Is it wrong to not believe in free will but still believe that evil should be punished?

Great Debates
141

Yep! That’s how probability and apparent randomity would occur in a purely deterministic system. Pseudorandomity is actually a well known thing to we computer programmers, because computers by and large just don’t do actual randomity. So so-called “random number generators” actually function by taking a determined input (the current time on the system clock) and running it though gnarled-up math to produce a series of outputs that looks random, but which actually isn’t. This is pretty much where “randomity” comes from inside a computer.

This sort of thing is as close as you could get to randomity in a deterministic universe - and it could look really random in practice, as the coin flip example does a great job of demonstrating.

Note that the universe might not be deterministic - there could also be actual randomity present. However I argue that if you actually consider how decision-making actually works, the addition of randomity to decision-making isn’t an addition of will, free or otherwise; it’s a reduction of will. The more random you are, the less will you are exercising. Something that is completely random is acting on no will at all.

If libertarian free will is just “deterministic free will with some random elements preventing it from being perfectly predictable”, then “libertarian free will” is “freedom from will”.

There’s no paradox here (though there is one potential problem). Once you add knowledge of your current existing brain state to your existing brain state, then the resulting brain state is necessarily different than it was prior to adding the awareness of your existing brain state. The new brain state may, or may not, decide things differently than the previous brain state would have.

Note that something like this can actually happen in real life - you can say, “Well, I know that normally I’d choose the strawberry pie here, but I’m feeling contrary today for some reason (perhaps I’m trying to prove to somebody that I have free will) so I’ll choose the shit sandwich instead.” Of course you didn’t actually do a full simulation of your normal brain state, you just approximated it, due to that potential problem I mentioned earlier:

The potential problem is actually one of storage. Consider a brain that has 100 bits of data. If this brain tries to store an image of its own brain inside itself, the brain only has 100 bits of data to store that image in. There’s no room for anything else but the image - so the image becomes the new brain state with no room left for thinking about the fact it is the brain state.

“But compression!” you might exclaim, and you might have a point. However proofs have been done showing that regardless of what form of compression you use, compressions must either be:

  1. Lossy (like the approximation I mentioned earlier)
    or
  2. Sometimes counterproductive. Any non-lossy system will have some data arrangements that doesn’t compress, and some data arrangements will even become larger when compressed. This is unavoidable for mathy reasons. And it does put the kibosh on reliably being able to simulate your entire brain using only a part of your brain.

There’s also the extreme likelihood that your brain will actually have less storage capacity than it has moving parts. This is why when you emulate a computer you require noticeably more storage capacity than the computer you’re emulating had. Plus of course human brains don’t actually know their own physical makeup (it took hundreds of years to figure out!) so people would never emulate their own thoughts to that precision anyway. But they can, and do, think about and approximate their thought patterns in general terms. Far from being a paradox, that’s pretty normal.

People don’t really do random shit. Actual random shit would probably not result in coherent action - if I “randomly” decide to punch you, that’s me identifying you as a target, locating you in physical space, orienting my body, and carrying out a rather complicated set of muscular adjustments to cause my fist to clench and move rapidly towards you. Actual random impulses occurring in my brain would probably look more like a spasm.

And of course murdering your family is a scenario I invented, because I don’t think I’ve yet heard a libertarianist come up with any scenario that is supposed to demonstrate libertarian free will that is not obviously just as easily explainable with compatiblist free will. Libertarian free will adds nothing.

Especially since libertarianists tend to insist that it’s not randomity either, which really screws things up. (And not just because it’s literally impossible by definition.) There is literally nothing they could possibly point to as an example of libertarian free will that is not more easily explained by determinism with a sub-microscopic dash of randomity. (Or no randomity at all.)

The state of the universe at time T+1 occurs because the state of the universe included a decision made at time T that was instigated by the state of the agent’s mind at time T-1. If not for the physical machinations that occurred while the mind considered its options and selected one of them preferentially, the physical universe would not have ended up in the state it was after the decision is made.

