Of course, chaos theory would appear to preclude determinism in any form. Newton, I’ve heard or read, once said words to the effect that if he knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at one moment in time and had sufficient computing power, he could therefrom extrapolate the entire past and the entire future of the universe . . . but, no, he couldn’t, not even under those conditions.
And it follows that not even God could – not without sticking His finger under the glass of the cosmic pinball machine.
How did your DNA encode your body?
Free will is a holdover from the philosophical battles of the dark ages. Like the much touted question about the reason for the existence of evil, spending time mulling it over is a fairly hollow pursuit.
These things were the best we could do to put off boredom in the days before television and the internet. We have much better stuff to waste our excess mental energy on nowadays.
What if they are, say, suffering from a bout of blunted affect that makes them temporarily incapable of empathy? Are they less worthy of help and more worthy of punishment than somebody who say, committed a crime because they thought Satan told them to? I think mental illness could compromise someone’s moral faculties in many ways, though it’s not politically correct to say that.
I’m surprised Straight Dope is sticking up for free will, then again most of the people here were also saying the Gospels are factual history in another thread I started. I wonder if you’re actually all Crypto-Christians (I’m kidding!)
Just because the future is indeterminable, doesn’t mean it’s not determined. Even if it was a random process, that’s not the same as an X factor of free will.
Information is lost in this process.
However, information is created by the overall process of evolution.
As noted above, absolute determinism would not allow that to happen.
We’re sticking up for philosophical free will – human volition – not theological free will.
If you don’t believe in the ability of humans (and other mammals, and some birds and reptiles) to make choices…well… Give me all your money, eh?
Yes, to quote: “Not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself”.
By which logic no entity is free, since we are all bound to the surface of a spshere by gravity. And birds are not free either because they are bound by the atmosphere and so ad infinitum.
Since nothing and no one is free by this definition, “free” becomes meaningless. It;s a four sided triangle. Something that exists semantically but can never exist in reality. Of course that is logically invalid. An entity can exist in a state even if that state is not absolute. My fridge is cold even if it’s not at absolute zero.
I also think that you are confusing will and action.
People can have *will *determined only by their own nature even if their actions can be forced by outside entities. To give the crudest example, I can imprison someone, but they didn’t decide to spend years in a single room, it was simply their physical action.
The same applies to issues of free will. I have a reflex that causes my knee joint to straighten when the tendon is stretched. That is a physical action that I have no control over. I also have the ability to straighten my knee joint through an act of will. To a casual observer, it is impossible to distinguish one act from the other. But there is no dispute that the mechanisms of those actions are completely different.
I have an (apparent) freedom to will my knee joint to straighten any instant, despite the fact that at times the exact same action will occur without or even against my will.
Or to put it even more simply, I am free to will my knee to straighten or not at any moment. Whether that will is overridden by some outside agency at the exact same moment does not change what my will was.
In the same way, a bullying may ask another child why he is hitting himself, but no parent or teacher will buy that as an excuse because they know that the bully is overriding the victim’s will.
This is where the free will argument has always resided. Everybody in the history of the world has known that it is possible to constrain a person’s physical actions or to “break” a person’s will. These aren’t novel psychological discoveries.
The question regarding free will has always been whether people have the ability to choose in normal, “domestic” circumstances, absent overriding external forces. I don’t think anybody has ever believed that humans can’t be manipulated, coerced, tricked or tortured into making the wrong choices.
That is kinda the whole point of Christianity, that even “perfect” people like Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ can be tempted, threatened or deceived into making the wrong choice and that imperfect slobs like the rest of us actually *need *God magic to free us from these temptations.
None of that has prevented the free will debate from raging. The argument that humans have free will can’t be refuted by the fact that some actions *can *be forced. The point is that the vast majority of actions are *not *forced are are entirely open to choice.
Whether that’s correct or not is an issue i am undecided on, but it certainly can’t be refuted by pointing out that some subset of actions are outside conscious control.
