it’s an argument for some randomness injected into the sequence of events, but such randomness isn’t controlled by any self.
What’s the point of trying to convince people they don’t have free will? Either they believe they have free will, or they don’t. It’s not like they have any choice in the matter.
Right.
Although one theoretical possibility is that only some people have free will. So then the world is sort of like a multi-player online computer game where some of the characters are controlled by other players while others are NPCs just doing what they’re programmed to do, and we don’t know which is which.
I actually don’t have an opinion, besides that whether we have free will or not is untestable, so I don’t know. My point was not in support or opposition to free will, it was to give more evidence that we can never do a test to see if we have free will or not, since a change in result might come from something other than the mind or whatever would make the decision.
More precisely, my position is that it looks like we have a limited amount of free will, and that it looks like others do also, but we could be wrong. And we’ll never know for sure.
See? This is why I love this board!
I think such a framing would confuse determinism with fatalism.
We could put in policies that decrease (or increase) the murder rate; the fact that such decisions may be based on prior events (e.g. noticing a high murder rate) does not invalidate or supersede more proximal causes.
If, as a marketing stunt, McDonalds starts including grenades in its happy meals, with the result that the (grenade) death rate for infants massively increases, then we can say those deaths were caused by the marketing stunt. We can also say the marketing stunt was implemented for reasons. Neither description overrides the other.
But what do we mean by free choice?
I make choices based on my preferences* and the information available to me at the time. Under this kind of description, it makes no difference whether the universe is deterministic or not. I mean, it makes a difference from a god’s eye view of what’s predictable or what isn’t, but from my point of view, the means by which I make a decision are the same.
How would you describe making a free choice?
* And in case anyone says it: no, making choices based on preferences is not circular. I can choose whether to go to college or take a job. But I don’t get to choose to prefer, say, being set on fire versus a gentle massage. It’s this latter meaning of preference (what you like a dislike) that I am using.
Here is the definition of fatalism I found which seems to apply here:
noun
noun: fatalism
“fatalism can breed indifference to the human costs of war”
I don’t see the difference between this and determinism in this context. In this view the marketing campaign is predetermined also, as is which people will blow themselves up. I’m not supporting this view, I’m just saying what I think a determinist would say.
By saying you are making a choice, you are begging the question. In a purely deterministic universe you would not have a choice based on the inputs, even if you thought you did. Your actions would be a purely deterministic function of the inputs and states inside your brain.
And I totally agree with you that from your point of view your decisions are made the same way no matter if the universe is deterministic or not. Further, you can never tell which answer is correct.
It is often the case that words in a philosophical context have a more specific meaning than the generalized dictionary definition.
Fatalism would say, for example, that it is pointless buckling your seatbelt, because you are either fated to die in an accident today, or you aren’t. Whereas Determinism says that, while your decision whether to buckle your seatbelt came down to prior causes, that decision in turn causes other things, like surviving a car crash.
I’ll restate that for emphasis: Determinism does not claim you are merely a passenger. Just because your decision happened for reasons, does not mean your decision wasn’t the cause / reason for what followed.
No, you’re implicitly asserting the position that “choice” must be something not fully causally connected to the universe, and I reject such a definition of choice. If choice must involve something outside of causality, let’s hear it; what is that thing, and how does it get involved in my choice of coffee or tea?
As I said upthread, if anyone wants to take the position that quantum randomness is the critical thing required for free choice then fine…that idea of free will likely exists.
But most proponents of free will don’t go there, because that randomness is just something happening at the very lowest level, not something that would appear to have any bearing on culpability.
That is indeed a good argument against free will. If you have a choice, who is making it in a way that is not a deterministic function of your inputs and internal states. You might as well say a finite state machine chooses to go to the next state. We don’t have to consider quantum randomness - a machine which goes to the wrong next state because of a defect has no more choice than a fault-free one.
On the other hand, the number of internal states that affect our apparent choices and the complexity of our history which caused us to arrive at those states is so great that it looks like choice, and is not predictable in principle - again neglecting quantum randomness. So it is indistinguishable from the situation if we actually had a choice.
So, we mostly act as if we had a choice even if we don’t. In fact we act that way even in situations where we can be influenced so much that we don’t really have a choice. If I would like to have free will, and as far as I can tell I do, no matter how, I’m not going to lose any sleep thinking that my free will is an illusion in a deterministic world.
Right, but in this analogy, the conscious thoughts in your mind are also state systems also causally connected to prior events.
I say this, because I think this is how the issue, and whole debate originated. Our conscious thoughts feel (and currently still largely are) private, and hence, feel separate to the physical world.
However, not only do we now know that those internal thoughts are the result of neurochemistry, but it never really made sense to think of our thoughts as separate. What is a reasoned choice without being causally connected to prior events and predilections?
Again, this sentence implicitly assumes that a real choice must include something not causally connected with the rest of the universe. Such as what? How would that work?
I don’t want to sound too aggressive in my language here, because I do understand the angst: we are saying that our lives are totally fixed by the characteristics that we are born with, and the events that happen to us.
I see it in two ways.
Yes, libertarian free will – the kind of free will that theism usually requires, or people that believe that prison should be about punishing evil – is garbage. The best I can say is we have no evidence that it exists, but really it’s an incoherent mess: a reasoned action that is not performed for reasons.
However, it’s also true that the conscious thoughts in your mind are real and important; they are really you making a decision based on what you know and what you like.
That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. Virtually every human being operates as if they had free will. The few exceptions are those who feel they are controlled by god or a stewardess Barbie.
The result is indistinguishable from any kind of determinism. Free will is the default; all forms of determinism exist solely to disprove or otherwise undo free will. As it stands today, no reasonable fact-based defense of determinism has ever been made - talk about rerunning time is as fact-based as any other variety of time travel - so most people outside of philosophy continue to assume they have free will and operate as such. They may be wrong, certainly. We simply don’t know. Until we learn much more than we do today, the discussion is purely for amusement. Why tempers get raised by it is mysterious. Might as well get heated by someone dissing a sports team.
Yeah, but he said it funnier.
The ree-zult is inn-diss-ting-squishable frum e-knee k-eye-nd of determinism.
Is that better?
Hey, don’t make fun of my accent!
I’ve just always found the idea of debating free will versus determinism amusing, since the very concept of debate itself presumes the existence of free will.
Not at all. I thought you were joking with your earlier statement.
Even people that believe that Determinism entails that we are zombie automatons (incorrect, IMO) do not claim that such automatons could not talk about free will. Heck, a couple of AI bots could talk about how they make decisions and, even without hearing of the concept before, give it a label like free will.
Not quite. I think everyone here agrees that our choices are limited by the universe, in lots of ways, and I include our genes as part of the universe. The question is whether the universe limits us to a small number of options or only one option, meaning we don’t have a choice at all. Whatever the answer we have evolved into thinking we do have a choice, and since we cannot prove we don’t, that’s good enough for me. I suspect even determinists go through life as if they have choices, even if they don’t.
We know our “choices” aren’t made by a soul sitting in a bubble disconnected from everything. Now, if someone wants to consider “choices” made from a complex set of inputs and internal states, irreproducible, as free, fine with me. If not, also fine with me.