Well, it’s not odd - that’s precisely why the conversation about free will started in this thread. I do believe that men are machines, if by machine you mean something that obeys all the same laws of physics as everything else in the universe.
Nobody believes that free will means rolling a dice. So the assumption in the discussion above (which I’ve stated explicitly several times) is that we’re talking about different outcomes except any differences attributable to truly random quantum effects.
I found the old thread. Half Man, Half Wit posted a link to a survey on the PhilPapers site.
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
Accept or lean toward: compatibilism 550 / 931 (59.1%)
Other 139 / 931 (14.9%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 128 / 931 (13.7%)
Accept or lean toward: no free will 114 / 931 (12.2%)
Libertarianism is a jargon term that does not correspond to the political usage. My beliefs leaned toward what philosophers call Modest Libertarianism. I don’t know what would be included under “Other” but it can’t be ignored.
You responded to Half and Half with this:
I could be snarky about you repeating your false claim two years after being shown it was dead wrong but I’d rather be snarky against philosophers who, according to you, write such incoherent gibberish that even other philosophers can’t parse what they say.
This all by itself means you cannot simply assert that free will is nonsense, as you have. Moreover you can’t say “Any decision I make is solely a function of the internal state of my brain plus the inputs it receives” because we have no understanding of how the brain works and therefore we don’t know how the inputs create changes or even what inputs are meaningful. Nor do you have sound definitions of anything you want to measure. Nor can you dismiss quantum effects until they are ruled out for brain function. I’d call this pretty confused.
If you want to point me to a serious philosopher who thinks that the spooky could have done otherwise kind of free will exists, I’d be extremely interested. I have never come across one. I have no idea who’s in that survey. Maybe you will accuse me of making a “no true Scotsman” argument, but if it includes theologians, then of course they will say that - because it’s a fundamental premise of Christianity. In any event, I’m not so much concerned about whether I’m technically right about “approximately zero” philosophers, I’m more interested in what any serious philosophers have to say if they really do believe in spooky free will.
To be clear, my claim is solely about the popular spooky could have done otherwise notion of free will. Compatibilists redefine the term to me something coherent (although I’d personally prefer if they used a different term.)
As I’ve said, it’s analogous to a claim that there are hippos living on the moon, in the sense that:
(a) There is no evidence that the phenomenon is happening;
(b) For those who claim it is happening, no coherent logical process is proposed.
Now, if you want to claim that there is such a process (b), good for your you. But why do this unless you can first show that there exists some phenomenon to explain?
Sure, we don’t know exactly how the brain works. Do you really think that it’s therefore unreasonable to assume that it follows the same basic principles as the rest of the universe? When you come across something new and unexplained, is it sensible to assume “it could be magic until proven otherwise”?
I’m not “dismissing” quantum effects. To the extent that quantum effects are non-deterministic, they are truly random. I’m saying that nobody thinks “free will” means rolling a dice, so quantum effects don’t provide anything that comports with the could-have-done-otherwise notion of free will.
Wait, isn’t that what I’ve been asking you? I’m the one who keeps saying you can’t make assertions about phenomena you can’t define.
Um, look up. The basic principles of the universe say its future movements can’t be determined. Therefore, neither can the brain, according to you.
Again, some people do indeed believe there may be quantum effects in the brain. Whether or not that’s “rolling dice” I couldn’t say. Mostly because you never bother to define what you mean by it.
You can’t hand wave away all objections by calling them nonsense while not offering rigorous arguments to prove your arguments. That’s what woo does.
You keep conflating the brain in general, consciousness, and free will. I say something about free will, and you rebut as though I’m saying that about everything the brain does. So let me restate quite clearly.
The brain is obviously a real thing! It’s complicated, we don’t understand it. Consciousness is also obviously a real phenomenon that we don’t understand. I’m not making any claims about how any of this works in general.
