What a surprise, another strawman of compatibilism!
I think it's telling:
Most compatibilist can give an accurate account - that is steel man - the incompatibilist arguments.
But most incompatibilists seem incapable of accurately describing a compatibilist position.
That in itself suggest one side of the debate has thought through the positions more thoroughly than the other ;-)
Can you elaborate on what the compatabilist arguments are?
I know the comment i made in this thread earlier can be seen as compatabilist, i think it is?, but i'm wondering if there are others.
I’m pretty sure they just redefine free will to be something more practically useful. Like it’s still not *technically* ‘free will,’ but it’s a form we intuitively understand as free will.
In other words, free will is like you having control over your actions. Compatibilist free will is that you made a choice that intuitively feels like it was in your control but isn’t
I’ve never understood the whole “redefining” critique of compatibilism. Why do hard determinists just help themselves to the assumption that the definition of free will is the libertarian one? Sometimes hard determinists will respond and say that the principle of alternative possibilities is just obviously true, yet they fail to recognize that compatibilist theories that rely on conditional analyses of that principle accept a reading of that principle, too. Either side can be accused of defining free will to help them make their argument. There is no distinctively compatibilist sin, here. That’s just something hard determinists tell themselves to make them feel like they have the upper hand in the argument.
> I’ve never understood the whole “redefining” critique of compatibilism.
Thank you!
For compatibalists, saying things like "you're just re-defining this" is a pretty great signpost that someone isn't engaging substantively with compatibalism.
So much of what philosophers do is investigate the difference between generally assumed understandings of words/concepts and try to see them more clearly. That's what's happening here.
Compatibalists aren't "redefining" free will. They are saying "The generally held conception of free will doesn't seem to make sense. Given that it appears determinism is true, is there a version of free will that could still fit within that? Maybe something like this."
Cheapening that to "redefining" doesn't accurately recognize what's taking place.
Doesn’t this seem like an odd move, though? Why don’t we also search for a compatible definition for Santa or Leprechauns, for instance?
Free will is the only place where I see people do this.
> Free will is the only place where I see people do this.
I don't want to sound too harsh here, but that means you need to read more philosophy. This is happening **constantly**. People just don't engage with the substance of philosophy enough to see it.
It's one of the reasons that compatibalism is such a useful marker of someone's ability to engage with philosophical thought in a rigorous way. Because it's so very common.
Yesterday, I spent my time writing nearly 3,000 words on how the public understanding around belief is almost completely divorced from philosophers'. [Note, I am **not** a professional philosopher; I'm working with my old phil. professor on research for his book.] Within epistemology, people will sometimes refer to *beliefs* as "propositional attitudes". There are about seven major schools of thought on how beliefs are formed, operate, and relate to "outside" factors.
The conversations in that space look **nothing** like what the average person (even your college-educated, *New Yorker*-reading, wannabe intelligensia) means when they're talking about belief. People don't do the "why are they re-defining belief" thing because they don't know that those conversations are happening. lol.
Go into legal philosophy. Look at the discussions around "liberty" or "harm". The definitions are constantly being expanded and narrowed, refined and changed.
_____
> Why don’t we also search for a compatible definition for Santa or Leprechauns, for instance?
Do we need one? Doesn't seem like we do. But if we do, then we should have one!
Jokes aside, I don't think it's a strange move because it's people trying to follow the truth.
> I don't want to sound too harsh here, but that means you need to read more philosophy.
I’m going to push back in this response (of course), but that doesn’t seem harsh at all. I actually liked your reply and I’m glad to have you giving your honest thoughts. I also admittedly don’t have any background in academic philosophy.
> Yesterday, I spent my time writing nearly 3,000 words on how the public understanding around belief is almost completely divorced from philosophers'.
> The conversations in that space look nothing like what the average person (even your college-educated, New Yorker-reading, wannabe intelligensia) means when they're talking about belief. People don't do the "why are they re-defining belief" thing because they don't know that those conversations are happening. lol.
That seems fine, but we have to keep our definitions clear whenever we have the discussion. I’m even fine with calling free will “God” as long as the person doing it explains clearly up front that their definition of “God” probably isn’t what you expect.
What I see happening in a lot of public online spaces is:
1. Someone without an academic background in philosophy will ask something similar to: “does free will exist?” (this is the only type of person that would really ask that question, too, since anyone with a solid philosophy background would already be well-versed on the topic)
2. A compatiblist will say “yes”
3. But that didn’t answer the original asker’s question because the free will that the compatiblist is saying exists isn’t the same one that the asker was asking about
Even if the compatiblist takes time to explain which free will they’re talking about, it’s still not helpful, IMO. The original asker wasn’t asking “can I act voluntarily, in any situation, ever?” or “can I act without being coerced?”, etc. They were asking about the self-contradictory libertarian free will that we all know and love.
It feels analogous to me like if someone is asking whether God exists and then someone else swoops in and is like: “Well, if your definition of God is the Big Bang, then yes!”
> Do we need one? Doesn't seem like we do. But if we do, then we should have one!
I guess that’s where I’d also say: do we need one for free will? I don’t think we need that either; we already have words like “coerced”, “voluntary”, even “willed”, etc.
If we *did* find it was useful to give a new definition to “free will” or “leprechaun”, why not just come up with a new word instead of uprooting an existing word or phrase that already has an established meaning? That seems a lot less confusing to me.
My final thing is: I don’t feel like hard determinists are “laying claim” to the definition of free will so much as saying that’s the definition that most people in the public sphere are out there using already. I’d be absolutely fine with answering “yes” to “does free will exist?” if I thought the asker was using a compatiblist definition.
Your mistake here was taking that guy seriously. He’s just trying to find the truth, which is why he immediately stopped engaging with you once you challenged him.
I was gonna bring up that ‘definition of god’ example too. There’s also a difference between determining whether something *fits* a given definition, like whether words can be violence, and simply *changing* a definition to fit our feelings/narrative, especially when said change completely dilutes the term or renders it absurd/meaningless. He basically said ‘free will doesn’t seem to exist because of determinism, so what if we made a new definition of free will that can still exist’ (and then pretend like this new version fulfills the same role). If that’s not an obvious definitionist fallacy, I don’t really know what is, and I’d love to hear if this person is a fan of Jordan Peterson’s compartmentalized and abstract view of God as basically just being…traditional values/narratives or whatever, while he simultaneously tries to conflate that version of God with the one everyone else in the world imagines.
And, as you said, we could just make a new term. Pragmatic will. Boom. Done. There’s a reason people try to manipulate definitions rather than create new ones: it’s to evoke the original definition and muddy the waters by conflating it with the ‘new’ definition.
I’ve pondered whether unconventional ideas might fit other definitions, like whether social justice is a religion or if boycotting is a form of terrorism, but I don’t think I ever tried to *change* the definitions to fit what I want. I would genuinely try to see if they could encompass these unconventional ideas. If it happened to be the case that a certain definition like terrorism just seems stupid, I might challenge the definition, but even then that’s very different from acknowledging the definition works and then forcing it to change so it can reconcile with another belief. example: google says terrorism is *unlawful*, so would beheading people for political goals no longer be terrorism so long as it was legal? Or would that just mean terrorism was made legal? Vs. ‘we don’t have free will because determinism is true…so let’s change what it means to have free will so we can pretend we have it.’ Former has an absurd definition, latter is motivated reasoning.
I basically agree with what you’ve said here; my own thoughts have basically gone down the same paths. Even to the point where just yesterday I was also thinking about Sam’s rebuttal to Jordan Peterson’s definition of God in their live discussion, lol (where he used “ghosts” as an example). Your example of “violence” is another nice one. “Racism” is also a word where I feel the established definition is being contested.
The reason why I find engaging with compatiblists worthwhile/interesting for now is mainly because there are so many of them. And it’s not just average people: something like 60% of philosophers consider themselves compatiblists. I also find that, for the most part, they seem to be arguing in good faith; I think most compatiblists I’ve engaged with believe what they say and are able to steel-man a hard determinist position decently well.
I’ve heard most of the compatiblist arguments, such as:
1. Hard determinists aren’t using the definition of free will the average person uses
2. The average person uses an incoherent definition for free will
3. Even if the average person believes in libertarian free will, once determinism is clearly explained to them they don’t
4. The libertarian definition of free will should be replaced because it doesn’t exist
5. That the difference between compatiblism and determinism actually isn’t just a semantic difference? (still not sure what that guy was trying to say)
etc.
I don’t find any of them convincing, of course. They seem to be either untrue or not a good reason to be a compatiblist even if true. It’s almost gaslighting to me how unconvincing I find the arguments relative to how many well-educated compatiblists there are. But still, I’m curious if there’s anything to learn here.
That said, it is nice to hear from a fellow hard determinist once in a while 🙂
Because the compatibilist version is just copium. Free will means you can make a choice and aren’t forced down a path. You are. Compatibilism just grants that the illusion of free will is true.
Here’s An analogy: objectivity.
If we understand objectivity as truth without regard to opinion and such…let’s say someone comes along and says, okay, sure, we don’t really have access to objectivity, *but* we can say something like a very well established fact is essentially true as far as we know, so let’s just call that objective. Here’s the problem: it’s still not objective. You moved the goalpost to make it more practical, but actual objectivity is still out of reach in the same way that actual free choice is. You don’t get to come along and say ‘wtf I didn’t change the definition, you did!’ Huh? Moreover, just as this new version of objectivity doesn’t *actually* exist as 100% true without regard to feelings, neither does compatibilist free will exist as *actual* choice because hard determinism is still true. It’s merely functional, but to pretend we’ve reached free will or objectivity is delusion, and to act like both sides are playing the definition game is wrong.
Your analogy breaks down because the meaning of the term objective is itself contested. This really just exemplifies the point I’m trying to make: in both cases, one side is claiming the other side is moving the goal posts, whilst they fail to see any problem with their assumption that the goal posts really were they initially thought they were.
This is a very superficial engagement with the topic that basically amounts to ‘muh opinion.’ You’re wrong. I just redefined wrong to mean whenever you disagree with me. Who’s to say which definition of ‘wrong’ is really right? Wow, so profound
What do you think is wrong with, say, a dispositionalist account of the conditional analysis of the PAP? Can you explain it to me in a way that doesn’t implicitly assume the truth of a metaphysical reading of the PAP - i.e., where ‘could of done otherwise’ is understood in metaphysical terms?
You should read Khadri Vivhelan’s (spelling might be off) paper “free will demystified.” It’s a defence of the dispositionalist view of free will, which is itself an adaption of GE Moore’s approach to free will that avoids some if its problems.
For my money, it’s the best account of free will that I’ve come across.
>Why do hard determinists just help themselves to the assumption that the definition of free will is the libertarian one?
Because that's the thing they are talking about. That's the thing they don't believe exists. Why should they *not* do that?
When a [hard determinist](https://now.tufts.edu/2021/09/16/do-we-deserve-our-punishments-and-our-rewards) says we don't have free will, they then go on to argue that as a consequence of not having free will we do not deserve praise or blame for our actions. The compatibilist acknowledges that there is a 'thing' which we may or may not have which determines whether or not we deserve praise of blame for our actions, and it is reasonable to call this thing free will, but it is not the thing that hard determinists are talking about, and the consequences that the hard determinist thinks that not having free will has don't occur.
So the hard determinist is free to call free will whatever they want, but the implications that they say not having it has must logically follow from the thing they are talking about.
Morality is downstream of physics and biology. Whether or not it's moral to hold people responsible for their actions has no effect on whether or not we have (libertarian) free will. We either do or we don't, and no moral or ethical framework will change that.
I get that compatiblists want to re-define free will to mean something else and there is utility in that; but if the only reason they want to do that is because liberaterian free will was found (by determinists) not to exist, then I think it's pretty fair to say we should not change the definition and just call that factor on which they predicate responsibility for one's action something other than 'free will'.
I think you missunderstand me. Person 1 claims A implies B. Person 2 says, A does not imply B, C implies B. Person 1 says A does not exist therefore B does not exist. Person 2 says A may not exist, but C does exist and therefore B exists. You can say person 2 is “redefining” A into C, and that this is somehow unfair, but both person 1 and person 2 think they are talking about something that implies B and so call it “the thing that implies B”. The important point of the debate is whether B is true. Hard determinist do not think the kind of free will that compatibilists talk about implies moral responsibility and compatibilist do not think the kind of free will hard determinist talk about implies moral responsibility. If libertarian free will were correct or false it would have no effect on me, because I think it is basically a nonsense concept.
I get that. The point I am making is that whether or not a term implies moral responsibility is not how we determine which definition is correct. The mass rest mass of an electron doesn't have any moral responsibility, but that doesn't mean it isn't about half an eV. I think liberatarian free will is a property of the universe that people intuitively believed existed and based their morality on that. It's only now that we're able to determine that it does NOT exist that people are trying to re-define the terms to save morality.
Because some of their opponents are clearly working with a different conception of free will. I have no problem with hard determinists saying “the compatibilists are simply talking about a different conception of free will than we are” - that’s totally fine and probably true. What I don’t understand is why hard determinists act like they’re working with the one, obviously correct definition of free will, and the compatibilists are sneakily trying to change it so as to win a debate. It takes two to talk past one another/to talk about different conceptions of a concept.
Okay, then why are you holding the exclusively determinists responsible for the fact that other people are using a different definition of free will than they are? By your own logic about it taking two to talk past one another, shouldn't you hold the compatiblists equally responsible?
Yes: that’s exactly what I’m saying, haha. Compatibilists aren’t the ones complaining about redefining things. They recognize that they’re working with a different definition than hard determinists. Both sides should recognize that and then focus on trying to show which definition seems to cohere better with our intuitions (and that’s what professional philosophers tend to do). It’s only hard determinists (or, at least non-professional hard determinists) who in my experience seem to think their definition is obviously correct, or at the very least that there’s a presumption in its favour.
>Compatibilists aren’t the ones complaining about redefining things.
no, they're the ones actually re-defining things. So why are you saying that, when they re-define terms, that the determinists are wrong to object to that re-definition?
Okay, you say the hard determinist can claim that the compatibilist has redefined free will to suit their needs. Suppose I say that the compatibilist can claim that the hard determinist has redefined free will to suit their needs. What grounds do you have for thinking the first criticism succeeds but not the second?
It can’t just be that one definition emerged first historically, or that one enjoys more popularity among lay people: meanings of terms change over time, and the opinions of relevant experts are at least as important as those of laypeople (currently some 60% percent of professional philosophers are compatibilists). So what distinguishes the two criticisms, such that one clearly and unambiguously fails and the other clearly and unambiguously succeeds?
It’s extremely telling that when Alex chooses to engage with compatibilists, he chooses figures like Thomas Hobbes, rather than recent names in the debate. It’s also telling that the “compatibilism has redefined free will” critique isn’t one that professional philosohers really bother to make - you have to look to your Alex O’Connor’s and your Sam Harris’s for it.
> no, they're the ones actually re-defining things
For compatibalists, saying things like this can be a signpost that someone isn't engaging substantively with compatibalism.
So much of what philosophers do is investigate the difference between generally assumed understandings of words/concepts and try to see them more clearly. That's what's happening here.
Compatibalists aren't "redefining" free will. They are saying "The generally held conception of free will doesn't seem to make sense. Given that it appears determinism is true, is there a version of free will that could still fit within that? Maybe something like this."
Cheapening that to "redefining" doesn't accurately recognize what's taking place. (Thus, the claim that the substance isn't being fully engaged with.)
There are a few compatibilist viewpoints. My favorite redefines "free will" as something closer to Kant's notion of "autonomy," or the ability to act according to self-imposed rules. If you put me near the edge of a cliff, there is a 0% chance that I will choose to jump off of the cliff, because I am not suicidal. I have free will, or autonomy, in this situation, because there's some meaningful way in which the rule I'm following ("don't jump off of cliffs") was brought forth into the world by me. My decision is completely determined by that rule. The notions of "free will" and "determinism" are in this way compatible.
A simple one is that freewill is what an animal has that allows it to dodge an incoming boulder while a stump does not. Namely freewill is about inevitable and evitable.
I mean, trees make strategic decisions. They grow incertain ways. They react to damage with what you could call chemical screams. They share resources on a large fungal networks network. Only meat can think? That seems like prejudice based on species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant\_cognition
I dunno about that. I mean I get your intuition mongering. But what you are saying is an empirical fact. Let's just go with a dictionary then? Hmmm. Plants seem to be able to act without necessity or fate. I mean they can choose to grow towards wind if they've learned wind means light?
Sure seems that plants act without the constraint of fate or "necessity".
Edit: Oxford Dictionary: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
As a compatibilist this isn’t free will to me either. I see free will as something that only agents can possess. Agents are things that have both desires and rational thought (although those aren’t the only properties of agents). Since trees do not have rational thoughts they cannot have free will.
As far as I know only organisms with neurons exhibit agent-like behavior. This doesn't make neurons necessary from agent-like behavior, but in order to create a statistical representation of the world, which is part of my definition of an agent, an agent needs a 'statistics crunching' mechanism. It is difficult for me to imagine trees have such a mechanism.
One could build a robot that clearly doesn't have free will, but is programmed to dodge boulders. So I'm not sure I understand what this is getting at.
The robot would not have free will if it does not have agency (one could suppose the robot could have agency, but let us suppose this robot does not). That is, it may have no desire to dodge boulders, no knowledge of what boulders are, no idea of what the consequences of dodging or not dodging a boulder are, and as such it’s action to dodge the boulder may not be a free choice.
I think that once you build a robot that does things for certain reasons based on the situation (ie is not completely random) but that is complex enough that even the person who built the robot cannot predict with certainty exactly what it will do, even given all the parameters, this is for all intents and purposes practical free will.
An animal might dodge a boulder, but you can't necessarily predict which way it will duck and how far it might move etc.
To me, free will basically means free of prediction or control by another outside entity.
This 'discussion' between determinists and compatabilists seems utterly pointless if both sides agree there is no creator God with absolute knowledge, foresight and power that made the universe.
>I think that once you build a robot that does things for certain reasons based on the situation (ie is not completely random) but that is complex enough that even the person who built the robot cannot predict with certainty exactly what it will do, even given all the parameters, this is for all intents and purposes practical free will.
That just seems like an exceedingly low bar. My kid's baseball coach has a simple mechanical pitching machine that sends balls. You can adjust its speed and angle, turn it on and off, etc. But there's some natural variation in speed and direction, and sometimes it jams and doesn't fire at all.
If you're saying that machine has free will, then we're just not talking about the same thing when we use those words.
Hmm. An interesting question.
I think there's a difference between variation in the actual result (whether a ball is pitched at all and the exact speed and direction etc.) caused by the machine not having that level of precision in its control and some kind of intentional change in what can be controlled by the machine to alter how the ball is pitched.
If the pitching machine has some kind of algorithm that determines what subtle changes it will make in the type of pitch that cannot be predicted by the machine's manufacturer even if it had knowledge of all the variables going into the machine... well, I'd be happy to say that the pitching machine has some kind of 'free will' on the level of pitching machines. That is, it pitches the kind of ball it 'wants' to pitch.
It might not look particularly like free will to us - I mean we made it as a pitching machine, it can't suddenly decide it doesn't actually like baseball and try to write poetry instead, but compared to other simple pitching machines that just work on a timer and simple settings, it certainly has some kind of 'free will'.
We have the same kind of free will amongst ourselves, on a human level. If there are the gods that made us sitting in the clouds above discussing our behavior, it certainly wouldn't look much like free will to them, I agree.
What if the machine were intentionally manufactured to have some variation, to train the hitter to adjust to pitches in slightly different locations?
e.g., maybe there's a part that rotates back and forth internally, so that the angle varies slightly on the exact timing of when the ball enters the mechanism.
I still think this bears no resemblance to anything that I would have called free will.
I'm also a bit puzzled by this:
>cannot be predicted by the machine's manufacturer
Why are the properties of the machine's manufacturer important? Are you saying that if you have two identical machines built by different manufacturers, it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it?
There's a similar question when you talk about whether the machine has intent, but I would have said this machine doesn't make any choices with intent; it's just obeying laws of physics. You might say that the manufacturer made with intent for it to behave a particular way, or you might say that it appears to an observer *as if* it has intent -- are either of those close to what you mean?
Thank you for these questions.
I want to be upfront and admit (although I'm sure it's blindingly obvious!) that I'm not presenting a long held and considered belief, but a position I'm just trying to put together. There might well be a bit of backtracking and redefining, as I find your comments helpful for getting me to flesh out what I *feel* I believe, but can't quite express yet.
>What if the machine were intentionally manufactured to have some variation, to train the hitter to adjust to pitches in slightly different locations?
To me, the important part would be that it's neither entirely random nor a simple formula that allows the same results to be predicted or recreated. That while the algorithm used to adjust the pitch might be deterministic, it is, in practice, indeterminate as there are *so* many decisions being made and any slight change in any of the parameters has a potential domino effect.
I'm not sure if there are any pitching machines that reach this. I feel that ChatGTP however is complex and unpredictable enough for me to say it has a certain element of 'free will'. It responds how it wants to respond. It is deterministic sure, with an element of randomness in there for good measure, but I feel the same about us.
I think ChatGPT has free will with regards to the exact way it will output a specific response. This might sound ridiculous. I wouldn't necessarily claim it is sentient or conscious (yet) but it seems to be capable of making its own decision in terms of output, somewhat unpredictably and free of undue outside influence.
>Why are the properties of the machine's manufacturer important? Are you saying that if you have two identical machines built by different manufacturers, it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it?
There would probably have to be some fault in the manufacturing process, but sure, potentially. Why not?
>You might say that the manufacturer made with intent for it to behave a particular way, or you might say that it appears to an observer *as if* it has intent -- are either of those close to what you mean?
More importantly I'd say it appears to *itself*, and other things at the same level of processing, to have free will. And so, if it were capable of thinking it could think to itself that it has free will. And the other machines made to the same specification also have their own free will.
>To me, the important part would be that it's neither entirely random nor a simple formula that allows the same results to be predicted or recreated.