Being incapable of empathy does not mean a person is not responsible for their actions IMO. If you understand that you are doing something punishable and do it anyway, you may be punished. I feel very little empathy with David Cameron. I wouldn’t wish torture on him, but if he were to die tomorrow, I would be pleased. I still understand the legal and moral prohibition against murdering him though. If I were to attempt to cause him physical harm, I would deserve punishment.
The whole concept of free will is incoherent. I think one of the early responses nailed it, but then the discussion went to the familiar stops of “Going against our instincts = free will” and “There’s no free will, so any sense of choice is an illusion”.
Your choices are the product of nature and nurture, because that’s the only way that “choice” even makes sense. A kind of choice which is somehow separate from how you’re “wired”, and your past experiences, and yet not random either…what would that even be? How would it materialize?
Souls only “help” with such problems while we ignore questions like “Do souls start out as identical blank slates, or are there good and bad souls?”
So free will is at best ill-defined. But that doesn’t mean your choice is an illusion. You are a thinking machine. You take the inputs of your experiences, and your instincts, and make decisions. And that decision-making process is not an illusion. I could not predict your actions without simulating your brain and its memories (essentially making a copy of you and asking it what it wants to do).
Determinism is only a problem for religion, because we want God to not be culpable for human actions. Well, tough shit – no-one can think of a coherent model of how decisions are made that means an omniscient creator bears no responsibility for our actions.
Without the illusion of free will it is hard to maintain the illusion of a separate self. So in essence, truly realizing that there is no free will is a form of identity suicide. Or enlightenment, if you wish.
Computers and insects can analyze their environments and make decisions. Making decisions is not free will, as most people use it. Not that they can define it. But they use free wll usually as something humans have because we’re so great. The ability to have done otherwise, for example.
Remember the Fundamental Problem of free will:
- If our brains are determined we are not free.
- If our brains are indeterminate then our choices are random, thus not free either.
Compatibilists like Dennet don’t believe in free will as most people use the term. Their position is basically you’re free to make the choices your brain will let you.
One interesting snag in the debate is that studies show when people are exposed to anti-free will arguments they become increasingly anti-social.
This sort of moral panic seems similar to people who are afraid of becoming atheistic because then morality doesn’t exist. Personally, I don’t see the angst in either case. We should all recognize our limitations as biological robots, however advanced.
What I find troubling is the existence of qualia / subjective experience of the conscious self, in the sense of why it even exists. It must be useful somehow, since it evolved and is conserved. But…why? That’s a whole other thread, though.
Right, and the point I was trying to make is that instead of declaring “There is no free will” as though it’s a specific fact about our universe, we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether the concept itself makes any sense. Can we concretely define any universe in which free will could exist? How would it operate?
Remembering of course that you are your brain. It’s important to recognize that our decision-making process is not illusory.
Agreed.
I think this post nicely encapsulates the debate. I disagree strongly that Dennet and other compatibilists use free will differently than most people. If you ask people what that mean by free will, then yes, they will give you a theory that is different from compatibilism and is in fact not compatible with determinism, quantum mechanics, or chaos theory. But that’ snot necessarily what they actually mean by “free will.” People confuse theory and phenomenon all the time, and that’s what’s going on here.
At one point, if you asked people what they meant by the word “star” they’d have told you that it referred to the lights embedded in the celestial spheres encircling the Earth, or that they were holes in the divine firmament. But proving that neither the celestial spheres nor the firmament exist didn’t disprove the existence of stars in anyone’s mind because that’s not what they actually meant by “star.” What they actually meant was, “those things I see apparently in the night sky, whatever their nature or source may be.”
The fact that people exposed too anti-free will arguments change their behavior in certain ways is PROOF that they don’t really mean by “free will,” “an ability to make choices unrestrained by physics or the nature and state of my brain.” The types of behavior changes people make when exposed to anti-free will arguments only make sense if they are interpreting “free will” to mean the “the ability to make choices that meaningfully affect my future free of external coercion.” They may think this is only possible in a world with souls or other supernatural entities, and explain free will in those terms, but that just means that, like premodern astronomers, they are wrong (even radically wrong) about the theory behind the phenomenon, not about the existence of the phenomenon itself.