Seriously, I don’t understand what non-compatiblists imagine is going on here. At time T-1 Fred is looking at an apple and an orange. At time T+1 Fred is picking up the apple and biting into it. What do they think happened in the meantime? Nothing? That the molecules of the universe moved randomly and in defiance of the laws of physics to get from where they were at time T+1 to where they were at time T+1 without stopping anywhere inbetween? Do they think that everything happening in the brain was meaningless unaware static and that Fred doesn’t even know that he’s reaching for the apple? What?

You’re arguing that Fred didn’t make a choice. Why is he suddenly eating the apple and not the orange? Because a freak wind blew the apple into his mouth or something?

“Wouldn’t be predictable nor entirely random” describes a universe with random elements. This universe wouldn’t be a deterministic one, at least not technically. However it could be mostly deterministic. (In fact if an agent continued to exist for more than one unit of Planck time, it pretty much has to be.)

The thing is, though, randomity doesn’t add anything good to the decision-making process. Randomity is a reduction in will - in fact, it’s an abrogation of free will. Because randomity could be described as an external force (the randomity, which isn’t caused by anything about you) intruding into and interfering with your will. Which is no better than Zeus reaching into you and flipping your switches around.

Hold on a second - if your plan is to wait for somebody to shout “fall” before you drop the marble, and you’re planning to drop it as soon as they do, they’re causing you to drop the marble. Sure, the chain of causation is rather esoteric, but it’s certainly there. You just argued a deterministic example, where the system that encompasses the marble the human, and you chose that the marble would fall.

The non-deterministic example would be if you set a timer to drop the marble after ten seconds, and then your volunteers shouted “fall” or “hover” whenever they wanted. But what are the odds that that will work out? The vast majority of your volunteers will figure out they’re not causing anything, especially if you let them do the test multiple times. (Read: let them do some science on it.)

“Neither fully determined nor random” just means “deterministic with random elements” or “nondeterministic”. Which certainly could be occurring, but it wouldn’t be libertarian free will, unless libertarian free will is way lamer than libertarianists claim it is.

Also worth noting, just because the universe is nondeterministic, doesn’t mean cognition necessarily is. It’s entirely possible for a physical system to account for and correct minor perturbations in its state, to operate deterministically regardless of the peturbations. Computers have been doing it all the time with regard to minor fluctuations in the electrical current, and if they didn’t they wouldn’t work at all. I’m firmly convinced the the human brain operates with similar protections against most or all randomity within itself, because we’re not spasming all the time.

You could tell me what you think libertarian free will is, how it works, and how it adds value to cognition beyond what a completely deterministic cognition can offer.

I could get you to understand what compatibilist free will is, how it works, and why I think it is the only true form of free will, which adding randomity only detracts from. (I don’t expect you to come to agree with me, but it would be nice if you understood where I’m coming from.)

I would LOVE if somebody could give me an example of libertarian free will in action that isn’t obviously just deterministic free will doing what deterministic free will does.

142

A better victory is always learning something and growing.
I appreciate that’s not something anyone is going to witness happen in this thread, as it’s already devolved into the standard back and forth “fight”.

But, I hope offline you can reflect on the fact that the mind isn’t a black box any more; that neuroscience is understanding more every day about how our neurology brings about personality, emotions, and yes, choice. Whether that’s uncomfortable for you or not (and I really believe it doesn’t have to be), it’s just a fact.

It is not a hypothesis at all, it’s a prediction.
Prediction is king in science. While I know of one or two scientists (and prominent figures like Matt Dillahunty), who have said that a prediction is only valid if it comes from a detailed mathematical model, they are wrong. If a model predicts something that other models cannot, then that is our best model right now, period. A loose prediction is better than nothing.

However, this does get to the real problem with “the sun will come up tomorrow morning” – it’s something we’d expect to happen anyway. That’s why, as I said, discovering Neptune was the key prediction of Newton’s theory of gravitation, not just observing the sun rising again.

For the reason already given, this isn’t a prediction. People have always felt this way, and is completely consistent with a mind based wholly on neuroscience anyway.

It’s not whether your behaviour is unusual, it is whether the point has any merit. It does not.
You have not given any reason why anyone should feel like that, plus the actual data is in conflict.

