Free will is nonsense. Your thoughts and actions are not decided upon abstractly and unencumbered by your genetics, environment, circumstance, and brain activity. But then again I would say that wouldn’t I?
You most certainly can, but that decision making does seem to be influenced by emotions attached to “like” and “dislike”. We appear to use logic, reasoning, and past experience to analyze and model the possible outcomes of hypothetical decisions, and then tag each possible outcome with an emotional value. (“Do I like outcome A more than outcome B?”).
(Cite: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Chap 9, in discussion of the work of neurologist António Damásio)
In the white vs. rye example, you may enjoy white more, but decide that rye is healthier and that outcome is more desirable. If you were unable to feel emotional responses to the white vs. rye question, you would be unable to make a decision. (As Damásio observed).
Not really. “Subliminal” suggests that the processes are happening below conscious perception, and that does seem to be how decision making works.
We seem to make these decisions based on the factors above (logic, planning, emotional weight), and then (only after we have made the decision) do our conscious minds supply a plausible rationale for the decision. This rationalization process takes place after the decision has been made, and people will construct elaborate explanations for behavior that they have undertaken.
(Don’t have cite reference to hand, but Pinker: Blank Slate is the source).
Or, to look at this in slightly different terms: In order to take any given action, you must first want to take this action. Right? Thus, let’s define the will as the variable that stores this wanting. If you want icecream, the will stores the value ‘want icecream’.
Now, free will, as it’s most commonly interpreted, means that you and you alone are in control of the value of the will variable. So, let’s say you intend to change the value to something else – like ‘want beer’. But, in order to actually do so, you must first want to do so – thus, the will variable will have to read ‘want to change the value of the will variable to ‘want beer’’ before you can take action to actually do so! That’s all well and good – if the will variable stored that want value, then you can proceed and change it to simply ‘want beer’. However, how’d it get to have that value in the first place? Did you set it? Well, if that’s the case, then the value of the will variable must have read, at some earlier point, ‘want to change the will variable to ‘want to change the value of the will variable to ‘want beer’’’, or else, you could not have done so.
And there’s the problem – in order to be able to set the will variable to any value, it must have previously gone through infinitely many other values; an infinite regress, and one of the bad kind that actually would have to be completed before any action could take place.
So, determinism is actually a red herring – the problem lies in the logical impossibility to will one’s will.
Free will simply means the will is within the agent itself and not an outside entity. You can make an argument about determinism, but this is really not an argument about free will but instead about whether the concept of “identity” is valid.
That’s because what you think of as free will is different from the reality of it. The idea that people act unpredictably does not necessarily lead to a conclusion that people act completely randomly. We have a general idea of what types of behavior to expect from people, but we had no way of knowing for sure, in the way we can know for sure exactly what angle to blast off the earth from to land at a specific point on the moon, or the speed of light, or what you’ll have leftover when you combine two chemicals. No amount of science brings us any closer to understanding and predicting what people do. That’s a good enough explanation for “free will” for me, if free will is the opposite of “determinism”.
Even the science types have mostly abandoned the idea of determinism in the face of the randomness of quantum mechanics. I’d be surprised if anyone actually believes human behavior is deterministic in reality. It’s fun to consider, like when SentientMeat graces us with his presence, but at the end of the day, nobody can even begin to develop a vague, basic philosophy of how to understand and study behavioral determinism.
You can also not predict the behaviour of three gravitationally interacting masses; does that mean they have free will? Does an unstable atom exercise its free will when it decays at a perfectly unpredictable point in time?
We know that the interaction between more than 2 gravitationally interacting masses CAN be predicted. It’s not a question of whether gravitational interaction is predictable in a philosophical sense. We just haven’t developed models accurate enough or computers powerful enough to do the math.
Like I said before, the fact that we are uncovering layers of honest-to-goodness unpredictable phenomenon points very strongly in the non-deterministic direction. It can definitely be argued that anything reacting in such a way has free will. Our version of free will might have some more profound source than random decay of atoms, or it might not. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.
I don’t really buy this one. I see it as entirely plausible that the brain be developed with a set of basic beliefs (a pre-installed operating system, sort of), that are the result of biological/chemical/whatevs processes, rather than conscious/neurological ones. I don’t really see willing one’s will as a problem - of course, you’ll have to will it first, but that will could very well have evolved from a basic, preinstalled one.
Absence of determinism, however, does not imply free will. It’s like flipping a coin to decide whether or not to go for beer, rather than submitting to your preexisting wants.
Although I myself am a firm believer not only in unfree will, but also determinism, I’d like to make reference to a quaker Voltaire mentions in one of his letters, who’se view on the matter I find rather poetic. He sais that people’s wills indeed determine our choices, and in that respect we’re not free. God, however, gives us the wills we deserve, based on our heart’s content. This, of course, is merely begging the question, but its the most beautiful excuse for free will I’ve come across. (I don’t know if it’s a view prevalent among quakers, but a quaker friend of mine seemed to recognize it.)
But is it impossible for the unpredictableness of humans to be of the same kind? That we just don’t have the powers to do so? And by the way, no matter how powerful your computer, once you enter the realm of deterministic chaos, perfect predictions are an impossibility.
That might fit the requirement of freedom, but how does something like that meet the definition of will? There is no intention in the atom’s decay (or not more intention than is determined by its physical circumstances – i.e. the fact that it is an unstable atom), and how is a will without intention anything but random?
As I said above, the question of determinism is, basically, a red herring. Mere indeterminism (or indeterminability) does not grant you free will; the concept itself is not logically sound.
