Whoa, what? I don’t know if you intended it that way, but your language here strikes me as being insulting, when i’ve gone out of my way to be polite and respectful. What you’re calling “indefensible and pathetic” is my definition of the word “free will.” You aren’t obligated to use it, but I don’t see how my use of the term to mean what I think most people lay and professional mean by it is subject to debate or judgment. I don’t see why it’s a problem for you. I’m not trying to score points here or shift the target for the debate. I think it is currently unknown just how tenuous and rare free will might be, but my point is that it exists even if it is tenuous and rare. Arguing that most of what we do isn’t subject to our free will is in no way an argument relevant to my position unless you can generalize it to all behavior. You’ve made solid effort at doing so, so I don’t think I’m setting an impossible standard or saying that you have to demonstrate that each individual behavior I could name is specifically specifically outside of conscious control. I’m just saying that if the topic of debate is unicorns, it only takes one unicorn to disprove the statement “Unicorns don’t exist.” And I’m telling you what I mean by unicorns so we don’t get hung up on narwhals or surgically altered goats.
You say “I’m guessing if I was, I wouldn’t be able to type so fast.” Why guess?
You can do it right now: type out a few sentences while conscious of each motion, instead of just being vaguely aware that you’re typing; I realize you usually make those movements without specific awareness, just intending the typed result, but so what? I can likewise enter ‘swift autopilot’ mode at will, and can likewise slow down for ‘consciously plan and execute each motion’ mode at will.
Sometimes I will a result without bothering to will the intermediary steps, and my body delivers. Sometimes I take the time to will each step along the way. As far as I can tell, that’d be the case whether free will is a mere illusion or whether I truly was acting on my own volition, free from remote-control beams or whatever.
Because words matter. There is a lot of baggage associated with “free will”. People have been beaten over the head with it for two thousand years. People use its supposed existence as an excuse to do nothing. “Criminals are just going to be criminals, right? Why try to rehabilitate them, when they are just so darn willful?” But maybe if we collectively let go of the notion of free will, our policy makers would feel more comfortable devising social policies that go right to our decision-making abilities. Like, instead of throwing drunk drivers in the slammer and ruining their lives, why not re-program them by making them more aware of their drinking habits?
Free Willers say that’s bullshit. Throw all the bad guys in jail and don’t worry about teaching them 'cuz their problem is moral character, not faulty programming.
Now, you may not believe this. I don’t recall you ever being a die-hard conservative, tough guy type. But a lot of people are. Perhaps they don’t explicitly reference “free will” in their argumentation, but they appeal to the basic philosophy. “We all make choices” is their constant refrain.
People still roll their eyes at the concept of mental illness, for the same reason. Only people who want to be depressed and anxious are that way, they say. You, personally, may not believe this. But when you insist that free will is a perfectly valid concept, no matter how much evidence there is against it, you’re endorsing that view. Whether you intend to or not.
I’m a scientist and thus a bit of a pedant. If someone says the Sun revolves around the Earth and they insist this is a valid belief to hold, I’m not going to spare their feelings. I’m going to tell to tell them that’s indefensible and pathetic. If everyone had stayed stuck on “self-evident” ideas, we would still be living in caves, shivering in the cold. We wouldn’t be sending probes to Mars, since we’d have an incorrect understanding of our world and the world outside of it. The words we use shape our thoughts and beliefs, which in turn shape our ideas and actions. Letting go of free will is one step towards being more enlightened as a society.
I also respect you as a poster, Alan Smithee. But I’m just calling it like I see it. I hope my passion hasn’t detracted much from my posts.
One major difference is that a chess-playing computer isn’t conscious: it doesn’t have numerous deep levels of self-observing routines and an awareness of its own awareness of its own awareness. (To however many levels.)
It also doesn’t have a bunch of conflicting emotional inputs – “If I win this game, my opponent will be mad at me and won’t have sex with me…but if I lose in an obvious way, my opponent will also be mad at me,” etc. etc.
Our consciousness is a big messy tug-o-war amongst lots of conflicting stimuli. It’s amazing it works at all. That it works well enough for us to choose our actions is, I think, best supported by the physical evidence I’ve referred to before: studying people who are not able to make decisions, and comprehending how and why.
Anyway, this is one of those threads on SDMB where we can go round and round, stating our beliefs, but failing (catastrophically!) to be convincing. (Same for the Star Trek Transporter debate!)
