That “i.e.” does not follow at all, fyi. The fact that your emotions are neurological states that obey the laws of physics when they influence your behavior does not imply that they are not part of your “self”.
The point is that the notion of a “free self” that is anything other than computation, anything other than neurological states that obey the laws of physics, is incoherent nonsense.
I agree, but I’ll note that this presumes we live in a material and causal universe, without supernatural forces. The concept of a “free self” is not incoherent if you use other frameworks - say, a dualist framework where we have an immortal soul that’s entirely separate from the material world.
Now, I don’t think we live in such a world. There’s no evidence that we do (other than maybe our subjective feeling on the matter), and there’s lots of observations that we make that are compatible with a material universe but not a dualist one. But if someone else looks at the evidence and decides not to rehect the dualist premise, then I don’t think it is possible for us to have a “meeting of the minds” on the subject of free will. We are operating from incompatible first principles.
I know you’re playing devil’s advocate here, but I don’t agree at all that this is a possibility that makes the concept of a “free self” any more coherent. Dualism just dodges the question, it’s like postulating a homunculus inside you that’s “free”, it’s turtles all the way down. The existence of a “supernatural” realm really doesn’t change anything. If there is this supernatural realm, how exactly is it interacting with the material world? I’m not asking about mechanism, but “how” in the sense of “what are the principles of interaction”? Are the rules of interaction deterministic, or purely random? If it’s either of those things, there is still no “freedom” in the sense of “could have done otherwise”. You still come back to the same issue. Nobody can provide a coherent account of principles of interaction that are neither deterministic nor random.
Well, in that framework, and presuming the existence of a supreme deity creator, “Free Will” just means “freedom from the creator’s direct control”.
God creates the universe and sets out a whole big long list of natural laws. The laws of physics, but including the ones we don’t have formulas for yet. But these laws don’t make things happen. Gravity says objects will move towards each other, but that’s not a natural process - God Himself is constantly controlling the position of objects but since He likes his creation ordered he follows his own rules about doing so (which we approximate with the theory of gravity). Of course, if he ever needs a miracle, he just does something else.
Souls on the other hand are the one thing he doesn’t control. You’re free to make decisions as you wish.
Now, God knows everything, including the initial state of His universe and all the rules that govern non-soul things within it. So He knows exactly how everything is gonna go down for all eternity.
Throw souls into the mix. Once created they are the only things that aren’t being directly controlled by God. So in that sense, they have Free Will.
You may point out that God created the soul and knows it perfectly well; He also knows every other soul, and we already established that He knows exactly how all the non-souled things will behave through all of time since He has the initial condition as well as all the rules.
Given this, you may expect that He would also know exactly what every soul is going to do until the end of time. Yes, I agree.
Free Will in this framework does not mean “the freedom to have done otherwise”. This remains an incoherent concept. But the fact that in this framework with an omnipresent deity everything aside from souls is under the direct and immediate control of the deity goves us an alternative definition of Free Will - these souls can act independently of the creator.
The fact that the souls are “on rails” formed by the outside world (which is directly under God’s control) and their own internal state (which is shaped by their initial internal conditions, chosen by God at the soul’s creation; and their experience, formed by their itneraction with the outside world which we established is controlled by God too) means that absolutely everything that could influence a soul’s decision is created to God’s specifications. So he certainly does have complete control and influence over souls - he could have tweaked the initial conditions of the universe or souls or both to get any outcome.
But we do have a coherent definition of Free Will. Since the soul is an autonomous construct that makes its decisions without direct intervention by God once unleashed (as opposed to every unsouled object in the universe), it is “Free”. But it could not have “chosen otherwise”.
This is why I kept insisting upthread that the concept of free will requires a deity. Without a deity it is incoherent as there is nothing to be free from aside from physical laws or causality, which no one argues.
This is not far from the worldview I heard expressed by some Chabadniks. Rabbinical Judaism is of course all about argument and debate, so I wouldn’t say that this is a universal view by any means, but it is held by at least some Orthodox Jews.