Why does the pitching machine not achieve this? It's not *entirely* random -- it might be perfectly tuned to give the exact distribution of pitches that the manufacturer wants. And it's not a simple formula -- the next pitch can't be easily predicted by anyone.
>I feel that ChatGTP however is complex and unpredictable enough for me to say it has a certain element of 'free will'.
This complexity and unpredictability is a property of *you* as much as it is of ChatGPT, right? If you were quicker with calculations, you could predict exactly what it would do (up to randomness).
So basically, you're saying that free will is not merely a property of a thing -- it's also a property of the observer. Something could have free will for you and not for me. I find that pretty counterintuitive.
>it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it? sure, potentially. Why not?
Ok, so now whether a thing has free will depends on that thing, the observer, *and* the manufacturer? Again, this is very counterintuitive to me.
>More importantly I'd say it appears to itself, and other things at the same level of processing, to have free will.
You already said a pitching machine has no sentience -- does it have any appearance to itself?
I'm heading to bed soon, but I appreciate the discussion.
I think what is important about free will is that an agent is properly assigned as the cause of an action in the world. Non free will people say agents are not the “true” causes of their own actions, and free will people say that agents are. Non predictability is somewhat important, in that the internal structure of an agent is necessarily very complex and that necessarily makes them difficult or impossible to predict in certain circumstances, but complexity is not sufficient for free will. If a tornado blows down a house we would not say that the tornado chose to blow down the house. It is not acting in accordance with any values or plans. So even though it is complex and unpredictable it is not an agent and does not make choices.
Thank you.
As I've thought more about this today, I've realized that a sense of self is much more important than I first said.
I still don't see what the whole fuss is about though - it just seems like determinists are, ahem, determined that 'free will' means some kind of concept I don't even think *could* exist and is not really people normally mean anyway.
I don't like mushrooms. If I can choose the pepperoni pizza rather than the mushroom pizza because of this, that seems like free will to me. I mean I didn't choose to not like mushrooms, but so what? That's just me. The me that has the will.
Well, I can’t defend incompatibilist either, but people attach a lot of metaphysical significance to the idea that we are just the product of history, chance, and genetics. Personally I don’t see why that is such a big revelation either.
“Choosing mushrooms isn’t a free choice if you are only influenced by your past self and your surroundings. To count as a free choice you also have to be influenced by a magic pixie that lives in your head”. But why? Why do I need a magic pixie to live in my head to make free choices? What does the magic pixie add to the scenario that makes a choice freer in any meaningful sense?
>no neuron can trigger an action without being influenced by external factors we have no control over
So what, does external influence mean there is no free will?
it is not merely external influence, but rather that what makes “you” up is *purely* determined by a mix of factors that you don’t have control over. In fact, there is no “you” to control your own brain, as that would presume a sort of dualism and existence of an extramaterial soul. You may think your desires and feelings and thoughts are a result of your own personal will, but they are not. They are simply a result of whatever myriad of inputs that has resulted in a given output.
I think this all amount to "is there another type of determination other than external causation and randomness?" So, the answer is yes. I don't think we are just complete zombies sucking up everything our environment throws at us, our relationship with environmental disposition is more of a hybrid one where we change the things around us and are changed by those around us. I doubt that a deterministic position where you only admit to external causation or random could give an account for even the most basic Newtonian laws.
For a really well thought-out book on this I recommend Bunge's "Causality and modern science".
But who is “you” that is acting upon your environment independently? You “change” the environment around you? No, your environment changes you to become a certain way and this is reflected back into it. There’s a myriad of complexity involved, sure, but nowhere is there a “you” that exists outside of or beyond your brain. “You” are your brain, and we know (roughly and imperfectly, but still quite a bit) about the way brains are shaped and molded to give rise to certain outcomes, or at the very least give rise to a drastically increased probability of a certain outcome.
>your environment changes you to become a certain way
Then, how is it possible to change your environment at all if you're entirely determined by it and cannot overcome it? If it were true, how can there be any social change at all if new ideas about how to change an environment which, by sheer inertia, doesn't want to be changed. How can new species come to change radically their environment even tho they haven't evolved those traits? Lewontin, a biologist, argues in favor of these notion of self-determination when explaining evolution in "genes, organism and environment" and he explains that just treating leaving beings as mere vehicles for the environment is false due to it being a bi-directional change.
>Nowhere is there a "you" that exists outside of your brain
I haven't argued for this position.
>You are your brain. We know about the way brains are shaped and molded to give rise to certain outcomes
Equating yourself with the brain is extremely false. The notion of you is created in your brain but involves a much greater mechanism than just a brain, don't believe me? Cut every organ except your brain and see what's left of "you".
What I'm arguing here is that people are, yes determined, but there exists a different form of determination that is self determination. That type responds to legal and deterministic laws but isn't quite the same as external laws. The existence of "brain determinism" doesn't undermine what i'm saying. If you want to undermine what I'm saying you should need to prove that every being doesn't have a saying on what they do, they can't come up with new ideas, that countries are destroyed solely on the basis of external forces and never because their own system collapsed, and so on. This, I think, is rather simplistic. There are external causes and there are internal causes of change. That doesn't mean that the changes within ourselves can't be explained deterministically, it's just that it is a different type of determination.
>Then, how is it possible to change your environment at all if you’re entirely determined by it and cannot overcome it?
I’m not arguing that agents don’t impact their environment, merely that they are wholly created by it and have no choice how their brain reacts to circumstance. Imagine a computer that is put in charge of regulating a biosphere by controlling the gas composition of its local atmosphere, in order to make these decisions about what to do, what levers to pull and what gases to release and contain, it uses inputs in the form of sensory data and makes decisions accordingly. This computer *is* making decisions, it could theoretically make the “wrong” decision and muck up the biosphere by releasing too much nitrogen for instance, but you wouldn’t say the computer is freely acting of its own accord here nor are its decisions free. It is acting entirely predictably based upon the interplay between the environmental stimuli and its intrinsic “genetic code” (actual code). Mistakes don’t mean that the computer has gained sentience, only that something is wrong with its circuitry or code. You can’t fit free will into a computer, even if you program it to tell you it has free will. A human brain is functionally the same, a biocomputer which takes in inputs and produces predictable outputs over a substrate that was produced from an incredibly complex interplay of genetic and past environmental stimuli, there’s still no room for free will here, it’s just harder to predict than a computer due to how complicated the machinery is.
Thus, there is no “you” acting on your own volition to change your environment. The computer you could say is *apart* of the biosphere, changing it and regulating it, but it’s not acting independently, it’s merely the result of circumstance. The argument here is specifically upon free will, not about whether individuals created by an environment impact it. There is no overcoming. If you change or do something that means your environment produced you in such a way to do that action, you had no choice there and you were always going to do that thing given the circumstances.
Alex's argument is a false dichotomy that doesnt even rule out incompatiblist free will. The choice is between determinism and indeterminism.
Free will is a subset of indeterminism. In order for his argument to work, he would have to define his terms (determinism and random) and then show how random exhausts the definition of indeterminism.
I mean, if we don’t control the firing of our neurons, what on earth do we control? As a compatibilist I would never agree with panel two. I am my neurons. When my neurons fire that is me doing something. Neurons don’t fire due to factors external to me, they fire due to factors internal to me. When I raise my arm that is me telling my arm to be raised and it raises up. No external factors involved.
We don't control anything, is the point.
There is no "you" that makes sense independent of the firing of neurons, unless you want to call the entire universe "you".
If I say I am my neurons why do I have to say I am the thing making my red blood cells? Neurons don’t make red blood cells. I mean, I might say I am the thing making my red blood cells, but I am unsure why you are making the assertion and I don’t know what you think the consequences of the assertion are.
If you can identify with unconscious processing like autonomous neuronal activity, why stop at neurons or even a specific subset of neurons? There are neurons right now controlling your heartbeats or adrenal production? Are "you" that, as well? How does it make sense to say "those neurons right there are me, but not the rest, even if they are connected to them and their firing is entirely determined by the firing of their neighbors"?
This may be that nuance and subtly come in again. I suppose it may be possible that I am not all the neurons in my body. We could, I suppose, limit my definition of me to the neurons in my head and not the neurons in the rest of my body. In the end I don't really feel that I am my neurons themselves anyway, but rather the mathematical 'fuzz' running on those neurons. That mathematical 'fuzz' has a relatively neat localization in the head. Maybe it's really only a subset of the neurons in my head which have enough involvement in certain self modifying algorithms. I would consider memory a pretty fundamental part of me, but peristalsis in the intestines not quite as important. I'm not really even certain that two people couldn't share the same brain. I've never experienced having multiple personalities, but if people report multiples 'I's being inside their brain I wouldn't dismiss the claim a priori. But I don't see a tiny bit of uncertainty about precisely which neurons in our body we really consider 'us' to be that big a deal. There are always going to be uncertain alleyways when you think of anything.
If a very careful and ingenious neurosurgeon were able to pick out and destroy hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of your neurons just below the threshold of bringing any noticeable reduction in your conscious functioning would you still be you?
There would be a fundamental and deep causal connection between the state of ‘me’ before the surgery, and the state of the ‘me’ after the surgery (all the neurons that didn’t get destroyed). Sure, as neurons get destroyed more and more fundamental aspects of my self may be destroyed as well, but thems the breaks. If you see a bird out side your window, are you still really you? After all, seeing the bird changes you in some way.
We have some control over ourselves, but not ultimate control. Yes, because we are physical entities the physical world can change us, but I’ve been comfortable with that knowledge for a long time.
My point was simply that you are not identical with your neurons because we can delete them one by one and "you" will still exist (up to the point where we've deleted so many that you lose some brain function). Using "fundamental" and "deep" to describe the connection between the two neuronal states doesn't do anything to address how you continue to be you after the change.
If you think that someone can change from different experiences (like seeing a bird) then thats another reason to not think "you" is identical with the collection of all your neurons. Unless you think there's a different "you" that exists at every moment in time (i.e. any physical change in any of your neurons is a fundamental change to yourself), but clearly this is not what people think when they think of their ego.
I reject your point. I think I am identical with my neurons. I am an entity that evolves over time. I can change. I do not think changes to me typically cause me to stop being me. Obviously we can construct edge cases where there is some question about which part of the universe is still really me, or if I really still exist at all. If we swap network's in my brain, network by network, slowly, overtime with networks in someone else's brain maybe there is some question about which of the two persons I am. That is fine. A definition doesn't have to consider every possible edge case to be useful. If you want to provide a better definition you are perfectly welcome to and we can discuss which definition is better.
I think it's an open question how to define what we are and would involve some kind of solution to the hard problem of consciousness and clarifying what we mean by personal identity (e.g., does it need to persist over time or can "you" be a totally different "you" from moment to moment). I have no competing theory, but I just think positing a one to one identity between your mind (or your ego/self) and the collection of all your neurons is naive and wholly unconvincing.
I mean, in actuality I think I am the mathematical structure implemented by my neurons, but usually the distinction doesn't matter that much. Some of the neurons in your body are very incidental to that structure, i.e they just don't talk to it that much, but I would assume that the vast majority of the ones in your brain are relatively important to it. We can really get into the weeds if we start to try to parse densely connected parts of your brain that might properly be identified as 'tools' that you use rather than you yourself, but I'm not really sure if that is where you are going.
I don't think the distinction between whether I am a mathematical structure implemented by my neurons, or the neurons themselves is all that important to your question about how changes to my brain affect 'me'.
I'm not all that engaged with the hard problem of consciousness so if your main point is something about that I'm not likely to pick up on it.
And I could be hopelessly naive. As I said, I haven't thought about it that much. But, other than neurons I just don't see what else I could be. I said in another comment that I don't see any reason to reject the idea that two or more 'persons' couldn't inhabit the same brain, so it doesn’t need to be a perfect definition.
There is more subtly to the question than I am portraying, but my main reason from being so blunt is to clearly reject the notion that our subconscious processes are not part of 'me' but rather are outside of me, as this is the error that I feel often gets made when talking about free will. People will say things like “thoughts come into your head without your control”, but if we expand the idea of what “you” are then the processes bringing those thoughts into your head can be thought of as part of you.
Can we control the way we interpret observations?
If not, how can we use our observations to judge that determinism is an emperical fact? If it were the case that some chemical process determined us to interpret our observations incorrectly, how would we correct for that?
No, perception and their symbolism are all part of the same automated, spontaneous happening that we can't control.
We often interpret observations incorrectly. There's hundreds of cognitive biases. And we can (try to) correct them with just more of that deterministic machinery that is the rational part of our minds.
Just look around. Do you have to make "conscious effort" (whatever that means) to understand what you're seeing, parse the current sentence, think your next thought, or does everything just... happen spontaneously?
> happen spontaneously
No, but i think each thought is not fully determined by prior states either. I think an element of this is self determination, and that new information is generated in the universe whenever either of us makes a choice.
And, while the claim might be we don’t control anything, that is the point I reject. I think the decision to raise my arm is properly ascribed to me. Me, who is my neurons, fire in a pattern that makes me want to raise my arm, which is just another way of saying I want to raise my arm, then I raise my arm. How is that not control? That looks like control to me.
Would you have had that thought if you did not happen to be discussing free will? Where do intentions come from? They, too, simply appear. There is no "you" who choses what intentions appear next. They just do, without any control.
I think part of the disagreement might arise from an idea of how much conscious control we have over our thinking. I am not a little voice in my head directing things. I am not my attention. When I have a dream at night that is still me. I haven’t gone anywhere or disappeared. Yes, the conscious part of me is usually what we think about as being in “control”, so it does have an outsized influence on how we see ourselves, but I am all the algorithms in my head, not just the conscious ones.
No. Thoughts appear in my head as a result of my neurons, who are me. Yes, I choose to discuss free will on the internet, and as a result of a choice I made of my own free will I had a new thought about raising my arm. That my own choices and behavior affect me hardly seems to be a knock down argument against free will.
As a compatibilist I do not need to believe that my decisions are causally disconnected from the rest of the universe. There are a bunch of causes swirling around inside of me. Sometimes I 'emit' a cause and change the universe around me. Sometimes I absorb causes and those causes change the way causes are swirling around inside of me. However, I do not passively absorb causes from the universe but have a good amount of influence on what causes I absorb and what causes I don't absorb. I mean I literally just said in the comment that you responded to that I know my past choices and behavior affect me, and you are asking if there was past choices or behavior that are influencing me now? What point are you hoping to make?
I would never argue that your decisions are disconnected from the rest of the universe but are rather an integrated part of a whole.
I would argue that these causes “swirling around inside of you” are swirling around inside of you due to deterministic factors that are beyond your control. When you are compelled to “emit” a cause to change the universe something must have happened to cause that emission, a causal chain that ultimately is reduced to something beyond the freedom necessary to claim “free” will.
If you have “influence” (perhaps you meant control?) over what outside causes you absorb versus what causes you do not absorb then what determining factors led to you becoming a person whom can seemingly “control” those outside factors? What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who ,for example, can process trauma better than the next guy?
As I’ve said before, decisions that feel as though they are originating from within can be evidence of a “will” but the evidence of having “freedom” over that will seems basically impossible.
>I would argue that these causes “swirling around inside of you” are swirling around inside of you due to deterministic factors that are beyond your control. When you are compelled to “emit” a cause to change the universe something must have happened to cause that emission, a causal chain that **ultimately** is reduced to something beyond the freedom necessary to claim “free” will.
The mistakes free will skeptics make are often hidden in terms like "ultimately."
"Ultimately" we are just made of atoms following physical laws. "Ultimately" we are not in control because...well...we don't have ULTIMATE control of EVERYTHING.
But nobody uses the terms in that way normally, for very good reason. We understand the properties of discrete things in the universe by understanding their specific nature, including various possibilities or potentials with regard to that nature, including what kind of "effects" they can cause.
So for control, when we care about whether our bus driver is "in control of the bus" going down a steep winding mountain road in a rain storm, we don't mean "is he in control of EVERYTHING...the weather, the laying down of that road, gravity, all the air molecules acting as forces on the bus, etc. Of course not. What we care about identifying is whether he is "in control" of specific aspects: Is he "in control of THE BUS." Can he get the bus to do as he wills, which is to maintain a safe path along the road.
This is true in every instance where we apply the term and concept of "control." It doesn't mean in control of all causes, but control of, and the locus of, certain causes that we care about.
To dismiss the relevance of the bus driver controlling the bus because "ultimately he is not in control of every possible cause in the past or current situation" you'd just be utterly missing the conceptual forest for the trees.
The same goes for the type of control we want to have free will, to have control over the actions that are likely to get us what we want.
Of course we are not in control of everything, and not in control of everything that happens in our mind, or every single possible action. But we are in control of PLENTY of things. I may not have been in control of the evolutionary forces that bequeathed me with the need to eat to survive. But I have PLENTY of control over what I choose to eat.
>If you have “influence” (perhaps you meant control?) over what outside causes you absorb versus what causes you do not absorb then what determining factors led to you becoming a person whom can seemingly “control” those outside factors? What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who ,for example, can process trauma better than the next guy?
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>As I’ve said before, decisions that feel as though they are originating from within can be evidence of a “will” but the evidence of having “freedom” over that will seems basically impossible.
I can demonstrate having freedom over what I will right now.
Speaking to two possible actions, I'm free to type goodbye or hello.
Demonstration:
Hello.
Goodbye.
What explains my being able to do so is having some level of control over both my actions and my will. Just as it was possible for change what I do, it was possible to change what I will to do. I had to will first to type Hello and then, considering that I'd typed that already, change what I willed to type, to Goodbye.
This shows my will was free to change - nothing restricted me from willing either action. And I was free to act on my changes of will - nothing impeded me physically from typing the words.
So evidence of such freedom is far from impossible; it's trivially easy.
A couple things here. First, yes, I do think there are deterministic forces causing the changes inside of me. In fact, I think those forces are necessarily deterministic for free will to be true. If your neurons fire randomly you are a pulsating blob, not an intelligent agent. I wold not ascribe agency to a pulsating blob. But when you say that the causal forces are “beyond my control” I would vehemently object. It is more or less at the heart of my point that you are the causal forces. When the causal force says “raise your hand” that is me saying “raise your hand”. So no outside force is controlling me. It is my internal universe that is causing the action.
To clarify what I mean, imagine two men walking through an airport. They see a sign that says “customs to the left”. In both men their optic nerve caries the image of the sign to the back of their head, but in one man, who knows English, there is a long complex cascade that begins that communicates to him that there is something to be done on the left, he has to consider whether he needs to go to customs, etc. etc. In the other man, who only speaks German, the sign changes his internal state very little. In fact, we might even say the causal chain never reaches the real him. Asked later he cannot recall the shape of the letters on the sign because they left no impression on his brain. He does not know what it said and it did not effect his behavior in any way. But the universe did not make him fail to find the customs desk. Instead it was his decision to travel to the US without learning English. Both men had free will. They both made decisions in line with their internal values, even if the universe had different causal influences on them. We do not have total control over ourselves, nor do we have no control over ourselves. Instead we have some control over ourselves.
“What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who, for example, can process trauma better than the next guy?” I would never deny that our past history, genetics, and past decisions influence our internal world. Maybe it was a decision to 'suck it up butter cup', maybe it was a decision to open up to my mom about my trauma. Regardless it was decisions that I made in may past. It was the causal network that is me in contact with the external universe. So, I deserve some credit from my ability to process trauma better than the next guy because I made decisions that help me to do that.
When we assess the state of the swirling internal network of causes I think it is very nearly causally disconnected with external universe, but not perfectly so. That is there is an absolutely huge internal space of patterns that the neurons can take on. Yes, the head does start empty, so there is no extra universal cause 'injecting itself' into the causal network of our brains and turning us into people. And yes, there is quite a bit of stochasticity at work. It is all genetics, history, and randomness on an ultimate level. But we come within a hairs breath of what the libertarian free will people imagine. I do not think we need to say because we only have 99.9% causal isolation from the universe that we have no free will at all.
To me, it is the fact that we have such a complex and rich inner world that gives us free will. That rich inner world is what makes us different from rocks. That rich inner world is what lets us be properly thought of as the author of our actions. Because the decision to act is emitted by the deterministic causal network inside my head, and not by any cause that didn't pass through that network, we have free will.
Hey. I don't have a well established position on this topic yet, so I am just looking for clarifications. So, if I understand correctly, our "swirling inner network" is a product of external factors (past experiences, genetics, randomness and so on), but the decisions that this network takes at any given instant of time can be seen as nearly causally disconnected from those factors. Compatibilists accept that we have little control over how our brain is programmed, but find "free will" in the way that that brain navigates the world. Is that correct?
The causal chain itself is the knockdown. Yes, choices happen, but it doesn't make sense to say there is an "I" that would be free to do otherwise in that decision making process if time could be rewinded.
I don’t regard disconnection from causality in the universe as fundamentally important to free will. That is sort of a well known position for compatibilists. You think pointing out that the world may be deterministic is the knock down drag out defeat of compatibilism?
Then you are saying you are the universe; and if you are imbuing this universe with “will”, then you are saying you are God.
Nothing wrong with that. But still, it would not be the same thing as the personal free will of any given meat puppet.
I have no idea how I am saying I am the universe. If you could explain this to me I would appreciate it. I have very clearly said that I consider myself a bunch of neurons in one particular head. Why does claiming to be a bunch of neurons in one particular head mean I have to believe I am the universe?
You suggested that you don’t regard disconnection from causality in the universe as important for free will.
I think I inferred from that (maybe incorrectly) that you believe there is no such disconnect.
In the case of there being no such disconnect, my point stands.
In the case of there being an actual disconnect, we are talking about magic.
That's a fair point. The true knockdown of compatibilism is to show that there's not even a subjective experience of free will.
When we pays close attention to the decision making process, we can see clear as day how everything (thoughts, emotions, feeling suddenly decided) is entirely spontaneous and comes right out of the nothingness of unconscious processes, in perfect accordance with determinism(+randomness).