143

Under determinism, when faced with choices you will be able to make them and there is more than one possibility open to you in your life. However you are limited in that you only have one path through life. Which is to say, whatever you choose, that is what you chose, and you can’t have a do-over or fork time and have done a different contradictory thing at the same time.

Under determinism, your future is like your past, in that when you make a choice, that is the choice you made, and there is no changing it after it’s made. So if a person outside of time (or just outside of your time, in the future) looks at your life, you will have traced a single, unchanging path from birth to death.

You’ll note that this is exactly the same thing that happens if you insert randomity into the system*. The only difference between a universe where your mind operates deterministically and one where it doesn’t is that under nondeterminism you are a plaything of fate and have less personal will. But in either case, under every model, you have only one past, and at the time of your death you will still only have one past. Which means that prior to your death you will only have one future.

*(Okay, introducing randomity enables the possibility of a “many worlds” hypothesis. That won’t change your future any though.)

144

I suppose you were predestined not to find my jokes funny.

I don’t think we are disagreeing here. It’s a loose prediction. It’s based on faulty inductive reasoning that will almost certainly fall apart on longer time scales. But the fact is that it’s good enough for 99.9999…% of purposes that we could want to use it for. It is for all practical purposes True.

Prediction, not a prediction, whatever. It is for all practical purposes the Truth. You want to explain to me that there is a chemical in my brain that was released because a neutrino from the Big Bang happened to pass through me at just the right moment so that I would experience the subjective feeling of preferring the turkey sandwich today? Great. At best, it adds nothing to my life. At worst it robs me of a sense purpose and motivation that help me to survive. And it’s not like you can really ever prove it to me. If you show me a rigorous physics, developed from first principles, that explains everything in the universe perfectly and proves definitively that “I” don’t exist in the manner I believe myself to exist (i.e., I am an agent, free to make choices) I’m going to say that there’s something wrong with your physics.

This still doesn’t seem to follow logically for me. I don’t see how you’ve excluded the middle between total predestination and total randomness or the existence of a third possibility (called “choice”).

The paradox persists because in the hypothetical, the adding in of the knowledge of your current brain state is completely factored into the model. It’s perfect foreknowledge based on the idea that the universe operates in a completely deterministic way.

There may be some common ground here. It is at least conceivable that what we’re dealing with here is a problem of irreducible complexity. That is, the universe operates in a completely deterministic way; however because of its complexity, it can’t be modeled in a way that gives complete predictions, only approximations. Therefore the future is, even in principle, not just unknown but unknowable. Which is kind of like saying that the future is neither completely determined nor completely random.

I’m not sure that I’m arguing for “Libertarian free will”. I’m arguing for “moronic free will” (or I might say rather “naive free will”). That is, “I have free will because I observe myself to have free will” or even “I have free will because I choose to believe that I have free will”. I think this is the position that most humans come to without any training in philosophy or physics etc. and is therefore the “default” position. “compatibilist free will” appears to be an attempt to make this naive position compatible with a deterministic universe. To that end, it appears to me to be designed to add nothing (and take away as little as possible) from naive free will.

Ok. That’s all fine. But what makes the “choice” phenomenon special here? It’s not as if if could have come out some other way. You may as well say that after you jumped off the bridge and fell half way, you “chose” to fall the rest of the way.

Sorry if I was unclear. We drop the marble then let the participants call out. They cause nothing. I presume that most of them will call out “hover” for the laughs and realize they were being had. But if even one of them calls out “fall” then you have an agent who went through an evaluation process and chose for the marble to fall. As far as he knows, he caused it. If you think his belief that he caused the marble to fall is sufficient to say that the marble in fact fell because he chose it to, then that would be consistent with “compatibilist free will” as I understand you to be describing it. We believe ourselves to be “choosing” between two possibilities but that’s only because we can’t see the universe’s thumb on the scales, which predetermines the outcome.

No, I’m arguing that there are more possibilities.

Right. I understand it (and have understood it from the beginning of this conversation) to mean that. I just disagree.

I am, on the other hand, on board for the many worlds hypothesis. If your path through the universe looks less like a worm and more like bristling, branching mycelium with every moment splitting off into multiple possibilities and your consciousness sitting in a superposition of some subset of them at any given moment, that would look more like my understanding.