But free will is not a phenomenon. There is no evidence that it happens. If you disagree, then please state the evidence that when I act in some way, I *could have *acted differently?
You seem to keep repeating over and over again,
“What is your explanation for why there are no hippos on the moon? You don’t understand everything, there are quantum effects, you can’t dismiss this, or dismiss that!”
And I just keep saying:
“There is no evidence that there are hippos on the moon, so we have nothing to explain.”
Hi, brick wall. Sorry that I keep bumping my head on you.
My only claim is that we don’t know enough even to define the terms rigorously, let alone make sweeping assertions about reality. You haven’t even defined what free will means to philosophers. All you’ve done is to say “my claim is solely about the popular spooky could have done otherwise notion of free will.” Let me remind you that I have never referred to that or any other specific type of free will, so that’s hardly a refutation of anything I’m asking. If you are making claims about something, then define that something. Telling me what it isn’t is meaningless.
For that matter, tell it to philosophers. Despite your dismissing the PhilPapers survey out of hand, I won’t let it go. Over a quarter of philosophers - not zero! - reject your characterization of the problem.
I haven’t rejected it because you won’t bother to define it. I do reject a great many statements in this thread because they are self-contradictory or wrong or use undefined terms. This is nothing personal. I would reject a similar set of statements from anybody about any scientific or logical issue.
I’m not trying to be difficult or obstinate. I’m instead frustrated because you refuse to make any statement clearer than, as I read it, “determinism looks exactly like free will in practice. Determinism is exactly the clockwork universe physicists have rejected for a century, but it’s better than free will because free will is impossible so stop bothering me about it.” That wins philosophy no points.
I don’t see any reason to continue slamming into a brick wall if you don’t clear up part of that statement. How about starting with why “determinism is exactly the clockwork universe physicists have rejected for a century” is not true.
And my first point was that if we cannot predict, even in principle, what we are going to do, how can we determine that what we did was or was not deterministic? If we can predict that we should do A based on a deterministic view, but do B instead, we might be said to have free will. But if our prediction includes both A and B, we can’t say anything about having free will.
Say our action depends on activating an internal memory. If memory a is activated first, we perform action A, if memory b action B. Now suppose we have a race condition, in that we can’t know for sure which memory arrives first. (In logic design we work hard to eliminate these, and it is tough. No reason to think our brains don’t have them.) Our process is deterministic (a -> A, b -> B) while being chaotic. Is that free will or not. It might look like it. Especially since a and b depend on other decisions made in a similar way. If you consider “you” as including the sum of these, you could say that “you” made non-deterministic decisions.
This has nothing to do with the concept of some “you” detached from the brain making free will decisions. We can be pretty sure that doesn’t happen.
If you don’t consider my scenario free will, fine. Since the presence or absence of free will is undecidable, I don’t really care about it.
I agree that men are machines also. What I don’t believe is that if you could repeat the internal state and inputs leading to an action you wouldn’t get a different action.
I give one example above, but I saw this on a real machine, a microprocessor, where repeating the same inputs and same internal states yielded different results. We figured out how to prevent this from happening, but we never figured out why it happened. When machines act differently in the same situation, I have to think that the much more complex brain will, especially since it has not evolved to be consistent.
Sure and if we are defining “free will” simply as unpredictability from a particular state then I, as well as scientists and philosophers, would be quite happy to have the discussion about whether it is the case (from what I understand of QM, it’s not settled; actions being probabilistic as you go forwards in time does not, in itself, refute the “block universe” hypothesis).
But I disagree that this is what people typically mean by free will. For one thing, this kind of free will would not be limited to brains; all matter, any system, would have it, to one extent or another.
For another, people arguing that “there’s no such thing as free will” (which again, is not my position, I’m saying free will is such an ill-defined concept that it’s unclear what its non-existence would even mean) are happy to handwave quantum randomness: how can the role of a die be considered a conscious choice? Let’s say you offer me coffee or tea and I remember that I much prefer coffee and choose it. Now rewind the tape: how is quantum randomness going to affect my knowledge or decision-making process in a way that we would consider voluntary?