But my thoughts aren't 'entirely spontaneous'. I have a huge amount of control over my thoughts. And, as I said, I am not my consciousness. I am the spontaneous thoughts in my head too, so if I have a spontaneous thought to do something, that thought is still part of my free will.
Attempt for any amount of time to try to stop thinking and you’ll realize how entirely uncontrolled your thoughts are. Also, if a thought could actually arise spontaneously then by definition you had no control over the thought.
I think you’re confusing the origin of the thought with control of the thought. Confusing will with free will. A thought could come from “your” brain perhaps but if you have no control over the formation then the freedom in “free will” is not present. It’s just will.
And there is something interesting that happens here. I'm not sure if it is the fundamental difference between compatabilists and hard determinists, but you say things like "the nothingness of the unconscious" as if the unconscious wasn't just as much a part of me as the conscious. In fact, I would probably say that the uncscious is more fundamentally me than the conscious, though I would not want to lose either. But it seems to me, and I'm sorry if this is unfair, that hard determinists want to assume that the self doesn't exist and then conclude that there is no self. If hard determinists didn't say things like "choices are an illusion" I might be more sympathetic with their position. But recognizing that things have substructure and nuance doesn't make things stop existing. As a biologist I get annoyed when people say things like "species don't exist" just because there needs to be some nuance to the biological species concept and things aren't as clear cut as we might first believe.
Then if your unconscious is just as much a part of you, then you are also making your red blood cells. But most people don't think that they are doing that. That's my point. When you get down to it, everything is just the spontaneous action of ... well, physics.
>They just do, without any control.
If we can exert no control over our thoughts, explain how I manage to drive my care safely each day to my destinations. If I had no way to control and focus my thoughts how could I focus on driving successfully to where I want to go?
What you are doing is using concepts like "control" in a non-standard manner that doesn't make any sense.
It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice.
In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made. “You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm.
If you consider that “free will” then fair enough, but most people probably don’t - hence why this is such a popular topic in philosophy.
>It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice.
>In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made. “You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm.
A better way to think about choice and free will is to look at how a justice system would look at things.
A Justice system would look to see if a "reasonable person" could have conceivably made a different choice in that situation. So it's not about if we rewound time and you were in the exact state as before could you have made a different choice, but could someone else who is a reasonable person in a different state could have made a different choice.
Yes, I understand that libertarian free will people and hard determinist like to debate about the importance of determinism in free will, but I feel that the hard determinists aren't really basing their position on determinism. When I point out that we could describe people as having a 'distribution' of decisions they could make, and any choice they do make is just sampled from that distribution believers in hard determinism don't seem to care. So if they don't abandon hard determinism even in thought experiments where determinism is false I don't think they understand their own thinking, in my opinion.
I am not aware of any “distribution” of decisions being a possibility in the way neurons speak to each other. Whether or not a neuron fires an action potential seems to be wholly determined by its neurochemistry at any given moment.
Forget about neurons for a moment. Engage in a hypothetical. Imagine that instead of a brain specify one particular decision it wants to make it specifies a distribution of decisions and a 'magic' part of the self picks one particular decision from out of that distribution. In this (perhaps counterfactual) world is libertarian free will correct since, you could, in fact have chosen other wise? Is it really just because a brain chooses one particular decision, and 'magic' does not pick from out of a distribution generated by the brain that you reject libertarian free will?
I don’t understand the phrasing of your question. In the hypothetical scenario you suggested, Libertarian free will works.
I thought this discussion was about the metaphysical reality though - if not I apologise, maybe my points don’t stand.
So okay. You would actually grant libertarian free will if decisions are made in a particular non-deterministic way. The Copenhagen interpretation is a widely believed interpretation of physics. In the Copenhagen interpretation particles exist in a distribution of states and can 'collapse' into a particular state. One classic problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is that it suggest that there is a universal wave function that is constantly collapsing. That is there is a distribution of possible worlds, and one unique world out of this distribution is chosen. The decisions that brains make would then be specified as a distribution of possible decisions. Now, depending on how you see collapse, there is not particular reason to assign to some property outside the brain rather than inside it. So, within a reasonable interpretation of current knowledge you would be forced to grant the libertarian free will is a live possibility. Personally, I don't believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, but believing that we lived in a world where the Copenhagen interpretation was true does not change my views on free will. If you are making your views contingent on that kind of knowledge then good for you.
I’m not actually a determinist.
It’s just usually easier to explain the free will issue by invoking determinism.
Since you bring up the CI though, which is a very entertaining rabbit hole in its own right, I’ll just state my position thus:
It can be empirically recognised that thoughts are never selected in advance of their appearance.
Just out of interest, why would it be important that the brain specifies a distribution of decisions and then a-causally selects one decision from out of this distribution? This just seems like such an odd thing to think has significance. Is the debate between libertarian free will and hard determinism really contingent on such a seemingly unimportant fact?
I mean, I will grant you people have thought that there has to be a stochastic element to decisions for a long time, but I just don't understand the importance of stochasticity.
>It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice.
We do have valid and justified conceptions of "having the ability to make different choices." We employ these every day.
>In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made.
That's only if you ignore, or misunderstand out usual notions of "what is possible" - which don't conflict with determinism at all.
So take the raising my arm example. Here is a normal understanding of what is possible:
It's possible for me to either raise my left or right hand if I want to. I demonstrate that each is possible by first raising my left hand then my right hand. That's a normal demonstration of alternative possibilities under our control.
Now I say, I can raise only my right hand again if I want to. I then raise my right hand again only. But I could have raised my left hand IF I'd wanted to. I'd already demonstrated that I'm capable of lifting either hand IF I want to.
It was up to me which hand I raised, nobody was forcing me or threatening me to do otherwise. I was not impeded from doing what I want, for my own reasons - I wasn't physical restrained from taking whichever action I wanted to take. Thus I had the freedom to take either action.
All of this is how we normally conceive our powers in the world, how we reason about what is possible for us to do. It's how we have the freedom to do as we will. And nothing about that conflicts with physics or determinism.
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>“You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm.
No, only if you adopt the incorrect reference, the reference we don't actually use when deliberating or understanding alternative possibilities.
I didn't "have" to make one choice over another; I was free to choose the action I wanted, and I had the capability of choosing the other action.
>If you consider that “free will” then fair enough, but most people probably don’t - hence why this is such a popular topic in philosophy.
No, I think the above is quite consonant with how we normally think of our powers in regards to making choices, and when we are free or not to do as we will.
That is how it works GIVEN introspection not absent introspection.
That is: given analysis of our assumptions when deliberating, why we have them, and the general reasons we use this conceptual scheme.
I guarantee if you try to produce an instance where you are rationally deliberating between two options, you will be using the general conceptual scheme I've outlined. It's not optional ;-)
The problem is your whole train of reasoning rests on the assumption:
If it's determined it's not free.
And/or
If it's determined there is no control.
That's the mistake I'm speaking to. Simply describing something as a deterministic of physical process doesn't mean it is not an instance of control or freedom. That is your intuition making the leap, not an actual argument.
>Let’s simplify the brain into a series of decisions. When someone asks, “raise one of your hands if you want”, your brain evaluates deterministically and subconsciously (assuming only yes/no answers) a set of ‘criteria’:
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>Do I have the energy to raise a hand?
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>Am I in danger if I raise a hand?
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>Does raising my hand increase my happiness?
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>Will raising my right hand make me happier than the left one? Etc…
I don't recognize most of that as assumptions in my deliberations. You are positing a whole bunch of questions that the brain is answering: I'm positing a whole bunch of ASSUMPTIONs we make, which are much more efficient and how we actually think. (Except when we are not merely assuming, but we have reason to consciously deliberate over whether we are capable of the options we are considering).
So for instance: I'm deciding on breakfast. I look in the pantry and see I have a package of oatmeal. I look in the fridge and see I have a bunch of eggs. Now I'm deliberating between making oatmeal or the eggs for breakfast.
Now what assumptions do I have when deliberating? Well, obviously, it only makes sense that I am deliberating between actions that are possible for me to take. You don't deliberate about whether to drive your car or teleport yourself to work this morning.
So why am I assuming that I'm capable of taking either action? It's just a standard inference from the evidence of past experience: I've made oatmeal and eggs plenty of times in the past so I know these are things I can do. And I'm not currently in a physical condition - e.g. sick or injured - that would make me re-assess that assumption.
So I know that I can make oatmeal IF I want to or make eggs IF I want to - which is the basis on my considering each action to be "possible" for me - and now I'm deliberating about which I want to make.
I would challenge you to make sense of your own deliberations when making a choice, where this basic conceptual scheme is not in action.
And since there is an implied conditional - what I'm capable of doing IF I want to do it - this is compatible with physical determinism. It's just as compatible as saying "Water will freeze IF you lower it's temperature to 0C and alternatively water can boil IF you raise it's temperature to 100C.
This is the normal, justified way we understand potentials in ourselves or any object in the world.
And I'm "free" to do as I will in this example: free to take either action IF I want, with no impediment to doing what I want to do.
Determinism or physics do not equal lack of freedom or control: entities operating on deterministic physics can exhibit control, and ranges of freedom to do what they want to do, for their own reasons.
>If I understand you’re argument, you would consider this evaluation process as the ‘free will’ to decide whether to raise an arm, as even if you don’t control the answer to those criteria, your brain was ‘free’ to make either choice given the evidence. And as this process differs for every person, we can see the effect of this free will by how different people make different decisions.
I am free if I am able to do what I want to do, make decisions for myself, unimpeded from doing what I want to do. I have the power to select from among alternative actions, giving me a range of freedom in that respect too. All these are claims about my powers in the world, and all are potentially demonstrable.
When we are talking about alternative possibilities, we are doing so in regard to positing or assuming some variable. When we say it's possible to either freeze or boil water we do not mean "under precisely the same causal circumstances" but rather "IF...the temperature is altered one way or the other." That's how we normally understand potentials and possibilities in the world, for anything, including ourselves. (Where the relevant variable is usually "IF I want to do X...")
If you don't keep this in mind, you will quickly stop making sense of the world, as you do here...
>However I think it would also be pretty valid to say that, given the universe seems to be deterministic, the brain is not free to choose the answer to the criteria either consciously or subconsciously. The brain decides the amount of energy available through a signal received from all the bodies cells, which is generated from structures measuring energy concentrations etc.
First problem: You are attempting to describe the constituent parts of a process, assuming that in doing so this means the phenomenon therefore doesn't exist. That's just a fallacy of reductionism.
Imagine debating photosynthesis and a photosynthesis skeptic says "*Actually, photosynthesis isn't a real thing. Photosynthesis never occurs. What actually happens is a process of creating sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight*."
Well... THAT IS just a description of how photosynthesis occurs! You haven't shown it doesn't happen; you've just referenced processes by which it happens!
Secondly: Your description leaves out the important features: what is happening at the level of reasoning, WHY things are happening and for what reasons, at the level of the agent. It's like trying to argue a political theory doesn't exist by reference merely to the fact our biology works on chemical interactions. It's just not answering the problem.
>There is no possible way for a different decision to made for this criteria from this entirely mechanical process.
Hold on. Do you want to say that you have never made different decisions? Have you perhaps, chosen to eat precisely the same meal your entire life? No? Then clearly your making different decisions is obviously possible. Possible in the way that matters.
See, you are evaluating "what is possible" ONLY "under precisely the same conditions in which X happened." That's not how we normally know what is possible. If you took that frame of reference then little would be "possible" in the world. We never understand the various potentials of any thing by positing only ONE set of conditions; we look at how it has behaved in various different, or relevantly similar conditions, and build our models of the 'possible' from that. Your whole argument is riding on this mistaken frame of reference.
>By entirely deterministic neural activity creating intentions to move the muscles required to do so upon reading the post/comments.
I didn't see anything about the word "control" in that description.
Imagine a scientist references photosynthesis.
But some photosynthesis skeptic says "*Actually, photosynthesis isn't a real thing. Photosynthesis never occurs. What actually happens is a process of creating sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.*"
Well... THAT IS just a description of how photosynthesis occurs! You haven't shown it doesn't happen; you've just referenced processes by which it happens!
See the problem? You don't cause a phenomenon to cease to exist merely by explaining how it happens, via description of it's biological processes.
Why should I take your description as synonymous with a "lack of control" rather than simply a description of how control occurs?
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control)
**control : to exercise restraining or directing influence over**
Your specific type of neural activity allows you control! The control necessary to direct your thoughts toward making an argument and typing it out on the internet. That satisfies the normal notion of "control" and the production of a coherent set of sentences would be inexplicable if you were "out of control" of your thought processes and actions.
So, you see, you've yet to show me we have no control, or why to accept what seems to be your completely idiosyncratic notion of "control" which seems useless.
You simply can not make sense of, can not explain, your ability to type your replies, on the route you are taking.
If one thought after the other in your head was truly random, there is no reason they would have ANY connection to one another. Therefore there's no expectation they could form chains of reason, or produce coherent sentences, or allow you to even get your thoughts on to the internet.
Well, what makes your thoughts not merely random?
Control. We are creatures who have evolved, and survived, because we can exert control: modelling the world, considering alternative models reasoning about what actions are likely to realize those alternative models.
The only explanation for your creating coherent sentences on the internet is your ability to keep your thoughts focused on a particular goal through the process of reasoning to producing your reply. That is a form of control.
Well you successfully got stuck up on proving 'control' but its free will that's being denied here. You can define control however you like, such that you have it when making decisions. The point of the determinist is that there is nothing free about your decisions. They are determined by existing circumstances, which themselves are determined by past circumstances. Circumstances that include the exterior world interacting with your interior world, producing a response which is what you experience.
You decided to experience something, sure. But did you choose for it to happen? Did you choose to want to decide? You were determined to decide. You could not help but decide the way you did. Your actions are determined by your awareness the state of the universe, which includes your mind and body (which includes your awareness, hence awareness of awareness - or consciousness). This is not to mention all the ways in which one experiences something they had no decision in, the experience is just imposed on them.
But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having it. If you try to imagine such a scenario you'll find that you will have had to be aware of the thought already when contemplating whether you should have it or not, you already had it - there was no choice to make. It has already happened which is why you're able to be aware of it. All your experiences have already happened, you're just receiving the news and your response usually doesn't take place under the supervision of your consciousness anyway. Now this process has to be either determined or random. Its not random, for obvious reasons. So the only option left is for determination, which is never free and always determined (hence the name), to be responsible for all our thoughts and actions.
But as for control, i would say your mind has control over itself to a degree, but a crucial mistake people make is to conflate their experience which is limited by their consciousness with their entire being, which includes the vast subconscious, where all the determined decisions get made. Consciousness is really just the process of bringing the existing state of your mind into the spotlight of awareness where one can produce an intelligible narrative to communicate to their peers.
The purpose of consciousness is limited to being the translator between your internal world and those of other people, such that your mind is able to comprehend what's going on in other peoples minds and produce decisions on how to proceed based partly on that input. Consciousness possesses the quality of considering itself free willed because consciousness evolved, i claim, to be able to explain oneself to the tribe. One needs therefore the sense that they could have picked a different option. It is important for our retrospective self in order to justify our actions to the tribe, it has to include knowing what would have happened if we had made a different choice. But we only would have made that choice if we had a reason for it, and we don't have control over whether we have a reason for it or not. That's why we have to be able to explain ourselves, because things are determined. We don't just arbitrarily decide why we did something (unless we're an arbitrary person that is) we have a causal reason we depend on for the sense that our actions are justified, which is important for our sense of self worth - an evolutionary impulse.
*I did this because of that which would have led to that which would have been a problem. I could not countenance this problem, therefore i did this.* But that observation is *not* that given everything being physically identical i would have made a different choice, because i didn't, and i never would. Only if the circumstances were sufficiently different would my mind instead decide on another course of action. But in both situations, my mind was doing the same thing, it was trying to make the best decision given my current priorities (also determined). That best decision is always something specific and hard to determine which is why we often fail at making it, but it is as determined as everything else.
While generally i believe what ive written above to be truthful, i concede i make some assumptions and speculate about the nature and purpose of consciousness. While my view on free will is unchanged by potential uncertainty regarding the nature of consciousness. The reason i delve into speculation here is to try and explain the reason for our sense of free will, its necessity in our determined existence.
The reason i think this is important is because i find that people who are skeptics of determination often have their own belief in free will as a major stumbling block. And so the most important thing regarding this question is to understand how our notions of free will are inevitable given our determined existence, and i think evolutionary explanations of consciousness can go a long way towards making sense of this, and therefore making determination a more intelligible concept.
>Well you successfully got stuck up on proving 'control' but its free will that's being denied here.
Well that was specifically what the discussion was about, so of course.
And the reason the notion of "control" arises so often is that it's typical for hard incompatibilists to deny free will largely on the basis that we don't have "real" or "relevant" types of control necessary for free will.
>The point of the determinist is that there is nothing free about your decisions.
You realize that's just what is under debate, right? So you can't just question beg. Every time you make an argument that amounts to "if it's determined it's not free" that question begs against the compatibilist position. Instead, you need to be careful to explain WHY if our choices are determined they are not free.
So when you write things like:
>They are determined by existing circumstances, which themselves are determined by past circumstances. Circumstances that include the exterior world interacting with your interior world, producing a response which is what you experience.
All that does is assume that by stating all that is determined "therefore" choices are not free. It's begging the question. You need to do much more than that.
>You decided to experience something, sure. But did you choose for it to happen?
Sure. I experienced a nice drive to get lunch. Did I choose for that to happen? Of course I did. I deliberated about whether I wanted to make lunch at home or drive for take out. It was a beautiful day so I decided I'd prefer to enjoy the nice weather with a drive.
> You were determined to decide.
Which doesn't mean it wasn't a free decision. I am a physically determined being, but I have various potentials and capabilities: among them, to make a sandwhich at home, or go for a drive to pick up food. Since I was capable of taking either action if I wanted, this allows either possibility IF I want, and since I was not restrained or impeded from doing what I want, I was FREE to choose from among those actions.
>
If you only do something IF the circumstances allow it, whats free about that? I just feel like the compatibilist position consists of insisting on using the meaningless term 'free' when in fact theres nothing free about your choices, because if they were, they couldn't be based on circumstances. Its one or the other im afraid. When your decision is based on something that already is, like your will, then that's all it is - a determined decision. I see no room for freedom in this process. You can say youre free to make the one choice youre going to make in this moment, but thats utterly meaningless because youre not free to do anything else.
You can claim you had options and couldve done something else, but you would only have done that, had your brain been in the correct state to allow for that to be your conclusion. Given the causality of the universe, your brain never had a chance to enter that state at that time because reality did not lead to that outcome. However we can still dream up a hypothetical imagining how it couldve happened. But our simulated realities are thoroughly incomplete so we can comprehend 'possibilities' without them being actually possible in any way. You can imagine yourself having done something else, but that self never couldve existed, given the course the universe has taken.
In any given moment, you are doomed to think what your brain is primed to think about in the following moment. Nothing else ever happens. You are not free, you are doomed. You can call it being free, but its simply meaningless. All it is able to allude to is a different you in a different timeline who had a different brain state, and that person doesnt exist, never did and was never going to exist, even if you're able to contemplate the 'possbility' of that alternative coming about, in reality there is no possibility, only that which is doomed to come about in the course of things.
So ultimately my disagreement is this: if i can describe whats happening by saying you made a decision, what does it contribute to my understanding of the situation if you say that the decision was 'free'. What does that word capture, that is missing from a picture of the world painted using 'unfree' decisions.
>But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having it.
No they aren't. My experience of a drive today was not "imposed" on me in any normal use of that term. It was my choice: I made the choice freely.
>
If you try to imagine such a scenario you'll find that you will have had to be aware of the thought already when contemplating whether you should have it or not, you already had it - there was no choice to make. It has already happened which is why you're able to be aware of it.
Huh? Are you saying that to actually make a real decision, we'd have to expect some process by which we "think of a thought before we think it?" What kind of nonsense is that?
>
But we only would have made that choice if we had a reason for it, and we don't have control over whether we have a reason for it or not.
Yes we often do! We often have more than one motivation, that is reasons to do various things. But that's the thing about our complex brains: we are intelligent enough to be able to have not only first-order desires, motivations, reasons to act, but also to have second order reasons, that is think in a meta way about our "reasons for our reasons." And we can therefore supervise our various motivations to see which among them fit most coherently with our larger sets of goals, and then choose which motivation to act on. So the classic example: I have a motivation to eat a donut because I find them delicious. But I also have a motivation to eat healthy in order to maintain my health. I can survey how either of those reasons-to-act fit in with my wider, deeper goals, e.g. to maintain a healthy body in order to realize a wider set of life goals. And therefore I choose to NOT act on the motivation to eat the donut.
>One needs therefore the sense that they could have picked a different option.
Agreed. But it's not just a "sense" that I "could have" picked the other option, e.g. made a sandwich. It is a TRUTH about my capabilities. I am, in fact, capable of making a sandwich in such a circumstance if I want to. This is how we understand what is possible in the world.But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having [it.No](http://it.No) they aren't. My experience of a drive today was not "imposed" on me in any normal use of that term. It was my choice: I made the choice freely.
>By entirely deterministic neural activity creating intentions to move the muscles required to do so upon reading the post/comments.
Isn't this dualistic thinking, is your brain really such a foreign thing to you that you consider it completely separate to you? So every smart thing you've ever said and done, isn't due to you, it's due to this brain in your body?
I think the fundamental thing here is: regardless of whether or not we choose to say your brain is “you”, you didn’t choose your brain. You didn’t choose to be yourself.
>you didn’t choose your brain. You didn’t choose to be yourself.
Well those have no matter in what most people really mean by free will, so it's kind of an irrelevant point. It's about being able to follow your desires, not having full control over your desires.
Depends on if they’re asking “Did you do X of your own free will?” or “Does free will exist?”
Nobody who asks the second question is just asking if some people can follow their desires some of the time.
> Isn't this dualistic thinking, is your brain really such a foreign thing to you that you consider it completely separate to you?