So…ultimately… I disagree…but can’t think of any way to make my opinions persuasive.
(Is there any possible scientific test that would support one view over another? i.e., with the Star Trek Transporter…we’d take the two individuals and test them. Can we do that here?)
I’m glad we can still be friends. 
The following was supposed to be an edit to my last post, but was way too long. I typed it before reading your last.
To clarify my position: I acknowledge that much of what we do mentally isn’t what we think we’re doing. I have no problem recognizing that our minds play tricks on us. I think that there are specific, narrow circumstances in which there is strong evidence for limited free will that can’t be explained satisfactorily by other theories without making large assumptions. Specifically, if I am choosing between a limited set of potential behaviors, and I talk myself through the pros and cons of each one, and come to a conclusion based on that, and then act on that conclusion, I think that I have demonstrated free will. It is possible that I’m wrong. It is possible that alien beings are creating that illusion in my mind and laughing at me, but that strikes me as unsupported by evidence and extremely unlikely. You’ve admitted that you don’t think it’s the case.
I think the crux of the matter is that we’re disagreeing on what generalization are most justifiable based on the evidence we have. I think that is precisely the sort of thing reasonable and knowledgeable people can disagree on. As I understand your position, you take into account the many, many ways in which we know, through strong evidence, that our minds fool us, and say, while we haven’t mapped out complex decision-making processes in the brain or studied them the way we have more simple processes, there is no reason to think that our perception of them is any more accurate, and so there is no reason to think that we are any more in controll of them that we are of the things we know we only think we have control over.
That’s a reasonable and appealing argument. I can see why you believe it and find it convincing, and given a slightly different set of background knowledge or personal experience, I might find it compelling myself. The reason I don’t is one I think you should be able to see is also reasonable and appealing to me, if not to you. First of all, I don’t think that you can dismiss free will simply because we seem to possess it. That is, however unreliable our intuitions are in this area, having an intuition towards a position isn’t evidence against it. And I think we DO have evidence in favor of some limited field of cognitive processing that I think meets my definition of free will. Specifically, the experiment I described before, in which I make a decision to do something through a process of internal dialog, and then do that thing. It could be something else, but it’s exactly what I’d expect if we have free will. It’s extremely close to being free will by definition. (Again, you’re welcome to use a different definition, but you also seem to be disagreeing on the facts, not just the terminology.) It is possible that it’s NOT free will. It could be prediction, but that would be an incredibly unlikely coincidence given the number and specificity of that type of prediction. It could be aliens beaming thoughts into our minds, but I find it easier to believe that our conscious thoughts influence our behaviors than to believe in mind-controlling aliens. It could be that I’ve never actually made a conscious decision and then followed through on it, and that all my memories of doing so are entirely fabricated falsehoods, soup to nuts. That would require a degree and pervasiveness of delusion on my part that would render further discussion, and even thought, pointless. It could be that consciousness and the illusion of free will are simply powerful by-products of other neural functions, and I suspect this is your position. It’s possible, but there’s no evidence for it (that I know of) other than the fact that many other cognitive illusions seem to be such. But that doesn’t explain how this illusion arose or give any specific alternative explanation for my experiment. It’s just throwing out my evidence without presenting anything else from which to reason.
You may be correct. It may be that the winds of neuroscience will continue to blow as they have, and will eventually give us evidence that presents a viable alternative explanation for my experiment (and the countless daily experiences that it models). But to say that is a prediction about what evidence we will have, not a statement about he evidence we have now.
Again, I don’t expect that argument to convince everyone (though I think it should). It’s not a slam dunk (though I think it’s good enough to tip the probability that I’m right past 50% to an impartial observer). It may not convince you. But it is my best honest attempt at evaluating the evidence I have at my disposal, and I think it is without any severe or fundamental errors.
I also think that our actual differences of opinion are fairly slight, and that they are magnified by differences in terminology.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this, not because I think what you said is silly, but because it is very much a mirror of my own thinking. I agree that people who hold a naive view of free will do harm in society in the way you describe, though I don’t think it’s quite as clear cut or universal as you seem to. I also think that people who dismiss free will entirely become less empathetic and see less point in helping or rehabilitating people because we’re all just robots anyway. I think there is research evidence showing that to be the case. And on a personal note, I suffer from depression, and I often have to convince myself that it really is worth getting out of bed and going to work because, yes, my decisions do make a difference in my life and I’m not just a powerless victim of my brain.