Telling people that free will doesn’t exist, even when you use carefully defined philosophical terms and arguments, leads them to draw false conclusions about reality and about the psychology of human beings. They falsely believe that people are less capable of making choices than they are, that behavior is less modifiable than it is, and that the choices we make have less effect on our environment and our selves than they do.
OTOH, telling people that free will doesn’t work the way they thought it did, that our ability to make choices using internal mechanisms free of external coercion is compatible with (and in fact occurs entirely in the context of) chaotically and stochastically deterministic systems, that it isn’t a supernatural suspension of physics, but the natural property of very complex self-influencing physical systems, and that it is both constrained and influenced by the nature of those systems in specific ways, will (I very strongly suspect) lead to fewer false beliefs and more rational behaviors.
In theory, they both mean the same thing. Both sets of philosophical arguments describe the same situation. The debate between compatibilists and non-compatibilists is almost entirely semantic. But it has real consequences because non-compatibilists unintentionally create a straw man version of free will that leads consistently (and demonstrably) to confusion and miscommunication.
Anyway btw that study’s results could not be replicated in later attempts.
What does “If our brains are indeterminate” mean?
Do you mean if they are not determined?
If they are not determined doesn’t that mean they are free?
Didn’t you just try to slide one by?
You have it exactly backwards. Determinism isn’t a “magical force”, it’s how the physical world works. Trying to invent or rationalize a physical basis for free will – now that’s magic!
Exactly. In other words, free will is entirely subjective, an outgrowth of consciousness. It doesn’t matter if our actions are predetermined and theoretically predictable, we are making free choices as long as we think we are, and we have free will as long as we think we do.
Chaos theory doesn’t preclude determinism. It’s just a way of describing complex systems for which a deterministic description is impractical or maybe even impossible. That doesn’t mean that those systems are not, in fact, deterministic.
In a previous incarnation of this topic, this question was asked repeatedly.
To me, it doesn’t seem that hard to imagine what free will would look like, but we would certainly need to have the right technology to verify it. Like a very sensitive bran scanner that could serve as a lie detector, of sorts.
If we have free will, we should be able to choose our thoughts. Which means we should also choose our feelings. Which means we should be always conscious of our thoughts and feelings. There should be no hidden urges or behind-the-scenes calculations going on. What is in our conscious mind is all there is.
Using our brain technology, we could see how reliable a “witness” we are to our own inner brain processes. In a free will universe, everyone of sound mind would be able to accurately report whatever is going on in their mental processes. There would be no such thing as a “just so” story, and our scanner would comfirm this.
Another thing we could look for:
If there is free will, that means people’s behaviors largely arise from idiosyncratic factors inherent to their character. We shouldn’t be able to predict with high accuracy what individuals conforming to a certain profile will do. Like, in a free will universe, I would not expect the children of abusers to be more predisposed to becoming abusers themselves as adults, since individuals with free will do not act according to external programming or hardwiring. They rise above these influences without any problem, as long as they want to.
I would not expect hypnosis to work in a universe with free will. Because hypnosis involves engaging one’s subconscious and I don’t see how a mind laden with all those hidden urges and hidden decision-making is compatible with free will. I also wouldn’t expect most marketing techniques to work. People would buy products because they’ve intentionally willed themselves to like them, not because the products speak to their biological or psychological compulsions.
Nor would I expect automatic thinking. Most of the decisions we make in life are done automatically. We aren’t usually conscious of changing lanes on the highway, or which foot we step with first when we step off a curb. Again, if we aren’t actually conscious of what we’re doing when we do it, how can we say that we were “free” to make that choice? If I don’t know why I do the things I do, how can I say I exerted the will to do those things? So in a free will universe, I would not expect people to talk about “being in the zone” or “going on automatic.” They would be in control all the time. And our magical brain scanner would confirm this.