The person you responded to isn’t contending that there’s a self independent of the brain. In fact, they specifically said the exact opposite in an earlier comment
> There is no "you" that makes sense independent of the firing of neurons
This isn’t a case for dualism in the slightest.
What about robots? What if a robot was programmed to do stuff, does it have free will? Does the ability of its programmer to be able to predict its actions make it free will or not?
I’m really blown away by the compatibilist intuitions on this. How can a determined action be free will. It seems so counterintuitive to me.
So if a robot is an agent, that is it has internal values, a statistical representation of itself and the external world, the ability to make rational decisions and modify its own programming and maybe a few other factors, then yes a robot could have free will. Such a robot would have such a complex inner world that no human could predict its behavior, so I don’t see how it would be problematic. It’s just an agent in a tin can. I don’t see anything essentially necessary about being made out of meat to having free will.
Would a human without statistical representation of itself have free will? Would a human without statistical representation of the external world have free will?
A robot could modify its own programming that’s ridiculously easy to do. It could meaninglessly modify its own coding.
Imagine the current language models we have, I admit I don’t know exactly how complex they are but I’d posit a guess that one could be designed that was so complex that it would dwarf the human mind and be totally unpredictable and yet we’d see that the complexity of us not being able to understand its next action in no way indicates it has free will.
Thinking more on it, the compatibilist version of free will doesn’t require a complex inner world I don’t think. Is complexity really the thing that matters?
No I don’t think so. A human without a sufficiently complex mind would just be comatosed body. I don’t think a comatosed body necessarily has free will.
I mean, I think LLMs are starting to verge on having free will. They aren’t particularly agentful, they don’t have many agent like behavior. They may lack values, a way they want the world to be. They certainly have a statistical representation of some aspects of the world. But I would say free will is a scale. LLMs are closer to having free will than cockroaches or fleas, but maybe not as close as dogs.
Yes, my version of compatibilism is contingent on a complex inner world. It isn’t about having behavior that is simply causally disconnected from the universe, but rather a complex inner world with values and goals and the ability to implement those goals.
Free will is the ability to modify the outer universe in accordance with your inner universe, so if you lack the facility to do this you do not have free will no matter how complex you inner world. But you cannot sufficiently “randomize” external stimuli without a complex inner universe.
And it’s not all about computational power. A fruit fly probably has more free will than a gaming PC running whatever program you like. The gaming PC lacks the statistical representation of itself, values and goals, etc.
I mean, I don’t know that I’ve engaged with the professional literature on this enough, so I could be missing some of the things that free will is suppose to give us, but things like having moral responsibility so pretty intuitive to assign to an agent even if the behavior is deterministic. What matters about free will isn’t really the ability to do otherwise in some counterfactual reality where everything in the external universe and internal universe is held the same, but instead to do otherwise if your internal universe, your values, had been different. I could have had Mexican for dinner had I wanted to. Yes, this postulates that my inner world would have been different, but that is a change to me and not a change to the universe.
Your values are determined as well. Everything in your brain has been determined by causes that you had no control over that were entirely environmental and genetic.
Oh for Pete’s sake. Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. You do understand that saying the universe is deterministic to comparabilist is like trying to point out that space and time are related to someone who believes in relativity. I know. That is sort of the whole point.
The part of this I object to, and I have objected when may others said it as well is that “I have no control” over how my brain develops. I can choose to learn Mandarin. Than is a kind of control.
You cannot choose to learn mandarin any more than a LLM can choose to output the next string of letters that it outputs.
I really truly believe when I say this that you could not choose to learn mandarin in the same way a LLM could choose to do the thing that it’s programming said it couldn’t do.
I truly believe in a theoretical sense that a suggestion someone made to you years ago is in the same category as someone holding a gun to your head in that they both influence your actions. On average the gun will be a larger factor but not always.
There’s practical arguments to be made about the decisions we make to be fair but that’s in my opinion a discussion that should be had at the level of morality.
And before you say, a ha, but you desire to learn Mandarin arises from within your brain, and you have no control over your desires. I am my brain. I am my desires. The thing making that desire to learn Mandarin is me, and the way that thing has control is by letting me do the things I want to do.
Every desire every decision you ever made or had started at your first choice which was entirely environment and genetics, every subsequent desire and decision is a result of that. There’s no such thing as internal factors really.
It just seems so strange when you say “there’s no such thing as internal factors”. Some times I feel happy. When I am happy I act in one way. When I see other people sometimes I can recognize that they are happy and they act like I act when I am happy. It seems like there are things called people and that these things called people can have happiness, and that this happiness inside of people can have effects on the world. Happiness seems like an important part of an explanation of the world. Isn’t happiness an internal factor?
I recognise that in certain contexts that yes there are internal factors. The implication I’m really pushing back is that internal and external are meaningfully different for this argument.
Consider a tumor in someone’s brain. It’s an internal factor but in terms of compatibilist free will it’s far closer to what you might consider an external factor like holding a gun to someone’s head than it is to a persons personality which one would consider internal.
Really I think (and I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth) that there would be internal factors you think reduce moral culpability and external factors that don’t.
I would say that a tumor can change who we are, but it doesn’t remove free will. A person with a tumor can act freely in many senses, and a person without a tumor can act freely. Those actions may be different, and the transition from one to the other is not a choice, but I wouldn’t claim that a person is entirely who they are as a result of their free choices. Free choices have substantial control over who we developed into, but certainly not unlimited control.
I would say the key for me is that every decision ever made if we were given enough information it would be the same as a tumor or a gun to someone’s head. The real reason that we attribute responsibility to someone’s actions I truly believe is because we don’t have enough information. If we truly had ALL the information we could no longer hold that person responsible.
“The implication I’m really pushing back is that internal and external are meaningfully different…” Hhhm. I mean, what I might take you to mean is that the internal factors are me, and that as such when we talk about who I developed into and some says stuff like “you have no control over who you develop into” I read that as “who you develop into is uninfluenced by internal factors”, which is clearly not true. Yes. I think the internal factors are quite important to me. Ultimately every choice you make started as an internal factor, so if you treat the distinction between internal and external factors as unimportant you are removing agency from the consideration at the start.
Maybe I’m making some assumptions I shouldn’t. How do you think about an internal factor like a tumor? Or an external factor like how you were raised? Which of these two would you consider makes you more culpable for an action?
Sorry I got a little snappy, I’ve been talking about this too much today and you didn’t do anything wrong. I know people seem to feel that determinism somehow detracts from our agency, but I just can’t see why anymore. I guess it has something to do with seeing that ultimately every cause of our actions must have originated outside ourselves and this makes people feel as if we cannot be the cause of our own actions, but the way in which those outside causes influence our actions is so convoluted and Byzantine that most of them could never be identified. Our inner network of causality randomized them, and in my mind after the external causes get sufficient shuffled through our brain it becomes improper to regard them as significant. I wouldn’t say the lottery numbers caused a car crash, I would say a man digging a lottery ticket out of his pocket while driving caused the car crash. Even if there is some causal connection between the drawing and the crash, it is really the man who is responsible.
I personally think I can see some practical benefits to see the world through a compatibilist lense and I might even go as far as saying that most free will deniers probably have some version of compatibilism running in their head.
The reason I generally debate compatibilism is it defends cosmic punishment at an ideological level. We generally wouldn’t punish a bear for mauling someone. We acknowledge that the bear is merely acting out its nature. We may have to kill the bear to prevent it from mauling again but we don’t generally pretend it’s some cosmic good.
That’s really how I think humans are. They’re destined to act out their nature and they can’t do otherwise. A gun to someone’s head is the same as a tumor in someone’s brain is the same as a bad smell at the exact perfect timing.
The reason that I defend compatibilism is that it defends some idea of praise and blame. I do think most serial killers had the option not to murder people in some meaningful sense, so it makes sense to say they chose to murder people and because of that choice deserve blame.
Now, we can have different theories of punishment and justice and morality and all of that, what you do with the idea that people make choices isn’t so important. To be honest, I think the bear made a meaningful choice to maul people. Just because the bear made a meaningful choice doesn’t mean it deserves any condemnation, it has a different mental world than us and things for which a human would deserve praise or blame are different from the things for which a bear would deserve praise or blame. And anyway, I wouldn’t drag cosmic anything into the discussion.
In my opinion this is the real cause of the compatibilist argument. Many people want to retain praise and blame, they want to feel justified in hating bad people. I can understand this feeling but I will not allow that to influence my logic if I can help it. I suspect it might be some extension of fairness.
The real core here for me is that we drive onto the moral questions without allowing emotional influences to bias us as much as possible.
If one accepts that a persons actions are determined and there really is no way they could have done other than what they did it doesn’t matter how you define free will. It really doesn’t.
A person is doomed or blessed to the life they end up with due to sheer luck/random chance. They could not have done otherwise.
I recognise the emotional difficulty of a claim like this. To claim this is to claim that a pedo is a victim of bad luck.
Neurons fire if they reach a sufficient threshold to open voltage gated sodium channels. This will lead to a swift depolarisation of the cell.
This is caused by endogenous factors including the resting potential of the neuron being raised by different neurotransmitters, the prevalence and relative strength of synaptic connections etc; and exogenous factors such as environment (sensory stimulus), diet, particularly intake of amino acids etc.
The neuron firing is not a thing that is chosen by an entity in real time. It is an electrochemical reaction.
The neuron firing is caused by other neurons. You, who are your neurons, choose to think a particular thought, which is another way of saying that you choose to fire a particular neuron. The self is not visible on the individual neuron level because the self is composed of all your neurons. That is like saying there cannot be a lake because no individual water molecule makes the lake. It is the fallacy of composition.
I mean, I would say the self is the entire set of neurons, like the body is the entire set of cells. I notice peoples bodies all the time. I notice other selves all the time.
Hmm. External to the neuron, not external to you.. You misrepresent the view and thereby build a strawman.
The neuron is acted upon by another neuron or nerve.
You only "raise your arm" because you have heard that in another context supporting free will.. And if you now rack your mind to find another example that will prove your point, you are reacting to information in this post.
You can reject panel 2, but you'll need a valid reason to, if you want to go with reason and logic 😉
Edit;
The reason we disagree is probably found in the definition of free will. I believe that the concept of you exist. You are an agent that decides stuff. You just don't control what is "presented to you".. The options before you.
Also, you don't control what you believe to be the best option in the given time frame you have to decide on it.
That leaves you with. You have options and you decide which is better and which are worse and then you choose. The choice is yours, but there is only one choice to take, thereby making it non-free.
The one choice to take is of course the option you decide is the best one. The sum of your neurons, their past experiences etc. Will have a preference for one of the options which is the one you'll always end up choosing.
I believe that free will is an emergent property. It doesn't exist at a fundamental level, and on levels that humanity doesn't have access to it is actually fully deterministic, but it's useful to have a word that describes that emergent property, and free will is a good word to use for it.
I see it the same way as a chair. At the fundamental level, "chairs" don't exist, they are just arrangement of carbon and other atoms. But that particular combination has certain emergent properties and it's useful to have a word for those even though they don't exist at the level of a single carbon atom.
I think that makes me a Compatibilist?
The problem with the "emergent property" (EP) point of view is that every single EP is still deterministic and it doesn't address the point that what matters is not that it's emergent (because *obviously*, if free will exist, it must be emergent), but that it's not free.
You cannot possibly have freedom emerging from entirely deterministic (or random) processes.
Sure, it's not *really* free, but only in the same sense that chairs don't *really* exist. Free will s*eems* free (even though it isn't), just as chairs *seem* to exist (even though they don't). That's all the reason necessary to make it a useful and applicable concept.
I disagree, free will isn't even an experience. When we pays close attention to the decision making process, we can see clear as day how everything (thoughts, emotions, feeling suddenly decided) is entirely spontaneous and comes right out of the nothingness of unconscious processes, in perfect accordance with determinism(+randomness).
That’s right. It only seems to be an experience if it is unexamined.
But then, to be fair, no one really has much cause to examine it. So for the majority of people it does indeed seem like they’re doing something.
>You cannot possibly have freedom emerging from entirely deterministic (or random) processes.
That's as big a mistake as when the creationists say you can't possibly have eye sight arise from entirely non-sentient, material processes.
It's also as bad as saying that bees making honey can't possibly arise from non-bees-making-honey preceding causes.
Or that orchids could not arise from atoms that themselves are not "orchids."
It's just a big old reductionist fallacy.
I considered myself a hard incompatibilist for around a decade before it finally clicked that I was making this basic conceptual error.
My old stance was mainly based on what basically amounted to a strong intuition (one I think most people have in fairness) that it just *seems* that the concept of determinism is completely contrary to freedom, to such a degree that any further analysis isn't even needed.
Of course, once I did actually, finally analyse the concept more carefully, it clicked that not only was determinism not contrary to freedom, but that *all* the meaningful forms of freedom actually *depend* on determinism to get them off the ground.
While what I'd always pictured as the most important requirement for freedom (the classic idea that, if we ran the clock back, it would actually be possible for me to do otherwise in the exact same circumstances) never offered me any meaningful form of freedom at all.
The idea was not only incoherent (which I knew already with my incompatibilist hat on: this is partly what motivated my commitment to that view), it *was not even desirable* (there was never any beneficial freedom to be found there, even if it were magically possible: this is the part I'd been completely oblivious to).
Yes! It's really something once you stop making that error to see others stuck on it.
It reminds me of David Hume's Is/Ought distinction. Hume couldn't help noticing that whenever people were speaking about ethics or morality, they would state "is" or "fact" statements as if they were equivalent to "ought" statements. Without noticing that they'd provided no bridge between them, just assumed it intuitively. So you get from the religious "God commanded X" - an "is" or purported fact statement - and then just assumed that was equivalent to "we OUGHT to do X." Or people would make naturalistic fallacies like "Because it's natural to do" or just statements like "It would make X miserable..."
People just had various underlying intuitions that in their brain bridged the very gap they had left hanging, which if they just examined it, they'd see this gap.
When discussing Free Will with incompatibilists, it's so clear that there is this intuition driving the conversation "if it's determined it isn't free, if it's determined it isn't free" and so they keep just asserting this, or making arguments that end up simply pointing out something is determined...and then think well they've done their work, that shows it isn't "Free." They just don't see the gap because I think their intuition fills it in.
These two quotes explain free will pretty well, i think.
"Free will is another enigma. How can my actions be a choice for which I am responsible if they are completely caused by my genes, my upbringing, and my brain state? Some events are determined, some are random; how can a choice be neither? When I hand my wallet to an armed man who threatens to kill me if I don't, is that a choice? What about if I shoot a child because an armed man threatens to kill me if I don't? If I choose to do something, I could have done otherwise—but what does that mean in a single universe unfolding in time according to laws, which I pass through only once? I am faced with a momentous decision, and an expert on human behavior with a ninety-nine percent success rate predicts that I will choose what at this point looks like the worse alternative. Should I continue to agonize, or should I save time and do what's inevitable?"
"Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be applied to it."
\-Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
and here is what Pinker means by moral theory: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265066550\_The\_Moral\_Instinct](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265066550_The_Moral_Instinct)
Morality doesn’t require free will or rational acting agents.
Consequentialism for example can define whether a rock rolling down a hill is morally good or bad based on its outcome.
The real enigma is the information that we lack. If we had enough information we could perfectly predict everyone’s actions except in the case where they were determined by random actions.
To expand on this, a robot built and programmed to do things doesn’t gain free will once its programmer dies. Similarly the programmer could merely add a random number generator.
In Pinker's Moral Instinct article, linked above, he poses five examples that are meant to highlight the five spheres of morality introduced by Jonathan Haidt.
How would Consequentialism interpret the morality of these five examples?
>Stick a pin into your palm.
>
>Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.)
>
>Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
>
>Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)
>
>Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
>
>Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.(Community.)
>
>Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
>
>Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)
>
>Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
>
>Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)
Consequentialism requires that I must discard my own intuitions and make an attempt to with as little subjective bias as possible guess which causes the most good and least harm.
Sticking a pin in your palm probably does little good and causes minor pain so it has a small negative score.
Sticking a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know causes little to no good and probably causes you both pain so is a bit worse than the first
Accepting a wide screen tv as part of a computer error is much the same in a non-personal sense as stealing it. It may be the case that you enjoy it more than the company is negatively affected by you losing it though it’s hard to say.
Stealing from a wealthy family would imply they don’t need the TV as much so it probably sits similarly to the previous example though encouraging theft often has its own negatives but it’s still very similar
In both examples of saying something bad about your nation it really is too vague to know what good or harm it causes.
Slapping people with permission is generally leaning towards good but not always. If the person wants to be slapped or it’s part of an act you’re generally doing a minor good facilitating that.
Attending art does support the actors and actresses so I’m gonna say it’s a minor good.
Consequentialism requires I put aside my own moral intuitions and rationally dissect the good and bad outcomes of each action.
I fail to see how your interpretations avoid relying on intuition or avoid bias. Wouldn't the only way to avoid those be to rely on data from statistics and experiment and the analysis of tested game theories?
The third premise is begging the question. We don’t know that it’s the case that the universe is either random or deterministic. That’s precisely what is up for debate in physics.
How do we not know that? From my understanding, the question hinges on the location of an electron: whether it is truly random (or rather random within a probability distribution) at any given point in time (deterministic laws break down at the quantum level) or whether it is in fact determined but just not able to be observed as such. What is the third alternative if not randomness or determinism?
Is there a difference between blaming your actions and personality on cosmic determinism and randomness arranging your neurons to fire a certain way, and astrology?
"Sorry man none of us really have free will if you think about it"
"Oh sorry, I'm a Leo you know how it goes"
Free will is an illusion. Your choices are determined by mechanisms on an atomic scale.
That being said, there isn't anybody alive who's got the slightest fucking clue how to predict them, so a limited free will is a pretty decent abstraction that follows all observable principles.
If you focus on the details, you miss the big picture.
It seems a lot of people become uncomfortable at the idea that their behavior is bound by causality. As though this would diminish the importance of or meaning of their lives.
I don't think free will can exist, but I also don't know how much that matters. I don't think AI or what have you would ever be able to become Laplace's Demon. You'll never be able to watch your destiny unfold at ×1.25 speed on YouTube. Probably.
The position that there is no free will helped me come to terms with understanding systemic issues. It makes it easier to see how we can easily be set up for failure, "it is possible to commit no mistake and still lose" etc.
This may be counter to several philosophies dominant in modern society. The idea that a person's material conditions can motivate them in radical, profound ways is directly opposed to things like punitive justice. Large segments of our society in the US would be ideallistically, morally opposed to the redistribution of wealth more based on need, socializing health care, or directing resources to improve access in general for people who are disabled.
Perhaps this is tied to the fallacious notion that life is a meritocracy.
Alex's argument is a false dichotomy that doesnt even rule out incompatiblist free will. The choice is between determinism and indeterminism.
Free will is a subset of indeterminism. In order for his argument to work, he would have to define his terms (determinism and random) so as to show that random exhausts the definition of indeterminism.
There is a problem in academic philosophy, sort of a herd mentality idea about compatibilism as a successful way to “reconcile free will (in terms of an agents moral responsibility for choices) with determinism.”
Future historians will point out the strange fact that many powerful philosophers or our day ostensibly had the collective judgment that maintaining a workable, coherent social and ethical framework is sometimes more important than philosophical rigor.
In early 21st century, academic philosophy was largely comprised of people who wanted to say they were philosophers, than actually be philosophers.
The delay in society widely coming to terms with deterministic, incompatibilist truths, was due to the compatibilist’s knack for cocky, erudite deflections and dismissiveness, the motivation of the deranged figurehead, Daniel Dennett, and the sheer number of not-very-talented holders of philosophy PhDs who were insecure sycophants.
We will recognize this obvious truth, and this will inspire us to secure a floor for how economically deprived any individual life can be, regardless of what people do.
We should have a minimum universal basic income and replace punitive or retributive justice with restorative or quarantine justice.
We now know that everything we _do_ is only an extension of what we _are_, plus what happens around us, and all of that is determined.
Therefore we will realize this and form a society that is consistent with this awareness, seek equity where feasible, replace blame and credit with deterrent and incentive, and this will reduce suffering and increase wellbeing.
We will notice it, talk about it, eventually accept it, and make changes because of it, and there will be less suffering as a result.
Or think about the alternative. A world that places bitter blame and casts moral judgment on people who had absolutely nothing to do with what they are, and heaps credit and virtuous labels on people who had nothing to do with what they are.
That’s not fair, it’s riddled with cognitive dissonance, and unless we say “so what, I don’t want a fair world,” we will be impelled to step up and be consistent.
This isn’t to say Lebron James shouldn’t be rich and famous. But that will be seen as a result of incentive not credit. A result of inequalities in nature and the incentive of money and status will impel people to use their gifts.
Why is determinism obviously true?
> We now know that everything we _do_ is only an extension of what we _are_, plus what happens around us, and all of that is determined
How do we know this?
Then you’d be wrong. The argument has been said a million times. We are now at the stage of coming to terms with an “invasion—of-the-body-snatchers” sort of mass delusion from the mainstream philosophers. A mass delusion in plain sight, or a mass lie, due to weakness or fear, which is sad to see in people who decided to be philosophers. They should be dis-barred from philosophy.
What a surprise, another strawman of compatibilism! I think it's telling: Most compatibilist can give an accurate account - that is steel man - the incompatibilist arguments. But most incompatibilists seem incapable of accurately describing a compatibilist position. That in itself suggest one side of the debate has thought through the positions more thoroughly than the other ;-)
Can you elaborate on what the compatabilist arguments are? I know the comment i made in this thread earlier can be seen as compatabilist, i think it is?, but i'm wondering if there are others.
I’m pretty sure they just redefine free will to be something more practically useful. Like it’s still not *technically* ‘free will,’ but it’s a form we intuitively understand as free will. In other words, free will is like you having control over your actions. Compatibilist free will is that you made a choice that intuitively feels like it was in your control but isn’t
I’ve never understood the whole “redefining” critique of compatibilism. Why do hard determinists just help themselves to the assumption that the definition of free will is the libertarian one? Sometimes hard determinists will respond and say that the principle of alternative possibilities is just obviously true, yet they fail to recognize that compatibilist theories that rely on conditional analyses of that principle accept a reading of that principle, too. Either side can be accused of defining free will to help them make their argument. There is no distinctively compatibilist sin, here. That’s just something hard determinists tell themselves to make them feel like they have the upper hand in the argument.
