If I am in charge of what happens, where it’s all up to my approval and my choice, then I am alone and there is no other with whom to interact, to affect or be affected by. So, speaking as a thread-discussion participant who has declared for the free will side, this is a problematic truth. Many of us free will folks make reference to how it feels, our actual felt experience of being alive, to underline the relevance of our feeling of being volitional creatures, of being consciousnesses making our own choices.
Because what we also experience and consider to be real and relevant is the social experience of communicating with others. Of being *not-*alone. Of intimacy and sharing and connecting.
So, umm, aren’t the determinists going to see this as a gaping hole in what we’re describing? If we’re not alone, our willful selves are bumping up against actions and presences and notions and other stuff that’s coming from the others who constitute our environment. We operate within a context.
Of course, not being a determinist, no I don’t know that that’s how determinists would perceive this issue. But can I play the straw man game if we both agree the straw man is of my creation and doesnt’ represent any actual determinists? Just conjecturing to help clarify my own thinking and maybe elicit some interesting comments?
Going back to the very emphasized sense of being a choice-making conscious deliberator and decisive presence taking actions of my own choosing and all that… to me what seems coherent here, not like a strategic argument but as what I actually think is real, is that for every interaction between a conscious entity and a context, there is a more inclusive self that can be defined as the interaction thusly described.
I have no insight into your inner experience. I can believe what you say, but only as constrained by the laws of physics as I understand them. You don’t get any credit for things that I believe to be impossible. Therefore, if you (as I do) do have the inner experience of free will, whatever it is has to be compatible with some combination of determinism or randomness.
As for external inputs, those pose no conceptual problems for a determinist. All it ever meant is that for the same inputs, you get the same outputs.
Does free will have to be an all or nothing proposition? That is, you can’t have free will unless you believe there are no constraints at all on your decisions? (I may be misreading the OP, but that’s what it sounds like to me). To wit:
That does not seem like a sensible or tenable assertion. Any more than that determinists believe that every last motion of the molecules and particles in one’s brain is pre-determined so that even your thoughts are constrained by previous events.
How about that you have free will within constraints of reality, a reality that includes other people and prior events and influences that affect you. By the OP’s apparent definition, such a state would be neither free will nor determinism.
It doesn’t seem a million miles away from the position articulated by Leibniz. From the Discourse on Metaphysics:
For speaking absolutely, our will is in a state of indifference, in so far as indifference is opposed to necessity, and it has the power to do otherwise, or to suspend its action altogether, both alternatives being and remaining possible. […] It is true, however, and indeed it is certain from all eternity, that a particular soul will not make use of this power on such and such an occasion. But whose fault is that? Does it have anyone to blame but itself?
So Leibniz proposes a radical form of compatibilism, where there is perfect determinism, but the only cause any entity can point to would be itself. So the price he pays is that the world essentially decomposes into ‘windowless monads’, each of which has its own program to follow and which is not affected by anything else—they are pregnant with the future and laden with the past, as he sometimes puts it. Anything they do, and even all they experience, is already contained in their essential nature, only unfolding through time.
Of course, this means that we don’t really know of anything but ourselves, so he has to postulate a ‘prestabilized harmony’ where everything evolves in sync—so there is never any causal relation between two distinct entities, they just behave according to their own nature in such away as if there were. As for why things should be set up that way, well, God.
In previous discussions I noted how the subject of Free Will is nonsensical if one thinks that it is all there all the time, or if it does not exist. This is because there is a lot of a middle that is missing that I proposed that this subject should be the poster boy of the excluded middle fallacy.
For starters: the ones proposing total determinism like to point at the recent experiments from Benjamin Libet.
In the 1980s, Libet’s experiments, involving measuring brain activity (specifically the readiness potential or Bereitschaftspotential) and individuals’ self-reported timing of their intention to act, showed that the brain’s preparation for movement (readiness potential) occurred about half a second before people consciously reported their intention to move. This finding led many to interpret it as evidence against free will, suggesting that our actions are initiated unconsciously and that our feeling of conscious intent is merely an afterthought.
Well, things is that even Libet said in essence: “not so fast!”
Crucially, Libet himself did not interpret his experiment as evidence that our decisions are predetermined. Instead, he proposed the concept of “free won’t”, suggesting that while our brains might initiate potential actions unconsciously, conscious will retains the power to veto or block those actions before they are carried out. He believed this “veto power” was the essence of free will, allowing us to consciously choose which unconscious impulses to act upon and which to suppress.
Now, for the side that claims that free will is there, IMHO, as an emergent property as me and others think it is: it follows that free will happens, but on limited situations and it has to do a lot on what people does know or learn, and the society where they live.
Certainly. I mean, if we don’t fix the internal state, are we even talking about the same person?
Though one can imagine a minimally altered internal state; one that would be undetectable, though still with an influence. That influence would likely grow over time due to chaos and quickly result in very different outcomes. Everything is still perfectly deterministic, but since the original difference was undetectable the actions appear to be random or even exhibit “free will”.
