Who determines human actions?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Translated as free will, the Latin phrase liberum arbitrium (coined by early European philosophers) literally means independent arbitrator, where the quality of arbitrator points out human beings’ faculty to decide on the worth of anything, whereas that of independent refers to their capacity of self-objectivation. Regarded as Man’s ability to cause his own course of actions by his own means, free will is defined as the control of instinctual and emotional behavior through reason.

**Thales of Miletus **(624 BC - 546 BC) Thales does not trust people’s capacity to control themselves and their own fate. His attempt to give a naturalist explanation of the world is regarded as the beginning of science and philosophy. He urges people to lead a just life but believes their morals have a better chance of reforming under an autocratic rule.

Anaximander *(610 BC – 546 BC) *Anaximander is the first to conceive a mechanical model of the cosmos (possibly only one of a series of worlds), to use the principle of sufficient reason and to put forth a theory of evolution. The laws governing both nature and human society stem from an eternal and indestructible entity that makes the ultimate motive force of the universe (somewhat similar to the modern concept of energy).

Anaximenes (585 BC - 525 BC) Anaximenes is the first one to put forth a theory of the soul and to also employ the microcosm/macrocosm argument in his natural philosophy. Human beings’ actions occur under the influence of a ubiquitous divine element that shapes both the universe and Man.

**Pythagoras of Samos **(580 BC - 500 BC) The first to state that the thought processes and the soul are located in the brain (not in the heart), Pythagoras considers human freedom to be the ability to subordinate passions to reason.

**Heraclitus of Ephesos **(535 BC - 475 BC) Heraclitus shows that people are endowed with both will and awareness, which allows them to make resolutions and act morally. Man is regarded as a voluntary agent, whose awareness of the nature of reality and human condition can determine him to undertake morally correct actions.

Xenophanes (570 BC – 480 BC) Xenophanes implicitly denies the possibility of free will, given the limited scope of human experience and reasoning. Since the truth of reality is inaccessible to human beings, knowledge can only be used as working hypotheses.

Parmenides of Elea (510 BC - ?) Parmenides denies the physical possibility of natural phenomena or human action, and he would find the question of free will irrelevant.

**Philolaus ***(480 BC - 405 BC) *He is the first thinker to put forth the idea that the earth is not the center of the universe. Although Philolaus never considers the concept of free will, he establishes a clear opposition between thinking, on the one hand, and emotions, desires and perception, on the other hand.

**Protagoras **(490 BC – 420 BC) Protagoras is an agnostic: “Many things prevent knowledge including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

**Archytas of Tarentum **(428 BC – 347 BC) Archytas is convinced that people, as creators of culture and civilization, can preserve and develop their humanity only through the exercise of their intellectual faculty. Archytas insists that reason is human beings’ sole faculty that can free them from the dominance of instinctual and emotional behavior.

**Empedocles ***(490 BC – 430 BC) *Empedocles considers human beings to be potentially perfectible by refining their knowledge.

Democritus *(460 BC - 370 BC) *The first thinker to realize the Milky Way is composed of distant bright celestial bodies and to suggest the universe includes numerous worlds, Democritus emphasizes the epistemological and ethical importance of reason. Rational interpretation of sense data helps grasp the truth, while rational control of emotions and instincts allows people to fulfill themselves as strong characters.

**Socrates **(*469 BC – 399 BC) *Socrates’ ideas show a conviction that Man is endowed with virtues and it is their cultivation which can allow for his best self-fulfillment because Man’s will can only manifest freely under the influence of knowledge of the good and of the truth.

Plato* (428 BC – 348 BC) *The first to put forth the idea of knowledge as justified true belief, Plato thinks it is only reason which can ensure a person’s inner harmony through the control it should exert over will and desires. Thus, will can only manifest freely under the influence of knowledge of the good and of the truth.

Speusippus (407 BC-339 BC) Speusippus regards Man as able to reach happiness (untroubledness) by means of rational control over his desires.

**Aristotle **(384 BC – 322 BC) Man reaches his purpose or happiness by developing the learned faculty of controlling his irrational side through reason. The “autonomy of will” thus attained allows for voluntary actions, whose causes lie within Man himself.

**Stilpo **(380 BC - 330 BC) Man can reach his highest happiness by freeing his mind from the control of passion.

Carneades *(214 BC – 129 BC) *An atheist and a radical skeptic, Carneades is the first to claim that metaphysicians have failed to identify rational meanings in religious beliefs. Neither senses nor reason can allow people to acquire truth: all knowledge is impossible, except for the knowledge that all other knowledge is impossible. People manage to live and act correctly by means of probabilities of truth, the only ones that can be determined. The world is the result of chance, but human beings can freely choose what to do due to their “free movement of mind” and the ability to be the cause of their own actions.

42

nm, mistake

43

Which is, of course, merely a name for a cognitive process arising from physiology and thus as subject to determined physical forces just as much as everything else in the universe. I’m not seeing the disagreement you have with determinism, if there is one.