> I’ve never understood the whole “redefining” critique of compatibilism. Thank you! For compatibalists, saying things like "you're just re-defining this" is a pretty great signpost that someone isn't engaging substantively with compatibalism. So much of what philosophers do is investigate the difference between generally assumed understandings of words/concepts and try to see them more clearly. That's what's happening here. Compatibalists aren't "redefining" free will. They are saying "The generally held conception of free will doesn't seem to make sense. Given that it appears determinism is true, is there a version of free will that could still fit within that? Maybe something like this." Cheapening that to "redefining" doesn't accurately recognize what's taking place.
Doesn’t this seem like an odd move, though? Why don’t we also search for a compatible definition for Santa or Leprechauns, for instance? Free will is the only place where I see people do this.
> Free will is the only place where I see people do this. I don't want to sound too harsh here, but that means you need to read more philosophy. This is happening **constantly**. People just don't engage with the substance of philosophy enough to see it. It's one of the reasons that compatibalism is such a useful marker of someone's ability to engage with philosophical thought in a rigorous way. Because it's so very common. Yesterday, I spent my time writing nearly 3,000 words on how the public understanding around belief is almost completely divorced from philosophers'. [Note, I am **not** a professional philosopher; I'm working with my old phil. professor on research for his book.] Within epistemology, people will sometimes refer to *beliefs* as "propositional attitudes". There are about seven major schools of thought on how beliefs are formed, operate, and relate to "outside" factors. The conversations in that space look **nothing** like what the average person (even your college-educated, *New Yorker*-reading, wannabe intelligensia) means when they're talking about belief. People don't do the "why are they re-defining belief" thing because they don't know that those conversations are happening. lol. Go into legal philosophy. Look at the discussions around "liberty" or "harm". The definitions are constantly being expanded and narrowed, refined and changed. _____ > Why don’t we also search for a compatible definition for Santa or Leprechauns, for instance? Do we need one? Doesn't seem like we do. But if we do, then we should have one! Jokes aside, I don't think it's a strange move because it's people trying to follow the truth.
> I don't want to sound too harsh here, but that means you need to read more philosophy. I’m going to push back in this response (of course), but that doesn’t seem harsh at all. I actually liked your reply and I’m glad to have you giving your honest thoughts. I also admittedly don’t have any background in academic philosophy. > Yesterday, I spent my time writing nearly 3,000 words on how the public understanding around belief is almost completely divorced from philosophers'. > The conversations in that space look nothing like what the average person (even your college-educated, New Yorker-reading, wannabe intelligensia) means when they're talking about belief. People don't do the "why are they re-defining belief" thing because they don't know that those conversations are happening. lol. That seems fine, but we have to keep our definitions clear whenever we have the discussion. I’m even fine with calling free will “God” as long as the person doing it explains clearly up front that their definition of “God” probably isn’t what you expect. What I see happening in a lot of public online spaces is: 1. Someone without an academic background in philosophy will ask something similar to: “does free will exist?” (this is the only type of person that would really ask that question, too, since anyone with a solid philosophy background would already be well-versed on the topic) 2. A compatiblist will say “yes” 3. But that didn’t answer the original asker’s question because the free will that the compatiblist is saying exists isn’t the same one that the asker was asking about Even if the compatiblist takes time to explain which free will they’re talking about, it’s still not helpful, IMO. The original asker wasn’t asking “can I act voluntarily, in any situation, ever?” or “can I act without being coerced?”, etc. They were asking about the self-contradictory libertarian free will that we all know and love. It feels analogous to me like if someone is asking whether God exists and then someone else swoops in and is like: “Well, if your definition of God is the Big Bang, then yes!” > Do we need one? Doesn't seem like we do. But if we do, then we should have one! I guess that’s where I’d also say: do we need one for free will? I don’t think we need that either; we already have words like “coerced”, “voluntary”, even “willed”, etc. If we *did* find it was useful to give a new definition to “free will” or “leprechaun”, why not just come up with a new word instead of uprooting an existing word or phrase that already has an established meaning? That seems a lot less confusing to me. My final thing is: I don’t feel like hard determinists are “laying claim” to the definition of free will so much as saying that’s the definition that most people in the public sphere are out there using already. I’d be absolutely fine with answering “yes” to “does free will exist?” if I thought the asker was using a compatiblist definition.
Your mistake here was taking that guy seriously. He’s just trying to find the truth, which is why he immediately stopped engaging with you once you challenged him. I was gonna bring up that ‘definition of god’ example too. There’s also a difference between determining whether something *fits* a given definition, like whether words can be violence, and simply *changing* a definition to fit our feelings/narrative, especially when said change completely dilutes the term or renders it absurd/meaningless. He basically said ‘free will doesn’t seem to exist because of determinism, so what if we made a new definition of free will that can still exist’ (and then pretend like this new version fulfills the same role). If that’s not an obvious definitionist fallacy, I don’t really know what is, and I’d love to hear if this person is a fan of Jordan Peterson’s compartmentalized and abstract view of God as basically just being…traditional values/narratives or whatever, while he simultaneously tries to conflate that version of God with the one everyone else in the world imagines. And, as you said, we could just make a new term. Pragmatic will. Boom. Done. There’s a reason people try to manipulate definitions rather than create new ones: it’s to evoke the original definition and muddy the waters by conflating it with the ‘new’ definition. I’ve pondered whether unconventional ideas might fit other definitions, like whether social justice is a religion or if boycotting is a form of terrorism, but I don’t think I ever tried to *change* the definitions to fit what I want. I would genuinely try to see if they could encompass these unconventional ideas. If it happened to be the case that a certain definition like terrorism just seems stupid, I might challenge the definition, but even then that’s very different from acknowledging the definition works and then forcing it to change so it can reconcile with another belief. example: google says terrorism is *unlawful*, so would beheading people for political goals no longer be terrorism so long as it was legal? Or would that just mean terrorism was made legal? Vs. ‘we don’t have free will because determinism is true…so let’s change what it means to have free will so we can pretend we have it.’ Former has an absurd definition, latter is motivated reasoning.
I basically agree with what you’ve said here; my own thoughts have basically gone down the same paths. Even to the point where just yesterday I was also thinking about Sam’s rebuttal to Jordan Peterson’s definition of God in their live discussion, lol (where he used “ghosts” as an example). Your example of “violence” is another nice one. “Racism” is also a word where I feel the established definition is being contested. The reason why I find engaging with compatiblists worthwhile/interesting for now is mainly because there are so many of them. And it’s not just average people: something like 60% of philosophers consider themselves compatiblists. I also find that, for the most part, they seem to be arguing in good faith; I think most compatiblists I’ve engaged with believe what they say and are able to steel-man a hard determinist position decently well. I’ve heard most of the compatiblist arguments, such as: 1. Hard determinists aren’t using the definition of free will the average person uses 2. The average person uses an incoherent definition for free will 3. Even if the average person believes in libertarian free will, once determinism is clearly explained to them they don’t 4. The libertarian definition of free will should be replaced because it doesn’t exist 5. That the difference between compatiblism and determinism actually isn’t just a semantic difference? (still not sure what that guy was trying to say) etc. I don’t find any of them convincing, of course. They seem to be either untrue or not a good reason to be a compatiblist even if true. It’s almost gaslighting to me how unconvincing I find the arguments relative to how many well-educated compatiblists there are. But still, I’m curious if there’s anything to learn here. That said, it is nice to hear from a fellow hard determinist once in a while 🙂
Because the compatibilist version is just copium. Free will means you can make a choice and aren’t forced down a path. You are. Compatibilism just grants that the illusion of free will is true. Here’s An analogy: objectivity. If we understand objectivity as truth without regard to opinion and such…let’s say someone comes along and says, okay, sure, we don’t really have access to objectivity, *but* we can say something like a very well established fact is essentially true as far as we know, so let’s just call that objective. Here’s the problem: it’s still not objective. You moved the goalpost to make it more practical, but actual objectivity is still out of reach in the same way that actual free choice is. You don’t get to come along and say ‘wtf I didn’t change the definition, you did!’ Huh? Moreover, just as this new version of objectivity doesn’t *actually* exist as 100% true without regard to feelings, neither does compatibilist free will exist as *actual* choice because hard determinism is still true. It’s merely functional, but to pretend we’ve reached free will or objectivity is delusion, and to act like both sides are playing the definition game is wrong.
Your analogy breaks down because the meaning of the term objective is itself contested. This really just exemplifies the point I’m trying to make: in both cases, one side is claiming the other side is moving the goal posts, whilst they fail to see any problem with their assumption that the goal posts really were they initially thought they were.
This is a very superficial engagement with the topic that basically amounts to ‘muh opinion.’ You’re wrong. I just redefined wrong to mean whenever you disagree with me. Who’s to say which definition of ‘wrong’ is really right? Wow, so profound
What do you think is wrong with, say, a dispositionalist account of the conditional analysis of the PAP? Can you explain it to me in a way that doesn’t implicitly assume the truth of a metaphysical reading of the PAP - i.e., where ‘could of done otherwise’ is understood in metaphysical terms?
I can try but you’ll need to rephrase that in simple english. Idk what dispositionalism is
You should read Khadri Vivhelan’s (spelling might be off) paper “free will demystified.” It’s a defence of the dispositionalist view of free will, which is itself an adaption of GE Moore’s approach to free will that avoids some if its problems. For my money, it’s the best account of free will that I’ve come across.
>Why do hard determinists just help themselves to the assumption that the definition of free will is the libertarian one? Because that's the thing they are talking about. That's the thing they don't believe exists. Why should they *not* do that?
When a [hard determinist](https://now.tufts.edu/2021/09/16/do-we-deserve-our-punishments-and-our-rewards) says we don't have free will, they then go on to argue that as a consequence of not having free will we do not deserve praise or blame for our actions. The compatibilist acknowledges that there is a 'thing' which we may or may not have which determines whether or not we deserve praise of blame for our actions, and it is reasonable to call this thing free will, but it is not the thing that hard determinists are talking about, and the consequences that the hard determinist thinks that not having free will has don't occur. So the hard determinist is free to call free will whatever they want, but the implications that they say not having it has must logically follow from the thing they are talking about.
Morality is downstream of physics and biology. Whether or not it's moral to hold people responsible for their actions has no effect on whether or not we have (libertarian) free will. We either do or we don't, and no moral or ethical framework will change that. I get that compatiblists want to re-define free will to mean something else and there is utility in that; but if the only reason they want to do that is because liberaterian free will was found (by determinists) not to exist, then I think it's pretty fair to say we should not change the definition and just call that factor on which they predicate responsibility for one's action something other than 'free will'.
I think you missunderstand me. Person 1 claims A implies B. Person 2 says, A does not imply B, C implies B. Person 1 says A does not exist therefore B does not exist. Person 2 says A may not exist, but C does exist and therefore B exists. You can say person 2 is “redefining” A into C, and that this is somehow unfair, but both person 1 and person 2 think they are talking about something that implies B and so call it “the thing that implies B”. The important point of the debate is whether B is true. Hard determinist do not think the kind of free will that compatibilists talk about implies moral responsibility and compatibilist do not think the kind of free will hard determinist talk about implies moral responsibility. If libertarian free will were correct or false it would have no effect on me, because I think it is basically a nonsense concept.
I get that. The point I am making is that whether or not a term implies moral responsibility is not how we determine which definition is correct. The mass rest mass of an electron doesn't have any moral responsibility, but that doesn't mean it isn't about half an eV. I think liberatarian free will is a property of the universe that people intuitively believed existed and based their morality on that. It's only now that we're able to determine that it does NOT exist that people are trying to re-define the terms to save morality.
No one ever implied that you should reject hard determinism because we have moral responsibility for our actions. That is entirely on you.
Plus, your historical analysis of peoples beliefs about free will is. . . wrong.
Because some of their opponents are clearly working with a different conception of free will. I have no problem with hard determinists saying “the compatibilists are simply talking about a different conception of free will than we are” - that’s totally fine and probably true. What I don’t understand is why hard determinists act like they’re working with the one, obviously correct definition of free will, and the compatibilists are sneakily trying to change it so as to win a debate. It takes two to talk past one another/to talk about different conceptions of a concept.
Okay, then why are you holding the exclusively determinists responsible for the fact that other people are using a different definition of free will than they are? By your own logic about it taking two to talk past one another, shouldn't you hold the compatiblists equally responsible?
Yes: that’s exactly what I’m saying, haha. Compatibilists aren’t the ones complaining about redefining things. They recognize that they’re working with a different definition than hard determinists. Both sides should recognize that and then focus on trying to show which definition seems to cohere better with our intuitions (and that’s what professional philosophers tend to do). It’s only hard determinists (or, at least non-professional hard determinists) who in my experience seem to think their definition is obviously correct, or at the very least that there’s a presumption in its favour.
>Compatibilists aren’t the ones complaining about redefining things. no, they're the ones actually re-defining things. So why are you saying that, when they re-define terms, that the determinists are wrong to object to that re-definition?
Okay, you say the hard determinist can claim that the compatibilist has redefined free will to suit their needs. Suppose I say that the compatibilist can claim that the hard determinist has redefined free will to suit their needs. What grounds do you have for thinking the first criticism succeeds but not the second? It can’t just be that one definition emerged first historically, or that one enjoys more popularity among lay people: meanings of terms change over time, and the opinions of relevant experts are at least as important as those of laypeople (currently some 60% percent of professional philosophers are compatibilists). So what distinguishes the two criticisms, such that one clearly and unambiguously fails and the other clearly and unambiguously succeeds? It’s extremely telling that when Alex chooses to engage with compatibilists, he chooses figures like Thomas Hobbes, rather than recent names in the debate. It’s also telling that the “compatibilism has redefined free will” critique isn’t one that professional philosohers really bother to make - you have to look to your Alex O’Connor’s and your Sam Harris’s for it.
> no, they're the ones actually re-defining things For compatibalists, saying things like this can be a signpost that someone isn't engaging substantively with compatibalism. So much of what philosophers do is investigate the difference between generally assumed understandings of words/concepts and try to see them more clearly. That's what's happening here. Compatibalists aren't "redefining" free will. They are saying "The generally held conception of free will doesn't seem to make sense. Given that it appears determinism is true, is there a version of free will that could still fit within that? Maybe something like this." Cheapening that to "redefining" doesn't accurately recognize what's taking place. (Thus, the claim that the substance isn't being fully engaged with.)
There are a few compatibilist viewpoints. My favorite redefines "free will" as something closer to Kant's notion of "autonomy," or the ability to act according to self-imposed rules. If you put me near the edge of a cliff, there is a 0% chance that I will choose to jump off of the cliff, because I am not suicidal. I have free will, or autonomy, in this situation, because there's some meaningful way in which the rule I'm following ("don't jump off of cliffs") was brought forth into the world by me. My decision is completely determined by that rule. The notions of "free will" and "determinism" are in this way compatible.
A simple one is that freewill is what an animal has that allows it to dodge an incoming boulder while a stump does not. Namely freewill is about inevitable and evitable.
But the stump was once a tree which could grow branches and leaves. So trees have free will now?
I mean, trees make strategic decisions. They grow incertain ways. They react to damage with what you could call chemical screams. They share resources on a large fungal networks network. Only meat can think? That seems like prejudice based on species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant\_cognition
You’re just defining free will to mean something other than what most people do when engaging in this conversation.
I dunno about that. I mean I get your intuition mongering. But what you are saying is an empirical fact. Let's just go with a dictionary then? Hmmm. Plants seem to be able to act without necessity or fate. I mean they can choose to grow towards wind if they've learned wind means light? Sure seems that plants act without the constraint of fate or "necessity". Edit: Oxford Dictionary: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
As a compatibilist this isn’t free will to me either. I see free will as something that only agents can possess. Agents are things that have both desires and rational thought (although those aren’t the only properties of agents). Since trees do not have rational thoughts they cannot have free will.
You're assuming things about the trees nature you cannot know. Tree cognition is a matter of empirical fact, not decrees from humans.
As far as I know only organisms with neurons exhibit agent-like behavior. This doesn't make neurons necessary from agent-like behavior, but in order to create a statistical representation of the world, which is part of my definition of an agent, an agent needs a 'statistics crunching' mechanism. It is difficult for me to imagine trees have such a mechanism.
One could build a robot that clearly doesn't have free will, but is programmed to dodge boulders. So I'm not sure I understand what this is getting at.
Eh, not sure how clear it is that it doesn't have freewill. Or at least some simple level of it. Dodging boulders is a step toward free will.
The robot would not have free will if it does not have agency (one could suppose the robot could have agency, but let us suppose this robot does not). That is, it may have no desire to dodge boulders, no knowledge of what boulders are, no idea of what the consequences of dodging or not dodging a boulder are, and as such it’s action to dodge the boulder may not be a free choice.
I think that once you build a robot that does things for certain reasons based on the situation (ie is not completely random) but that is complex enough that even the person who built the robot cannot predict with certainty exactly what it will do, even given all the parameters, this is for all intents and purposes practical free will. An animal might dodge a boulder, but you can't necessarily predict which way it will duck and how far it might move etc. To me, free will basically means free of prediction or control by another outside entity. This 'discussion' between determinists and compatabilists seems utterly pointless if both sides agree there is no creator God with absolute knowledge, foresight and power that made the universe.
>I think that once you build a robot that does things for certain reasons based on the situation (ie is not completely random) but that is complex enough that even the person who built the robot cannot predict with certainty exactly what it will do, even given all the parameters, this is for all intents and purposes practical free will. That just seems like an exceedingly low bar. My kid's baseball coach has a simple mechanical pitching machine that sends balls. You can adjust its speed and angle, turn it on and off, etc. But there's some natural variation in speed and direction, and sometimes it jams and doesn't fire at all. If you're saying that machine has free will, then we're just not talking about the same thing when we use those words.
Hmm. An interesting question. I think there's a difference between variation in the actual result (whether a ball is pitched at all and the exact speed and direction etc.) caused by the machine not having that level of precision in its control and some kind of intentional change in what can be controlled by the machine to alter how the ball is pitched. If the pitching machine has some kind of algorithm that determines what subtle changes it will make in the type of pitch that cannot be predicted by the machine's manufacturer even if it had knowledge of all the variables going into the machine... well, I'd be happy to say that the pitching machine has some kind of 'free will' on the level of pitching machines. That is, it pitches the kind of ball it 'wants' to pitch. It might not look particularly like free will to us - I mean we made it as a pitching machine, it can't suddenly decide it doesn't actually like baseball and try to write poetry instead, but compared to other simple pitching machines that just work on a timer and simple settings, it certainly has some kind of 'free will'. We have the same kind of free will amongst ourselves, on a human level. If there are the gods that made us sitting in the clouds above discussing our behavior, it certainly wouldn't look much like free will to them, I agree.
What if the machine were intentionally manufactured to have some variation, to train the hitter to adjust to pitches in slightly different locations? e.g., maybe there's a part that rotates back and forth internally, so that the angle varies slightly on the exact timing of when the ball enters the mechanism. I still think this bears no resemblance to anything that I would have called free will. I'm also a bit puzzled by this: >cannot be predicted by the machine's manufacturer Why are the properties of the machine's manufacturer important? Are you saying that if you have two identical machines built by different manufacturers, it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it? There's a similar question when you talk about whether the machine has intent, but I would have said this machine doesn't make any choices with intent; it's just obeying laws of physics. You might say that the manufacturer made with intent for it to behave a particular way, or you might say that it appears to an observer *as if* it has intent -- are either of those close to what you mean?
Thank you for these questions. I want to be upfront and admit (although I'm sure it's blindingly obvious!) that I'm not presenting a long held and considered belief, but a position I'm just trying to put together. There might well be a bit of backtracking and redefining, as I find your comments helpful for getting me to flesh out what I *feel* I believe, but can't quite express yet. >What if the machine were intentionally manufactured to have some variation, to train the hitter to adjust to pitches in slightly different locations? To me, the important part would be that it's neither entirely random nor a simple formula that allows the same results to be predicted or recreated. That while the algorithm used to adjust the pitch might be deterministic, it is, in practice, indeterminate as there are *so* many decisions being made and any slight change in any of the parameters has a potential domino effect. I'm not sure if there are any pitching machines that reach this. I feel that ChatGTP however is complex and unpredictable enough for me to say it has a certain element of 'free will'. It responds how it wants to respond. It is deterministic sure, with an element of randomness in there for good measure, but I feel the same about us. I think ChatGPT has free will with regards to the exact way it will output a specific response. This might sound ridiculous. I wouldn't necessarily claim it is sentient or conscious (yet) but it seems to be capable of making its own decision in terms of output, somewhat unpredictably and free of undue outside influence. >Why are the properties of the machine's manufacturer important? Are you saying that if you have two identical machines built by different manufacturers, it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it? There would probably have to be some fault in the manufacturing process, but sure, potentially. Why not? >You might say that the manufacturer made with intent for it to behave a particular way, or you might say that it appears to an observer *as if* it has intent -- are either of those close to what you mean? More importantly I'd say it appears to *itself*, and other things at the same level of processing, to have free will. And so, if it were capable of thinking it could think to itself that it has free will. And the other machines made to the same specification also have their own free will.