I figured as much, but just wanted to make it clear for people who haven’t studied finite automata. This is exactly why I think the question is not decidable given any likely technology. We’ll never be able to record the state of a person, let alone set one, and thus won’t be able to do an experiment to see if the same inputs and states can produce a different output.
Quantum mechanics means that you’d still get randomness producing different results from the initial state. But quantum mechanics is just as much opposed to free will as determinism, as much as people like obsessing over the latter.
Both violate the premise that we are physics-breaking superbeings whose behavior is dictated by a magical black box in our heads. The most important aspect of “free will” is that it caters to our ego, the idea that we are special.
Only if it were some magical property we only had because we’re somehow uniquely singled out, but few attempts at crafting a sensible notion of free will are like that.
Besides, if it were on offer, I’m not sure that I’d actually want to have free will. Sure, there are plenty of activities where I enjoy having a say in their outcome, a game of chess comes to mind, but equally, there are others where I’m quite content with just being along for the ride—watching a movie or reading a book, for instance: nothing I do will have any influence on the action, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. Or riding a rollercoaster: I can even see the tracks, yet it’s still an exciting experience. Why shouldn’t life be like that and still be worth living? An exciting ride you’re privileged to experience.
Plus, in any activity where you have a hand in how they turn out, there’s the option of screwing up, while if you’re just acting out a script, you’re always doing the best you can, because you’re doing the only thing you can. So believing in that should be hugely relieving—no performance anxiety, no worrying about what I should really have done in any given situation, no fear of failure: or even if those are there because they’re part of the script, then that’s all they’re there for—as part of the play (whose hero is the conqueror worm).
So why would I want free will if I can spend life watching it from the couch, so to speak? Being free doesn’t make me be special in any way—it makes me, at best, like all of the other assholes who can’t get their shit together and ruin their health by eating bad food, ruin their relationships by worrying too much about their own anxieties, ruin their finances by making bad investments, instead of just making better choices. What the hell of a shit deal is that?
(However, I do have a feeling we’re rather straying away from the OP’s intended topic of discussion. Maybe it would help to clarify what that topic is actually supposed to be?)
And of course these are extremely primitive forms of stimulation. Imagine a full VR experience, with every sense replicated, and even your brain states being directly stimulated. It would be so immersive that you could get lost in it.
When mulling on the idea of the world being a simulation a while back, with people actually being creatures participating in some kind of VR game, I first came to the conclusion that it’s impossible: we’d have noticed that people seem like they’re being remote controlled. But then I realized that wasn’t necessary. It could just be a very immersive movie from their perspective; one that is so realistic that there’s no need for actual control.
nods. In my own OP above, I point out that requiring total, absolute “My decisions are not in any shape way or form caused by anything but me” situation in order to lay claim to free will leaves us with ourselves being the only things in existence. I do think it is ridiculous, and ridiculous to impose such an absolute demand in the first place. Whatever it is that we mean by the term, that ain’t it.
That doesn’t mean that, in discussions, it won’t end up being thrown forth as a reason that free will can’t exist, and I wanted to grapple with that.
I’m not a physics-breaking superbeing. If there’s a black box in my head dictating my behavior, that black box had better be me because otherwise my behavior is being dictated by something that is not me, which would obviate any claims to free will, if you see what I mean.
This is actually what I was driving at, though: an infinite hierarchy of self-and-context. Whatever it is, within any such interaction, that is “dictating my behavior”, is the locus of a self that has free will.
No; if your behavior is being dictated by you that’s determinism, not free will. Cause and effect. Your thoughts, desires and experiences affecting your behavior are all examples of cause and effect, which means determinism, which means that if free will existed they wouldn’t have any effect on your actions.
People just have this idea that “determinism is bad”, therefore they look at obvious examples of determinism and claim they are “free will”.
I believe that this best describes it. Free will may not be equal for everyone as we are not equal in the choices we have to make and the experiences we base our decisions on.
Honestly, I’ve always been less interested in the debate itself and more in the implications. “Free will does/doesn’t exist, therefore people should work towards a society that is or does X, Y, and Z.”
This is one reason I drew the connection I did in the head injury and crime thread; there was a little dipping toes in the water there about implications.
I know a lot of people do approach the issue from that direction. I have to confess, I find a lot of peoples’ interpretations of the implications to be bewildering. For example, a lot of folks who embrace the notion of free will are in favor of penalties and punishments as imposed by the criminal justice system. To me, reward and punishment are behaviorist and hence determinist-camp modalities, go figure!
No; “choosing” is a deterministic process, the decision-making processes of the brain making a choice based on learned skills, experiences, natural tendencies and so on. All cause-and effect determinism.
Free will rejects determinism, therefore free willed behavior would mean your actions have no connection to your thoughts and desires. You’d just be a puppet trapped in your body constantly yanked about by the black box called “free will”.
Which yes, doesn’t resemble reality, but that’s my point; the world doesn’t look at all like one with “free will”. It looks like one that operates on a mix of determinism and quantum randomness, not undefinable eldritch forces.