145

Well I certainly don’t find “Perhaps I / you were predestined to X” funny, since you’ve said this about a dozen times at this point, and I don’t believe in predestiny anyway.
It only serves to remind us all that you aren’t really engaging in what anyone is saying,

You say you agree, but your summary here is completely contrary to what I just said.
There is nothing wrong with the prediction per se, and no indication of faulty reasoning.

The problem with testing a hypothesis by predicting the sun will rise tomorrow is that we already expect that to happen. Predictions need to be something we would otherwise not expect to happen, or at least need to predict some new observation about a known event.

I think the discussion should end right there. You don’t care if you have good grounds for believing what you do. It’s an embrace of ignorance, completely the opposite of what this forum is supposed to be about.

This is after me imploring you to engage with the reality that neuroscience is a thing. Thoughts happen in brains, we’re long past this being debatable.
Instead of engaging with that, you’re still throwing out this pachinko nonsense again.

The vast majority of processing going on in your brain at any time is updating its internal model. Very obviously data from the outside world is crucially important for this, particularly in infancy when we’re actually building the model. But to frame it as if the brain is a passenger is just nonsense; it’s handwaving the vast majority of processes that led to my decision.

Let alone the picking of “a neutrino” versus the actual large-scale stimuli from my environment that might actually have significant weight in whether I like turkey sandwiches.
e.g. My parents made turkey sandwiches a lot growing up, I live in a culture where turkey is traditionally eaten at big family gatherings, I am aware that turkey has less fat than chicken but is also drier and less tasty. I mean, do you think these inputs don’t directly influence my choice of whether I want to eat a turkey sandwich?

146

It’s a matter of definition - or rather, understanding that the definitions mean. (The latter part there is why I can’t be talked into ignoring them.)

Determinism is when things have causes. Randomity is when they don’t. Or put another way, anything that is not random is deterministic. Anything.

Note that there is the added complexity of partial randomity, which is when things have causes, but the causes don’t completely control the outcome. This is not a third category. It’s a case where you can figure out what all the causes are determining, and whatever ambiguity remains will be determined by pure randomity. Think of it as starting out with a blank sheet representing the complete set of theoretical possibilities, and then causality/determinism blacks out all the things that aren’t possible because of reasons. More and more of the sheet gets blacked out. If every possibility gets blacked out but one, that’s determinism. If you’re left with some set of possibilities that are all entirely possible in a way unconstrained by any reason whatsoever, then the remaining white area is pure randomity. Or more accurately, pure randomity is what is going to be what dictates which of the remaining possibilities comes to pass.

The only colors on the sheet are black and white. There is no other color, nor any possibility of it. Because the colors simply describe a clean either/or division - the outcomes are dictated by causality, or the final selection will have no cause at all.

No it’s not. The fact that the brain is necessarily ignorant about some of its own details doesn’t say anything about how the wider world functions at a causal level, much less that there’s some sort of third magic impossible thing between “caused” and “not-caused”… That’s like saying that because I don’t know what color your car is that means it can fly.

:neutral_face:

What.

So if the current discussion was about lightning, you’d be saying, “We see flashes of light from the sky that reach down and burn things,” and I’d be saying, “Yes, that’s because differing electrical charges in the sky and ground cause a giant spark to leap between them which looks like a flash of light from the sky and which reaches down and burns things.” And you’d be like, “No, no that’s wrong, all of your science facts are wrong, because lightning is flashes of light from the sky that reach down and burn things.”

I am not arguing that people don’t experience free will. I am indeed trying to explain to you how that could be happening in the actual real universe. It’s called an explanation. Why do you have a problem with that??

And for the record, as the person who introduced the term “moronic free will” into this thread, the term has been being used to refer to libertarian free will. Libertarian free will is an alternate attempt to explain why we experience free will, except it’s a crappy incoherent not-really-an-explanation based on a poor understanding of theology mixed with a poor understanding of philosophy. That is what I’m arguing against.

I’m not arguing that we don’t experience free will. Of course we experience free will. Duh. And we experience it in the real, physical, functionally deterministic world that we clearly are living in. Duh.