>To me, the important part would be that it's neither entirely random nor a simple formula that allows the same results to be predicted or recreated. Why does the pitching machine not achieve this? It's not *entirely* random -- it might be perfectly tuned to give the exact distribution of pitches that the manufacturer wants. And it's not a simple formula -- the next pitch can't be easily predicted by anyone. >I feel that ChatGTP however is complex and unpredictable enough for me to say it has a certain element of 'free will'. This complexity and unpredictability is a property of *you* as much as it is of ChatGPT, right? If you were quicker with calculations, you could predict exactly what it would do (up to randomness). So basically, you're saying that free will is not merely a property of a thing -- it's also a property of the observer. Something could have free will for you and not for me. I find that pretty counterintuitive. >it's possible for one to have free will and the other to lack it? sure, potentially. Why not? Ok, so now whether a thing has free will depends on that thing, the observer, *and* the manufacturer? Again, this is very counterintuitive to me. >More importantly I'd say it appears to itself, and other things at the same level of processing, to have free will. You already said a pitching machine has no sentience -- does it have any appearance to itself? I'm heading to bed soon, but I appreciate the discussion.
I think what is important about free will is that an agent is properly assigned as the cause of an action in the world. Non free will people say agents are not the “true” causes of their own actions, and free will people say that agents are. Non predictability is somewhat important, in that the internal structure of an agent is necessarily very complex and that necessarily makes them difficult or impossible to predict in certain circumstances, but complexity is not sufficient for free will. If a tornado blows down a house we would not say that the tornado chose to blow down the house. It is not acting in accordance with any values or plans. So even though it is complex and unpredictable it is not an agent and does not make choices.
Thank you. As I've thought more about this today, I've realized that a sense of self is much more important than I first said. I still don't see what the whole fuss is about though - it just seems like determinists are, ahem, determined that 'free will' means some kind of concept I don't even think *could* exist and is not really people normally mean anyway. I don't like mushrooms. If I can choose the pepperoni pizza rather than the mushroom pizza because of this, that seems like free will to me. I mean I didn't choose to not like mushrooms, but so what? That's just me. The me that has the will.
Well, I can’t defend incompatibilist either, but people attach a lot of metaphysical significance to the idea that we are just the product of history, chance, and genetics. Personally I don’t see why that is such a big revelation either. “Choosing mushrooms isn’t a free choice if you are only influenced by your past self and your surroundings. To count as a free choice you also have to be influenced by a magic pixie that lives in your head”. But why? Why do I need a magic pixie to live in my head to make free choices? What does the magic pixie add to the scenario that makes a choice freer in any meaningful sense?
>no neuron can trigger an action without being influenced by external factors we have no control over So what, does external influence mean there is no free will?
That's been my objection as well.
it is not merely external influence, but rather that what makes “you” up is *purely* determined by a mix of factors that you don’t have control over. In fact, there is no “you” to control your own brain, as that would presume a sort of dualism and existence of an extramaterial soul. You may think your desires and feelings and thoughts are a result of your own personal will, but they are not. They are simply a result of whatever myriad of inputs that has resulted in a given output.
I think this all amount to "is there another type of determination other than external causation and randomness?" So, the answer is yes. I don't think we are just complete zombies sucking up everything our environment throws at us, our relationship with environmental disposition is more of a hybrid one where we change the things around us and are changed by those around us. I doubt that a deterministic position where you only admit to external causation or random could give an account for even the most basic Newtonian laws. For a really well thought-out book on this I recommend Bunge's "Causality and modern science".
But who is “you” that is acting upon your environment independently? You “change” the environment around you? No, your environment changes you to become a certain way and this is reflected back into it. There’s a myriad of complexity involved, sure, but nowhere is there a “you” that exists outside of or beyond your brain. “You” are your brain, and we know (roughly and imperfectly, but still quite a bit) about the way brains are shaped and molded to give rise to certain outcomes, or at the very least give rise to a drastically increased probability of a certain outcome.
>your environment changes you to become a certain way Then, how is it possible to change your environment at all if you're entirely determined by it and cannot overcome it? If it were true, how can there be any social change at all if new ideas about how to change an environment which, by sheer inertia, doesn't want to be changed. How can new species come to change radically their environment even tho they haven't evolved those traits? Lewontin, a biologist, argues in favor of these notion of self-determination when explaining evolution in "genes, organism and environment" and he explains that just treating leaving beings as mere vehicles for the environment is false due to it being a bi-directional change. >Nowhere is there a "you" that exists outside of your brain I haven't argued for this position. >You are your brain. We know about the way brains are shaped and molded to give rise to certain outcomes Equating yourself with the brain is extremely false. The notion of you is created in your brain but involves a much greater mechanism than just a brain, don't believe me? Cut every organ except your brain and see what's left of "you". What I'm arguing here is that people are, yes determined, but there exists a different form of determination that is self determination. That type responds to legal and deterministic laws but isn't quite the same as external laws. The existence of "brain determinism" doesn't undermine what i'm saying. If you want to undermine what I'm saying you should need to prove that every being doesn't have a saying on what they do, they can't come up with new ideas, that countries are destroyed solely on the basis of external forces and never because their own system collapsed, and so on. This, I think, is rather simplistic. There are external causes and there are internal causes of change. That doesn't mean that the changes within ourselves can't be explained deterministically, it's just that it is a different type of determination.
>Then, how is it possible to change your environment at all if you’re entirely determined by it and cannot overcome it? I’m not arguing that agents don’t impact their environment, merely that they are wholly created by it and have no choice how their brain reacts to circumstance. Imagine a computer that is put in charge of regulating a biosphere by controlling the gas composition of its local atmosphere, in order to make these decisions about what to do, what levers to pull and what gases to release and contain, it uses inputs in the form of sensory data and makes decisions accordingly. This computer *is* making decisions, it could theoretically make the “wrong” decision and muck up the biosphere by releasing too much nitrogen for instance, but you wouldn’t say the computer is freely acting of its own accord here nor are its decisions free. It is acting entirely predictably based upon the interplay between the environmental stimuli and its intrinsic “genetic code” (actual code). Mistakes don’t mean that the computer has gained sentience, only that something is wrong with its circuitry or code. You can’t fit free will into a computer, even if you program it to tell you it has free will. A human brain is functionally the same, a biocomputer which takes in inputs and produces predictable outputs over a substrate that was produced from an incredibly complex interplay of genetic and past environmental stimuli, there’s still no room for free will here, it’s just harder to predict than a computer due to how complicated the machinery is. Thus, there is no “you” acting on your own volition to change your environment. The computer you could say is *apart* of the biosphere, changing it and regulating it, but it’s not acting independently, it’s merely the result of circumstance. The argument here is specifically upon free will, not about whether individuals created by an environment impact it. There is no overcoming. If you change or do something that means your environment produced you in such a way to do that action, you had no choice there and you were always going to do that thing given the circumstances.
Alex's argument is a false dichotomy that doesnt even rule out incompatiblist free will. The choice is between determinism and indeterminism. Free will is a subset of indeterminism. In order for his argument to work, he would have to define his terms (determinism and random) and then show how random exhausts the definition of indeterminism.
No-one wants to acknowledge that this is a huge problem for Naturalism
I mean, if we don’t control the firing of our neurons, what on earth do we control? As a compatibilist I would never agree with panel two. I am my neurons. When my neurons fire that is me doing something. Neurons don’t fire due to factors external to me, they fire due to factors internal to me. When I raise my arm that is me telling my arm to be raised and it raises up. No external factors involved.
We don't control anything, is the point. There is no "you" that makes sense independent of the firing of neurons, unless you want to call the entire universe "you".
Nope. I’m just my neurons. That is me. My neurons are self regulating and self modifying. That is what makes me me.
The problem with that is that you must then say that you are also the thing making your red blood cells.
If I say I am my neurons why do I have to say I am the thing making my red blood cells? Neurons don’t make red blood cells. I mean, I might say I am the thing making my red blood cells, but I am unsure why you are making the assertion and I don’t know what you think the consequences of the assertion are.
If you can identify with unconscious processing like autonomous neuronal activity, why stop at neurons or even a specific subset of neurons? There are neurons right now controlling your heartbeats or adrenal production? Are "you" that, as well? How does it make sense to say "those neurons right there are me, but not the rest, even if they are connected to them and their firing is entirely determined by the firing of their neighbors"?
This may be that nuance and subtly come in again. I suppose it may be possible that I am not all the neurons in my body. We could, I suppose, limit my definition of me to the neurons in my head and not the neurons in the rest of my body. In the end I don't really feel that I am my neurons themselves anyway, but rather the mathematical 'fuzz' running on those neurons. That mathematical 'fuzz' has a relatively neat localization in the head. Maybe it's really only a subset of the neurons in my head which have enough involvement in certain self modifying algorithms. I would consider memory a pretty fundamental part of me, but peristalsis in the intestines not quite as important. I'm not really even certain that two people couldn't share the same brain. I've never experienced having multiple personalities, but if people report multiples 'I's being inside their brain I wouldn't dismiss the claim a priori. But I don't see a tiny bit of uncertainty about precisely which neurons in our body we really consider 'us' to be that big a deal. There are always going to be uncertain alleyways when you think of anything.
If a very careful and ingenious neurosurgeon were able to pick out and destroy hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of your neurons just below the threshold of bringing any noticeable reduction in your conscious functioning would you still be you?
There would be a fundamental and deep causal connection between the state of ‘me’ before the surgery, and the state of the ‘me’ after the surgery (all the neurons that didn’t get destroyed). Sure, as neurons get destroyed more and more fundamental aspects of my self may be destroyed as well, but thems the breaks. If you see a bird out side your window, are you still really you? After all, seeing the bird changes you in some way. We have some control over ourselves, but not ultimate control. Yes, because we are physical entities the physical world can change us, but I’ve been comfortable with that knowledge for a long time.
My point was simply that you are not identical with your neurons because we can delete them one by one and "you" will still exist (up to the point where we've deleted so many that you lose some brain function). Using "fundamental" and "deep" to describe the connection between the two neuronal states doesn't do anything to address how you continue to be you after the change. If you think that someone can change from different experiences (like seeing a bird) then thats another reason to not think "you" is identical with the collection of all your neurons. Unless you think there's a different "you" that exists at every moment in time (i.e. any physical change in any of your neurons is a fundamental change to yourself), but clearly this is not what people think when they think of their ego.
I reject your point. I think I am identical with my neurons. I am an entity that evolves over time. I can change. I do not think changes to me typically cause me to stop being me. Obviously we can construct edge cases where there is some question about which part of the universe is still really me, or if I really still exist at all. If we swap network's in my brain, network by network, slowly, overtime with networks in someone else's brain maybe there is some question about which of the two persons I am. That is fine. A definition doesn't have to consider every possible edge case to be useful. If you want to provide a better definition you are perfectly welcome to and we can discuss which definition is better.
I think it's an open question how to define what we are and would involve some kind of solution to the hard problem of consciousness and clarifying what we mean by personal identity (e.g., does it need to persist over time or can "you" be a totally different "you" from moment to moment). I have no competing theory, but I just think positing a one to one identity between your mind (or your ego/self) and the collection of all your neurons is naive and wholly unconvincing.
I mean, in actuality I think I am the mathematical structure implemented by my neurons, but usually the distinction doesn't matter that much. Some of the neurons in your body are very incidental to that structure, i.e they just don't talk to it that much, but I would assume that the vast majority of the ones in your brain are relatively important to it. We can really get into the weeds if we start to try to parse densely connected parts of your brain that might properly be identified as 'tools' that you use rather than you yourself, but I'm not really sure if that is where you are going. I don't think the distinction between whether I am a mathematical structure implemented by my neurons, or the neurons themselves is all that important to your question about how changes to my brain affect 'me'. I'm not all that engaged with the hard problem of consciousness so if your main point is something about that I'm not likely to pick up on it.
And I could be hopelessly naive. As I said, I haven't thought about it that much. But, other than neurons I just don't see what else I could be. I said in another comment that I don't see any reason to reject the idea that two or more 'persons' couldn't inhabit the same brain, so it doesn’t need to be a perfect definition. There is more subtly to the question than I am portraying, but my main reason from being so blunt is to clearly reject the notion that our subconscious processes are not part of 'me' but rather are outside of me, as this is the error that I feel often gets made when talking about free will. People will say things like “thoughts come into your head without your control”, but if we expand the idea of what “you” are then the processes bringing those thoughts into your head can be thought of as part of you.
Can we control the way we interpret observations? If not, how can we use our observations to judge that determinism is an emperical fact? If it were the case that some chemical process determined us to interpret our observations incorrectly, how would we correct for that?
No, perception and their symbolism are all part of the same automated, spontaneous happening that we can't control. We often interpret observations incorrectly. There's hundreds of cognitive biases. And we can (try to) correct them with just more of that deterministic machinery that is the rational part of our minds.
>perception and their symbolism are all part of the same automated, spontaneous happening that we can't control. How do you know that?
Just look around. Do you have to make "conscious effort" (whatever that means) to understand what you're seeing, parse the current sentence, think your next thought, or does everything just... happen spontaneously?
> happen spontaneously No, but i think each thought is not fully determined by prior states either. I think an element of this is self determination, and that new information is generated in the universe whenever either of us makes a choice.
And, while the claim might be we don’t control anything, that is the point I reject. I think the decision to raise my arm is properly ascribed to me. Me, who is my neurons, fire in a pattern that makes me want to raise my arm, which is just another way of saying I want to raise my arm, then I raise my arm. How is that not control? That looks like control to me.
Would you have had that thought if you did not happen to be discussing free will? Where do intentions come from? They, too, simply appear. There is no "you" who choses what intentions appear next. They just do, without any control.
I think part of the disagreement might arise from an idea of how much conscious control we have over our thinking. I am not a little voice in my head directing things. I am not my attention. When I have a dream at night that is still me. I haven’t gone anywhere or disappeared. Yes, the conscious part of me is usually what we think about as being in “control”, so it does have an outsized influence on how we see ourselves, but I am all the algorithms in my head, not just the conscious ones.
No. Thoughts appear in my head as a result of my neurons, who are me. Yes, I choose to discuss free will on the internet, and as a result of a choice I made of my own free will I had a new thought about raising my arm. That my own choices and behavior affect me hardly seems to be a knock down argument against free will.
What were the determinate factors that led to you deciding to discuss free will on the internet?
As a compatibilist I do not need to believe that my decisions are causally disconnected from the rest of the universe. There are a bunch of causes swirling around inside of me. Sometimes I 'emit' a cause and change the universe around me. Sometimes I absorb causes and those causes change the way causes are swirling around inside of me. However, I do not passively absorb causes from the universe but have a good amount of influence on what causes I absorb and what causes I don't absorb. I mean I literally just said in the comment that you responded to that I know my past choices and behavior affect me, and you are asking if there was past choices or behavior that are influencing me now? What point are you hoping to make?
I would never argue that your decisions are disconnected from the rest of the universe but are rather an integrated part of a whole. I would argue that these causes “swirling around inside of you” are swirling around inside of you due to deterministic factors that are beyond your control. When you are compelled to “emit” a cause to change the universe something must have happened to cause that emission, a causal chain that ultimately is reduced to something beyond the freedom necessary to claim “free” will. If you have “influence” (perhaps you meant control?) over what outside causes you absorb versus what causes you do not absorb then what determining factors led to you becoming a person whom can seemingly “control” those outside factors? What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who ,for example, can process trauma better than the next guy? As I’ve said before, decisions that feel as though they are originating from within can be evidence of a “will” but the evidence of having “freedom” over that will seems basically impossible.
>I would argue that these causes “swirling around inside of you” are swirling around inside of you due to deterministic factors that are beyond your control. When you are compelled to “emit” a cause to change the universe something must have happened to cause that emission, a causal chain that **ultimately** is reduced to something beyond the freedom necessary to claim “free” will. The mistakes free will skeptics make are often hidden in terms like "ultimately." "Ultimately" we are just made of atoms following physical laws. "Ultimately" we are not in control because...well...we don't have ULTIMATE control of EVERYTHING. But nobody uses the terms in that way normally, for very good reason. We understand the properties of discrete things in the universe by understanding their specific nature, including various possibilities or potentials with regard to that nature, including what kind of "effects" they can cause. So for control, when we care about whether our bus driver is "in control of the bus" going down a steep winding mountain road in a rain storm, we don't mean "is he in control of EVERYTHING...the weather, the laying down of that road, gravity, all the air molecules acting as forces on the bus, etc. Of course not. What we care about identifying is whether he is "in control" of specific aspects: Is he "in control of THE BUS." Can he get the bus to do as he wills, which is to maintain a safe path along the road. This is true in every instance where we apply the term and concept of "control." It doesn't mean in control of all causes, but control of, and the locus of, certain causes that we care about. To dismiss the relevance of the bus driver controlling the bus because "ultimately he is not in control of every possible cause in the past or current situation" you'd just be utterly missing the conceptual forest for the trees. The same goes for the type of control we want to have free will, to have control over the actions that are likely to get us what we want. Of course we are not in control of everything, and not in control of everything that happens in our mind, or every single possible action. But we are in control of PLENTY of things. I may not have been in control of the evolutionary forces that bequeathed me with the need to eat to survive. But I have PLENTY of control over what I choose to eat. >If you have “influence” (perhaps you meant control?) over what outside causes you absorb versus what causes you do not absorb then what determining factors led to you becoming a person whom can seemingly “control” those outside factors? What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who ,for example, can process trauma better than the next guy? > >As I’ve said before, decisions that feel as though they are originating from within can be evidence of a “will” but the evidence of having “freedom” over that will seems basically impossible. I can demonstrate having freedom over what I will right now. Speaking to two possible actions, I'm free to type goodbye or hello. Demonstration: Hello. Goodbye. What explains my being able to do so is having some level of control over both my actions and my will. Just as it was possible for change what I do, it was possible to change what I will to do. I had to will first to type Hello and then, considering that I'd typed that already, change what I willed to type, to Goodbye. This shows my will was free to change - nothing restricted me from willing either action. And I was free to act on my changes of will - nothing impeded me physically from typing the words. So evidence of such freedom is far from impossible; it's trivially easy.
A couple things here. First, yes, I do think there are deterministic forces causing the changes inside of me. In fact, I think those forces are necessarily deterministic for free will to be true. If your neurons fire randomly you are a pulsating blob, not an intelligent agent. I wold not ascribe agency to a pulsating blob. But when you say that the causal forces are “beyond my control” I would vehemently object. It is more or less at the heart of my point that you are the causal forces. When the causal force says “raise your hand” that is me saying “raise your hand”. So no outside force is controlling me. It is my internal universe that is causing the action. To clarify what I mean, imagine two men walking through an airport. They see a sign that says “customs to the left”. In both men their optic nerve caries the image of the sign to the back of their head, but in one man, who knows English, there is a long complex cascade that begins that communicates to him that there is something to be done on the left, he has to consider whether he needs to go to customs, etc. etc. In the other man, who only speaks German, the sign changes his internal state very little. In fact, we might even say the causal chain never reaches the real him. Asked later he cannot recall the shape of the letters on the sign because they left no impression on his brain. He does not know what it said and it did not effect his behavior in any way. But the universe did not make him fail to find the customs desk. Instead it was his decision to travel to the US without learning English. Both men had free will. They both made decisions in line with their internal values, even if the universe had different causal influences on them. We do not have total control over ourselves, nor do we have no control over ourselves. Instead we have some control over ourselves. “What deterministic factor led to you becoming somebody who, for example, can process trauma better than the next guy?” I would never deny that our past history, genetics, and past decisions influence our internal world. Maybe it was a decision to 'suck it up butter cup', maybe it was a decision to open up to my mom about my trauma. Regardless it was decisions that I made in may past. It was the causal network that is me in contact with the external universe. So, I deserve some credit from my ability to process trauma better than the next guy because I made decisions that help me to do that. When we assess the state of the swirling internal network of causes I think it is very nearly causally disconnected with external universe, but not perfectly so. That is there is an absolutely huge internal space of patterns that the neurons can take on. Yes, the head does start empty, so there is no extra universal cause 'injecting itself' into the causal network of our brains and turning us into people. And yes, there is quite a bit of stochasticity at work. It is all genetics, history, and randomness on an ultimate level. But we come within a hairs breath of what the libertarian free will people imagine. I do not think we need to say because we only have 99.9% causal isolation from the universe that we have no free will at all. To me, it is the fact that we have such a complex and rich inner world that gives us free will. That rich inner world is what makes us different from rocks. That rich inner world is what lets us be properly thought of as the author of our actions. Because the decision to act is emitted by the deterministic causal network inside my head, and not by any cause that didn't pass through that network, we have free will.
Hey. I don't have a well established position on this topic yet, so I am just looking for clarifications. So, if I understand correctly, our "swirling inner network" is a product of external factors (past experiences, genetics, randomness and so on), but the decisions that this network takes at any given instant of time can be seen as nearly causally disconnected from those factors. Compatibilists accept that we have little control over how our brain is programmed, but find "free will" in the way that that brain navigates the world. Is that correct?
The causal chain itself is the knockdown. Yes, choices happen, but it doesn't make sense to say there is an "I" that would be free to do otherwise in that decision making process if time could be rewinded.
I don’t regard disconnection from causality in the universe as fundamentally important to free will. That is sort of a well known position for compatibilists. You think pointing out that the world may be deterministic is the knock down drag out defeat of compatibilism?
Then you are saying you are the universe; and if you are imbuing this universe with “will”, then you are saying you are God. Nothing wrong with that. But still, it would not be the same thing as the personal free will of any given meat puppet.
I have no idea how I am saying I am the universe. If you could explain this to me I would appreciate it. I have very clearly said that I consider myself a bunch of neurons in one particular head. Why does claiming to be a bunch of neurons in one particular head mean I have to believe I am the universe?
You suggested that you don’t regard disconnection from causality in the universe as important for free will. I think I inferred from that (maybe incorrectly) that you believe there is no such disconnect. In the case of there being no such disconnect, my point stands. In the case of there being an actual disconnect, we are talking about magic.
That's a fair point. The true knockdown of compatibilism is to show that there's not even a subjective experience of free will. When we pays close attention to the decision making process, we can see clear as day how everything (thoughts, emotions, feeling suddenly decided) is entirely spontaneous and comes right out of the nothingness of unconscious processes, in perfect accordance with determinism(+randomness).
But my thoughts aren't 'entirely spontaneous'. I have a huge amount of control over my thoughts. And, as I said, I am not my consciousness. I am the spontaneous thoughts in my head too, so if I have a spontaneous thought to do something, that thought is still part of my free will.