Or, let’s take an extreme example. Let’s say I have the choice between murdering someone and just chilling. I choose to commit the murder. Later we find out that quantum effects are a significant part of humans’ decision-making process, and in this case there was only a 20% chance that I would have chosen to murder. So, can I now consider myself unlucky?
For another bear in mind the high proportion of the public that is still religious and believes an omnimax god will judge humans. If “free will” just means quantum randomness, we can ask whether omnimax god can foresee the result of quantum interactions, and philosophically it’s problematic either way. Hence I don’t think theologians define free will in this way either.
Again, because the scenario has been presented to them extremely poorly. The “spooky” kind of free will is a notion that literally was based on spooks - ghosts, in other words; souls. The notion was that you have the body, and you have the soul, and that “the universe is in precisely the same configuration” didn’t apply to the soul because the soul wasn’t in the universe. When a philosopher with an axe of some kind to grind tells them “no, you don’t have souls, and you are just a clockwork toy and you have no free will and bow before my intellectual might, minion” (or whatever the goal of the discussion is), the yokel without the philosophy degree still hasn’t given up on the notion that they can still have a change of mind, because this whole “precisely the same configuration” business it a bait and switch.
The bait: We’re talking about your ability to change your mind, which in all previous discussion has been assumed to exist independent of the universe configuration.
The switch: We’re going to redefine “change your mind”, and not tell you. Because decision-making still happens in a materialist universe (obviously), but with the switch to materialism, it’s no longer independent of the universal state, and thus by switching to the materialist model the philosopher has changed the question from “could you choose differently if you wanted to” to “could you choose differently without wanting to”, because by moving the person’s mental state into the set of things that are unchanging, you really mean that while they still ARE choosing, they (quite literally) can’t change their mind.
In the discussions I’ve seen where people argue there’s no free will, in addition to an utter failure to define “free will” in a non-moronic manner (and “unpredictability” is a moronic definition*), they also fail to acknowledge that decision-making still occurs, and it does so exactly as freely as it does under the spooky model. The mind makes decisions free of outside control. The physical state of one’s own brain is not ‘outside control’.
*As for unpredictability, consider the following choice: Eat a delicious cherry pie, or eat a somewhat less delicious cow pie. Yep: eat food, or eat shit. Under what In what sane universe would you have to sometimes eat the cow pie in order to have free will? No sane universe. However that’s what the unpredictability definition demands. A sane definition of free will will recognize that people have preferences and inclinations that can make them extremely predictable at times, and that wouldn’t make their wills any less free (at least by any decent definition of “free will”).
begbert2, you keep repeating this framing, and it’s just nonsense.
Philosophers’ arguments are generally aimed at other philosophers, and they don’t redefine terms to condescend; they are generally trying to be more precise. Note that giving a technical / specific meaning to words that have a generic meaning in common parlance, is very common in mathematics, science , engineering etc. So if attempting to give “free will” a precise definition is evidence of philosophers being jerks or engaging in a willful bait-and-switch then basically any technical field is wholly populated by jerks.
And I’ll repeat my argument from my last post (since it wasn’t addressed yet): if people in general don’t mean the “spooky soul” concept of free will, how is it that the majority of people in, say, the US, still believe in an omnimax god judging us? The “common sense” idea of free will that you’ve outlined (that I probably agree with, once we pin down exactly what you mean by it) doesn’t seem to support the religious idea of free will. God would be culpable for a start.
I’ve met a couple of philosophers, in philosophy classes I’ve taken. The first one said outright, on the first day, that all philosophers are egotistical jerks. I choose not to dispute his expertise in his own field.