I’m not even sure it’s even worth continuing here, but whichever, I’m waiting for my laundry to finish.

It’s important to recognize that material, deterministic brains make choices because if you don’t recognize this then you freak out and start casting about for some other explanation like souls or magic or unicorn farts - aka the moronic “libertarian” free will. People turn to that crap because they don’t understand how a person can possibly make decisions based on just what they know and like and want to do. That and/or they read some bad philosophy that makes them think that unpredictability is the whole point of free will, which is really stupid when you actually think about it.

I don’t know where you found experimental subjects this stupid, to not be familiar with gravity before taking the test, but suffice to say if you let them try this a few times they’ll figure out their words have no effect. Science, baby!

Note that people, historically, have indeed been this dumb. When people don’t understand why things are happening, their brains lead them to make snap judgements, and their cognitive biases can make them somewhat resistant to changing their opinion about these guesses. Some examples of guesses like this are people who thought the gods create lightning, or who thought that souls and libertarians create free will. Fortunately as science advances we can figure out what’s actually going on, and dispense with the old mythology.

You’re wrong.

Uh huh.

Under the many worlds theorem your variants’ minds don’t end up in superposition in any meaningful sense. You only personally experience one of the pathways. You don’t experience the multiverse and you personally only have one past - and only one future.

And of course you need to keep in mind that the multiverse will never split over anything meaningful like whether you choose the apple or the orange. It will only split based on stupid random meaningless randomity, like which way a quark ends up going or something. I believe there is very good reason to believe that every single version of you in every single version of the multiverse will act exactly the same as each other for their entire lifetime(s), right down to each and every decision they make, except for the handful where a weird random subatomic reaction caused a black hole to spontaneously appear in your spleen and kill you horribly.

147

I kind of glossed past this, but this is actually a really good summary of the large brain fart that powers the libertarianist argument against compatiblist free will.

“The universe puts its thumb on the scales”, huh? That’s what’s determining the outcome? Well, what part of the universe is doing this then? What is the thumb?

This is where libertarianists refuse to answer the question because if they do, they can’t help but out their position as stupid.

The “thumb” that the universe is putting on the scales is, indisputably, the physical matter that makes up our own brains. Our own brains, and our own brain activity, is what “determines the outcome” of our decision-making.

You’ll note that I didn’t say “predetermines the outcome”, because what’s happening is not predetermination in the sense that the oracle of Delphi pronouncing that you will have sex with your father and kill your mother. What’s actually happening is that the outcome is determined by physics, which are happening at the time of the decision being made. The only sort of predetermination that is happening here is that if you previously developed a fondness for strawberries, perhaps due to physical interactions between strawberries and your tastes buds interacting to generate pleasurable feelings in your brain at some prior date and imprinting that into your memories, the presence of your favorable opinion of strawberries as you are going into the decision will be a pre-existing factor that will help determine the outcome when the decision is finally made.

148

This is false on its face. I have no idea what point you are trying to argue here.

I won’t argue your first point, as I think we are seriously running into diminishing returns. But for what it’s worth, I’m not arguing for ignorance. I’m saying that if something is completely indistinguishable from the Truth under all circumstances that we can reasonably foresee and it doesn’t lead to any perverse outcomes, you may as well treat it as truth. I have a pet rock. You can see that my pet rock appears to be green. But I tell you that it’s not green - it’s “grue”, by which I mean that it is green until the year 3000 and after that it will be blue. You insist that it’s green. The claim is untestable during our lifetimes. Any measurements we take in the years before 3000 will only serve to support both our arguments. How many rounds do you want to go telling me that I’m an idiot for believing it to be grue?

I’m well aware of neuroscience, thanks. And the rest of your post is waving at strawmen.

I quite like that analogy. It does help me see what you’re getting at. I would be interested to hear how your conception of the universe deals with the EPR paradox. When Bob makes his measurement, all possibilities save spin +1/2 and -1/2 are blacked out, while those two are still open. But the choice of which one he finds isn’t random.

