You are still not making a case for “free will”. As marshmallow said above, while determinism may invalidate “free will”, so also does randomness. We base our decisions on information, some of which may be from sources we cannot perceive (you chose the tikka masala, the palak paneer and the biriyani, but not the vindaloo at the buffet because of biochemical signals your body issued indicating what sort of nourishment it needed at the time, but you could not perceive those signals consciously – indecision is not evidence for “free will”). If there is an element of randomness to our decisions, then you simply change us from robots to roulette wheels. In neither of these formulae is “free will” a meaningful term. Perhaps the dichotomy itself is not valid?
Well, there’s now about three different very messy sub-debates going on.
One: what the fuck does “deterministic” mean if it can be compatible with “random?” How can the time of an atom’s decay be both “determined” and “random.” If ordinary language won’t suffice, then someone needs to define the term in whatever private language physicists use.
Two: what does “free will” mean? I only believe in human volition, in everyday choices. The strict dichotomy seems to leave out the middle ground of human choice in the rather ordinary sense of the decisions we all make every day.
Three: how do we make decisions? Yes, most definitely, there are unconscious influences. Yes, to some degree we make up explanations after a decision has been made, justifying it to ourselves. But that story-making is also a part of the same human mind that made the decision. Otherwise, you can ask the same question: “Who is making up the story?” Ultimately, it’s still “us.”
We are neither roulette wheels nor BASIC programs (although the latter is closer to the truth, given an interpreter of the massive complexity of the human brain.)
There are some severe linguistic problems in this thread. People are throwing terms around that have very unclear meanings.
Let’s start with “random” first and then get to quantum afterward.
So you’re flipping a coin. It’s heads or tails. Fifty-fifty shot, you think. You make a guess. You do this twenty times. You get about half of the guesses right.
So you play again. You’re flipping a coin. It’s heads or tails. It seems like a fifty-fifty shot but your pal Superman is the one guessing this time. Before the coin reaches the top of its arc, he calls out the answer. You do this twenty times. He gets the answer right nineteen out of those twenty times.
How did he do that if the result is “random”?
He has access to more information. His eyes are better: he can see the coin clearly, not as a blur, as it’s spinning through the air. His mind is faster: he can extrapolate the current spin of the coin to the top of the arc, then back down to the ground. He knows the air pressure and temperature. He knows where on the carpet the coin will hit. He knows how bouncy the carpet is. “Random” is a word that applies to our personal state of ignorance. It does not apply to the rigid laws of nature.
Another example.
You’re playing a game similar to the Price is Right’s Plinko. But the Plinko disc itself is much, much, much smaller and there are more pegs on the way down. At the top of the board, you use a computerized arm to drop the disc. The computerized arm allows only discrete starting positions, but it is nevertheless very precise. It allows literally billions of discrete starting positions. At the bottom of the board are the slots for the chip to fall into. They are very, very small – just large enough to catch the chips. The labels of the slots alternate heads and tails. There are no other labels.
You choose a position with the arm. The computer tells you it’s starting position #1,288,115,732. You drop the chip and it bounces down through the board and falls into one of the heads slots. You drop the chip from the same starting position, and it falls down into heads again, the very same tiny slot. And again. And again. It falls into heads every time it starts from that position.
An idea strikes you. You decide to change the position of the arm one number higher, to starting position #1,288,115,733. You cannot physically see the difference between the two positions. As far as you can personally perceive, the arm hasn’t moved. But you drop the disc… and it falls into a tails slot this time, some distance away from the original heads slot. You do it twenty times, and it falls into tails, the same slot, twenty times.
You switch it back to the original state. You can’t see the arm move, but you drop the chip anyway. It’s heads again, the same first slot. You have chosen two different starting positions whose difference your senses can’t detect, but whose outcome reliably results in two different “random” events.
The room is climate controlled. The engineers tell you that to the best of their knowledge, almost perfectly half of the starting positions will always drop the chip into slots marked heads, and the rest into slots marked tails. They haven’t tested all possibilities, but they’ve taken a large sample of starting positions, and from each starting position, they’ve taken a large sample of trials. This game is not “random”. It works according to the laws of physics. Eventually the chips will become damaged, the pegs will become worn from impacts, and the results will change. But the game is not “random”. It follows the rigid laws of physics.
If you, with your unsteady human hand, were to drop a Plinko chip without aid of the machine’s precision, you’d have no better than a fifty-fifty shot of guessing right. The game is so sensitive to starting conditions that you can’t tell the difference. The “randomness” is not a result of physics. It’s the limitation of our knowledge.
And now on to quantum. Or rather, pseudo-quantum in our case.
We’re going to return to a variation of Game 2.0, and we’ll call it Game 2.Q. This new game is extremely similar to Game 2.0, but it runs exactly four parallel worlds instead of one world. It’s deterministic. The same thing will happen every time. The four parallel worlds start identically. There is no difference between them at the start.