I don’t know how I missed this bit, but this is plain bollocks. Sociology and psychology, for instance, although they might not be the greatest of sciences, are both far beyond “vague, basic philosophy.” Memetics, to me, seems a very promising endeavour. And I am at a complete loss as to understand how anyone familiar with the consistent and predictable changes in personality caused by certain brain damages, can foster a notion of free will - neurology, as such, is my strongest candidate for a “philosophy of how to understand and study behavioral determinism”. And plenty of people have more than begun to develop an understanding of neurology, I’m sure you’ll find.
No, not after a certain time with any accuracy. As I explain here, once the system requires more than 10[sup]120[/sup] flops (PDF), the so-called “Lloyd limit”, predicting the system requires information capacity in excess of the whole universe, and is an impossible task. Many systems are “hard-irreducible” in this way, including the weather, protein properties, even a couple of hundred entangled particles. One would not say that any of these systems had free will: they are deterministic but not determinable.
To misquote a great mind: Do, or do not. There is no choose.
Well, yes, but that basic, preinstalled one would not be free, right? It would have to be pre-set, and that’s just what my analogy was meant to demonstrate – that ultimately, the will can not be set by you according to your will.
'course! I think it was the way you put it that was a little confusing to me. Like you were introducing some new nuance to being unable to will one’s will, perhaps.
What better definition of free will do you have? I think the problem is nobody here can agree on what free will even means. I think I provided an acceptable definition, which is “not deterministic,” so at this point all we’re doing is arguing semantics.
I’m still waiting for a better definition of free will. Non-determinism combined with intent is an acceptable edit to my definition, if you’ll let it fly. If not, you’ll have to provide a better definition than I did, or we won’t get anywhere.
Isn’t that just another way of saying exactly what I said? The system in your example IS deterministic, we just don’t have the capacity to calculate it. Anyway, the philosophy of determinism is the direction I wanted to take this discussion, so I’d rather not get any further into whether it’s logistically possible for phenomenon A or B can ever be perfectly modeled.
Intent presupposes will, so that would merely be circular. And if you define free will as non-determinism, then yes, you trivially have free will if the universe exhibits some sort of non-determinism. The same would hold if, for instance, you defined free will as non-greenness; it would, however, have little to do with the notion of free will as it’s commonly understood.
I gave a definition above couched in my ‘will variable’ analogy, which is that nothing but you determine the value of the will variable. Analogously, one could say that the will (the value of the will variable) does not have sufficient prior cause – because, if it had sufficient prior cause, it would be determined, and hence, not free.
The will is what you want – like ‘I want icecream’. Only if this wasn’t determined by prior causes – likes, dislikes, favourite flavours, hunger, etc. – would the will be free; however, since it has a determinate value, it must be determined, and hence, can’t be free in that sense. The value ‘I want icecream’ is as determined as the position of three interacting bodies at arbitrary t, as determined as the fact that an unstable atom decays; all that indeterminism could conceivably give you would be an element of randomness – which may be free, but, precisely by the virtue of this freedom, not subject to will.
Definition 1: nondeterministic. By this definition, a flipped coin has free will. Most people would reject that definition. (Typically used in discussions about the POE, to absolve God of various responsibilities for its creation.)
Definition 2: Decisions are the product of complex internal calculation - “You” make the decisions, possibly in an predictable manner if somebody fully understood the thought process. May or may not be completely deterministic, but presumes that non-deterministic effects have a minor, negligible, or nonexistent effect on final decisions.
Definition 3: Completely uninfluenced by anything, including one’s own knowledge, opinions, and preferences. Nonsensical, but I’ve seen it used.
Definition 4: “It just works”. Typically attributed to souls or something else that is non-examinable, and presumes that our decisions and whatnot just ‘happen’ without any mechanism at all. In my opinion, this requires you to close your eyes to and deny the fact that decisions based on knowledge require a mechanism for processing and judging the knowledge - whether or not the mechanism is available for examination.
“Nonderterministic, but with will” sounds like definition 2 to me, but backwards. In definition 2 the nondeterministic aspect of the decision-making process (if it has such an aspect) is not a good thing - it’s noise in the system. To the degree that we are coherent, that we are rational, that we have will, those processes are not random. Those processes speak of retained identity and rational decision-making processes, which necessarily must be constrained by deterministic processes to a huge degree.
Myself, I think it’s a certainty that if randomity is introduced into the system it is corrected for by the cognition process, the same way that computer circutry largely ignores tiny fluctuations in voltage. If this was not happening, we’d be twitching randomly all over the place, as the randomity expressed itself in our motor functions, and we’d all be prone to cognitive (and verbal) tourettes’s syndrome. No, all human unpredictably aside, our behavior is largely devoid of cognitive white noise. Our ‘unpredictability’ is focused and directed.
Points all taken - all I was trying to do was describe what it would have to be - even if that creates new logical problems. In order to be free, it would pretty much have to be supernatural, and not accessible or pertaining to inquiry or examination, except by its large scale effects.
Not sure. I’m talking about emergent properties - maybe our thoughts can be explained by all the little mechanical things that comprise them, but we can also think about ourselves, think about our thoughts, etc - the meta-stuff influencing the detail.
I guess… but I’m not sure - maybe there is some way for the emergent property to become the driving phenomenon. I’m not going to try to assert anything like that thought, because I have no particular dog in this fight - I’m just an interested observer.
As Damon Runyon said, “Free will may be impossible to prove, but that’s the way to bet.”