44

That describes me pretty well. For a label, I would say “Non-determinist”. Of course, I always pretend I have free will. That’s the way the quantum flops.

45

Thing is, physical things aren’t “deterministic” to that degree. There is plenty of variation in physical events. Pool balls don’t break exactly the same way. Take a hillside that’s having a landslide: the same event would fall out different if repeated.

To claim that our behavior is determined indefinitely requires the information to have been present at the Big Bang. All of Shakespeare’s work would have had to have been encoded in the energy cloud at the universe’s origin. Pure determination excludes the creation of information or the acquisition of knowledge.

You might be able to argue for a limited kind of determinism, where a person’s actions of the next five minutes are physically determined. But that Barack Obama was determined to be President of the U.S.A. from the day he was born – or from the day Julius Caesar was born! – is absurd.

At very least, you have to give up on absolute determinism.

46

I “voted” for the libertarian position. I believe I have the capacity to choose, to make choices that are not completely determined (though they are certainly influenced and limited) by pre-existing circumstances. There are things I’ve done today that I could have done differently. I know that it feels/looks to me as though I have free will, though I can’t prove that this feeling isn’t an illusion. If it is an illusion, though, I have no real choice whether or not I believe in it or worry about it.

47

There is nothing absurd or inherently self-contradictory about the idea that all information – from Shakespeare’s works to Barack Obama’s presidency to the particular habits of an individual apatosaur born in 151633291 B.C.E. – was encoded in the universe all along.

The idea is, however, contradicted by the observation of non-deterministic phenomena like radioactive decay. I’m not arguing that. The universe appears to be non-deterministic, i.e., there are significant random factors at play. If you could repeat a landslide’s initial conditions, it would of course play out identically to the last grain of sand, but that’s a short-term effect. A hundred years hence you’d probably notice differences in the saplings pushing up through the scree, because they’ve had a while to accumulate divergences based on unpredictable particle effects at the quantum level. A thousand years, a million years later, the differences will be magnified exponentially.

This is why I mentioned earlier that I voted Determinist with a caveat. But the question in the poll was, “Who determines human actions?” To the extent that there is any determination at all, it is down to the nature of the individual actor, which is a product of its physical state. I don’t know what scale of time or space is necessary before the random effects become observable, but I don’t doubt that such a point exists. Call that “Limited Determinism” if you like.

My problem is that I don’t think the definitions of Combatibilism or Libertarianism are coherent. They can’t be meaningfully distinguished from Determinism or Limited Determinism by any experiment, real or imagined.

48

“Free will” should properly by placed in the category of folk psychology. It’s a useful abstraction for conceptualizing how we think. But it breaks down under close scrutiny. There’s no way to fit it into what we actually understand about how the brain functions at a neurological level.

49

I think the scrutiny you talk of is orthogonal to the framing of free will as a description of our cognitive processes. More to the point, however we conceptualize volition, it doesn’t create a third possibility on the continuum between determined and undetermined (random) things. This is what I mean when I say that Libertarianism is indistinguishable from Determinism. I agree that folk psychology is probably a fair classification of it.

That should be “Compatibilism,” of course. :smack:

50

We don’t have an integrated mathematical model of how the Universe works, but we don’t cringe over theoretical concepts such as “dark matter” or “branes” the nature of which is only hypothesized.

There are many compatibilists, but that’s not due to their poor education or poor reasoning - they simply choose the hypothesis that seems to best clarify human behavior in their opinion. (This is the reason I would rather call myself a realist instead of a compatibilist.)

Suppose you are asked: “Who turned the Universe from a dark place into one with comparatively so much light?” You would probably point at the causal chain of events that started with the burst of expanding hot energy, continued with the coagulation of leptons, electrons, photons and atomic nuclei and ended with transparent Universe when the initial temperature dropped and photons stopped interacting with matter on a regular basis.

Would you answer the same if the question were: “Who turned the world cities from the dark places they used to be into ones with comparatively so much light?” (It wouldn’t make sense to blame it on the Big Bang for humans’ waste of electric energy either, would it?)

Thomas Edison is the main (but not the sole) cause of the existence of so much light in our cities during the night. Which of the following statements do you agree/disagree with?

  1. Edison’s actions are part of the Universe’s causal chains.
  2. Edison is an identifiable cause for city illumination.
  3. Edison had a purpose in mind.
  4. Edison generated a plan for achieving his goal.
  5. Edison used his intellectual abilities to achieve his goal.
  6. Edison knew what he was doing.
    I for one agree with all six and believe that there is a qualitative difference between the manner in which light appeared in the Universe and electric illumination appeared on Earth. Thinkers have coined this qualitative difference free will and, in my opinion, it is characterized by the properties implicitly included in the six statements I have listed above.
51

Is your position equally skeptical as regards to string theory given the fact that it has not produced any new experimental predictions at accessible energy scales?