During the exact mid-point of the predetermined running time of the game, the entire stock of bananas within the game runs a “random” chance of dissolving away. (It’d be too much bother to program the decay of individual potassium atoms, but it’d be easy to have discrete items labeled “banana” and have all those banana dissolve.) Here’s the thing. The agents might know about this property of bananas, but they won’t know which world they’re in.
The program is this: in Worlds A, B, and D, the bananas are fine. Nothing happens to them. It’s only in World C that the all the bananas dissolve away at the midpoint of the game. This happens every time the game is run. World C’s bananas are always fucked.
What happens is this: in all four worlds, running in parallel but never interacting, the parallel agents make identical decisions to their copies in other worlds. That is, until the midpoint of the game. Then in one quarter of the worlds (specifically in World C), the bananas all disappear. From that point, three of the worlds continue to move identically with each other to the end of the simulation. The odd one out, World C, will move differently because the agents of this world are now deprived of the banana energy resource.
The worlds split 75% to 25%. There is nothing “random” about this. It is part of the deterministic program. It happens every time Game 2.Q is run.
But the agents inside the game are still deprived of this information: They don’t know which world they are in. They all act identically until the pseudo-quantum event. They appear indistinguishable until the pseudo-quantum event.
But they’re not. Three worlds are one type of world, and the fourth is a different type of world, and the agents inside have no way of perfectly knowing what type of world they are in until after the split.
So let’s say I give you a video feed of one of the worlds, and I don’t tell you which world it is. The agent on your screen is holding a banana it just found. The moment is shortly before the midpoint time in the game. The agent is considering something: whether to consume the banana now even though it already “ate” and doesn’t really need the energy yet, or to take the risk of saving the banana for later in hope that it will still be there. It doesn’t know for sure which world it’s in. You don’t know either.
But it can run the calculation. (The technical term for this is an intertemporal utility calculation: it’s evaluating the expected gain from eating the banana now, versus the expected gain from not eating the banana.) It runs the probabilistic calculation. Its parallel agents run the same calculation, but you can’t see them. It decides to hold the banana. There’s only a 25% chance that it will disappear. It continues walking around until midpoint time in the game.
The banana disappears! Ah, it’s World C you’re looking at. It dies later of starvation. Its three brothers in the other worlds survive and reproduce.
This happens every time the game runs.
The universe is what it is. It is not confused about itself. Confusion lies only within the minds of the agents who inhabit the worlds, because their brains are smaller than the whole. Much, much, much smaller. There is nothing random about their universe. It follows the rigid laws it was given. And those rigid laws indicate that the bananas all disappear in World C. They do not know which of the four worlds they inhabit. The apparent randomness is the result of their ignorance. Their brains are much smaller than the entirety of the universe. Game 2.Q is not the way real quantum physics works, not even remotely close, but it does illustrate the nature of “randomness” in a deterministic world. Randomness is not about the nature of the universe. It’s about our state of knowledge. (It’s not ontological. It’s epistemological.)
Now I want to repeat two things I’ve already written in this thread.
First:
This is the reason why I argue determinism instead of “free will”. I have no idea what free will is supposed to mean, but I do understand determinism. I speak about what I can better understand.
Second:
I’m not advocating my own infallibility here.
I’m just saying that deterministic physics could easily explain what we see in a clearly defined manner. The physics of the MWI is fairly well defined, well, at least compared to Copenhagen. In contrast, what is the physics of “free will”? No idea. No one ever tries to answer that question, because they can’t.
Do you think that the decisions you make are a result of the physics and electrochemistry going on in your physical brain? That the resulting output (decision) has been produced by physics playing out, possibly with a little bit of quantum randomness thrown in?
If you answered “yes” to this, I don’t see how that answer is compatible with the common, contra-causal idea of free will.
“Volitionally” means that the reason for the agent’s behavior is the agent’s intention. The agent is behaving that way deliberately, on purpose, having chosen to do so.
“Deterministic”, as I take it to mean, asserts that the reason for the agent’s behavior is the matrix of causal stimuli that elicit that response, in which case the agent is behaving that way automatically, mechanically, as the the direct consequence of the causal stimuli.
I mostly don’t give a rat’s ass about what various camps and clusters of other people have said in the past about determinism and free will. I’m in here fresh and I’m not affiliated with any of those camps.
Let’s consider this “compatibilism” thing. The easy way here is to say that in the case of the above-mentioned agent, it is simultaneously accurate to say that the reason for the agent’s behavior is the causal stimul AND that the reason for the agent’s behavior is the agent’s own volitional intention to behave that way.
Because, as you say,
Me, I don’t have an issue with folks who say “a causal determinism model is a good and useful explanation of all behavior”. I only have an issue with people who say “a causal determinism model is the only explanation for any behavior” and/or “free will is an illusion, it doesn’t exist”, by which I assume they are espousing the belief that the agent’s volitional intentions are not an explanation for the agent’s behavior. Or that, if they are, they’re only an explanation in the limited sense that causally determinant stimula CAUSED the agent to have those intentions and via that mechanism went on to cause the agent’s behavior.