So we both have personal and emotional reasons to want our position to be the correct one. Politically (in the broad sense of the word) we’re on the same side. I want acceptance for people with mental illness. I also want compassion and evidence-based interventions for people who have committed crimes. I’ve tried not to let those idea influence my assessment of the evidence, but it would be foolish indeed to think I’m any better at avoiding “motivated reasoning” than anyone else.
If person A wants to have sex with person B is there no element of free will in this? Aren’t all these examples predicated on units acting in vacuums?
What about couples, cities, armies etc? how can that be predetermined?
I’m confused. Wouldn’t the argument be to do nothing because nothing matters if there is no free will? How can the argument to do nothing at all be on both sides of the question? Isn’t the concept of rehabilitation associated with Free will, and forgiveness too? What would be the sense otherwise?
I can’t see the inhumanity in free will, if that’s what you’re positing. Does the idea of no free will make you feel good?
If we are all defining the use of our wills within the world we live in as relative autonomy, why isn’t that free?
You (or anyone with any programming skills) can build a computer program that is completely non-deterministic very easily because true random number generators (as opposed to pseudo-random number tables that are predictable in theory) are available off the shelf. You can’t just hand-wave away chaos theory and quantum mechanics because that is what they use. A very simple example would be to build a program that plays rock, paper, scissors with you based on the seed provided by the true random number generator. Not even the programmer nor even the best scientist in the world could tell you exactly why it is making an a given choice no matter how closely they looked at the code because ultimate determiner is a true black box that nobody can ever look into even in theory. You could do the same thing with more complicated programs as well including chess AI and stock pickers.
There are theories that suggest the brain also depends on the same effects and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true especially because it is an analog network with hundreds of billions to trillions of connections that depend on constant and very sensitive feedback loops.
That doesn’t speak to the idea of free will directly but I believe it is a death blow to the idea of strict determinism in a system as complex as the human brain and behavior.
That’s true. My point was merely that free will doesn’t depend on any of that (even if brains do) except to the extent that any system complex enough to have free will may necessarily involve chaos theory. But it would still make sense to evolve an ability to analyze data, to conceptualize the future, to do all the things we associate with consciousness and free will, in a purely Newtonian universe.
You are assuming too much here, for me at least free will is vague language for volition with no further religious or otherwise baggage. In the real world language is rarely precise, like if a person said an event hurt their soul I don’t immediately assume they are even religious.
RE: The OP, one problem is that, depending on your definition, free will isn’t falsifiable. That’s why it’s in the realm of philosophy. Neuro-scientists are going in circles measuring reaction times or studying retrospective construction, which is how people rationalize choices they didn’t make by making just so stories about their agency. Which is interesting, but doesn’t really do much.
Philosophers can’t even agree on what free will is, even if had God like powers like rewinding time. Like whether the principle of alternate possibilities matters or if it’s a red herring.
Are you a dualist? You seem to be arguing that subjective experiences can’t be reduced to the physical properties of brain states.
I didn’t invent the standard argument against free will. You should be blaming the Greeks, I think. If our brains are indeterminate it means our actions aren’t based a strict causal chain. At some point, something random happens. It argues random actions aren’t compatible with a will because there’s no responsibility on the part of the agent. Something just happened out of nowhere. You can’t freely choose a random thing you didn’t mean to.
If you think indeterminacy and free will go together then congrats, you’re a metaphysical libertarian.
If “decisons are made in the mind” what’s making them? If the maker of the decisions is “the person” then the person has free will. If the person does not have free will then the decisions are not being made by the person, but by something else. In which case the “Something Else” has free will, does it not?
If everything is a clockwork mechanical intricacy in which everything is caused by something else, is anything anywhere doing anything on purpose?
Something somewhere says “I am”.
And you say in reply “no you aren’t”.
This whole “free will versus determinism” thing is just the bottom-side of the identity question: who AM I, when I say “I am”, in response to the question of whether anything anywhere is doing anything on purpose?
Say a person has no free will, but his actions are determined by what he has done and the inputs to a situation. If you can’t predetermine the inputs (which you obviously can’t) you can’t predetermine the actions of this person without free will.
And even in the free will situation, the answer to whether person A will have sex with person B is strongly influenced by person B’s sex. Who knows what less obvious determining factors we have. Even if we make decisions as determined by a program running inside us, we all seem to have different programs.