Sure, but - as you say - this is simply semantics, this is a completely different concept. It does not make contracausal free will coherent. The strong intuition that we “could have done otherwise” is an illusion.
Yet the fact is, 99% of the population does believe that contracausal free will is real. 99% of humanity trusts their intuition that they “could have done otherwise”. Major world religions and our justice system are based on this incoherent concept. That needs to be addressed. Yet many philosophers seem to feel that it’s more important to play semantic games and “rescue” free will by just redefining it, pretending that no serious thinker ever really believed in contracausal free will anyway, and obfuscating the matter. There seems to be this fear that if the unsophisticated masses came to understand this, the world would collapse into chaos. To me, this is just as stupid as Christians who can’t understand why anybody would have any morals if there is not god to tell them what’s right and wrong.
I’m definitely not trying to do that, or proposing this definition of Free Will as something I believe. You are right, contracausal free will is incoherent. But this thread is about Free Will in the religious context - it posits that God is asking if we would want to lose Free Will. And I think the religious conception of free will has always been more along these lines than the contracausal lines (although perhaps that’s due to my Jewish upbringing perspective, it is possible that the Christian conception is different in some subtle way I fail to grasp?)
I think Christianity is unambiguously based on contracausal free will. And the assumption that we “could have done otherwise” in precisely identical circumstance is central to our justice system.
I should clarify - of course it’s also about the notion of god not interfering. But the key assumption is that if god doesn’t interfere, then we have “free will”, and that people who sin could have done otherwise under precisely identical circumstances. And that retribution against them - condemning them to an eternity in hell - is therefore justified.
Possibly we don’t function properly unless we feel that we make choices.
And, in fact, we do make choices. The argument is over whether we always needed to make the specific choices we do make; major ones, like whether to propose marriage to somebody or to become a bank robber; and also minor ones, hundreds or thousands every day, down to the sort of thing like how many chews to make before swallowing, for each and every mouthful; or, for that matter, whether or not to reply to this thread.
But we do need to make those choices; just as a rabbit needs to choose whether to jink left or right or hold still and hope the predator doesn’t see it; just as nearly everything has to decide whether to eat or not eat a specific thing at a specific moment.
Maybe, in our kinds of minds, the experience of making those choices feels like “free will”, even if in practice each choice is the only one we could make. Maybe it’s necessary for it to feel like free will.
And our internal sense that we can make one choice or another – that’s part of the universe, also. So, logically, it can affect what choice we do make. If I see somebody drop a $100 bill on the street and walk on, not knowing that they dropped it, and I badly need the money (and maybe so do they) – wouldn’t I be more likely to steal it if I feel that, whatever choice I make, I’m not responsible for it because I had no will in the matter?
So if our sense that we have free will, however delusional, can change the choices that we make – is that free will, or isn’t it? Or are we arguing about the definition of a term, instead of about how we actually function?
I guess Christianity does use the same Adam-and-Eve story in a very different way, what with the concept of Original sin and all.
I agree that this in this conception even if Adam and Eve’s souls are “free” to do as they want, God created them and put them into a situation where he must have known how they would act. This leads one to wonder why, if God didn’t want these beings to eat the forbidden fruits, he would have created beings whose innate properties lead them to do so. After all, he could have created beings that didn’t have the inclination to do such a thing, or did but had a stronger inclination to listen to God, and then avoided the problem entirely.
The sense I got from Judaism was that it is acknowledged that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and enter the world all along, that it was always His plan. But I guess Judaism doesn’t frame the act as an Original Sin that dooms all future generations to Hell. There are two specific consequences, and neither involves hellfire - they are that men must work the fields and toil their lives away just to coax out enough food to survive, while women must suffer during childbirth. (I guess there’s a third consequence - snakes must crawl on his belly and eat dirt).