If that makes me a traditional orthodox “compatibilist”, well, cool beans, useful to know that I’ve arrived at a vantage point others have identified as their own, but I’m not arguing as a person on an existing “side” of a debate already in progress. I might or might not agree with some other assertion or perspective of these compatibilists.
In my opinion, the fact that this information exists at all negates the definition of random. it reduces the case to “pseudo-random,” as in certain (very good!) computer algorithms.
I do answer yes…and I do not think that human decision-making is “contra-causal.”
Has anyone here in this entire thread said they believe in something “contra-causal?” I don’t see it. Why is my ability to grit my teeth and go on a diet – or my failure to diet, come to think of it – contra-causal?
You’re making an enormous claim here, and I don’t see either that anyone agrees with it, or that it follows at all from the evidence. What has ever happened in this world, other than maybe the Big Bang, that is contra-causal?
If someone points me in the direction of a camp that I can agree with, I’ll happily join 'em. So long as the dues aren’t too steep, and I don’t have to drink any chicken blood.
I don’t even have an issue with the claim that volition and consciousness are in part illusionary. I readily accept that there are significant holes in our perception of the universe, and in our perception of ourselves.
I can’t buy that my choice of lunch today was determined 13 billion years ago; I don’t see how that information could possibly have been encoded in the hot gas of the Big Bang. The process of entropy has allowed for enormous creation of information, locally, which can not possibly have been in existence at the beginning.
I can very easily accept that my choice of lunch today was heavily influence by advertising, social input, the weather, traffic conditions (I was heading for one restaurant, but the offramp was too crowded.) We certainly don’t have unlimited free will.
But we do make decisions, and to call that an illusion is pointless, as it reduces everything to an illusion. The freeway was crowded. Nope, just an illusion. There’s a full moon tonight. Nope, just an illusion. I think therefore I am… Nope, just an illusion.
So, whatever camp I’m going to join won’t be one that supports absolute choice, absolute predestination, or absolute randomness. If Compatibilism is the word, I’ll get it tattooed on my knee.
I’m certainly not claiming that we have contra-causal free will, which is just another term for libertarian free will, and I think the people who frequent this board realize that it’s senseless. However, most people out there think we do have this contra-causal free will, and that’s what they mean by the term “free will.” They reject the idea that the output of their brain is entirely dependent on the regular ol’ laws of physics inside their brain.
We all seem to agree here (I think) that your brain is a physical object, and its mind is the result of physics doing its stuff. I guess we’re just discussing whether to call that “free will.” I’m trying to point out that for the idea of free will that most people in the world subscribe to, is not what we here agree on.
Like, dependent on the “soul” or something?
I certainly don’t see any use in a “magical” kind of free will…and so I just use the phrase to mean the ordinary kind. To me, “free will” is perfectly consonant with material models of brain function and psychology…because that’s how I think the term is best used.
It seems to me that this ordinary kind is perfectly valid, theologically. Religious free will really is little more than the ability to make decisions that have a moral basis. The ability to do “right or wrong.” In fact, if Adam’s disobedience came from his soul, it would indicate God flubbed when he made that soul. But if Adam’s disobedience comes from his body (material mind) that doesn’t reflect as poorly on God.
In any case, I have never liked the line of argument, “Free will is a meaningless concept,” not only because it appears to impugn ordinary human volition, but also because it makes perfect sense in theology. Instead, I would argue for the nomination of a special phrase to indicate “supernatural free will,” to distinguish it from ordinary decision-making.
(This particular topic seems more heavily booby-trapped with terms having multiple meanings than any other topic I know of.)
On this board there are those of us who consider it misguided or misinterpreted to say that the thoughts in a person’s mind are a deterministic consequence of physics or chemistry, external context, history, or anything else.
The person’s mind is a part of the entire big picture and hence is affecting everything else just as everything else is affecting IT. Hence it is no more “caused by” those other things than it is “causing” them.
Good news - there’s already a term, libertarian free will or contra-causal free will.
I’m completely OK with that. But you should try sometime mentioning to a religious person that his mind is a consequence of the laws of physics playing out in his brain (and getting its inputs from the external world). 80% of the time you’ll get a reaction of shock and horror.
I’d probably be a less irritating presence in these recurrent debates if someone would kindly dissect out for me whatever the heck it is that religious theologians are trying to do, or did historically try to do, with the notion of free will.
I consider MYSELF theistic but in an unconventional way; in my experience, theo folks are as often likely to argue against what I think of as free will as anyone else — Presbyterians and Calvinists and their predestination, Catholics and their original sin, born-agains and their turning everything over to God, etc…
Does it have something, somehow, to do with culpability, with being held accountable? Or with the theological importance of it being YOUR CHOICE to accept God versus turning your back on, that kind of thing?