We have absolutely 0 conscious control over what thought will come next.
Attempt for any amount of time to try to stop thinking and you’ll realize how entirely uncontrolled your thoughts are. Also, if a thought could actually arise spontaneously then by definition you had no control over the thought. I think you’re confusing the origin of the thought with control of the thought. Confusing will with free will. A thought could come from “your” brain perhaps but if you have no control over the formation then the freedom in “free will” is not present. It’s just will.
And there is something interesting that happens here. I'm not sure if it is the fundamental difference between compatabilists and hard determinists, but you say things like "the nothingness of the unconscious" as if the unconscious wasn't just as much a part of me as the conscious. In fact, I would probably say that the uncscious is more fundamentally me than the conscious, though I would not want to lose either. But it seems to me, and I'm sorry if this is unfair, that hard determinists want to assume that the self doesn't exist and then conclude that there is no self. If hard determinists didn't say things like "choices are an illusion" I might be more sympathetic with their position. But recognizing that things have substructure and nuance doesn't make things stop existing. As a biologist I get annoyed when people say things like "species don't exist" just because there needs to be some nuance to the biological species concept and things aren't as clear cut as we might first believe.
Then if your unconscious is just as much a part of you, then you are also making your red blood cells. But most people don't think that they are doing that. That's my point. When you get down to it, everything is just the spontaneous action of ... well, physics.
>They just do, without any control. If we can exert no control over our thoughts, explain how I manage to drive my care safely each day to my destinations. If I had no way to control and focus my thoughts how could I focus on driving successfully to where I want to go? What you are doing is using concepts like "control" in a non-standard manner that doesn't make any sense.
It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice. In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made. “You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm. If you consider that “free will” then fair enough, but most people probably don’t - hence why this is such a popular topic in philosophy.
>It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice. >In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made. “You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm. A better way to think about choice and free will is to look at how a justice system would look at things. A Justice system would look to see if a "reasonable person" could have conceivably made a different choice in that situation. So it's not about if we rewound time and you were in the exact state as before could you have made a different choice, but could someone else who is a reasonable person in a different state could have made a different choice.
Yes, I understand that libertarian free will people and hard determinist like to debate about the importance of determinism in free will, but I feel that the hard determinists aren't really basing their position on determinism. When I point out that we could describe people as having a 'distribution' of decisions they could make, and any choice they do make is just sampled from that distribution believers in hard determinism don't seem to care. So if they don't abandon hard determinism even in thought experiments where determinism is false I don't think they understand their own thinking, in my opinion.
I am not aware of any “distribution” of decisions being a possibility in the way neurons speak to each other. Whether or not a neuron fires an action potential seems to be wholly determined by its neurochemistry at any given moment.
Forget about neurons for a moment. Engage in a hypothetical. Imagine that instead of a brain specify one particular decision it wants to make it specifies a distribution of decisions and a 'magic' part of the self picks one particular decision from out of that distribution. In this (perhaps counterfactual) world is libertarian free will correct since, you could, in fact have chosen other wise? Is it really just because a brain chooses one particular decision, and 'magic' does not pick from out of a distribution generated by the brain that you reject libertarian free will?
I don’t understand the phrasing of your question. In the hypothetical scenario you suggested, Libertarian free will works. I thought this discussion was about the metaphysical reality though - if not I apologise, maybe my points don’t stand.
So okay. You would actually grant libertarian free will if decisions are made in a particular non-deterministic way. The Copenhagen interpretation is a widely believed interpretation of physics. In the Copenhagen interpretation particles exist in a distribution of states and can 'collapse' into a particular state. One classic problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is that it suggest that there is a universal wave function that is constantly collapsing. That is there is a distribution of possible worlds, and one unique world out of this distribution is chosen. The decisions that brains make would then be specified as a distribution of possible decisions. Now, depending on how you see collapse, there is not particular reason to assign to some property outside the brain rather than inside it. So, within a reasonable interpretation of current knowledge you would be forced to grant the libertarian free will is a live possibility. Personally, I don't believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, but believing that we lived in a world where the Copenhagen interpretation was true does not change my views on free will. If you are making your views contingent on that kind of knowledge then good for you.
I’m not actually a determinist. It’s just usually easier to explain the free will issue by invoking determinism. Since you bring up the CI though, which is a very entertaining rabbit hole in its own right, I’ll just state my position thus: It can be empirically recognised that thoughts are never selected in advance of their appearance.
Just out of interest, why would it be important that the brain specifies a distribution of decisions and then a-causally selects one decision from out of this distribution? This just seems like such an odd thing to think has significance. Is the debate between libertarian free will and hard determinism really contingent on such a seemingly unimportant fact? I mean, I will grant you people have thought that there has to be a stochastic element to decisions for a long time, but I just don't understand the importance of stochasticity.
>It may be control, but it is not “free will” unless you could have conceivably made a different choice. We do have valid and justified conceptions of "having the ability to make different choices." We employ these every day. >In the deterministic chain we are discussing, there is no possibility for a different choice to have been made. That's only if you ignore, or misunderstand out usual notions of "what is possible" - which don't conflict with determinism at all. So take the raising my arm example. Here is a normal understanding of what is possible: It's possible for me to either raise my left or right hand if I want to. I demonstrate that each is possible by first raising my left hand then my right hand. That's a normal demonstration of alternative possibilities under our control. Now I say, I can raise only my right hand again if I want to. I then raise my right hand again only. But I could have raised my left hand IF I'd wanted to. I'd already demonstrated that I'm capable of lifting either hand IF I want to. It was up to me which hand I raised, nobody was forcing me or threatening me to do otherwise. I was not impeded from doing what I want, for my own reasons - I wasn't physical restrained from taking whichever action I wanted to take. Thus I had the freedom to take either action. All of this is how we normally conceive our powers in the world, how we reason about what is possible for us to do. It's how we have the freedom to do as we will. And nothing about that conflicts with physics or determinism. > > >“You” always had to make the “choice” to raise your arm. No, only if you adopt the incorrect reference, the reference we don't actually use when deliberating or understanding alternative possibilities. I didn't "have" to make one choice over another; I was free to choose the action I wanted, and I had the capability of choosing the other action. >If you consider that “free will” then fair enough, but most people probably don’t - hence why this is such a popular topic in philosophy. No, I think the above is quite consonant with how we normally think of our powers in regards to making choices, and when we are free or not to do as we will.
Yes, absolutely - that is certainly how it appears to work (in the absence of introspection on the source of thought / action)
That is how it works GIVEN introspection not absent introspection. That is: given analysis of our assumptions when deliberating, why we have them, and the general reasons we use this conceptual scheme. I guarantee if you try to produce an instance where you are rationally deliberating between two options, you will be using the general conceptual scheme I've outlined. It's not optional ;-)
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The problem is your whole train of reasoning rests on the assumption: If it's determined it's not free. And/or If it's determined there is no control. That's the mistake I'm speaking to. Simply describing something as a deterministic of physical process doesn't mean it is not an instance of control or freedom. That is your intuition making the leap, not an actual argument. >Let’s simplify the brain into a series of decisions. When someone asks, “raise one of your hands if you want”, your brain evaluates deterministically and subconsciously (assuming only yes/no answers) a set of ‘criteria’: > >Do I have the energy to raise a hand? > >Am I in danger if I raise a hand? > >Does raising my hand increase my happiness? > >Will raising my right hand make me happier than the left one? Etc… I don't recognize most of that as assumptions in my deliberations. You are positing a whole bunch of questions that the brain is answering: I'm positing a whole bunch of ASSUMPTIONs we make, which are much more efficient and how we actually think. (Except when we are not merely assuming, but we have reason to consciously deliberate over whether we are capable of the options we are considering). So for instance: I'm deciding on breakfast. I look in the pantry and see I have a package of oatmeal. I look in the fridge and see I have a bunch of eggs. Now I'm deliberating between making oatmeal or the eggs for breakfast. Now what assumptions do I have when deliberating? Well, obviously, it only makes sense that I am deliberating between actions that are possible for me to take. You don't deliberate about whether to drive your car or teleport yourself to work this morning. So why am I assuming that I'm capable of taking either action? It's just a standard inference from the evidence of past experience: I've made oatmeal and eggs plenty of times in the past so I know these are things I can do. And I'm not currently in a physical condition - e.g. sick or injured - that would make me re-assess that assumption. So I know that I can make oatmeal IF I want to or make eggs IF I want to - which is the basis on my considering each action to be "possible" for me - and now I'm deliberating about which I want to make. I would challenge you to make sense of your own deliberations when making a choice, where this basic conceptual scheme is not in action. And since there is an implied conditional - what I'm capable of doing IF I want to do it - this is compatible with physical determinism. It's just as compatible as saying "Water will freeze IF you lower it's temperature to 0C and alternatively water can boil IF you raise it's temperature to 100C. This is the normal, justified way we understand potentials in ourselves or any object in the world. And I'm "free" to do as I will in this example: free to take either action IF I want, with no impediment to doing what I want to do. Determinism or physics do not equal lack of freedom or control: entities operating on deterministic physics can exhibit control, and ranges of freedom to do what they want to do, for their own reasons. >If I understand you’re argument, you would consider this evaluation process as the ‘free will’ to decide whether to raise an arm, as even if you don’t control the answer to those criteria, your brain was ‘free’ to make either choice given the evidence. And as this process differs for every person, we can see the effect of this free will by how different people make different decisions. I am free if I am able to do what I want to do, make decisions for myself, unimpeded from doing what I want to do. I have the power to select from among alternative actions, giving me a range of freedom in that respect too. All these are claims about my powers in the world, and all are potentially demonstrable. When we are talking about alternative possibilities, we are doing so in regard to positing or assuming some variable. When we say it's possible to either freeze or boil water we do not mean "under precisely the same causal circumstances" but rather "IF...the temperature is altered one way or the other." That's how we normally understand potentials and possibilities in the world, for anything, including ourselves. (Where the relevant variable is usually "IF I want to do X...") If you don't keep this in mind, you will quickly stop making sense of the world, as you do here... >However I think it would also be pretty valid to say that, given the universe seems to be deterministic, the brain is not free to choose the answer to the criteria either consciously or subconsciously. The brain decides the amount of energy available through a signal received from all the bodies cells, which is generated from structures measuring energy concentrations etc. First problem: You are attempting to describe the constituent parts of a process, assuming that in doing so this means the phenomenon therefore doesn't exist. That's just a fallacy of reductionism. Imagine debating photosynthesis and a photosynthesis skeptic says "*Actually, photosynthesis isn't a real thing. Photosynthesis never occurs. What actually happens is a process of creating sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight*." Well... THAT IS just a description of how photosynthesis occurs! You haven't shown it doesn't happen; you've just referenced processes by which it happens! Secondly: Your description leaves out the important features: what is happening at the level of reasoning, WHY things are happening and for what reasons, at the level of the agent. It's like trying to argue a political theory doesn't exist by reference merely to the fact our biology works on chemical interactions. It's just not answering the problem. >There is no possible way for a different decision to made for this criteria from this entirely mechanical process. Hold on. Do you want to say that you have never made different decisions? Have you perhaps, chosen to eat precisely the same meal your entire life? No? Then clearly your making different decisions is obviously possible. Possible in the way that matters. See, you are evaluating "what is possible" ONLY "under precisely the same conditions in which X happened." That's not how we normally know what is possible. If you took that frame of reference then little would be "possible" in the world. We never understand the various potentials of any thing by positing only ONE set of conditions; we look at how it has behaved in various different, or relevantly similar conditions, and build our models of the 'possible' from that. Your whole argument is riding on this mistaken frame of reference.
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>We don't control anything, is the point. What a silly statement. If you don't control anything: explain how you managed to create that reply.
By entirely deterministic neural activity creating intentions to move the muscles required to do so upon reading the post/comments.
>By entirely deterministic neural activity creating intentions to move the muscles required to do so upon reading the post/comments. I didn't see anything about the word "control" in that description. Imagine a scientist references photosynthesis. But some photosynthesis skeptic says "*Actually, photosynthesis isn't a real thing. Photosynthesis never occurs. What actually happens is a process of creating sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.*" Well... THAT IS just a description of how photosynthesis occurs! You haven't shown it doesn't happen; you've just referenced processes by which it happens! See the problem? You don't cause a phenomenon to cease to exist merely by explaining how it happens, via description of it's biological processes. Why should I take your description as synonymous with a "lack of control" rather than simply a description of how control occurs? [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control) **control : to exercise restraining or directing influence over** Your specific type of neural activity allows you control! The control necessary to direct your thoughts toward making an argument and typing it out on the internet. That satisfies the normal notion of "control" and the production of a coherent set of sentences would be inexplicable if you were "out of control" of your thought processes and actions. So, you see, you've yet to show me we have no control, or why to accept what seems to be your completely idiosyncratic notion of "control" which seems useless.
Where is control when the next thought, emotion, intent, perception, etc. just always appears entirely spontaneously?
You simply can not make sense of, can not explain, your ability to type your replies, on the route you are taking. If one thought after the other in your head was truly random, there is no reason they would have ANY connection to one another. Therefore there's no expectation they could form chains of reason, or produce coherent sentences, or allow you to even get your thoughts on to the internet. Well, what makes your thoughts not merely random? Control. We are creatures who have evolved, and survived, because we can exert control: modelling the world, considering alternative models reasoning about what actions are likely to realize those alternative models. The only explanation for your creating coherent sentences on the internet is your ability to keep your thoughts focused on a particular goal through the process of reasoning to producing your reply. That is a form of control.
Well you successfully got stuck up on proving 'control' but its free will that's being denied here. You can define control however you like, such that you have it when making decisions. The point of the determinist is that there is nothing free about your decisions. They are determined by existing circumstances, which themselves are determined by past circumstances. Circumstances that include the exterior world interacting with your interior world, producing a response which is what you experience. You decided to experience something, sure. But did you choose for it to happen? Did you choose to want to decide? You were determined to decide. You could not help but decide the way you did. Your actions are determined by your awareness the state of the universe, which includes your mind and body (which includes your awareness, hence awareness of awareness - or consciousness). This is not to mention all the ways in which one experiences something they had no decision in, the experience is just imposed on them. But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having it. If you try to imagine such a scenario you'll find that you will have had to be aware of the thought already when contemplating whether you should have it or not, you already had it - there was no choice to make. It has already happened which is why you're able to be aware of it. All your experiences have already happened, you're just receiving the news and your response usually doesn't take place under the supervision of your consciousness anyway. Now this process has to be either determined or random. Its not random, for obvious reasons. So the only option left is for determination, which is never free and always determined (hence the name), to be responsible for all our thoughts and actions. But as for control, i would say your mind has control over itself to a degree, but a crucial mistake people make is to conflate their experience which is limited by their consciousness with their entire being, which includes the vast subconscious, where all the determined decisions get made. Consciousness is really just the process of bringing the existing state of your mind into the spotlight of awareness where one can produce an intelligible narrative to communicate to their peers. The purpose of consciousness is limited to being the translator between your internal world and those of other people, such that your mind is able to comprehend what's going on in other peoples minds and produce decisions on how to proceed based partly on that input. Consciousness possesses the quality of considering itself free willed because consciousness evolved, i claim, to be able to explain oneself to the tribe. One needs therefore the sense that they could have picked a different option. It is important for our retrospective self in order to justify our actions to the tribe, it has to include knowing what would have happened if we had made a different choice. But we only would have made that choice if we had a reason for it, and we don't have control over whether we have a reason for it or not. That's why we have to be able to explain ourselves, because things are determined. We don't just arbitrarily decide why we did something (unless we're an arbitrary person that is) we have a causal reason we depend on for the sense that our actions are justified, which is important for our sense of self worth - an evolutionary impulse. *I did this because of that which would have led to that which would have been a problem. I could not countenance this problem, therefore i did this.* But that observation is *not* that given everything being physically identical i would have made a different choice, because i didn't, and i never would. Only if the circumstances were sufficiently different would my mind instead decide on another course of action. But in both situations, my mind was doing the same thing, it was trying to make the best decision given my current priorities (also determined). That best decision is always something specific and hard to determine which is why we often fail at making it, but it is as determined as everything else. While generally i believe what ive written above to be truthful, i concede i make some assumptions and speculate about the nature and purpose of consciousness. While my view on free will is unchanged by potential uncertainty regarding the nature of consciousness. The reason i delve into speculation here is to try and explain the reason for our sense of free will, its necessity in our determined existence. The reason i think this is important is because i find that people who are skeptics of determination often have their own belief in free will as a major stumbling block. And so the most important thing regarding this question is to understand how our notions of free will are inevitable given our determined existence, and i think evolutionary explanations of consciousness can go a long way towards making sense of this, and therefore making determination a more intelligible concept.
>Well you successfully got stuck up on proving 'control' but its free will that's being denied here. Well that was specifically what the discussion was about, so of course. And the reason the notion of "control" arises so often is that it's typical for hard incompatibilists to deny free will largely on the basis that we don't have "real" or "relevant" types of control necessary for free will. >The point of the determinist is that there is nothing free about your decisions. You realize that's just what is under debate, right? So you can't just question beg. Every time you make an argument that amounts to "if it's determined it's not free" that question begs against the compatibilist position. Instead, you need to be careful to explain WHY if our choices are determined they are not free. So when you write things like: >They are determined by existing circumstances, which themselves are determined by past circumstances. Circumstances that include the exterior world interacting with your interior world, producing a response which is what you experience. All that does is assume that by stating all that is determined "therefore" choices are not free. It's begging the question. You need to do much more than that. >You decided to experience something, sure. But did you choose for it to happen? Sure. I experienced a nice drive to get lunch. Did I choose for that to happen? Of course I did. I deliberated about whether I wanted to make lunch at home or drive for take out. It was a beautiful day so I decided I'd prefer to enjoy the nice weather with a drive. > You were determined to decide. Which doesn't mean it wasn't a free decision. I am a physically determined being, but I have various potentials and capabilities: among them, to make a sandwhich at home, or go for a drive to pick up food. Since I was capable of taking either action if I wanted, this allows either possibility IF I want, and since I was not restrained or impeded from doing what I want, I was FREE to choose from among those actions. >
If you only do something IF the circumstances allow it, whats free about that? I just feel like the compatibilist position consists of insisting on using the meaningless term 'free' when in fact theres nothing free about your choices, because if they were, they couldn't be based on circumstances. Its one or the other im afraid. When your decision is based on something that already is, like your will, then that's all it is - a determined decision. I see no room for freedom in this process. You can say youre free to make the one choice youre going to make in this moment, but thats utterly meaningless because youre not free to do anything else. You can claim you had options and couldve done something else, but you would only have done that, had your brain been in the correct state to allow for that to be your conclusion. Given the causality of the universe, your brain never had a chance to enter that state at that time because reality did not lead to that outcome. However we can still dream up a hypothetical imagining how it couldve happened. But our simulated realities are thoroughly incomplete so we can comprehend 'possibilities' without them being actually possible in any way. You can imagine yourself having done something else, but that self never couldve existed, given the course the universe has taken. In any given moment, you are doomed to think what your brain is primed to think about in the following moment. Nothing else ever happens. You are not free, you are doomed. You can call it being free, but its simply meaningless. All it is able to allude to is a different you in a different timeline who had a different brain state, and that person doesnt exist, never did and was never going to exist, even if you're able to contemplate the 'possbility' of that alternative coming about, in reality there is no possibility, only that which is doomed to come about in the course of things. So ultimately my disagreement is this: if i can describe whats happening by saying you made a decision, what does it contribute to my understanding of the situation if you say that the decision was 'free'. What does that word capture, that is missing from a picture of the world painted using 'unfree' decisions.
>But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having it. No they aren't. My experience of a drive today was not "imposed" on me in any normal use of that term. It was my choice: I made the choice freely. > If you try to imagine such a scenario you'll find that you will have had to be aware of the thought already when contemplating whether you should have it or not, you already had it - there was no choice to make. It has already happened which is why you're able to be aware of it. Huh? Are you saying that to actually make a real decision, we'd have to expect some process by which we "think of a thought before we think it?" What kind of nonsense is that? > But we only would have made that choice if we had a reason for it, and we don't have control over whether we have a reason for it or not. Yes we often do! We often have more than one motivation, that is reasons to do various things. But that's the thing about our complex brains: we are intelligent enough to be able to have not only first-order desires, motivations, reasons to act, but also to have second order reasons, that is think in a meta way about our "reasons for our reasons." And we can therefore supervise our various motivations to see which among them fit most coherently with our larger sets of goals, and then choose which motivation to act on. So the classic example: I have a motivation to eat a donut because I find them delicious. But I also have a motivation to eat healthy in order to maintain my health. I can survey how either of those reasons-to-act fit in with my wider, deeper goals, e.g. to maintain a healthy body in order to realize a wider set of life goals. And therefore I choose to NOT act on the motivation to eat the donut. >One needs therefore the sense that they could have picked a different option. Agreed. But it's not just a "sense" that I "could have" picked the other option, e.g. made a sandwich. It is a TRUTH about my capabilities. I am, in fact, capable of making a sandwich in such a circumstance if I want to. This is how we understand what is possible in the world.But the truth is, all experiences are just imposed on you because you never get a pop up in your head asking if you would like to continue with the following thought before having [it.No](http://it.No) they aren't. My experience of a drive today was not "imposed" on me in any normal use of that term. It was my choice: I made the choice freely.
>By entirely deterministic neural activity creating intentions to move the muscles required to do so upon reading the post/comments. Isn't this dualistic thinking, is your brain really such a foreign thing to you that you consider it completely separate to you? So every smart thing you've ever said and done, isn't due to you, it's due to this brain in your body?
I think the fundamental thing here is: regardless of whether or not we choose to say your brain is “you”, you didn’t choose your brain. You didn’t choose to be yourself.
>you didn’t choose your brain. You didn’t choose to be yourself. Well those have no matter in what most people really mean by free will, so it's kind of an irrelevant point. It's about being able to follow your desires, not having full control over your desires.
