# What is this free will I keep hearing about? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 10, 2009, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-this-free-will-i-keep-hearing-about/509574 "2009-09-10T16:52:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 123
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2009, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-this-free-will-i-keep-hearing-about/509574/123 "2009-09-21T21:56:34Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > But we’ve been through that over and over again: cause and effect, while a useful and utilitarian model for a lot of purposes, is NOT intrinsically “how things are”, not unless you can clearly distinguish between SET A the independent variable(s) and SET B the dependent variable(s) such that if Element X is in SET A it is not also in SET B. Because otherwise you are, at least in part, saying “Phenomenon J is caused by Stimulus-Precursor Z” when actually Phenomenon J is part of Stimulus-Precursor Z to begin with and not a separate thing at all. Actually, nothing I said precludes a thing from being a cause of itself (though I would, from other considerations, argue that nothing can be sufficient cause of itself), and conversely, some thing being a cause of itself does not eliminate the requirement of every thing being causally determined. > [@](#): > > SO, onward to human personal decision-making: I am saying that cause and effect is not a viable model and can’t play a meaningful role in any discussion thereof _because the “I” who am making decisions has already, as well as currently and concurrently, played a deterministic role in establishing all of those stimuli, all of those external causes_. Your dependent variable is already all stirred up with your independent variable. Basically, what it seems you’re saying, then, is that since both the river determines the path of the riverbed, and the riverbed determines the path of the river, the path of the river is free; well, I disagree – causal interrelatedness does not provide grounds for freedom (as I hope the river example makes clear immediately). > [@](#): > > Philosophically, rhetorically, argumentatively you don’t GET TO START WITH cause and effect as an already-established mechanism by which things occur, not in this context. But I do get to start with consistency, without which any position is self-defeating – and something both requiring freedom and directedness (as is necessary for will), which are synonyms for ‘not being determined’ and ‘being determined’, is simply inconsistent. > [@](#): > > In saying free will exists (in a meaningful way) I am saying the reason things happen can be understood in a way OTHER THAN and NOT REDUCIBLE TO cause and effect. Show a way in which anything can be understood that doesn’t rely on cause and effect. > [@](#): > > If you could start off with “well of course EVERYTHING that happens happens as a consequence of PRIOR CAUSATION” we would not be having this conversation. That’s just a rephrasing of determinism as opposed to free will. The reason I don’t start of this way is that it doesn’t need something as strict as determinism to rebut the idea of free will; it merely needs the notion that logical deductions are possible, i.e. that there exists a formal system whose deducible theorems represent true propositions about reality. This is, I believe, the weakest sense in which one is able to come to any meaningful conclusions about the world; reject this, and I have trouble seeing how you could ever assert anything with confidence (i.e. how you’d know that any of your assertions apply to reality by anything but pure chance). > [@](#): > > The will determines them; they are not “equally undetermined” or “equally probable”. One set is chosen. By the chooser. By that which is exercising the free will, the consciousness who does the choosing. If the choice of the consciousness is a state thereof, that implies the necessity of a choice of this state. If it isn’t, the state is undetermined. > [@](#): > > Lost me here once again, but I think the lostness has something to do with a model that you have in your head which i do not share. And it probably again tied in with the notion of prior causation, the notion that in order for me to make a decision there has to be a reason behind my decision and that the reason is not “of me” or “in me” but somehow is an external factor, a precipitator of the decision? if I’m on the wrong track, I’m afraid you’re still not communicating on this part of it… I haven’t said that the reason for your decision can’t be part of your state at one point or another; I’m not sure if it can be wholly determined by that state (for if there were an action that is wholly determined by your own internal state, it would seem that it is possible that there is an action that (sufficiently) causes itself to occur, which causes itself to occur, etc. – but there, one eventually runs afoul of simple thermodynamics), but it can certainly be influenced by it. But I have said that your own state – however fuzzily you want to define ‘you’ – is in itself at best either free or wilful, but never both. > [@](#): > > The two articles you linked to are less clear overall than you are. I haven’t the faintest glimmering of what the hell they’re talking about or what it has to do with consciousness, decision-making, causality, etc. Eh, it’s not all that important, really. More or less something like a time-travel paradox, just without the troublesome time-travel. As a matter of interest, if a time-traveller appeared to you, told you what you’d do tomorrow, and you’d find yourself doing exactly those things absent any manifest feelings of coercion, would you then consider your actions to be free? > [@](#): > > I am saying that for you to be conscious (period; never mind “of something”), YOU need to possess volition. I don’t know what you mean by “subject to volition” as used in this sentence. And I’m saying that I’ve got no idea what ‘for [me] to be conscious, \* need to possess volition’ could conceivably mean in such a way that it would actually follow. (And to a lesser extent, also what to be conscious means in the absence of being conscious of _something_.) > [@](#): > > This makes perfect sense. Maybe where we diverge is on the boundaries. To be “of free will” means that in some meaningful sense I am my own determinant, that my identity cannot be entirely extracted from the elements that give rise to my decisions (thoughts, conclusions, feelings, etc – the content of my consciousness). It is still determined, but when I say I reject determinism I mean the classic garden-variety EXTERIOR determination model whereby something ELSE that is NOT ME is the cause of everythying that _I_ do think feel etc. Nevermind exterior, interior, and whatever flavours of reductionism to holism you’d like to prefer – given the state of the universe at some point (seen from some inertial frame in spacetime, if we want to attempt some objectivity), could you or couldn’t you decide differently from the way you end up deciding? > [@](#): > > When I say (as I do in the beginning of this very post) that cause and effect are NOT simply “how things are”, I’m referring to the classical or conventional model whereby cause is one thing and effect is something else, and the latter is attributed to the former in a linear causal process. (Or a convoluted chain for that matter, but one which, if unravelled, would still take on the appearance of a linear chain of PRIOR situations and events giving rise to those that FOLLOW). So is a case like the aforementioned river, which carves its own bed, yet is directed by that very bed, a case of an exercise of freedom? --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-this-free-will-i-keep-hearing-about/509574)._