Thinking about this again, I wonder if we’re using the same definition of “random”. When I say a coin flip is random, I mean that if we were to repeat the flip multiple times we would find that the distribution of outcomes is flat across the space of possible outcomes. I don’t mean that the outcome is entirely unconstrained (sometimes it turns into a frog, sometimes it ends the universe). And I don’t mean that it’s a two headed coin that has 0% possibility of any outcome other than heads. I’m not sure “random” is even a meaningful description of the outcome of a coin that is flipped exactly once ever and then destroyed without examination.

No, it’s a bit more like you asking if I own a car and me saying that I lease a car that it technically owned by the bank but I can drive it in exactly the way I could if I owned it outright. You can pound your hands on the table all you want demanding that I either own or don’t own when the real answer is “sort of”.

See, that’s the kind of reaction I hope for when I make a funny joke.

Because your explanation is that people don’t have free will but only experience it as an illusion. If you tell me that "differing electrical charges in the sky and ground cause a giant spark to leap between them which looks like a flash of light from the sky and which reaches down and burns things,” then great, you’ve helped me to understand lightning. If you tell me "differing electrical charges in the sky and ground cause a giant spark to leap between them which doesn’t look like a flash of light from the sky and which reaches down and burns things,” because you believe that it’s not a “flash”, then you’ve added nothing to my understanding. And in fact my original understanding will work better for me. NB, I’m playing along with your analogy here, but it’s really inexact. There’s something about talking about our fundamental perception of our lived experience that doesn’t analogize well.

You are arguing (as best as I can tell) that we experience an illusion of free will that is compatible with a deterministic universe. I am arguing that free will (exactly as you experience it) is real and therefore the universe cannot be deterministic. I suspect that the universe actually follows probabilistic quantum mechanical rules and that our free will arises from this. (I know some folks have made a fairly compelling argument that this implies that at least some subatomic particles have free will and I am ok with that.)

You’re missing my point (or avoiding my question). What is the significance of the “choice”? We both agree that the universe can progress from T to T+1 in the absence of a choice: e.g., I fall the rest of the way under the influence of gravity. I’m saying that in your deterministic universe there’s no fundamental difference between moving from T-1 to T to T+1 with a choice at T or without a choice at T. In either case it’s purely mechanical and U(t-1)–>U(t)–>U(t+1). What makes the “choice” special?

Cool cool cool. So to test whether your deterministic or my probabilistic vision of free will is correct, we just have to rewind the universe and replay it a few times and see who’s right. If it comes out the same way each time, I owe you a Coke.

But back to the actual point you are avoiding. The participants cannot take the test twice (any more than we can rewind and replay the universe). What we have is an agent who went through an evaluation process and decided that the marble should fall and then the marble fell. He now has the (false) belief that he caused the marble to fall as the result of his choice. In fact, the marble fell because of the experimental set up. This is exactly how you have described “free will” to operate in a deterministic universe. We are “free” to make choices from our own perspective but from the perspective of an omniscient observer (analogous to the experimenters) our choices are predetermined. If you agree that the marble fell because our subject chose for it to, then your position is consistent. If not, then you have to concede that having an agent go through an evaluation process and make a choice is necessary but not sufficient for “free will”. There needs to be a possibility of a different outcome.

You’re free to believe so.

Why wouldn’t you? The proverbial cat is both alive and dead until I open the box. I’m in a superposition of those two universes until I make the observation. Right now, there’s a whole vast universe that I’m not currently observing and that may as well be inside the box.

Are you saying that based on belief or some actual science? It seems to me that if one quark ended up going in on slightly different path shortly after the Big Bang, it could have led to a substantially different state today.

The only way that distinction makes a difference (as far as I can tell) is if you fail to distinguish between “unknown” and “unknowable”. If you are saying that our choices are unknown to us but knowable to an external observer, then I contend that’s not “free will”. That’s saying “things happen”. If you’re saying that our choices are unknowable to any observer, then you can’t say with authority that they are determined.

149

You’re going to like this, but my response to the EPR paradox is “There is no way in hell I’m going to try and read and understand this wall of text.”