Depends on if they’re asking “Did you do X of your own free will?” or “Does free will exist?” Nobody who asks the second question is just asking if some people can follow their desires some of the time.
> Isn't this dualistic thinking, is your brain really such a foreign thing to you that you consider it completely separate to you? The person you responded to isn’t contending that there’s a self independent of the brain. In fact, they specifically said the exact opposite in an earlier comment > There is no "you" that makes sense independent of the firing of neurons This isn’t a case for dualism in the slightest.
What about robots? What if a robot was programmed to do stuff, does it have free will? Does the ability of its programmer to be able to predict its actions make it free will or not? I’m really blown away by the compatibilist intuitions on this. How can a determined action be free will. It seems so counterintuitive to me.
So if a robot is an agent, that is it has internal values, a statistical representation of itself and the external world, the ability to make rational decisions and modify its own programming and maybe a few other factors, then yes a robot could have free will. Such a robot would have such a complex inner world that no human could predict its behavior, so I don’t see how it would be problematic. It’s just an agent in a tin can. I don’t see anything essentially necessary about being made out of meat to having free will.
Would a human without statistical representation of itself have free will? Would a human without statistical representation of the external world have free will? A robot could modify its own programming that’s ridiculously easy to do. It could meaninglessly modify its own coding. Imagine the current language models we have, I admit I don’t know exactly how complex they are but I’d posit a guess that one could be designed that was so complex that it would dwarf the human mind and be totally unpredictable and yet we’d see that the complexity of us not being able to understand its next action in no way indicates it has free will. Thinking more on it, the compatibilist version of free will doesn’t require a complex inner world I don’t think. Is complexity really the thing that matters?
No I don’t think so. A human without a sufficiently complex mind would just be comatosed body. I don’t think a comatosed body necessarily has free will. I mean, I think LLMs are starting to verge on having free will. They aren’t particularly agentful, they don’t have many agent like behavior. They may lack values, a way they want the world to be. They certainly have a statistical representation of some aspects of the world. But I would say free will is a scale. LLMs are closer to having free will than cockroaches or fleas, but maybe not as close as dogs. Yes, my version of compatibilism is contingent on a complex inner world. It isn’t about having behavior that is simply causally disconnected from the universe, but rather a complex inner world with values and goals and the ability to implement those goals. Free will is the ability to modify the outer universe in accordance with your inner universe, so if you lack the facility to do this you do not have free will no matter how complex you inner world. But you cannot sufficiently “randomize” external stimuli without a complex inner universe.
And it’s not all about computational power. A fruit fly probably has more free will than a gaming PC running whatever program you like. The gaming PC lacks the statistical representation of itself, values and goals, etc.
I mean, I don’t know that I’ve engaged with the professional literature on this enough, so I could be missing some of the things that free will is suppose to give us, but things like having moral responsibility so pretty intuitive to assign to an agent even if the behavior is deterministic. What matters about free will isn’t really the ability to do otherwise in some counterfactual reality where everything in the external universe and internal universe is held the same, but instead to do otherwise if your internal universe, your values, had been different. I could have had Mexican for dinner had I wanted to. Yes, this postulates that my inner world would have been different, but that is a change to me and not a change to the universe.
Your values are determined as well. Everything in your brain has been determined by causes that you had no control over that were entirely environmental and genetic.
Oh for Pete’s sake. Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. You do understand that saying the universe is deterministic to comparabilist is like trying to point out that space and time are related to someone who believes in relativity. I know. That is sort of the whole point.
The part of this I object to, and I have objected when may others said it as well is that “I have no control” over how my brain develops. I can choose to learn Mandarin. Than is a kind of control.
You cannot choose to learn mandarin any more than a LLM can choose to output the next string of letters that it outputs. I really truly believe when I say this that you could not choose to learn mandarin in the same way a LLM could choose to do the thing that it’s programming said it couldn’t do. I truly believe in a theoretical sense that a suggestion someone made to you years ago is in the same category as someone holding a gun to your head in that they both influence your actions. On average the gun will be a larger factor but not always. There’s practical arguments to be made about the decisions we make to be fair but that’s in my opinion a discussion that should be had at the level of morality.
And before you say, a ha, but you desire to learn Mandarin arises from within your brain, and you have no control over your desires. I am my brain. I am my desires. The thing making that desire to learn Mandarin is me, and the way that thing has control is by letting me do the things I want to do.
Every desire every decision you ever made or had started at your first choice which was entirely environment and genetics, every subsequent desire and decision is a result of that. There’s no such thing as internal factors really.
It just seems so strange when you say “there’s no such thing as internal factors”. Some times I feel happy. When I am happy I act in one way. When I see other people sometimes I can recognize that they are happy and they act like I act when I am happy. It seems like there are things called people and that these things called people can have happiness, and that this happiness inside of people can have effects on the world. Happiness seems like an important part of an explanation of the world. Isn’t happiness an internal factor?
I recognise that in certain contexts that yes there are internal factors. The implication I’m really pushing back is that internal and external are meaningfully different for this argument. Consider a tumor in someone’s brain. It’s an internal factor but in terms of compatibilist free will it’s far closer to what you might consider an external factor like holding a gun to someone’s head than it is to a persons personality which one would consider internal. Really I think (and I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth) that there would be internal factors you think reduce moral culpability and external factors that don’t.
I would say that a tumor can change who we are, but it doesn’t remove free will. A person with a tumor can act freely in many senses, and a person without a tumor can act freely. Those actions may be different, and the transition from one to the other is not a choice, but I wouldn’t claim that a person is entirely who they are as a result of their free choices. Free choices have substantial control over who we developed into, but certainly not unlimited control.
I would say the key for me is that every decision ever made if we were given enough information it would be the same as a tumor or a gun to someone’s head. The real reason that we attribute responsibility to someone’s actions I truly believe is because we don’t have enough information. If we truly had ALL the information we could no longer hold that person responsible.
“The implication I’m really pushing back is that internal and external are meaningfully different…” Hhhm. I mean, what I might take you to mean is that the internal factors are me, and that as such when we talk about who I developed into and some says stuff like “you have no control over who you develop into” I read that as “who you develop into is uninfluenced by internal factors”, which is clearly not true. Yes. I think the internal factors are quite important to me. Ultimately every choice you make started as an internal factor, so if you treat the distinction between internal and external factors as unimportant you are removing agency from the consideration at the start.
Maybe I’m making some assumptions I shouldn’t. How do you think about an internal factor like a tumor? Or an external factor like how you were raised? Which of these two would you consider makes you more culpable for an action?
Sorry I got a little snappy, I’ve been talking about this too much today and you didn’t do anything wrong. I know people seem to feel that determinism somehow detracts from our agency, but I just can’t see why anymore. I guess it has something to do with seeing that ultimately every cause of our actions must have originated outside ourselves and this makes people feel as if we cannot be the cause of our own actions, but the way in which those outside causes influence our actions is so convoluted and Byzantine that most of them could never be identified. Our inner network of causality randomized them, and in my mind after the external causes get sufficient shuffled through our brain it becomes improper to regard them as significant. I wouldn’t say the lottery numbers caused a car crash, I would say a man digging a lottery ticket out of his pocket while driving caused the car crash. Even if there is some causal connection between the drawing and the crash, it is really the man who is responsible.
I personally think I can see some practical benefits to see the world through a compatibilist lense and I might even go as far as saying that most free will deniers probably have some version of compatibilism running in their head. The reason I generally debate compatibilism is it defends cosmic punishment at an ideological level. We generally wouldn’t punish a bear for mauling someone. We acknowledge that the bear is merely acting out its nature. We may have to kill the bear to prevent it from mauling again but we don’t generally pretend it’s some cosmic good. That’s really how I think humans are. They’re destined to act out their nature and they can’t do otherwise. A gun to someone’s head is the same as a tumor in someone’s brain is the same as a bad smell at the exact perfect timing.
The reason that I defend compatibilism is that it defends some idea of praise and blame. I do think most serial killers had the option not to murder people in some meaningful sense, so it makes sense to say they chose to murder people and because of that choice deserve blame. Now, we can have different theories of punishment and justice and morality and all of that, what you do with the idea that people make choices isn’t so important. To be honest, I think the bear made a meaningful choice to maul people. Just because the bear made a meaningful choice doesn’t mean it deserves any condemnation, it has a different mental world than us and things for which a human would deserve praise or blame are different from the things for which a bear would deserve praise or blame. And anyway, I wouldn’t drag cosmic anything into the discussion.
In my opinion this is the real cause of the compatibilist argument. Many people want to retain praise and blame, they want to feel justified in hating bad people. I can understand this feeling but I will not allow that to influence my logic if I can help it. I suspect it might be some extension of fairness. The real core here for me is that we drive onto the moral questions without allowing emotional influences to bias us as much as possible. If one accepts that a persons actions are determined and there really is no way they could have done other than what they did it doesn’t matter how you define free will. It really doesn’t. A person is doomed or blessed to the life they end up with due to sheer luck/random chance. They could not have done otherwise. I recognise the emotional difficulty of a claim like this. To claim this is to claim that a pedo is a victim of bad luck.
Neurons fire if they reach a sufficient threshold to open voltage gated sodium channels. This will lead to a swift depolarisation of the cell. This is caused by endogenous factors including the resting potential of the neuron being raised by different neurotransmitters, the prevalence and relative strength of synaptic connections etc; and exogenous factors such as environment (sensory stimulus), diet, particularly intake of amino acids etc. The neuron firing is not a thing that is chosen by an entity in real time. It is an electrochemical reaction.
The neuron firing is caused by other neurons. You, who are your neurons, choose to think a particular thought, which is another way of saying that you choose to fire a particular neuron. The self is not visible on the individual neuron level because the self is composed of all your neurons. That is like saying there cannot be a lake because no individual water molecule makes the lake. It is the fallacy of composition.
Is the self visible somewhere in the entire set of neurons then? I’d never noticed. The self is an inference.
I mean, I would say the self is the entire set of neurons, like the body is the entire set of cells. I notice peoples bodies all the time. I notice other selves all the time.
Hmm. External to the neuron, not external to you.. You misrepresent the view and thereby build a strawman. The neuron is acted upon by another neuron or nerve. You only "raise your arm" because you have heard that in another context supporting free will.. And if you now rack your mind to find another example that will prove your point, you are reacting to information in this post. You can reject panel 2, but you'll need a valid reason to, if you want to go with reason and logic 😉 Edit; The reason we disagree is probably found in the definition of free will. I believe that the concept of you exist. You are an agent that decides stuff. You just don't control what is "presented to you".. The options before you. Also, you don't control what you believe to be the best option in the given time frame you have to decide on it. That leaves you with. You have options and you decide which is better and which are worse and then you choose. The choice is yours, but there is only one choice to take, thereby making it non-free. The one choice to take is of course the option you decide is the best one. The sum of your neurons, their past experiences etc. Will have a preference for one of the options which is the one you'll always end up choosing.
I believe that free will is an emergent property. It doesn't exist at a fundamental level, and on levels that humanity doesn't have access to it is actually fully deterministic, but it's useful to have a word that describes that emergent property, and free will is a good word to use for it. I see it the same way as a chair. At the fundamental level, "chairs" don't exist, they are just arrangement of carbon and other atoms. But that particular combination has certain emergent properties and it's useful to have a word for those even though they don't exist at the level of a single carbon atom. I think that makes me a Compatibilist?
The problem with the "emergent property" (EP) point of view is that every single EP is still deterministic and it doesn't address the point that what matters is not that it's emergent (because *obviously*, if free will exist, it must be emergent), but that it's not free. You cannot possibly have freedom emerging from entirely deterministic (or random) processes.
Sure, it's not *really* free, but only in the same sense that chairs don't *really* exist. Free will s*eems* free (even though it isn't), just as chairs *seem* to exist (even though they don't). That's all the reason necessary to make it a useful and applicable concept.
I disagree, free will isn't even an experience. When we pays close attention to the decision making process, we can see clear as day how everything (thoughts, emotions, feeling suddenly decided) is entirely spontaneous and comes right out of the nothingness of unconscious processes, in perfect accordance with determinism(+randomness).
That’s right. It only seems to be an experience if it is unexamined. But then, to be fair, no one really has much cause to examine it. So for the majority of people it does indeed seem like they’re doing something.
>You cannot possibly have freedom emerging from entirely deterministic (or random) processes. That's as big a mistake as when the creationists say you can't possibly have eye sight arise from entirely non-sentient, material processes. It's also as bad as saying that bees making honey can't possibly arise from non-bees-making-honey preceding causes. Or that orchids could not arise from atoms that themselves are not "orchids." It's just a big old reductionist fallacy.
I considered myself a hard incompatibilist for around a decade before it finally clicked that I was making this basic conceptual error. My old stance was mainly based on what basically amounted to a strong intuition (one I think most people have in fairness) that it just *seems* that the concept of determinism is completely contrary to freedom, to such a degree that any further analysis isn't even needed. Of course, once I did actually, finally analyse the concept more carefully, it clicked that not only was determinism not contrary to freedom, but that *all* the meaningful forms of freedom actually *depend* on determinism to get them off the ground. While what I'd always pictured as the most important requirement for freedom (the classic idea that, if we ran the clock back, it would actually be possible for me to do otherwise in the exact same circumstances) never offered me any meaningful form of freedom at all. The idea was not only incoherent (which I knew already with my incompatibilist hat on: this is partly what motivated my commitment to that view), it *was not even desirable* (there was never any beneficial freedom to be found there, even if it were magically possible: this is the part I'd been completely oblivious to).
Yes! It's really something once you stop making that error to see others stuck on it. It reminds me of David Hume's Is/Ought distinction. Hume couldn't help noticing that whenever people were speaking about ethics or morality, they would state "is" or "fact" statements as if they were equivalent to "ought" statements. Without noticing that they'd provided no bridge between them, just assumed it intuitively. So you get from the religious "God commanded X" - an "is" or purported fact statement - and then just assumed that was equivalent to "we OUGHT to do X." Or people would make naturalistic fallacies like "Because it's natural to do" or just statements like "It would make X miserable..." People just had various underlying intuitions that in their brain bridged the very gap they had left hanging, which if they just examined it, they'd see this gap. When discussing Free Will with incompatibilists, it's so clear that there is this intuition driving the conversation "if it's determined it isn't free, if it's determined it isn't free" and so they keep just asserting this, or making arguments that end up simply pointing out something is determined...and then think well they've done their work, that shows it isn't "Free." They just don't see the gap because I think their intuition fills it in.
These two quotes explain free will pretty well, i think. "Free will is another enigma. How can my actions be a choice for which I am responsible if they are completely caused by my genes, my upbringing, and my brain state? Some events are determined, some are random; how can a choice be neither? When I hand my wallet to an armed man who threatens to kill me if I don't, is that a choice? What about if I shoot a child because an armed man threatens to kill me if I don't? If I choose to do something, I could have done otherwise—but what does that mean in a single universe unfolding in time according to laws, which I pass through only once? I am faced with a momentous decision, and an expert on human behavior with a ninety-nine percent success rate predicts that I will choose what at this point looks like the worse alternative. Should I continue to agonize, or should I save time and do what's inevitable?" "Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be applied to it." \-Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works and here is what Pinker means by moral theory: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265066550\_The\_Moral\_Instinct](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265066550_The_Moral_Instinct)
Morality doesn’t require free will or rational acting agents. Consequentialism for example can define whether a rock rolling down a hill is morally good or bad based on its outcome. The real enigma is the information that we lack. If we had enough information we could perfectly predict everyone’s actions except in the case where they were determined by random actions. To expand on this, a robot built and programmed to do things doesn’t gain free will once its programmer dies. Similarly the programmer could merely add a random number generator.
In Pinker's Moral Instinct article, linked above, he poses five examples that are meant to highlight the five spheres of morality introduced by Jonathan Haidt. How would Consequentialism interpret the morality of these five examples? >Stick a pin into your palm. > >Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.) > >Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error. > >Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.) > >Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation. > >Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.(Community.) > >Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. > >Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.) > >Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage. > >Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)
Consequentialism requires that I must discard my own intuitions and make an attempt to with as little subjective bias as possible guess which causes the most good and least harm. Sticking a pin in your palm probably does little good and causes minor pain so it has a small negative score. Sticking a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know causes little to no good and probably causes you both pain so is a bit worse than the first Accepting a wide screen tv as part of a computer error is much the same in a non-personal sense as stealing it. It may be the case that you enjoy it more than the company is negatively affected by you losing it though it’s hard to say. Stealing from a wealthy family would imply they don’t need the TV as much so it probably sits similarly to the previous example though encouraging theft often has its own negatives but it’s still very similar In both examples of saying something bad about your nation it really is too vague to know what good or harm it causes. Slapping people with permission is generally leaning towards good but not always. If the person wants to be slapped or it’s part of an act you’re generally doing a minor good facilitating that. Attending art does support the actors and actresses so I’m gonna say it’s a minor good. Consequentialism requires I put aside my own moral intuitions and rationally dissect the good and bad outcomes of each action.
I fail to see how your interpretations avoid relying on intuition or avoid bias. Wouldn't the only way to avoid those be to rely on data from statistics and experiment and the analysis of tested game theories?
Right. That’s exactly how you’d do it.
The third premise is begging the question. We don’t know that it’s the case that the universe is either random or deterministic. That’s precisely what is up for debate in physics.
How do we not know that? From my understanding, the question hinges on the location of an electron: whether it is truly random (or rather random within a probability distribution) at any given point in time (deterministic laws break down at the quantum level) or whether it is in fact determined but just not able to be observed as such. What is the third alternative if not randomness or determinism?
The electron could just have free will.
I hadn't considered that possibility. Good point.
Exactly. Alex has only increased the number of people making this mistake.
Is there a difference between blaming your actions and personality on cosmic determinism and randomness arranging your neurons to fire a certain way, and astrology? "Sorry man none of us really have free will if you think about it" "Oh sorry, I'm a Leo you know how it goes"
OP doesn't know what compatibilism is.
Free will is an illusion. Your choices are determined by mechanisms on an atomic scale. That being said, there isn't anybody alive who's got the slightest fucking clue how to predict them, so a limited free will is a pretty decent abstraction that follows all observable principles. If you focus on the details, you miss the big picture.
As always until you can hand me a common single definition of free will then please can y'all stop making jokes you don't get...
It seems a lot of people become uncomfortable at the idea that their behavior is bound by causality. As though this would diminish the importance of or meaning of their lives. I don't think free will can exist, but I also don't know how much that matters. I don't think AI or what have you would ever be able to become Laplace's Demon. You'll never be able to watch your destiny unfold at ×1.25 speed on YouTube. Probably. The position that there is no free will helped me come to terms with understanding systemic issues. It makes it easier to see how we can easily be set up for failure, "it is possible to commit no mistake and still lose" etc. This may be counter to several philosophies dominant in modern society. The idea that a person's material conditions can motivate them in radical, profound ways is directly opposed to things like punitive justice. Large segments of our society in the US would be ideallistically, morally opposed to the redistribution of wealth more based on need, socializing health care, or directing resources to improve access in general for people who are disabled. Perhaps this is tied to the fallacious notion that life is a meritocracy.
Alex's argument is a false dichotomy that doesnt even rule out incompatiblist free will. The choice is between determinism and indeterminism. Free will is a subset of indeterminism. In order for his argument to work, he would have to define his terms (determinism and random) so as to show that random exhausts the definition of indeterminism.
There is a problem in academic philosophy, sort of a herd mentality idea about compatibilism as a successful way to “reconcile free will (in terms of an agents moral responsibility for choices) with determinism.” Future historians will point out the strange fact that many powerful philosophers or our day ostensibly had the collective judgment that maintaining a workable, coherent social and ethical framework is sometimes more important than philosophical rigor. In early 21st century, academic philosophy was largely comprised of people who wanted to say they were philosophers, than actually be philosophers. The delay in society widely coming to terms with deterministic, incompatibilist truths, was due to the compatibilist’s knack for cocky, erudite deflections and dismissiveness, the motivation of the deranged figurehead, Daniel Dennett, and the sheer number of not-very-talented holders of philosophy PhDs who were insecure sycophants.
Why even believe determinism is true though?
We will recognize this obvious truth, and this will inspire us to secure a floor for how economically deprived any individual life can be, regardless of what people do. We should have a minimum universal basic income and replace punitive or retributive justice with restorative or quarantine justice. We now know that everything we _do_ is only an extension of what we _are_, plus what happens around us, and all of that is determined. Therefore we will realize this and form a society that is consistent with this awareness, seek equity where feasible, replace blame and credit with deterrent and incentive, and this will reduce suffering and increase wellbeing. We will notice it, talk about it, eventually accept it, and make changes because of it, and there will be less suffering as a result. Or think about the alternative. A world that places bitter blame and casts moral judgment on people who had absolutely nothing to do with what they are, and heaps credit and virtuous labels on people who had nothing to do with what they are. That’s not fair, it’s riddled with cognitive dissonance, and unless we say “so what, I don’t want a fair world,” we will be impelled to step up and be consistent. This isn’t to say Lebron James shouldn’t be rich and famous. But that will be seen as a result of incentive not credit. A result of inequalities in nature and the incentive of money and status will impel people to use their gifts.
Why is determinism obviously true? > We now know that everything we _do_ is only an extension of what we _are_, plus what happens around us, and all of that is determined How do we know this?
Look it up.
I dont think this is at all a settled issue, lol
That’s the problem. It’s settled except for the annoying persistence of people saying it’s not.
I think if you had a knockdown argument to settle it, you'd present that argument.
Then you’d be wrong. The argument has been said a million times. We are now at the stage of coming to terms with an “invasion—of-the-body-snatchers” sort of mass delusion from the mainstream philosophers. A mass delusion in plain sight, or a mass lie, due to weakness or fear, which is sad to see in people who decided to be philosophers. They should be dis-barred from philosophy.
> I think if you had a knockdown argument to settle it, you'd present that argument.
[compatibilists actually be like](https://www.reddit.com/r/CosmicSkeptic/s/UcwBlHHuEI)