I freely admit that I have always been confused about this “debate” because different people seem to be talking about very different things at fundamentally different levels. Are we talking about whether there are unconscious processes and environments that greatly influence behavior or are people arguing that everything you see is part of a predetermined and immutable script?
Posters like monstro seem to be talking about the former much more while others are speaking at a philosophical level that argues that there can never be a real choice at any level.
Shagnasty: Agreed… There are at least two different kinds of “will” here: philosophical free will, and theological free will. There are also two different kinds of determinism: absolute Newtonian determinism (which is pretty much a dead letter, and I don’t think anyone is actually arguing) and a more limited form, which might be called “computational” determinism.
The last point is a very good one: it says that either a machine’s decisions are determined by the prior state of the machine, or else there is a randomizing process, in which case the results are just coin-flips, or else there’s a non-physical actor of some sort.
I can’t wholly rebut this, but I do believe that a process can entail some randomness, without actually being random itself. Even simple PC-based chess playing programs, for instance, use randomness – or else they’d always make exactly the same move from any board configuration – but the result of the game is far from a coin-flip.
I believe the determinism side, as I have described it, presents a false dilemma. But, again, I’m not good enough to argue persuasively for my side. I’m afraid it really does fall into the bottomless pit of “You believe one thing, and I believe another.”
I think you meant “Is strongly influenced by Bs sexual persuasion”?
I wasn’t asking whether A will have sex with B, but whether there is free will in the system (The singles bar if you will) on the part of B. If B can choose without being retrofitted by someone saying “Yeah she was loose”
Seriously, let me ask this one for the non-free willers on the board, sorry if it’s been covered.
What is the practical effect on a man when there is no free will? How does it differ from having free will?
Computers either use pseudo-random algorithms or an external source of randomness such as noise on the microphone input (actually even the pseudo-random ones use an external input to initialise the algorithm - for example the time in microseconds between the computer being switched on and the start of the game).
Thus, a chess-playing computer will play exactly the same game over and over, if all of the inputs and starting conditions are the same every time. If the opponent is a human, they never can be, of course.
This was actually one of the two blunders Poe made when exposing “Maelzel, The Chess-Playing Automaton” to be a person hidden in a box.
He argued that, from a given position, a machine would always make the exact same play. He didn’t think of the possibility of a little mechanical spinner, like a tiny roulette wheel, that could randomize choices.
He also argued that the machine would always win, because a machine must have completely solved the game of chess in order to play it. He didn’t know about algorithms to assess the strength or value of a given chess situation, which allow machines to play an imperfect – but still darned strong! – game.
Why would free will be predicated on being able to ignore the constraints of outside forces like, I don’t know, the laws of physics? I still don’t understand why free will opponents seem to believe if there are things that are impossible, we have no free will. There’s a vast gulf between not being in control of any choices and not being able to make any choice.
To put it simply, it is extremely arrogant to pose the question in the thread title when we don’t understand in the least why our universe exists at all. All I know is that I popped out of my mother’s vagina as a conscious being about 42 years ago and I truly believe that I can make choices based on that consciousness.
Truly think out that for a second (or a lifetime if you are a truly deep thinker). There is no philosophical reason for anything in the proceeding statement to exist and yet they all do. How did that happen exactly?
There are some huge pieces of the mystery missing. Science can address some of the objections to the concept of free will but it also introduces some analogous concepts especially in the realm of quantum mechanics. The leading theories in that field state that even fundamental particles have something like free will themselves and are completely unpredictable even in theory no matter how much information you have.
This is a good example of something that people with low levels of knowledge take for granted and true experts take seriously at a very different level but the mid-level players try to discredit because they only understand a part of what is being said.
I think we can all agree that people only have some control over their overall behavior. Environment, upbringing, genes and lots of other things play into that. If you told me that you were going to lose 30 pounds and get a GED by the end of the year, I understand that those things may not be completely under you control based on circumstances (or they may be) but that is not what I am talking about at all. I am talking about the fact that you could ever make such a choice at all or if you (and everyone else) are just following a predestined journey like a ping-pong ball in an overflowing river.
It is the latter that many of us are objecting to and I know that nobody in the world understands consciousness even at the most basic level let alone the ability for that emergent phenomenon to enable choices. I do not appreciate it when people declare intellectual victory on things that they not only do not understand but will probably never understand.