When I say “random” (particularly in a free will discussion) I mean that the outcome under discussion isn’t fully determined by causation. I also take my tiny knife and split hairs - if the distribution is not flat but still not fully determined, I conclude that there’s some causal reason that the possible outcomes are happening on bell curve (and not turning into a frog, and not destroying the universe) , but the mere fact that causation leaves anything to chance means that randomity is present, bridging the gap between “the set of possible outcomes that causality leaves us” and “the single outcome that actually occurs.”

You didn’t seem to be making a joke, and if you were, it wasn’t funny.

NO. Goddammit, NO. I have never said this, nor even implied it. Do NOT accuse me of this shit.

My explanation is that people actually have free will, and that people who think that the term “free will” means “libertarian free will” are either morons or suckers who fell for the lies told by morons.

Libertarian free will is a moronic lie that not only doesn’t exist, but it also doesn’t match up with the common usage of the term “free will”.

Compatiblist free will is actual free will, where your mind is actually making your decisions and actually controlling what you do.

Before you can make the argument “Free will existing implies that the universe is nondeterministic”, you have to convince me to accept that free will is incompatible with a deterministic universe. Which probably would entail you convincing me that the term “free will” means “acting in a random and completely nonsensical manner”, or otherwise convincing me that doing what you want to do is not an exercise of free will.

Oh fuck no, you do not get to claim I said things I manifestly didn’t. Hell no. You just cut that shit out.

The universe can proceed from T to T+1 without a decision if there isn’t an agent involved. Agents, by the definition I proposed and you said you agreed with, are “Something that is capable of evaluating and selecting.” Agents are things that evaluate their situation in order to select how they will react. Since T+1 includes the outcome of their choice, you can’t get from T to T+1 without the process of making that choice having been carried out.

What makes the choice special is that its an example of a situation where a reaction is based on a selection heuristic, which means that it meets the definition of “a choice”. Situations that do not meet the definition of “a choice” are not “a choice”. If the outcome at time T+1 was determined by the result of a selection heuristic, then T+1 was gotten to by something making a choice, and it can’t have been gotten to without making a choice, because making a choice is what actually happened to get there.

No it fucking isn’t. It’s not even close. It’s as if you haven’t read a single word I’ve written.

Free will is when an agent makes decisions based on its own internal state and the preferences encoded into that internal state without interference from an external force altering its decision-making processes. (And I would personally argue that “randomity” would count as an external influence here, particularly if it was present in sufficient force to deviate the decision from what the agent would prefer.)

“Will” = “what you want, based on your own internal desires and preferences”
“Free” = “without interference from an external force”

This complies with the “classic” discussion on free will, since that was mostly concerned with whether God was reaching to Pharoah’s head and hardening his heart to make the story play out how god had ‘predicted’ (in a literal self-fulfilling prophecy), and the like. It also complies with how the term is commonly used - when a person stoutly announces “I did that of my own free will”, they are insisting that they made the decision based on their own will without bowing to external influences pressuring them to act differently. They are of course not announcing that they behaved in an unpredictable manner, because (of course) so-called “libertarian free will” has nothing to do with how any normal person actually thinks of free will.

Schroedinger’s cat is not comparable to or compatible with the many worlds hypothesis. That you thought that “superposition” was a sensical way to describe the many worlds scenario shows you don’t understand it and I apologize for entertaining this nonsense as long as I did.

And I contend that your definition of free will is nonsensical. Unpredictability is not a necessary element of any reasonable, rational, or real-world definition of the term “free will”. And because unpredictability is not necessary for free will, whether you’re knowable or not has nothing to do with anything at all.

I don’t consider unpredictability to be necessary, for obvious reasons - it is common for my choices to be predictable (I’m a creature of habit), and no sensible person would say that that mere fact means that I don’t have free will.

150

I thought this was very clear from the sun rising example, but let me rephrase it:

Predictions, in a scientific sense, are where we take some model or hypothesis and use it to make a prediction or inference about objective reality. It’s crucial that that prediction be something we would not otherwise expect.
For example, I can’t say I have a new model of dark matter, and if it’s true then a cubic meter of lead will weigh more on earth than a cubic meter of water. We already expect that, that’s not a prediction.