But fine, I’ve been having a little fun implying less-than-sincere motives in philosophers, alongside other statements saying that people have been simply misunderstanding each other which implies less nefarious motives. Whether or not I’m right that some philosophers are in it for the pleasure of winning arguments and showing how smart they are, it still remains a fact that this whole “free will” discussion is a train wreck - and it’s entirely fair to blame the philosophers, since their hand has been on the rudder of the discussion.
And if any other discipline was as bad at defining and explaining their terms as philosophy has been with this “free will” thing, I’ve yet to see it.
Wait, are asking me to argue that religion has internally consistent logic that its adherents strictly adhere to? Seriously? You’re asking me to do that?
First off, I think that most theists resolve the apparent inconsistency by shifting the goalposts wildly, because such folk solve all apparent contradictions in their religion by shifting the goalposts wildly. It’s reflexive by now.
But a more simple answer is that I don’t think that any theist really believes in an omnimax god. To a man they claim that god does things for reasons - as in, he does what he does because that was the only way to achieve an intended result. He had to nail somebody to a cross in order to forgive everybody, for example. (Which incidentally makes him less ‘max’ than me; I can forgive people without murdering other people, like, 60% of the time.)
I’d be the first to tell you that omnimax gods are impossible, for the simple reason that when a god has both omnipotence and omniscience, it’s logically impossible for things not to be exactly the way they want them to be, because if there was anything wrong they’d know about it and could (and would) instantly fix it with an idle thought. This is the actual heart of the Problem of Evil - that presuming a god is sufficiently powerful, it’s impossible for them not to be enjoying everything they see. Literally impossible.
I suppose that, to be fair to the theists, I should add: it’s pretty common to hear them talking about “the gift of free will” that God has supposedly given to people. What does that mean? One of two possible things:
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That he injected randomity into the world (or at least people’s minds), and that gives us free will because “unpredictability” is somehow a non-idiotic definition of free will now. This would immediately and explicitly break omniscience of course - at least the type of omniscience that means to know the future.
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That he created a bunch of us with preferences and tendencies and inclinations that he didn’t specifically design. Basically he tossed all the traits in a pot, covered his eyes, mixed, and poured, creating a wide variety of interesting [del]toys to play with[/del] souls to mingle with, rather than a bunch of cookie cutter same ones. But, sadly, some of his new varied creations are too varied, and so now it’s time to do some QC.
It also should be noted that when I talk about people having used the “spooky soul” notion of free will prior to the philosophers jumping in and mucking things up, I’m not talking about an omnimax god, or even necessarily a christian one. Philosophy started before christianity did, and it took quite a while for the ‘my god is better than your god’ fish story of omnimaxness to take hold within christianity itself.
When you have to make a really tough decision, or let’s face it, any decision where you’re considering doing more than one thing, you have the feeling as though the mental processes that you cannot comprehend could work themselves out in a way such that you might end up deciding on either of the options available. The process of your neurons firing or not, and the patterns that form when they do so, is not knowable by the person who houses those neurons. The way they work themselves out may end up not being entirely a process of cognition, but a process where at some point one neuron in a pattern gets tired and doesn’t fire, and now the other pattern dominates and so a decision is made. Is that how decisions are made? I have no idea, but it has to have something to do with the chemistry of the brain. And that ties into the quantum randomness of how the individual molecules of sustenance and electrolytes that allow for your cogitation end up in whatever state they are in, and what direction they go in the randomness of bouncing inside all the water that constitutes most of your body. Before the final decision is made, you feel as though the process of thinking about it could lead you in one direction or the other, and you can’t know the result because it depends on unknowable states of the brain and possibly quantum effects that occur during thinking.
But wait you say, what about the kind of person who always makes bad decisions? If it was all randomness, wouldn’t there be less complete fuck-ups and less people who always know the right thing to do? No, because not every decision is weighted differently by the inherent randomness in the decision making process. Those who have the most developed neural pattern corresponding to making logical conclusions and thinking in the long-term are going to be overwhelmingly more likely to make the “right” decision, but is there a single person out there that has NEVER made a wrong decision? Likewise, complete fuck-ups do tend to manage to live some sort of life - they aren’t deciding to walk across the freeway all the time, so sometimes they do the right thing.