52

Actually, I doubt that, too. I think that the variations in events are so chaotic that the landslide would have observable differences. Even quantum variations can add up, and the differences would diverge. (Yes, definitely around a core of similarity, but the 50% variation line would be observable.)

You can’t bounce a billiard ball vertically on top of another for an infinite number of times. But the fact is, you can’t even bounce them that way ten times. The smoothest possible ball, placed to the most exact position possible…is off a bit. The event explodes into ergodic chaos.

53

Could the disagreement reside, to begin with, in the fact that I believe a statement such as “I want to create a blog.” describes a fact whereas you may believe this statement is true only if it is interpreted as “I feel I want to create a blog.”?

54

I’m not well-enough informed to have an opinion on string theory, I’m afraid. But any proposed explanation that cannot even with the flightiest wishful thinking distinguish itself from the explanation it pretends to oppose is barking up the wrong epistemological tree.

Are you sure about that? Sure, you can’t bounce billiard balls vertically – but that’s not because of chaos, that’s because of intractable imperfections. When I say “repeat,” I mean exactly repeat. Could radioactive decay really accumulate into a macroscopic effect in such a short timeframe (on the order of seconds or minutes)? I honestly don’t know, but my gut says that it’s too small a source of chaos to be visible so quickly. I could be wrong. Either way, my point is more or less the same.

55

I’ve answered “other”. I don’t believe in free will. My actions are the result of complex biochemical processes. But since I am these complex chemical processes, I’ve no issue stating that I chose these actions.

56

There is no such thing as free will. Most people who believe in it mean freedom to choose stuff, not free will. You’re allowed to choose between chocolate and vanilla, but which one you want depends on your brain and the “wanting choice” has been made before you are aware of making the choice. After the fact you rationalise your choice, explaining it as free will, when there is nothing particularly free about it.

What drives human action? I like Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration: structure and agency as mutually constitutive entities. Individuals act with purpose, but they are not free in doing that. Structures enable and contain what we do. These structures do not exist independently of us: we make them and we are made by them.

It sounds somewhat similar to compatibilism, only without free will.

57

The baby doesn’t make a choice to avoid the fire. He has no option other than avoiding it.

58

Because those hypothetical entities have other properties. They’re not just tautologies. You keep dancing around the point I’ve been making over and over again – namely that “free will” is a vacuous concept. You offer it up as an explanation for what determines human actions. But the only thing that you’re able to say about it is “it’s the thing that determines human actions”. It has no properties other than it’s own self-referential definition.

I would answer that it was an ill-posed question. It presupposes an actor (“who”) and a teleology (that turning the universe from dark to light was a thing to be done, rather than just a thing that happened).

I would agree with all six, but only because folk psychology provides a convenient language for talking about how people behave one a day-to-day basis.

So if you were to say “Is free will a useful way to conceptualize what humans do?” I’d agree with you completely. It’s a perfectly valid shorthand for a constellation of neurological events. The problem comes when you start treating “free will” as something that actually exists, and not just a representational convenience. Treating convenient representations as ontological truths is a category error.

59

Free will is no more and no less a problematic construct than causal determinism.

The fact that the thing I can describe as a large cup of coffee can also be described as an assortment of protons neutrons and electrons doesn’t make it NOT a cup of coffee. Even though every! single! bit! of it can indeed be described as protons neutrons and electrons. Remove all of those and there is no cup of coffee any more, and yet even so it isn’t true that it is “really” an assortment of protons et al and that the “cup of coffee” no more than a shorthand or an illusion. For that matter it can be described as an interacting matrix of quarks that have a “tendency to exist” whose interactive dance creates the structure otherwise described as protons and neutrons and electrons. But the latter aren’t less real either.

Causal determinism is a highly useful model for understanding “why” something happens, in a certain sense of “why”. Free will is a very different one. The explanatory powers of the former don’t invalidate the latter.

The fact that the “reason” yonder cup of coffee ends up in my belly is that neurochemicals causes certain muscular contractions to occur doesn’t invalidate the fact that the “reason” it ends up in my belly is that I wanted to drink it and did so on purpose.

60

Grin! Heck no! The real sad part about some ideas – from String Theory to the Many Worlds interpretation – is that they are (almost?) impossible to test.

Agreed…but even if those imperfections were eliminated, you’d still have the quantum uncertainty of the exact center-of-mass of the two balls. Even if the error was on the order of the Planck Length, with every bounce, it would multiply. Exponential growth takes care of the rest. (And I don’t believe that the two balls could, even in abstract theory, be aligned to within one Planck Length!)

I hadn’t even thought of radioactive decay: I was thinking more on quantum uncertainty, increasing exponentially. “If you add a little to a little, and then do it again, soon that little shall be much.” Hesiod.

We definitely need an Alternate Universe machine (WABAC?) to make these kinds of tests!