Anyway, this is purely academic as I don’t think you’ve alluded to any prediction. But for people who care if their beliefs are true, they tend to withhold belief until such time as there has been such confirmation.

Sure, and I wouldn’t care about that.
The thing I am criticizing you for, is not taking on your beliefs. If I ask you a tough question, you ignore it. If you’re forced into admitting your belief makes no testable claim, you simply shrug.

I, like most people, once believed in some kind of libertarian free will, but the difference is, I actually challenged that belief, like I try to challenge all my beliefs. It didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

How is asking you a question a strawman? I’m asking you how your conception of libertarian free will can square with what we already understand about the brain? How does a non-random, non-deterministic part come in?

151

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret the above as:

“I will not update my beliefs based on new evidence”

Is that accurate? Can you explain why it should not be interpreted in that way?

152

Not that it should matter to the debate at hand, but I’ve been through a variety of positions on this topic. I regularly try to challenge my beliefs. I don’t think “compatibilist free will” makes any testable claims either. And based on my back and forth in this thread, it doesn’t look like a deterministic model of the universe fits well with quantum mechanics, which does make testable claims.

It’s a strawman because I never said that our decisions are totally disconnected from the past. Obviously, when you make a choice, you are able to draw on memories, reasoning, and emotions. But if there isn’t some ineffable “self” that can “will” the choice “freely”, then there’s no there there. Things happen because they happen, not because an agent chose them. And back to the OP, there’s no sense “holding someone accountable” for actions that they can’t control.

I may have put Descartes before the horse; all I’m saying is that while I am happy to update my beliefs based on new evidence, if that evidence conflicts with the idea that there is a “me” to update said beliefs, then I have to reject the evidence. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying sense of free will?

153

Why must the self be ineffable? Why wouldn’t an effable self (that gives you the subjective experience that we all experience) suffice?

154

It should perhaps be noted that “ineffable” means “indescribable” which I think may get to the heart of the matter - it may be the case that epolo considers the idea that the functioning of his mind/soul/whatever being comprehensible or understood by others would be an insult.

Which wouldn’t be all that surprising - one of the brightest lines drawn between people and computers/AI is that the latter are possessions, and another is that we understand the workings of computers and we don’t understand the workings of the human mind. (I mean we theoretically understand the workings of computers - I doubt anybody here in this thread, even me, can actually visualize the system in process from circuits to interface.)

Myself, I consider the idea that the self (or anything, really) could be “ineffable” to be the bad option, because if something is ineffable it really just means that humans are too stupid to understand it, even in abstract or general terms. And I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m not that stupid. And there’s another problem to ineffability as well; in real life, things are comprehensible. Things that are real actually exist and function, and the way they function can be described. To say that our minds/souls/whatever must be ineffable, is to say that they are fictional.

And I can’t speak for anybody else, but my mind and will are not fictional. They are real, they function, and the way they function can be described. Hell, the way I subjectively perceive them functioning can be described - and it seems pretty darned deterministic. There’s no part of it that so much as feels non-deterministic. So demanding that minds/souls/whatever be both ineffable and nondeterministic seems like an approach hellbent on doing anything but describing humans and the human experience.

155

To be accurate, Descartes did not say “I think, therefore I have free will”. Nobody is denying that you exist, or that you think.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret your above quote as:

“I will not update my beliefs based on new evidence if it contradicts with my strongly held ideas or senses of something”

What evidence would be required for you to update your belief that free will actually exists, not just that your sense of free will exists?

If you cannot think of any evidence, they your belief is purely faith-based, and not subject to rational thought. Which is fine, but then we will stop trying to use rational thought when discussing this with you.

As far as ineffable - as has been said above, that just means unable to be described in words. So fundamentally, using the word “ineffable” as part of an explanation of a phenomenon is not helpful. You can substitute the word “magic”, or “mystical” and it works just as well.

156

To be clear and succinct, nobody is trying to tell you that you don’t experience what you experience. We’re just disputing that you’re correct about why you experience it.

I may be a determinist, but I’m still a person. I have the same sense of self and feeling of volition that you do. Does it surprise you that I think that there’s no conflict between my feelings and experiences, and my opinions about how the world works?