The details of the decision-making process are such that it makes us feel as though we have free will precisely because we have no way to determine sometimes how we will decide, and are perfectly reasonable in feeling that way. Is there an extra-dimensional soul directing these chemical activities? Probably not, but I don’t think such a thing can be 100% ruled out. They can be seen as unnecessary in our attempts to explain how humans feel they have free will, and so Occam’s Razor says we should assume that such things do not actually exist.
I don’t know how you can discuss will, free or otherwise, not in the context of a brain. But this chaotic behavior does happen in other cases. Consider sex leading to fertilization. Even if you could repeat it perfectly, you’d get a totally different mix of genes out since the movement of sperm is going to depend on more or less random factors.
I think that what people mean by it involves some little man in your head making decisions. I agree that this doesn’t happen. I’ve already given what could be a definition. Or more accurately a model.
My examples don’t even involve quantum randomness. Race conditions happen at a much higher level.
Given that, say a man making love to his fertile wife has a twinge that makes him decide to urinate just before. If he had not, his child would have been a genius, but since he did his child had developmental issues. (Or vice versa if you prefer.) His level of stress due to this caused him to get hooked on some sort of drug - or drink - which led to him killing someone when driving drunk.
Pretty involved string of events, but his personality is going to develop differently in these two cases.
Is this free will? I’ve already said that I don’t think you can tell if free will exists, but it sure isn’t deterministic.
This I agree with totally. One of the many, many arguments against an omnmax god. And God foreseeing his own actions is even a bigger problem.
Theologians will tell you, no doubt, that God lets people decide and then knows the results of their decisions, and so won’t be impressed by your issue. God has the power to force a decision - like in hardening Pharoah’s heart, whether or not he uses it, and that is okay since humans are not omnipotent. God’s free will is another matter. But let’s not get into that.
Once you accept the notion of soul at all, free will becomes quite possible to explain, since the soul can make decisions using but not determined by input and state. Which probably could get us into a discussion of what affects the soul, but we can’t do that until someone demonstrates one.
And I’m not holding my breath until that happens.
Well it’s certainly one of those debates that has gone on far too long.
Before neuroscience, before physics became a formal science, it sort of made sense to have this debate. But since that time, it’s morphed into a monster, because people all accept the implicit premise that there is this thing called “free will” that is conceptually consistent, and either does or does not exist in the world.
But because the concept is not, actually, clearly defined, you invariably end up in the weeds if you begin from that premise.
However I disagree that the blame rests with philosophers. From the earlier linked survey it appears that most of them understand the absurdity of the problem as it’s usually posed.
If I were to blame anyone it would mainly be the pop sci writers coming from a physics background. They are often the guys who are very dismissive of philosophy as a subject, but then go ahead and write a chapter of a book, or upload a video, “explaining” why there is / is not free will based on a fallacious understanding.
Actually, in a way, yes.
Because you were making the claim that to ordinary folk, non-philosophers, free will did, or does, have a simple pragmatic meaning wholly consistent with determinism. If you’re now conceding that most people are religious (e.g. in the US), and that religious people’s understanding of free will jumps around because they need it for example as a “solution” to the problem of evil…well, there’s an inconsistency there.
You can’t say both those things at the same time.
Agreed. Religion in general is baseless nonsense, but omnimax gods are worse…we can show that they lead to all sorts of logical inconsistencies.
But the soul only “works” because it’s left completely undefined. Or rather, it’s defined as the solution to the problem, and nothing more.
For example, we can ask whether souls are blank slates. Were you and I born with the exact same type of soul, that just diverged over time due to our experiences? Or did we begin with different souls? Either answer is problematic for the idea of the soul being the source of our “free will”, which is one reason why no theist will ever think too long about what the soul supposedly is.