In other words, it’s a divinely flavored just so story. “How the snake lost his legs”, “Why the man must work for his food while animals frolic in the fields”, and “Why the woman must suffer during childbirth while animals deliver their young painlessly”. But note that even as God exiles Adam and Eve from the garden, He gives them dominion over the Earth. The point isn’t that humans are being punished for all eternity for an Original Sin; it is to explain why our existence may seem harder than that of animals wrapped up with a justification for the exploitation of nature. To get philosophical, is an anthropomorphized retelling of the process by which humans adopted a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. We know that early agriculturalists had worse diets and harder lives than contemporary hunter-gatherers; and yet their suffering would go on to grant them the power to shape their world.
This seems to be mostly a philosophical discussion about the nature or existence of ‘free will’, buyt I got the sense that the OP was really asking, “Would you give up your AGENCY for world peace?” In other words, would you be willing to live in a command economy and told what to do if such a setup could guarantee world peace?
Is that correct?
Where on Earth did you see anything to make you think this thread was about a command economy?
The loss of agency under discussion is far more fundamental than an economic question. People in even the most restrictive regime - Nazi Germany, the USSR, or North Korea - have every bit as much of the internal agency being discussed here as you or I or any other sentient being does.
They may live under a regime that controls their ability to express that agency, but what is being discussed is the loss of that agency altogether.
Okay, not ‘command economy’, but authoritarian/dictatorial rule? How else do you lose all your agency?
Of course. That’s what our brains do. Choices are computation.
I don’t know if its necessary, but it may well be that it’s adaptive, that we make better choices under the subjective illusion of freedom. It may also be an epiphenomenon, a spandrel, we don’t really understand consciousness at all.
I’m not sure what you mean. I am not disputing the moment-to-moment utility of the illusion. I’m not suggesting that we try to fight the illusion of free will moment-to-moment when thinking about the world and making decisions. Our brains probably work that way for good reason.
By analogy, I know that much of what we think we see is an illusion, filled in by our brains. This does not mean that I will (most of the time) try to use my eyes differently. But it’s sometimes useful to know that’s how our vision works.
As I’ve said, for me the knowledge that my internal sense of “free” deliberation is illusory is certainly deeply weird, but it doesn’t make me collapse into paroxysms of fatalism, imagining that it’s all pointless. I’m perfectly content that underneath this illusion of “freedom” my choices are computation, which simply means that I’m doing things for good reasons, with a sprinkling of purely random whimsy.
But understanding that it is an illusion has strong implications for our justice system.
Why?
I mean, sure, a belief in no free will is likely to have an effect on some decision making, but what that effect might be is not so predictable. The idea of “no free will means no responsibility to social contract” is just as inherent to the belief of lack of free will as “all Christians are more likely to not steal because they believe in a god who said not to.”
I think if we eject the “free will” part, an interpretation that might be closer to OP is to ask if we would accept externally imposed changes to our brains that would lead us to behave differently, less selfishly, less harmfully. We would still have agency in the sense of freedom from coercion, but we would be slightly different people. Or in the case of psychopaths, completely different people.
Isn’t this just a “god of the gaps” argument? It sounds like you’re saying something like “the minute we find something not easily explained right now, we have proven that free will exists, because free will is just a word that means “I don’t know why I decided something”?
It assumes that there’s nothing more to learn than we know right now, or even worse- that I, a non-expert, should believe in “free will” as opposed to assuming that there’s anything causal about decision making.
Again, these are all things that restrict your ability to exercise agency. They don’t change anything inherent to the person, though. If we dropped you off in North Korea, you would lose the freedom to do many things because you are physically prevented from doing them, but nothing about your experience of reality as a sentient being would change.
The scenario posed in the OP is that the deity that imbued you with that agency in the first place is removing it, so that whether you live in the US, China, or North Sentinel Island you are no longer a being capable of free agency.
No, the way I read it @Dr.Strangelove is giving an (excellent imo) account of the likely basis for our conscious experience of reasoning and making choices, why it feels like we are “freely” deliberating.
This is a much more interesting question, and one that touches on a concept that was raised by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus: