I’m rereading Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality for purposes that will become clear later. I do like the book, but oy, does it take naturalism to its most extreme! Alex wears the label of “scientism” proudly, and in many ways I agree with him, though he does take evolutionary psychology to unsubstantiated lengths. But he’s right on the mark in his views about determinism, free will, and consciousness. All of you should read the book, though many will disagree.
But while thinking about the book at the dentist’s yesterday (you have to think of something when they’re stuffing tubes of rubber into your bored-out nerve canals and then melting the rubber with red-hot probes as acrid smoke pours from your mouth), I had this thought about compatibilists—those philosophers and intellectuals who agree that while our thoughts and actions are controlled by the laws of physics (and so we can’t really choose differently from how we do), we still have some kind of “free will.” It’s just not the type of free will that most people think we have. I’ve written about this ad infinitum, and feel that compatibilism is merely a semantic trick, and the important thing, which none of these philosophers seem to emphasize, is the determinism behind our actions and its implications for stuff like criminal justice.
But putting that aside, why do philosophers engage in the exercise of comporting physics with “free will”? I can think of only three reasons:
1. It’s just an intellectual game with no consequences for the real world or how the average person thinks.
2. It makes people feel good by assuring them that, despite the advances of neuroscience that tell us we don’t really have the ability to influence how we think, we nevertheless remain active agents in our behavior, and can really make choices that could have been otherwise. After all, that’s the way we feel!
3. It’s necessary to tell people they have some form of free will because if they think that determinism is solely behind their actions, they’ll start acting either immorally or will lose all ambition and lie abed. That, for example, is at least one motivation behind philosophers like Daniel Dennett (see my post and the video here).
I can’t see the first alternative being the case, but I think #2 is partly true, and #3 is certainly true for some compatiblists, as evidenced by their own statements.
This makes compatibilists like creationists. After all, one of the motivations—perhaps the main motivation—for creationists to keep attacking evolution is that they think the theory has inimical effects on morality. If we think we evolved from beasts, they say, we’ll act like beasts. And so evolution must be denied lest the moral fabric of our society disintegrate. You hear this over and over again from creationists and fundamentalists.
That’s how many compatibilists feel about free will. The observations, from both experiment and observation, that determinism does not make people immoral—and that incompatibilists like myself still try to behave well, and do behave well—is irrelevant.
I think such people have unfairly debased conceptions of beasts, and unreasonably elevated conceptions of humans. I’ve known a number of animals that display significantly more compassion and cooperation and whatever else you care to cite than, say, your typical Republican Congressional representative.
If I were to manage to explain to Baihu that he doesn’t have “free will” (whatever the fuck that married bachelor is supposed to be), will he stop protecting me? I don’t think so!
b&
You set a very low bar Ben.
True…but it’s the members of that bar most likely to be bitching about us all devolving into animals if the truth were known!
b&
True . . . and the same ones that behave most like their own conception of lowly, depraved beasts.
Some pretty heavy duty ironing, indeed.
b&
If every republican “devolved” into penguins, we would have men on mars and the cure for cancer in five years time. Plus, a significant portion of the population would have much healthier diets! Seriously, some Omega 3 could really help with the forked brains issue.
Yes, I agree about the beasts. It seems to me that the more people hold themselves apart/above other animals the more they can justify abuse of many sorts. It strikes me as somehow desperate, this need to hold people apart – from animals can’t feel pain, to they can’t communicate, to they can’t use tools, to (aaargh) they don’t have souls.
Yeah, people really do think they are better than the other animals. Abrahamic religions don’t make this any easier to combat. My dog has a way better outlook on life and sense of humour than most people I know. In fact, I wish I were more like my dog!
What, furry and slobbers a lot and always sticking a nose in somebody’s crotch? Careful what you wish for….
b&
My dog isn’t like that (except for the furry part). She doesn’t take crap off people but at the same time is very friendly…until you piss her off, then she narrows her eyes and barks at you. I’ve never met a person who doesn’t like her – even people who don’t particularly like dogs, love my dog. I want the human version of that!
Yeah…but the humans who fit that description may well also be the type to slobber and sniff crotches….
b&
As I read that part about “behaving like beasts” I thought, so that means they go about their lives, feeding themselves, raising their families and doing what 4 billion years of evolution designed them to do? Sounds okay to me.
Uh oh.
I can’t help but sub
I’m thinking of all those people who were religious and then decided to become atheists when they were exposed to evidence of the falsehood of their religions. Was it not a choice of themselves to leave religion behind?
Do humans have an equation for atheism in their brain that is activated when the variables in that equation are filled with a certain type of information? And if different information is put into the equation, do atheists turn out religious?
It’s fascinating, but I’m having trouble picturing it in my mind.
Because the laws of physics governing terrestrial biology are completely known and Turing-computable (ask Sean Carroll for details), it therefore follows that Church-Turing holds at least for humans…and that there exists a mathematical equivalent of any human being. That is, you might have to create a simulation down to the atomic level (though that’s guaranteed to be overkill), but you can, in principle, simulate any person on a computer. (And we’re multiple orders of magnitude away from having the technical ability to do so, it must be noted.)
So, in a sense, yes, your speculation is correct.
But, in reality…the complexities overwhelm it to the point that expressing it as “variables in an equation” is akin to describing the Pyramids as “piles of sand.”
b&
I think, therefore I am three.
There. Are. Four. Equations!
b&
Funny how certain things like this stick with us forever. If only we knew that phrase would make up so many of our smart ass jokes when we heard it all those years ago!
It often happens around puberty so I’ve thought there was something to brain development at that time that triggers these things.
It could also be hormones. I fell in love with a girl of the pentacostal church when I was 16. We dated a lot but our differences were irreconcilable. I feared I would lose the thing that was most dear to me – my reason. But I did see other people from my class go to the pentacostal church and they’ve become members, often because they fell in love with a girl or guy from that church as well.
I generally stay clear of these free will discussions, but one thing has been bothering me: the notion that punishment as a deterrence of crime makes sense from a no-free-will position. I can’t get my head around that. The very notion of deterrence presupposes that the person being deterred has some choice in the matter. What else is being deterred than bad choices?
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
deterrence: the act of making someone decide not to do something
second blockquote was missing the virgule. Sorry.
I quite like the idea of punnishment – being subjected to a string of inane jokes.
I like it! We could put the cast of Monty Python in charge.
It’s all pun and games…until someone gets hurt.
Hi,
You said : “The very notion of deterrence presupposes that the person being deterred has some choice in the matter.”
If we build a learning device in a robot (with this principle : you have to avoid everything that makes you alone) and he do x, then we punish him by puting him in a isolated room… he will learn to NOT do x next time. No free will here. Just a learning device, a deterministic one.
But, did the “robot” had a “choice” in the beginning?
When you say that a person has some choice in the matter, what process in the “person” are you talking about?
You said : “one thing has been bothering me: the notion that punishment as a deterrence of crime makes sense from a no-free-will position. I can’t get my head around that.”
It make perfect sense when you deal with learning devices (like our mind). We doesn’t need a free device (What does it mean anyway? A device free from what, exactly? Determinism?) to have concrete result.
We are moist robots. Freedom in our devices is just weird and unecessary.
Have a good day!
Well, no. Determinism doesn’t say that choices aren’t made. It just says that the phenomenon we call “making a choice” is just as much a part of the causal web as the behaviour of an inanimate object is (though strictly speaking, it says causality is 100% predictable if you know the prior state of all the variables in the universe, as opposed to being merely probable). Free will treats choices as though they were fundamentally different from such causality, much like how dualists treat the mind as though it was fundamentally different from matter rather than, as physical monists claim, a subset of it.
Without questioning your main points, I must raise a flag about your passage in parentheses. Knowing the initial conditions, even to 100% accuracy, may give you no idea at all about the outcome. There is too much non-linearity about!
For the sake of brevity, I’m assuming at least determinism in principle. In principle, you could predict a non-linear system with 100% accuracy, since it’s still technically deterministic. That’s why chaos and complexity can still be studied; they have an underlying regularity and order, albeit less easy to study. In practice, though, even a simple chaotic system rapidly, perhaps exponentially becomes impractical to study the more variables are included.
It makes little difference to the debate either way. Even if we really lived in a completely random universe, that’s a different kettle of fish from what free will is intended to convey.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that if we knew the initial conditions of the universe to 100% accuracy, we could ‘in principle’ predict its current state precisely. I’m afraid I still don’t buy that.
Agree your final para though – let’s leave it at that!
The logical conclusion of your argument is that if we knew the initial conditions of the universe to 100% accuracy, we could ‘in principle’ predict its current state precisely. I’m afraid I still don’t buy that.
Why? If you can’t predict it even in principle, that’s got nothing to do with chaos. That’s because of some degree of uncertainty, i.e. because of randomness or probability.
Even in principle, there’s no such thing as calculation with infinite precision. Exponential increase in uncertainty means the actual trajectory of the system is unpredictable in all cases.
Virtually no criminal act is committed as if the perpetrator is comprehending the situation as if it is exposed by some constraint of free will (or deterrence). The idea is silly.
If someone really wants to kill someone else, for example, then regardless of free will or deterrence, that person can kill. Assuming the laws of physics are obeyed.
There are crimes of passion, and there are ones that people do because they think they can probably get away with it. Are you saying the second set is virtually empty? (Embezzlement and forgery can’t be deterred? Rubbish.)
At a crude level, our brain accepts input, uses beliefs (based on past inputs) and produces output (actions, new beliefs, etc). If you change the inputs, you change the beliefs and outputs. Many actions can change the (perceived) chances of getting caught and the punishments upon getting caught. Any police action, new law, media report, news show, discussion or article on law enforcement are inputs which change our beliefs and so influence our future actions.
All seems pretty clear & obvious to me.
Where’s the stumbling block here?
The fact that you no free will doesn’t mean that choices are random. It simply means you can’t consciously assess, and override a lifetimes worth inputs that go into making that decision.
NewEnglandBob,
“No, punnishment is just another input. The set of circumstances changes as inputs change.”
This doesn’t answer the question.
Deterrence does presuppose someone has a choice. If you say ““try jumping off this 10 foot height and you will get $1 million” it presupposes someone has a choice to either remain as they are (or do something else) OR do as you advise.
If they do not have a choice, your recommendation would make no more sense than
saying “try not being affected by gravity today and you will get $1 million.” This computes as a senseless recommendation because it’s impossible to do otherwise.
As usual the “just another input” response just misses the point. The point isn’t whether any input per se can affect behavior – bad and incoherent mutterings can be input that affect other people’s behavior. We want to know if what you are recommending actually makes sense, given the other things you also claim. If you start with the claim there is “no real choice” then recommending an action – an act that presupposes choice – is incoherent.
Were you have a root canal or your tires changed? I have had several root canals done and never had this procedure.
Of the choices:
I think many think #3 is the reason, although it is not correct. (sort of a belief in belief – even Dennett gets caught up into it).
I’m not going to say whether I’m a compatibilist or not because I’m not sure any two people have the same idea of free will, but:
First, I disagree that determinism has implications for the criminal justice system – specifically, I argue that the punishment/revenge model of justice is bad, and for exactly the same reasons, even in a world of libertarian free will.
Second, I think our common experience suggests people’s actions are predetermined even in a physically non-deterministic universe. Even if magic wizard-angels moved our bodies around entirely separately from the causal chain, they’d still have values and preferences that would alway control and perfectly predict their behavior. The better we get to know people, the better we become at anticipating their behavior. That sounds like determinism to me, and we don’t need Newton for that.
You are never going to understand compatibilism until you recognize that it treats “free will” as a deepity. The average person lumps a lot of things into the idea of ‘free will’ — some true but trivial, others extraordinary but false. The “kind of free will most people think we have” is actually a mixed bag.
When creationists say that if we evolved from animals then we’ll act like animals, the compatibilist position would be to agree that yes, we DO act like animals — but that doesn’t mean what they think it means.
Apropos.
When people talk to each other about freewill
A conflict of thinking the situation is something when it is something else. Also confer here (NSFW):
Mixing free will with texting
That’s a good point.
I’ve found the the same thing by reading the reactions to a denial of free will. The family of responses that go “if not X then why B?” are incredibly instructive as to what people think a particular concept entails. In the case of free will, often the B refers to abilities of a person which any monist would agree is part of what it means to be human.
Sastra, I think you are metaphorically shooting your own position in the face. You appear to be saying that the compatibilist position is either true, but trivial, or false. Heads we win, tails you lose.
No, what people generally mean by free will is the deepity – compatibilism is what you get when you clear the conceptual confusion.
No, it’s as kelskye says. The term “free will” has both realistic and non-realistic meanings. Compatibilism clears up the confusion.
You are never going to understand compatibilism until you recognize that it treats “free will” as a deepity.
That’s the overwhelming impression I’m getting: compatibilism treats “free will” as a deepity, which is another way of saying “as a bait-and-switch”.
People treat “free will” as a deepity and Compatibilists recognize this. The bait ‘n switch is being done by the supernaturalists, who try to hitch a ride on the back of the reasonable interpretation.
Consider this comparison:
“Does life have any meaning if there is no God?”
The religious answer is a swift and easy “No.” And then they frame atheism as an inherently nihilistic, depressing, and meaningless world view.
The atheist, however, will answer “Yes … and no: it depends on what you mean.” And then we will separate the trivial idea of a life formed FOR a reason (teleology) from the more important idea of a life which has meaning because it has meaning for the people who live it.
Has the atheist performed a bait ‘n switch?
No, the theist has. They put two plausible readings of “life has meaning” together and tried to swap the humanist one we ALL live by for the theistic one … and pretend there’s no distinction.
Just because free will is an illusion doesn’t mean that life is lessened or meaningless. Since the brain mechanisms that determine our actions are subconscious, I don’t live my life constantly thinking: “I’m doing this because I have no other choice.” Since I rarely get into a determinism mind set, I live as if I had free will. I suppose that’s how most determinists plod through life.
For a reason I can’t figure out, I find the whole idea of no free will incredibly funny…in a sort of dark way. As soon as it hit me that free will is an illusion, I found that very funny. Perhaps there is something absurd about us thinking anything else and that is what I find so funny.
I do believe that the many brains and nervous systems of the many earth creatures living now and hence default into the evolved state of free will thinking without the reality of free will being an illusion. That’s animals for ya.
I’m shutting up now as to sound too ?Deepakidumb?
The comparison with creationism is exactly on point with the compatibilist. And from Dennett’s argument he must believe it too. Look at the harm they do those evil scientist. We will all start acting like Monkeys if we don’t put a stop to these Atheist.
Rather than guessing, you could simply ask the compatibilists (like myself) why we believe what we do. In my case, it’s because talking about people as agents capable of making decisions is the best description we have of them at the emergent level where it’s possible to talk about “people” at all. On this view, denying the existence of free will because the underlying laws are deterministic is a non sequitur, like denying the existence of temperature or pressure because we now know that fluids are made up of atoms. Not every property of the underlying level is straightforwardly reflected at the higher levels.
Thanks for pointing that out, Sean. Maybe somebody will eventually get Jerry to stop misleading people (including himself) into believing that there are no serious arguments for compatibilism.
Sean, would you be so kind as to clarify what you mean by the term, “free will”?
What is the will free from? How is freedom willful?
Personally, I contend that the term itself is incoherent, with a caveat: when people say they’re exercising their free will, they’re pointing to the mental process of evaluating a set of options by imagining the outcomes of each. It subjectively feels like Jerry’s “rewind the tape” definition, but it all happens in the mind…and it’s also pretty emphatically an entirely deterministic process and not at all what most people mean by the term.
…which is why I don’t call the decision-making process “free will” and why I’m not worried about attempting to salvage this married bachelor for secularism.
You’ve obviously got some definition in mind that you consider coherent for the term…but I’m also left wondering how well that definition fits the common understanding of it.
Cheers,
b&
Hi Ben,
“Free will” is a construct about human interactions, and it is “free” from social constraints.
Thus someone is not “free” if they are being coerced by a gun to the head. They are also not free if they are in jail.
The freedom is “willful” if one is acting on one’s own internal (and determined) desires, rather than the social constraints of a gun to the head or being in jail.
Now, if your reply is that the above doesn’t correspond to your notions of that “free will” is supposed to mean, then, yes, we do know that, having discussed this 200 times.
Again, the phrase is used to denote entirely different concepts based on context.
In law, it is perfectly reasonable to ask if you had a gun to your head or if you signed the document of your own free will. Or, a free will might be a promotional gimmick offered by a family practice attorney — one free will with every prenup.
But the term as it is used by philosophers and theologians is as incoherent as “married bachelor.”
b&
But philosophers have also been using the term in the “perfectly reasonable” compatiblist sense for hundreds if not thousands of years.
This is the basic problem. There are two long-standing usages of the term: (1) dualist and incoherent, and (2) “perfectly reasonable” and actually fairly widespread and useful.
The incompatibilist insists that only (1) is the “right” one, and says (rightly) that it is incoherent and doesn’t exist.
The compatiblist entirely agrees about (1), but sees that the *other* usage is useful and more or less necessary for human social interactions, and so adopts it.
Thus, the compatiblist with full clarity and full explicitness, rejects (1) and adopts (2).
The incompatiblist then accuses the compatibilist of fudging the difference between (1) and (2) and of secretly hankering after (1).
Sigh.
That would be well and good, if the compatibilists didn’t essentially hijack the conversation and / or do a bait-and-switch.
The way compatibilism comes off is that somebody raises the question of the reality of dualist free will, and then a compatibilist says that free will is, of course, real, because you didn’t have a gun to your head when you signed your mortgage papers.
I think it might be Sastra who rightly identified that as a deepity: superficially true, deeply worng.
If your compatibilism stems from the fact that you think it’s useful to distinguish between whether or not there was a gun to your head at closing, then you’re engaging in an entirely different discussion from the one that everybody else is having.
b&
That last claim is simply not true. When used in everyday social interactions, the compatibilist sense of the term is just as prevalent.
Coel, the entire problem the compatibilists are causing is the conflation of two radically different definitions for a single word.
A shockingly close analogy would be, “married bachelor.” In the context of logic and philosophy and what-not, it’s instantly understood that a married bachelor is a man who simultaneously has never been married and yet, incomprehensibly, also has a wife to whom he’s married.
Yet it’s also true that there are millions of people who hold undergraduate degrees and who are therefore bachelors…and who are also married.
You incompatibilists are saying that the only type of bachelorhood worth wanting is that which is granted by a degree from an institution, so what’s the fuss about identifying all those wedded graduates as married bachelors?
I think you’d agree with me that that’s a bait-and-switch that would cause absolutely nothing but chaos and confusion.
And…you would also seem to agree with me that the philosophical / theological incoherent conception of “free will” is as radically different from the legal term, “of one’s own free will” as a married bachelor is from a coupled diplomate.
Where we part ways is that you still think it’s a good idea to keep muddying the waters by harping on gun-to-the-head legal definitions when the rest of us are discussing philosophical ghosts in the machine.
b&
So the conflation is all the compatibilists fault then? 🙂
Trouble is, both usages have a very long history.
That’s because both usages of the term originated as *interpretations* of human experience. We experience “will”, we experience making “choices”, we experience feelings of “freedom” versus social coercion (the famous gun to the head).
So how do we interpret those things? The compatibilist explains them as arising in a deterministic brain world.
The in-compatiblists still haven’t really sorted out what language they actually want to use about social interactions. When they do they’ll find compatibilist language available and convenient. 🙂
Yes, both usages have a very long history.
But there’s never any confusion about which definition is applicable to which context until you get a compatibilist muddying the waters.
It’s the same for all sorts of words. “Black” is a color, a race (such as “race” exists), a social construct, a not-uncommon last name, and a financial term for positive numbers. If I start talking about the perils of “driving while Black” in America and you tell me that there’s no problem because you keep a black ink pen in your glove box, I’d think you’d gone crazy.
b&
Sorry, I just don’t think it’s the case that the compatibilists’ “free will” is nothing more than the lawyers’. If it is, then I don’t think they (including Daniel and Sean) have described their position very well…
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Sean’s reply in this thread makes it pretty clear that he’s not thinking of a legalistic “of one’s own free will” but something roughly congruent with the popular notion of a ghost in the machine that’s an emergent property of the underlying physics.
How rough or smooth the congruency I’d love for Sean to clarify, but I’m pretty sure that’s the direction he’s headed in rather than questions about loan points and termite inspections.
b&
Yes, Ben. It seems like a Motte and Bailey tactic. They say, “yes, free will is real and true and people have it,” but when contested they say, “free will just means you don’t have a gun to your head…you don’t have a gun to your head, do you? Then you have free will!” It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s a dishonest tactic.
Yes, Ben. It seems like a Motte and Bailey tactic.
Agreed.
» Ben Goren:
That would be well and good, if the compatibilists didn’t essentially hijack the conversation
*LOL* I think we have to give it to you, Ben, that is just the perfect troll. Superbly done!
<sigh />
Do you have any idea just how easy it is to make that type of typo in a context such as this, especially given that neither word is in my spellcheck and always gets highlighted squiggly red?
Call it a Freudian slip if it makes you happy, but I stand by what I clearly meant to type as opposed to the motions my fingers went through.
b&
How easy it is? But, Ben, you had no choice but to mistype it?
(Depending on your OS, try the “Learn spelling” or “Add to dictionary” option from the contextual menu.)
/@
“Add to dictionary” only works for the device you’re using at the moment. As such, I abandoned it as a useless waste of time about five minutes after I first discovered the feature.
b&
Unless you’re using OS X and iOS devices, in which case the dictionary syncs via iCloud!
/@
I may be paranoid, but I avoid all things cloudy. The closest I come to that sort of thing is the Mac mini server I have in the closet that holds all my mail, contacts, calendars, that sort of thing. I don’t even use dictation or ask Siri for anything more significant than arithmetic or the woodchucking abilities of woodchucks.
b&
What typo, Ben? As far as I can see, what I quoted is exactly in line with what you have been saying all along. Or did you in fact want to concede that it is incompatibilists who are hijacking the conversation? That, I would have to confess, would be an interesting turn of events. 🙂
Okay…now I’m confused. I probably shouldn’t engage in this any more until after breakfast and coffee….
b&
So if I throw a rock at x but my friend is throwing a rock at my rock, then my rock is not free. It’s being coerce by another rock.
But normaly, my rock is a free rock when it is controlled by me.
But, at bottom, the rock is ALWAYS coerce by things (me throwing it or when the rock hits another rock).
In other words, my mind is always coerce by things, social, environnemental or else. When you talk about our mind being free, you are NOT talking about a capacity of our mind – choosing without being coerce – but a context.
Being free from this social context (a gun, a prison).
So basically, you’re changing the subject, which is okay.
But know that you are not really talking about the freedom of the will. “Freedom of the mind” is a metaphor for “x is not being constraint by social or environnemental contexts”.
You are talking about context, not about the mind. So we should say : were you in a context free from constraints?
Nope, compatibilist “free will” is a concept about human social interactions and doesn’t apply to rocks. You don’t blame a rock for falling under gravity and hitting you; you do blame a human for hitting you.
Want to figure out the difference there? Note that both cases are deterministic.
Nope, we compatibilists do know that compatibilist free will is a very different thing for dualist free will. Which one of them do *you* want to talk about? We *agree* with you on dualist free will.
We do know that we’re not talking about dualist libertarian free will! We really, really do know that!
But we *are* talking about the only sort of freedom that actually exists. You can regard that as a metaphor if you wish.
Fine, say that. (And note that you used the word “free”!) But it so happens that in English that concept is usually expressed by the phrase “did you sign the contract of your own free will?”.
Thanks for this response!
You said: “You don’t blame a rock for falling under gravity and hitting you; you do blame a human for hitting you.”
Because humans have many learning devices inside them and rock doesn’t. Okay. So responsability is a social construct made by our learning devices. Okay.
But to say that we have a free will is to explicitly say that our will is free from things (whatever these are). But our mind is – as you agree – never free from anything. That’s the context in which our mind is that matter.
And you are changing the subject (even if it’s only slightly), because people are talking about a capacity of the mind, not a metaphorical potential in some context (which is just abstract talking).
I do appreciate your way of speaking, it’s clear and it seems valid. But I see no reason to use the terms “free will” without adding some confusion to a discussion… I hope you do agree on this point 😛 haha
And about the english phrase “did you sign the contract of your own free will”, I couldn’t care less (I do not mean to be rude here, sorry), it’s a social use of a word to describe a context, not a capacity.
In the future, I have hopes that this will change.
have a good day!
“But to say that we have a free will is to explicitly say that our will is free from things …”
No it is not! Not when you use the term in the *compatibilist* sense!
“And you are changing the subject … because people are talking …”
That’s just such typical incompatibilism! Blithely insisting that the term “free will” can only mean one thing while being entirely oblivious to the long-standing and prevalent usage in the *compatibilist* sense.
» Coel:
Blithely insisting that the term “free will” can only mean one thing
Which is just like what the fundamentalists do, funnily enough.
That’s just such typical incompatibilism! Blithely insisting that the term “free will” can only mean one thing while being entirely oblivious to the long-standing and prevalent usage in the *compatibilist* sense.
Yes, because when I talk about bridge in the context of suspension cables and iron girders, I’m blithely insisting that the term can only mean one thing while being entirely oblivious to the existence of the card game.
Look, if you don’t think human choosing is done by ghost in the machine, and that this can’t be reconciled with the determinism or indeterminism of the world, then you’re an incompatibilist. If you insist that you’re compatibilist because of a legal definition that involves finding out whether or not someone had a gun pointed at their head, then you’re baiting and switching.
I think Sean means something like:
Free will is the capacity of people to make decisions.
The decisions are still determined, like temperature arises from the motion of atoms.
The problem with that is that the decision that people make are no different in principle with the decision that computers (or thermostats) make, and “free will” is explicitly formulated so as to distinguish itself from such.
Ask “the man on the street” if a thermostat has free will, and he’ll think you’re pulling his leg with a question so absurd. And, yet, from the perspective of physics, the choices the thermostat makes are no different from what the man on the street does when he gets home and decides to twist the dial on the thermostat.
b&
A problem with that is that the term “free will” has a long history of a very clear “ghost/soul in the machine” meaning. And that’s the meaning most people hear when you say there is such a thing as free will
You could pretty much have used the same argument as above to keep using “phlogiston”, back when.
Sure, you may well need a term to speak about that, but it’d probably better to coin *another*, anything, that does not come with that baggage.
The history of the compatiblist meaning is also very long.
No, the evidence is that most people have a confused mixture of the two concepts.
> No, the evidence is that most people have a confused mixture of the two concepts.
Even provisionally granting that it were so, the point of clinging to a word that evokes “a confused mixture of the two concepts” — in favour of coining a new “blank slate” word if needed — eludes me still.
And I do not grant this, as I don’t see how the very large percentage of, say, USA residents who believe in the survival of the soul after death (eg. 71%, 2009 Harris online poll) could possibly have “emergent property of inherently deterministic system (with possible stochastic components)” as one of the ingredients of that confused mixture. Souls and that don’t *mix*.
In my case, it’s because talking about people as agents capable of making decisions is the best description we have of them at the emergent level where it’s possible to talk about “people” at all.
Are you under the impression that incompatibilists don’t believe that children pick their favourite ice cream? Because my response is exactly the same as the one to Coel below: you’re confusing phenomenon with explanation. And which do you really think the debate over free will is about, if you think about it?
We’re not denying that people make decisions based on what they believe or what they want. In your analogy, we’re not denying the existence of temperature or pressure, since the debate was never about the existence of either. We’re pointing out that the explanation for said phenomena is in the same ball-park as an explanation for other phenomena of causality, such as how weather behaves and why animals seek out mates. We ARE pointing out that temperature and pressure don’t work because of some fundamental substance like phlogiston, but because of how atoms behave in a fluid, such that temperature and pressure are in the same ball park as chairs and galaxies.
And that’s a big deal, because when it comes to human minds in particular, it is incredibly, intuitively, seductively easy for people to start thinking like dualists and human exceptionalists. That’s in complete defiance of the science, and it’s an insidious, even unconsciously operating misconception that’s easily compartmentalized, leading to contradictions between the scientific view and popular policy. Even framing it as an emergent property should require an onus on exactly how it emerges from atoms, neurons, and physical things, because otherwise it lends itself well to the sort of mindset that would translate that as “and then a miracle happens”.
Which debate? There are two debates.
The debate between dualists and determinists is over whether decisions result from the prior physical state of the system. All of us here (I take it) say yes.
The debate between the compatibilists and the incompatabilists is mostly semantics.
The compatbilists consider it useful to regard children and cats and chess-playing computers as agents that make choices, so say things like “choosing an ice cream flavour”, as a shorthand for all the low-level deterministic gubbins.
The incompatiblists are so spooked by the prospect of dualism that they reject that usage — except that they don’t if you catch them in everyday conversation.
Which debate? There are two debates.
There are indeed two debates, and one is indeed a debate that involves dualism on one side, but I think you don’t characterize it accurately.
The first one, which you characterize as between “dualists” and “determinists”, is the classic one between free will and determinism, which is generally one of human exceptionalism. Crudely put, it’s “Are humans fundamentally endowed with some mysterious faculty that makes decisions, or are we simply different from clockwork only in degree rather than kind?” That’s the puzzler the likes of Descartes and religious believers have wrestled with, and it’s the one where the axes are drawn: free will or not, and compatible with determinism or not? On that front, it should be clear that compatibilism doesn’t make sense (if you agree determinism is true, it’s contradictory to also say there’s a mysterious faculty called free will there too).
And the science is decisive here: We differ in clockwork only in degree rather than kind, i.e. no free will, and the question is merely whether the causality involved can be predicted with 100% accuracy in principle (determinism) or involves probability and random chance (indeterminism). But that’s another, more interesting debate in itself.
The second one is a question of semantics; is it fine to use a word when we can be confident we mean nothing spooky, or is it best to avoid the spooky connotations like the plague? That’s fine, and it’s a legitimate point about word use and its consequences. But it’s simply not the compatibilist-incompatibilist debate, and it’s wrong to confuse the two.
No, we’re endowed with a *non*-mysterious faculty that makes decisions. It’s a neural network brain, and it makes decisions in the same way that a chess-playing computer makes decisions about which move to make — namely, deterministically.
Or are you really going to drop the word “decision” from the language along with “choice” and dozens of others?
This is another example of where compatibilism gets you into hot water.
I would absolutely agree that the decisions humans make when playing chess are, in principle, no different from the decisions computers make. Indeed, computers beat the snot out of humans at the game, so one must conclude that computers make better decisions than humans do.
But…it’s an incredible stretch in any sense of the term to describe a chess computer as having free will.
For the dualists, the rejection is outright, with a chess computer being an archetypal example of an entity that doesn’t have free will.
And, here’s the problem.
Would you say that a chess computer could sign a mortgage of its own free will?
Or would you admit that the concept of “of its own free will” is incoherent when applied to an iPhone?
So…why, again, is it in any why useful to conflate the social / legal term, “of one’s own free will,” with the philosophical / theological term, “free will”?
b&
“Would you say that a chess computer could sign a mortgage of its own free will?”
No, because the chess computer doesn’t know about mortgages.
But, I would be happy enough to say that if the computer took a pawn with its knight because it was the only legal move to get out of check, then it was “coerced” or “forced”, whereas if it did the same move as a positional sacrifice then it did so “of its own free will”.
Now, if that usage sounds strange, then it’s because the chess computer is vastly more limited and simpler than a human. But, it’s the same principle as “gun to the head”, and any such concept properly exists on continuum, rather than being binary, so I’d accept that usage — it’s all about the range of options and pressures determining the choice.
“Or would you admit that the concept of “of its own free will” is incoherent when applied to an iPhone?”
iPhones don’t have goals, as chess-computers do. So, no, I would not apply the term “will” to it. Now, I might accept the term about an app, depending on what it was programmed to do.
“So…why, again, is it in any why useful to conflate the social / legal term, “of one’s own free will,” with the philosophical / theological term, “free will”? ”
I don’t find it helpful! I wish the dualistic, theological sense would disappear. But, the starting point is human experience. We experience desires, “will”, goals, and we make “choices” and “decisions” (ones determined by our physical brains). We also have constraints on whether we act on our desires.
We need a language to discuss all of that. What language would you suggest using? De facto it’ll end up compatibilist.
I’m sorry, but the only context in which that can make sense is the dualist ghost-in-the-machine one.
In all instances, the chess computer is, logically, using the language of Turing Machines, applying its input to its table and writing the results to its output. Different inputs will result in different outputs depending on the table.
For the opening move, there’re…what, 20 possibilities? And the move the computer actually chooses is based on its input as determined by its table. In other situations, there are fewer possibilities, with your “force” being an example where there was only a single possibility.
You would have us believe that free will exists from the opening move through to situations where only two options remain, with free will vanishing in a puff of smoke the moment it’s reduced to a single option. Yet, at no point is the computer ever doing anything other than processing its input through its table to its output.
Such a distinction can only meaningfully arise if you think that the computer can ignore its input and table when there are two or more options available to it…which is pure dualism.
b&
Your analysis could just as well be applied to a person who is signing a contract “of his own free will” as opposed to having a gun held to his head.
Everything you said about the Turing machine can apply equally to that human. Yet, you’ve accepted the “of his own free will” usage in that context.
So why not accept it about a chess computer making a piece sacrifice, as opposed to making the only legal move to avoid check?
That’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it?
In the legal profession, the phrase, “of one’s own free will” has a very particularly defined definition relating to the social interactions of humans. It’s a term of art that only applies within the context of the legal profession.
As is common, there’s a parallel common definition of the term that’s too lose for the courts, but the fit is close enough that a lay person isn’t going to be able to tell the difference. It’s this informal formulation of the legal term you’re referring to for your compatibilist definition.
There is an entirely different and perfectly unrelated phrase, “free will.” It is a theological and philosophical concept regarding the forces of nature and supernature that drive individual desires, with interaction with other humans being an insignificant and typically irrelevant factor. It’s this term that the rest of the world understands is being used when the preface, “of one’s own,” is left off.
Because the one is utterly dependent on human interaction and the other ignores or discards human interaction, you just simply can’t conflate the two the way you insist on doing.
Again, “Black” as it relates to human society can’t be conflated with “black” as a financial term regarding positive cash flow. Certain parings of words with “black” would be just fine in the one context and incoherent or downright rude in the other context.
So why on Earth are you so eager to adapt the usage in one context to another diametrically opposed context?
b&
One Ben’s side, there is a very distinct difference between a compatibilist “free will” and a legal “(of your own) free will”.
If you sign at gun point, that’s not “free will” in a legal sense. Yet, you still have “free will” in a compatibilist sense: You can decide not to sign and get shot (depending on what it is you’d be signing, you might believe that it’s worth dying; I’m sure we can all think of examples of this) or maybe you have good reasons to think that the gunman might not actually pull the trigger. &c. &c.
So even in the legal “no(t of your own) free will” scenario, you still have the capacity to chose.
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* gunperson?
To Charlton Heston, I’m sure, guns are people, too, my friend!
b&
** choose
No, we’re endowed with a *non*-mysterious faculty that makes decisions.
Then stop calling yourself a compatibilist! You do not believe in free will – and don’t give me the “what definition” response, you know full well what I mean. You do not believe in mind-body dualism. You do not want to be confused with someone who thinks human decision-making is somehow something more than or fundamentally different from animal cognition or a complex physics system. You do not believe in the ghost in the machine. You are clearly an incompatibilist in the determinist or indeterminist camp, and – more to the point – not in the free will camp. The classic, dualist free will camp, I will emphasize, which is the one that matters. As far as the classic, popular, readily recognized debate between free will and determinism is concerned, you are in the same camp as I am. Yet you persist in acting like “indeterminist” is a diss-word applied to semantic pedants.
I don’t, when you get down to it, give a damn whether you want to defy the dualist connotations of the word free will or not, so long as you’re clear about doing so. If doing so doesn’t make it harder for people to distinguish the two meanings, then why not? But in practice, you jump from saying yes, you’re in my camp to insisting on making cheap cracks about dropping “decision” or “choice” from the language, as if the prior discussion had never occurred! What am I supposed to conclude, except that you’re either not getting it or deliberately muddying the waters?
You’re right, like all compatibilists I reject dualism and embrace determinism. And yes, that means rejecting dualistic free will.
Now, what language do you want to use for the “choices” and “decisions” that we make as “agents” in order to advance our “goals” and “desires”?
How about the words “control”, “attempt”, “option”, “plan”, “threaten”, “test”, “compel”, “consider”, “coerce”? Do you want to reject all of those from the language as well, or do you want, de facto, to adopt compatibilism?
I don’t think anybody here would deny that our language is infused with dualism…any more than we’d also acknowledge that our language is infused with theology.
But, really. All you’re doing is playing the same game that Christians use to attempt to convince atheists that we really do believe because we write “2015” on our checks in acknowledgement that it’s been two thousand fifteen years since the Holy Ghost got horny with Mary.
So?
Today is also Tuesday, Tyr’s day, the god of single combat.
b&
You’re right, like all compatibilists I reject dualism and embrace determinism. And yes, that means rejecting dualistic free will.
Then call yourself an incompatibilist, for goodness’ sake. It’s not a dirty word, and you’ll have fewer clashes here.
Look, if fair play will make you less squeamish, I’ll go first:
No, I do not want to junk words like “choice”, “decision”, “agent”, “goal”, “desire”, “control”, “attempt”, “option”, “plan”, “threaten”, “test”, “compel”, “consider”, and “coerce”. If it means people actually accept monism, determinism, and all that, then I won’t have a cow over word use. I will be watching if I think someone’s trying to inject some dualistic human exceptionalism in there, but I’m not going to kill over it.
Yes, in your narrowly defined and totally unsatisfactory complete redefinition of the badly misused word, I am thus technically a so-called alleged “compatibilist”. I do not agree with this use at all and still think it’s a needless cause for confusion, but temporarily taking this provisional alternative definition, I won’t object too much.
» reasonshark:
You do not believe in mind-body dualism
Which is about as effective as saying to a post-Einstein physicist: ‘Stop saying you believe in gravity. After all, you don’t believe in occult forces.’ That is just as irrelevant to the discussion as to insist (without a shred of evidence, in your case) that the majority of people believe in the occult-forces version, or in your case: dualist free will. What if they did? As if that by itself were any kind of obvious argument.
The classic, dualist free will camp, I will emphasize, which is the one that matters.
Which you keep insisting you can just unilaterally dictate. From what I gather from some of the other compatibilists’ responses here, that is an authoritarian (and basically anti-intellectual) attitude that quite a few people here resent. Strongly.
The term, “choose,” is, indeed, problematic in this context.
It would be much more precise to substitute, “compute,” in its place.
Once you have that established, with all it connotes, it may be convenient to informally use “choose” as a synonym for “compute,” but such usage should be careful as to avoid the dualistic implications of “choice.”
b&
“Once you have that established, with all it connotes, it may be convenient to informally use “choose” as a synonym for “compute,” …”
And the compatibilists are just further down that path than the incompatibilists. That’s the only difference.
Oh man, Coel, I feel for ya here.
Just watching, I don’t feel up to fully jumping on this merry-go-round.
How is what you are saying any different than because “it appears as though we act as if we had free will, then we have free will?”
» reasonshark:
Are you under the impression that incompatibilists don’t believe that children pick their favourite ice cream? Because my response is exactly the same as the one to Coel below: you’re confusing phenomenon with explanation.
Apparently, you are confused about the goal of that particular attack of yours. Jerry has indeed said over and over again (for another link, see below) that he regards choice as an illusion, as only apparent, as “choice” only to be used with scare quotes.
For you to charge the compatibilists here with confusing phenomenon and explanation is quite funny…
“talking about people as agents capable of making decisions is the best description we have of them at the emergent level where it’s possible to talk about “people” at all.”
Except when talking about people with particular kinds of brain injuries/tumors or particular hereditary deviations in brain physiology. Also when talking about people unkowingly under the influence of particular kinds of externally administered chemicals, or externally administered ideologies.
~~WHICH makes up, what, 90% of humans on the face of the planet?
This is the clearest explanation I’ve seen about the way I feel.
I’m afraid I posted this on the wrong thread. These long threads get confusing. I meant it to be in reply to Sean Carroll’s comment. My bad.
“Not every property of the underlying level is straightforwardly reflected at the higher levels.”
Please name one case where it isn’t so.
A billion nitrogen atom in a vessel has a certain pressure. Where does some of the pressure ‘go’ when atoms moved further away from each other, as in a bigger vessel? Thus the non-existenceness of pressure as an independent entity unto itself; it is always dependent on the properties of it’s constituent.
sub
I think a chunk of it is a difficulty to connect the explicit belief – that humans differ from inanimate objects and even animals by degree rather than kind – with something (the concept of free will) that compels intuition but is very slippery when actually examined. We’re still struggling to grasp how nerve impulses translate into seeing the colour blue, never mind the really heady stuff like thinking about politics or philosophy.
For instance, there’s a disconnect between the crisp logic of deterrence – which a scientist can lay out and extrapolate from – and the full-blooded, often uncontrollable thirst for revenge which people immediately make sense of without being able to see very deeply into the reasoning behind it. There’s another example in moral dumbfounding; people strongly and immediately say yea or nay when asked to judge the morality of an action, but can barely piece together a rationale behind said judgement when asked. A third example is taboo: some people are simply too outraged at being asked about them to ever stop and think if they make sense.
The result is a black box mentality. We talk cheerfully about “us” having “choices”, but hardly ever ask what those words even mean. They are black box concepts, and all the more suspect for it because they’re taken for granted, they are intuitive, they were put there to follow darwinian logic rather than make people happy or virtuous or intelligent, people resist or even demonize trying to analyze them, and they are sloppily compartmentalized from what an explicitly described scientific body of facts would imply.
It seems to me that there is a bit of ‘fighting the pendulum swinging too far the other way’ to compatibilism.
I’m very much a physicalist and argue often against libertarian free will, but there is this problem when talking to people who have magical explanations for their behavior, in that they think that the only option aside from LFW magic is being a puppet on a string.
A realistic picture of things is that our behavior is determined by a combination of factors, some of which are internal to us (memories/knowledge, constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, aesthetic preferences, etc.) as well as factors outside ourselves.
It seems to me that at least some compatibilism is an attempt to prevent the pendulum from swinging from one unrealistic extreme to another unrealistic extreme.
Anyway, some half-baked food for thought.
Here is the problem with the swing too far worry: Most everyone understands that computers process things and then makes decisions. And most people understand that the brains of individuals process complex problems or engage in complex, individualistic programs. That is, the idea that it is somehow god manipulating every decision and body part, or the idea that some evil genius has wound us up just right to make the choices we do, is rather absurd. When people like Harris talk about “puppets,” it is quite clear (and as he spells it out) the kind of complex (deterministic) processing that he thinks people/brains are.
The idea that we should be worried about the general public falling into Oedipus-like fatalistic beliefs is rather absurd, even if they do often show up in comment sections. Such an idea is easily dismissed even if some kind of fatalism/determinism is true in the end.
Lately I’ve been watching a bunch of physics talks on YouTube. There’s a ton of good stuff, from top physicists. One of the most interesting is Lee Smoling, author of “The Trouble With Physics”, in which he argues that string theory is a mathematical mirage which is untestable, and that it’s popularity among physicists is a symptom of the intellectual stagnation of physics.
Smolin has some interesting talks on his theory of “time reborn”. I am by no means qualified to articulate his theory, so I’ll leave readers the link to his talk, but basically he’s arguing that the laws of nature must have evolved over time, and that the inexplicable features of nature (the fundamental particles, the various constants etc) have arrived at their values by some process of cosmological evolution which he has theories about.
His views are absolutely fascinating, and listening to him talk is wonderful, because he has a hypnotic way of speaking. I’m no physicist, but one thing that makes me skeptical of is theory is the way that he ends up talking at certain points (around the 1:00 mark in this video) in a way that seems to me to indicate that his theory is motivated by a desire to find a source of free will in physics. “What does this mean for us? The future is open and yet to be made. We can choose to influence the future” etc.
He waxes on like this and mentions free will in other videos, generally speaking in a way that has a quasi-theological manner. I suppose his theory (which he claims is testable) could be true regardless of his views on free will. It’s interesting to me that sometimes cosmologists who are total atheists will sometimes employ the language of physics to wax one about the universe that sounds quasi-theological manner. The Universe is a gnosis upon which many dreams can be projected.
Smolin’s lecture here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxi0_-7HqQ
At 1:34 in the second video, he makes it clear that his cosmology is motivated by a desire to find free will in physics :
“I’ve come to the view that we must live in a universe where laws of nature evolve and time is real, to permit human beings to have the kind of agency that we imagine we need, if we’re going to address the problems that we face.”
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
Except that “agency” is not exactly equivalent to (any of a number of definitions of) “free will”.
In any case, trying to deny that agency can arise out of “conventional” deterministic physics (implicitly, by seeking a new physics) seems akin to denying that crude tools can be used to construct more precise tools.
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If we assume that agency comes with the territory of consciousness — a not unreasonable assumption, I would suggest — then we can assume that, once consciousness is solved, so is agency.
And we know that physics has, at a very rough level, solved consciousness. Whatever it is, we know for an absolute fact that it’s a phenomenon grounded in the electrochemical workings of human (at least) brains. We might well be a loooooooooooong way from understanding the chemistry of the logic circuits and what-not, but we already know that we don’t have to invent any new physics to explain it.
b&
You missed your usual link: … because the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood!
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Haven’t I already linked to that today? It’s hard to keep track sometimes….
b&
Well, this is interesting and i may find time to listen to more.
What immediately startles me is that he looks almost exactly like me but with a bit more hair, a different nose, and a different voice. Otherwise, it is like seeing myself.
Reblogged this on stacygturner.
How far down does determinism go? Yesterday I drove the old car so my husband could have the new one. Today I decided to have a cookie with lunch (despite knowing all the reasons I shouldn’t). Just now I was chewing on a fingernail. Are all of these decisions, from the potentially consequential to the tiny, the immutable result of the condition of my brain at a given moment? Do I have the power to decide freely which blog to read, or when to scratch my ear?
Well, yes. But then you’d have to explain how you can choose these things, but not choose to do an impossible feat, such as rolling a huge ass rock up a hill, that should be way too heavy for you to even move an inch.
In your brain, you’ve got a galaxy full of neurons that behave just like that rock.
the only difference, is that the unable to move the rock thing, is so much more apparent, since we can see and feel how heavy the rock is, and we can see the pusher’s puny muscles.
But, all inputs and current states of mind being equal, why would you want to choose otherwise?
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If I understand your conception of free will and determinism correctly (feel free to tell me I’ve misunderstood), you continue to be a decent play-by-the-rules sort of person because of all the prior circumstances of your life over which you had no control, e.g., genetic potential, nutrition, parental supervision, education and training, social experiences, and on and on. A hypothetical disappointed compatibilist might respond differently, deciding (for want of a better term, but not in the sense that there was any free choice in the matter) that, in the absence of free will, the ends justify the means. He/she is constrained only by the formal legal system and law enforcement (each of which might be successfully manipulated and modified to serve the compatibilist’s ends (the ends weren’t freely chosen either)), and possibly also by the compatibilist’s social experiences, including the approval or disapproval of others. Of course, this is the system under which we already live, it’s just that some of us realize it and others don’t. Right? Also, given my past life and the current state of my brain and other circumstances, I found your latest free will entry so provocative that I had no choice but to send you this question.
Let me briefly point out a couple of unfortunate shortcomings in your arguments:
I don’t think you have ever even acknowledged that such a claim calls for evidence that could possibly test it. Instead you uncritically take it for granted. As a scientist, that should worry you.
If somebody said, ‘The idea of individual life forms being descended in an unbroken line from completely different ancestors is just not how most people think about species’, you would rightly laugh them off as being ignorant. The idea that there may only ever be one unchanging definition of a technical terms is laughable—as, incidentally, is the idea that what most people think should ipso facto be taken for granted.
And if people said, ‘I feel that the biological species concept is merely a semantic trick’, you would ridicule them twice—first for assuming that what they “feel” is of any consequence whatsoever* and second for refusing to seriously try to understand the issue.
* Cf. Carl Sagan: “I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”
That, too, is simply ignorant of the issues. Neither is compatibilism a sufficient reason for supporting retributive justice, nor is incompatibilism a necessary reason to think retributive justice wrong.
I don’t know, Peter. I think that most people actually don’t think about species in that way. If at all. 😉
In any case, isn’t this a tu quoque? I think I’d rather see you put Jerry straight, rather than deriding him with faulty analogies. 😁
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» Ant:
I think that most people actually don’t think about species in that way.
Uh, yeah, that’s exactly my point. And the fact that most people have a mistaken idea of ‘species’ is completely irrelevant for the question of how we should use it.
I think I’d rather see you put Jerry straight, rather than deriding him with faulty analogies.
As I said, I don’t think it’s faulty. Most people have a notion of species as something fixed. Using that fact to argue that the biological species concept shouldn’t be used would be ludicrous. And Jerry’s argument is of that exact form. I think pointing that out is not to deride but to offer constructive criticism of a simple mistake in thinking, i.e. putting Jerry straight about his argument.
There is a fourth possible reason: that they think that compatibilist free-will language is a useful way of thinking about the world.
Thus, we do need to distinguish between the goal-oriented choice-selection behaviour of, say, a cat, compared to things like house bricks.
Thus anti-free-will anti-compatibilists, when they’ve finally get round to deciding what language and concepts they do want to use, rather than just talking about those they don’t want to use, would have to invent compatibilist language to use in the social interactions of everyday life.
Or do the incompatiblists never say to a child, something like: “Would you like an ice-cream, you can choose which flavour?”?
You’re confusing phenomenon with explanation.
Incompatibilist determinism isn’t denying the mundane fact that people choose what flavour ice cream they’d like, nor even people’s beliefs and desires which inform said choices (the phenomenon), regardless of your strawman portrayal. Heck, the whole free will debate doesn’t make sense if you think it’s somehow a quibble over such phenomena. Your jibe is inane at best.
Incompatibilist determinism emphasizes that such things don’t work because of some magic, or because the act of choosing is somehow fundamentally different from causality, or because an inscrutable We can Make Choices (explanation). As an explanation, compatibilism just restates the phenomenon, which is the hallmark of a poor explanation. Incompatibilist determinism is no more radical than pointing out that the mind is a subset of physical matter rather than an ontologically separate category in and of itself.
As soon as you admit that the phenomenon of decision-making is explained with physical things from the molecules in a neuron to the webs of information across societies through time (from physics up to social science), then you’re either an incompatibilist determinist or a “pessimistic” incompatibilist. It’s not even necessarily distancing oneself from a religious ghost in the machine: you can find secular thinkers who think free will is one of those things that somehow sets us apart from other animals. That’s the sort of distinction that needs a razor-sharp application of accuracy, and a confusion of phenomenon and explanation is not going to help.
That’s simply wrong, the compatibilist agrees with you 100% on that explanation! Compatibilism entails at wholehearted, 100% embrace of determinism.
If compatibilism agrees with a deterministic account for the explanation, then what is it agreeing to when it comes to free will? That people make choices (phenomenon)? In which case, why the switch? If you don’t agree with people who explain the ability to make decisions by invoking some mysterious faculty called free will, then why do you not call yourself an incompatibilist determinist? And if you agree that there’s something called free will – or making choices without having a gun pointed at your head, or whatever – what do you think the incompatibilist determinists are denying there? That the phenomenon somehow doesn’t exist?
Either way, it seems to me to be a confusion, possibly an outright contradiction.
Compatibilists simply consider that regarding complex decision-making neural-networks as “agents” making “choices” is a useful way of thinking about the world, one we use every day in social interactions.
I think they’re denying my last sentence. Except that they then do it themselves in every day life.
Basically they’re inconsistent, or they’re too busy fighting dualists that they haven’t noticed that the discussion with compatibilists is a totally different thing.
Compatibilists simply consider that regarding complex decision-making neural-networks as “agents” making “choices” is a useful way of thinking about the world, one we use every day in social interactions.
I don’t have a problem if people want to talk about how they followed their hearts, so long as I’m assured they don’t literally think that the pumping organ in the thorax is where emotions manifest themselves.
Again, you keep using the word “compatibilist” in the wrong context. I will admit I don’t like using the word “free will” because I think it’s seeped too deeply in its dualist sense, but that’s not why I’m an incompatibilist. I’m an incompatibilist because I align myself with the view that you can’t reconcile free will – the mysterious dualist faculty – with determinism (or indeterminism, come to that), without incurring either contradiction or having to play with the words, whether innocently or with intent to deceive and misdirect. That in turn comes out of the classic debate on free will (dualist free will, if you insist), which I think is an incoherent and nonsensical position.
“… I align myself with the view that you can’t reconcile free will – the mysterious dualist faculty – with determinism …”
Well sure, of course not. The compatibilists agree with you 100% there.
Er, no they don’t. The “compatibilists”, if they agree with me, are incompatibilists. They call themselves compatibilists erroneously, under the mistaken impression that it’s a term applied to the semantic debate. They either have a phobia about being called such or can’t tell the difference between a debate on dualistic free will and a semantic debate, possibly because they are mistakenly falling for the equivocation in the word free will or because they don’t really believe that you can’t reconcile free will – the mysterious dualist faculty – with determinism.
Let me make it simple: if you think redefining free will into a secular and mundane synonym for choice or decision-making, you are not a compatibilist. If you think you can reconcile free will – the mysterious dualist faculty – with determinism, then you are a compatibilist. That is how the word is supposed to be used. If your argument that free will and determinism can be reconciled involves redefining the word free will away from its classic roots towards a secular alternative, then it’s wrong to call it compatibilism when that word already has a meaning in the classic debate. It only leads to equivocation and pointless confusion.
“Let me make it simple: if you think redefining free will into a secular and mundane synonym for choice or decision-making, you are not a compatibilist.”
Oh yes you are!
“If you think you can reconcile free will – the mysterious dualist faculty – with determinism, then you are a compatibilist.”
Oh no you’re not!
This highlights another problem in these debates, quite apart from definitions of “free will”, definitions of “compatibilist” and “incompatibilist”! There seems to be an “atheist”/“agnostic” thing going on; we’re trying to map things along one axis, when there might be two (or more).
I’d far rather we had clearer labels for our camps (so I knew which one I was in).
So, human-agency-emerges-from-deterministic-processes-and-while-there-is-no-such-thing-as-contrcausal-free-will-the-term-free-will-remains-useful-as-a-way-of-talking-about-human-agency v. human-agency-emerges-from-deterministic-processes-and-there-is-no-such-thing-as-contrcausal-free-will-so-using-a-term-steeped-in-dualism-only-obfuscates-discussions-about-human-agency.
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Yes, that’s pretty much the argument.
Dan makes this explicit when he refers to “the only type of free will worth wanting.” Clearly, the “free will” he’s referring to isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile, and he’s going to great pains to make that clear.
His problem…is that it’s not even a car…it’s more of a home office rigged for telecommuting so you don’t have to drive…but it’s still got the familiar Olds logo on the mousepad! …even though you don’t have a mouse, you’ve got a trackpad….
b&
* contracausal [twice]
“Incompatibilist determinism emphasizes that such things don’t work because of some magic, or because the act of choosing is somehow fundamentally different from causality, or because an inscrutable We can Make Choices (explanation).”
Compatibilists would agree with all of that.
» reasonshark:
Incompatibilist determinism isn’t denying the mundane fact that people choose what flavour ice cream they’d like
For some of you, that is exactly what incompatibilist determinism is denying. Jerry, for one, has been saying over and over again that we don’t really make choices, but that those choices are “made for us”—which, by the way, is as straightforwardly dualist as it gets.
Jerry’s ultimate point is that, what we informally and poetically refer to as choices and decisions are really very complex computations and calculations that take place in our brains.
I think nobody would suggest that there’s any freedom in a computation. Would you?
So then, the heart of the question comes down to whether the decisions humans make are choices or computations. And we know that answer…the incompatibilists just keep blurring the lines between the two.
b&
Very nice point. The mental fallacy is that inevitability is somehow forcing us to do stuff against our will, as if it were an anthropomorphic entity.
No, the fallacy is in the other direction, of mistraking the inside-the-computing-device perception of computation for spooky ghost-in-the-machine choice.
When you make a decision, all that’s really happening is your brain is performing all sorts of very complex and subtle arithmetic-equivalent calculations that, eventually, cause a cascade of nerve impulses in your limbs in response. There really isn’t any choice going on in any of that, regardless of what it feels like. If you were placed in the same circumstances with your brain reset to the same state, including all memory or learning that resulted from how the results of the decision played out, you’d be every bit as guaranteed to always arrive at the same conclusion as a calculator is guaranteed to always come up with “2” after you ask it what “1 + 1” is.
The main perceptual difference is all the recursive layers of feedback loops that let you have self-awareness of the decision-making process, including the imagined results of the different choices.
But you have no more true choice in your deliberative computations than a thermostat does.
b&
We agree that the brain is the center of mental processing. How much is digital versus analog or conscious versus unconscious or calculations versus audio-visual is irrelevant to the point.
The point is that the deliberation is happening there, and “there” happens to be you.
Since there is no meaningful concept of your will that does not originate with you, the only issue is whether you are free to act upon your own will or whether someone else forces you to act upon theirs.
If you are free to act upon your own will, you are said to have acted upon your own free will.
The choices you make of your own free will are, of course, inevitable. But they are in fact uniquely yours, and made freely after you spent some time considering your options.
That is a most Orwellian definition of, “free,” would you not agree? You can have any color you want, so long as the color you want is black, because that’s the color you’re going to pick no matter what.
Would you argue that a thermostat has free will during the time that nobody’s fiddling with it? Because it’s most assuredly making decision no different in principle from our own.
b&
To be fair, don’t you think you should let your thermostat ask that question?
If it cannot, then there must be something wrong in your analogy.
Then let’s ramp it up.
Ask ELIZA if she has free will. Regardless of her answer, do you think she does?
b&
Ah! The Turing machine.
To have free will, one must first have a will. Living organisms come with a biological will to meet certain basic needs (for example, see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).
It is not enough to follow instructions programmed at the will of someone else.
Now, it is certainly “possible” to create an electro-mechanical being with programming sufficient to define a set of needs and intelligence (we can drop the “artificial” when it reaches a certain level of functionality, including processes that monitor the processes to produce self-awareness).
The needs become the source of will. When it is free to decide on its own behalf (best self-interest for meeting its own needs) what it will do next, then it has free will.
As suspected…supernatural dualism.
If you desire a piece of fruit as a result of an indeterminate and fuzzy chain of events including your genetic heritage and your personal history and blood sugar levels, that’s free will.
If you desire a piece of fruit as a result of the manipulations of electrodes implanted in your brain by a mad neuroscientist, that’s not free will.
The mental state is identical and indistinguishable; it’s the extra-physical magical intentionality responsible for the state that matters.
Thanks…but no thanks. I’m still not buying.
b&
Ben: “As suspected…supernatural dualism.”
Really, dude? I presume you are deliberately trying to be irritating.
Ben: “If you desire a piece of fruit as a result of an indeterminate and fuzzy chain of events including your genetic heritage and your personal history and blood sugar levels, that’s free will.”
Ben, there is NO INDETERMINACY at all, anywhere in the physical or rational universes.
Therefore, any definition of an “anti-causal” version of free will is an irrational straw man, easily demolished.
Free will operates totally within a physical, deterministic universe. If cause and effect were not reliable, then the choices we make of our own free will could effect nothing. Therefore, free will REQUIRES determinism.
If I pick an apple from the tree, I expect to have an apple in my hand. If I cannot rely upon this, because sometimes it goes “poof!” and sometimes becomes a cat in my hand, then I would be living in an Alice in Wonderland universe. It may be a nice place to visit (everyone loves a magic show), but no one could live there.
Then, now, we’re right back to Orwellian un-free freedom.
Again again again: nobody is contesting that “freedom” is a very useful concept in many contexts. Nor is anybody contesting that the “will” is also a very useful concept in many contexts. The problem arises when one insists that the freedom of the will — that free will — is a real phenomenon.
Bachelors are real. Marriage is real. Married bachelors are not.
Make sense?
b&
Ben: “Then, now, we’re right back to Orwellian un-free freedom.”
There is no situation in which there is freedom from causation. There is no situation in which one’s will is free from one’s self. There is no situation in which you are free from the world as it is (except in your imagination or dreams).
If you insist upon having a freedom that cannot rationally be, then you may as well dispose of the word “free”.
But we have plenty of freedom without requiring an irrational or indeterminate world. One of those freedoms is to choose for ourselves what we do next. The choice is literally our “will” at that moment. And if no one else takes that choice away and makes us act against our own will, then our will is free.
It is really strange to consider the idea of universal inevitability being consistent with free will. Usually when we say something is “inevitable” we are speaking of something “beyond our control”.
But the fact is that us biological organisms are in charge of choosing a lot of stuff that becomes inevitable. And all of the causes of our choices, our beliefs and values, our genetic makeup, our unique history and experience, are us being us. So it is perfectly true to say we, ourselves, of our own free will, determine a lot of what becomes inevitable on this planet.
I just asked Siri if she had free will. She said she couldn’t answer that.
She told me it’s because she’s never really thought about it.
b&
Then she must have a choice about what she says! 🙂
Either that, or she’s trying to give you the illusion that she does….
I asked her if she’s alive. She asked me if it really matters.
Clever girl.
b&
She must be a velociraptor!
Siri’s such a tease, isn’t she?
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I dunno. Take “heart” as an analogy – we still use the metaphor of our “heart” as being the center of emotions. It’s convenient, it’s clear, and it’s emotive but we know that it’s a metaphor and the head is the real source of emotions and don’t hesitate to say so if it’s unclear.
If compatabilists are really using it as a convenient phrase or metaphor then why the refusal to pierce the veil and call it a only a metaphor or a useful phrase?
It’s only a metaphor or a useful phrase.
Happy now?
So tell me, do you say things like: “Would you like an ice cream, you can choose the flavour?”?
There is a 4th reason. For many compatibilists, like myself, one of the critical criterion for free will is “the agent makes decisions.” While this is a natural criterion, an incompatiblist might raise “nothing can make decisions in a deterministic universe” This is outright false. We have good formal/mathematical/computational definitions of decision making processes that are contrasted with processes that are *not* decision making processes and determinism in no way violates it. See, for example, algorithms that solve MDPs versus algorithms that work with Markov chains.
An incompatiblist might then raise, “is this decision making distinction useful?” The answer is absolutely. For example, game theory is game theory because it involves agents that make decisions. Remove the fact that the agents are decision making agents and all the interesting and challenging properties of game theory go away. Therefore, it’s greatly in your interest to identify whether a system is a decision making agent or not, because having that knowledge affects how you should make decisions.
And a 5th one: people think of the sort of “free will they want” is the one which can be morally responsible. *That’s* what’s held to be “compatible” or “incompatible”, really, *not* free will proper. And why Paul Russell’s class at UBC, in part, was under the “Moral Philosophy” title.
I think a comparison of compatibilists to pantheists is more accurate than comparing them to creationists. They reject the most common notion of free will (the libertarian one), just as pantheists reject the most common notion of god (the personal one). They attempt to salvage the concept though because the emotion we attach to free will is real just as the emotion of experiencing god is real.
“one of the motivations—perhaps the main motivation—for creationists to keep attacking evolution is that they think the theory has inimical effects on morality”. I think this is a generous interpretation of their denial of evolution. The religious types who seem genuinely caring (and I’m assuming that by “morality” we mean concern for what’s best for folk) tend towards the less fundamentalist positions.
I tend to think such indefensible positions as creationism are held due to some kind of pig-headed tribalism, laced with holier-than-thou sanctimony.
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Den 24. mars 2015 kl. 19:58 skrev “Why Evolution Is True” <comment-reply@wordpress.com>:
whyevolutionistrue posted: “I’m rereading Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality for purposes that will become clear later. I do like the book, but oy!, does it take naturalism to an extreme. Alex wears the label of “scientism” proudly, and in many ways I agree with him, th”
This is off-assignment but this posting has freed/willed me to ask about the root canal.
I had one once, obviously long ago, when dentistry was more primitive but I have no recollection of acrid smoke pouring out of my mouth and the latex used seemed to be much more easily removed.
My experience may have been unusual but I don’t remember it as gruesome, etc (as I’d heard). Maybe this was trumped/damped/blotted out by the cost!
So, I wish you’d said a few more things about what these days we call the procedure.
“It’s just not the type of free will that most people think we have.”
I really don’t get why it matters. Most of the creationists who deny evolution (and many people who support it) don’t have a proper (or even coherent) understanding of what evolution is. That’s why it’s important to have biologists and philosophers of science try to get rid of the conceptual confusions and misapprehensions that exist on the topic.
The problem if you go full incompatibilism is that it suspiciously sounds like epiphenomenalism. Our thoughts and deliberations do matter – is it such a problem that a brain is *how* it’s done? At the end of the day, we still have the ability to act upon an understanding of the situation.
The problem if you go full incompatibilism is that it suspiciously sounds like epiphenomenalism.
That would be the “stuck on a rollercoaster” model of human sentience: you see and feel everything, but all along you’re just sitting back and only believing you control the way the mind steers.
I can see how that suggests itself, but I think it’s still too dualist to match the incompatibilism of, say, determinism. At the end of the day, “you” are still being treated as a ghost in the machine in epiphenomenalism. It’s just that instead of a limitless free will soul being whatever, the ghost that you are is in a straightjacket strapped to a robot.
I think incompatibilism sounds more like monism. You’re not some hostage to the robot; you are the robot. Your actions are yours all right; it’s just that “you” are not a ghost, but a machine so complex and astonishing that it seems like you are a ghost from a completely different world.
It might not seem like much of a difference, but I think it makes a huge difference. If a machine can be so amazingly complex and fluid as to seem like a ghost, what else can the world pull off?
“+1,” as the kids say these days.
“You” are not a ghost in the machine. You are the machine.
b&
That’s the contention – we have an intuitively dualistic view of self, and it’s hard to disavow our descriptions of problems from that view. When we aren’t ghosts in the machine, but the machine itself, don’t we then embody the functions of the machinery? That is, if brains area way of taking in information and processing decisions and actions, how do we then say freedom is an illusion without resorting to a Cartesian notion of self?
Both the compatibilists and incompatibilists are monists, recognising that there is no ghost in the machine. Yet our inherently dualistic language makes it incredibly difficult to tease out notions like free will from dualistic notions of self. It seems much of the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists is at what level of description a notion like freedom can be meaningful.
That’s the contention – we have an intuitively dualistic view of self, and it’s hard to disavow our descriptions of problems from that view.
Exactly, which makes it all the more crucial that we make the distinction clear, unambiguous, and without any kind of wiggle room or back door for libertarian assumptions to sneak in.
That is, if brains area way of taking in information and processing decisions and actions, how do we then say freedom is an illusion without resorting to a Cartesian notion of self?
Well, it can be done. Incompatibilist determinism can sound a lot like epiphenomenalism, which is basically the ghost in the machine while the ghost is tied to the machine with a straightjacket, but it isn’t exclusively epiphenomenalist, and it still contrasts sharply with libertarian free will, which requires Cartesian dualism.
Incompatibilist determinism is perfectly compatible with monism: you are the machine, accepting inputs both internal and external, and responding according to highly complex algorithms and goal states to pick how to behave. But fundamentally, the difference between you and a pocket calculator is simply design specs, not the existence of a soul.
It seems much of the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists is at what level of description a notion like freedom can be meaningful.
I don’t think there’s anything sinisterly dualist in everyday words like choice and agent. The problem is a widespread resistance to the idea that we are essentially glorified meat computers. The point is to say “That’s what the science shows, we’ve been wrong to proceed with this assumption, get used to it.”
“Compatibilists”, insofar as they agree that we are determined, are really incompatibilists. But then they say “Ah, free will can also mean something else, so in a sense, determinism and free will can coexist”.
Yes, you can certainly give a word another meaning in principle. But to me, they seem to be just as squeamish as Descartes was about going up to people and trying to knock down free will. And when, among their arguments, they descend to ridicule that is itself ridiculous – presenting incompatibilists in the same way sophisticated theologians present boorish atheists – I think they’re either muddled or muddling.
“Exactly, which makes it all the more crucial that we make the distinction clear, unambiguous, and without any kind of wiggle room or back door for libertarian assumptions to sneak in.”
But a compatibilist is arguing against libertarianism. Whether one disagrees with compatibilism, it could hardly said to be giving any sort of notion of libertarianism; indeed there’s explanation of precisely how compatibilism makes sense of the notion of “freedom” and it’s articulated precisely in monistic terms.
“and it still contrasts sharply with libertarian free will, which requires Cartesian dualism.”
There are libertarian monists, though I haven’t heard a good case for how that could work. Perhaps something to do with strong emergentism?
“I don’t think there’s anything sinisterly dualist in everyday words like choice and agent.”
I think the dualism comes with words like “my brain” and “illusion of” – that we can distinguish a notion of self and mind from the physical agency we have.
“The problem is a widespread resistance to the idea that we are essentially glorified meat computers.”
There is a danger in trying to extend the computer analogy too much – we aren’t literally computers, but that widespread resistance shouldn’t make us sloppy. Those meat computers still have to account for our mental lives, and it’s difficult to try to understand what that means precisely when we as yet don’t understand consciousness.
“Yes, you can certainly give a word another meaning in principle.”
That’s the issue though. It’s really not giving the word another meaning, but taking aspects of a fuzzy concept and showing how they fit with a monist notion of personhood.
“And when, among their arguments, they descend to ridicule that is itself ridiculous – presenting incompatibilists in the same way sophisticated theologians present boorish atheists”
Interesting, though, that this discussion started with comparing compatibilists to pseudoscientists of the worst kind… 😉
But a compatibilist is arguing against libertarianism
And therefore is really an incompatibilist, because in this debate, that’s what is under question. If your claim, that free will and determinism are compatible, starts with saying “now, define free will as the ability to make choices without being coerced”, you’re switching to another debate entirely.
There are libertarian monists
Really? Are they idealists, or closet dualists?
I think the dualism comes with words like “my brain” and “illusion of” – that we can distinguish a notion of self and mind from the physical agency we have.
Well, I don’t deny there could be more clarity and precision in the language. Separating “me” and “my brain” does come across as dualist. Then again, I might be persuaded it’s just a language fossil, akin to how people talk about “head” and “heart” without really believing the thoracic pumping organ makes them feel emotions.
There is a danger in trying to extend the computer analogy too much
Ah, now that sounds to me a bit like closet libertarianism: we’re not merely meat calculators, but free will makes us something more…
OK, to be fair, if by computer analogy, you mean “we’re not made of silicon circuits, and we don’t process in linear circuits but in parallel circuitry”, then that’s one thing. We’re not in the same class as commercial PCs or laptops. But I can agree that the plane analogy applied to birds doesn’t mean that birds have to have jet engines or stewards inside them offering refreshment.
The point is that brains are, technically, computers, not merely “like” them or “analogous” to them. They work on the same broad principles and function for the same reasons: information crunching and autonomous piloting of the body. Likewise, both birds and airplanes are aerodynamic machines designed on broadly the same principles to attain lift and powered flight. The fact that one is made of flesh and blood, while the other titanium and electric copper wiring, is a distraction.
– we aren’t literally computers, but that widespread resistance shouldn’t make us sloppy. Those meat computers still have to account for our mental lives, and it’s difficult to try to understand what that means precisely when we as yet don’t understand consciousness.
All that says is that mind sciences are still in their relative infancy as a scientific field. Any other conclusion must be dualist, even an epiphenomenalist one.
That’s the issue though. It’s really not giving the word another meaning, but taking aspects of a fuzzy concept and showing how they fit with a monist notion of personhood.
Compatibilists seem to be under the impression that they’re the only ones interested in how human minds work. At least, you seem to be implying as such. I think that’s wildly mistaken.
I’m not saying stuff like legal definitions of free will and how decision-making works aren’t interesting. But to use an analogy, you can be interested in how neurons modulate and fire their impulses AND decry people who think it happens because of “nervous energy” or “ectoplasm”. We’re both interested in explaining how decision-making works. “Compatibilists”, however, seem to think we’re not interested.
In the context of the free will debate, though, it IS giving the word another meaning. We’re not discussing “free will vs coercion”, but “free will vs determinism”.
Interesting, though, that this discussion started with comparing compatibilists to pseudoscientists of the worst kind… 😉
If creationists defend creationism by invoking an argument from consequences, and Dennett – a noted compatibilist – defends “compatibilism” by invoking an argument from consequences, what else is one going to conclude?
I get that there are two debates, and I get that one side thinks it’s OK to use free will in a legal sense to mean uncoerced. That’s semantics. But it really does comes across as a Motte and Bailey tactic when “compatibilists” – who, when pressed, explicitly identify their determinist credentials – suddenly start talking about incompatibilists as if they can’t tell the difference between the two debates, or as if there’s a lot more going on than mere semantics.
“And therefore is really an incompatibilist, because in this debate, that’s what is under question.”
This is *exactly* the problem. Whenever compatibilists try to have a debate with incompatibilists, the incompatibilists *always* respond by trying to have a debate against dualism!
We *agree* with you on rejecting dualism!
So, can we put dualism to one side, as refuted, and now have a debate about determinism?
“And therefore is really an incompatibilist, because in this debate, that’s what is under question.”
I thought this debate was about the merits of compatibilism, not whether it’s either libertarianism or incompatibilism. You are putting forth a false dichotomy.
“Really? Are they idealists, or closet dualists?”
Neither. “Strong emergentist” might be the best way to describe it, but mostly the arguments are around the abilities individuals possess.
“Ah, now that sounds to me a bit like closet libertarianism: we’re not merely meat calculators, but free will makes us something more…”
It’s not. It’s rather downplaying the overreach of the analogy between brains and computers. Not just in what they are made of, but in how they work. Certainly some points of the brain seem computational in nature, but it’s a further (and contentious) step to declare that therefore the brain is a computer.
“Any other conclusion must be dualist, even an epiphenomenalist one.”
Must be?
“Compatibilists seem to be under the impression that they’re the only ones interested in how human minds work. At least, you seem to be implying as such.”
That’s not what’s being implied at all. Indeed, the point I was making was about our use of language of personhood, not about function of mind. This isn’t a legal definition of personhood either, but a language to make sense of our actions.
“In the context of the free will debate, though, it IS giving the word another meaning. We’re not discussing “free will vs coercion”, but “free will vs determinism”.”
If it’s free will vs coercion, then determinism wouldn’t matter and the distinctions compatibilists are making wouldn’t matter. If it’s free will vs determinism then you are by definition defining free will as being libertarian – something compatibilists are not doing. Compatibilism is seeking to understand whether freedom makes sense in a deterministic universe, and that’s what compatibilist arguments advance. If it’s simply “free will vs determinism” then we should point out it has nothing to do with compatibilism. Compatibilism is looking at a deterministic concept of free will, so it’s again a false dichotomy.
“and Dennett – a noted compatibilist – defends “compatibilism” by invoking an argument from consequences, what else is one going to conclude?”
You are mistaking the importance of the concept for the merits of the concept. Dennett’s written at least two books on compatibilism where he argues precisely what compatibilism entails. Feel free to disagree with the arguments, but pretending it’s simply an argument from consequences is an egregious misrepresentation of the debate.
Okay, we can stop there.
Brains are Turing-equivalent devices (with, of course, limited memory). Period, full stop, end of story.
Anything that a brain can do can be done by a computer with enough memory and the right programming (both of which are, technologically, a looooooooong way beyond our current reach). The reverse is also true…though our memories are woefully limited unless we supplement them, and we’re very slow at processing operations at that level of abstraction.
Either you accept that, or you are a supernaturalist or spiritualist of one stripe or another.
There is absolutely no room for debate in this; the physics is as settled as the question of the direction in which the Sun will rise tomorrow morning.
If you like, I’d be happy to help walk you through the physics of why we know this to be true…but we absolutely, unquestionably, without doubt know this to be true. (With, of course, the ever-present caveat about all bets being off if any of the infinite number of possible insane conspiracy theories, like brains in vats or the Matrix, turn out to be true after all.)
b&
Go ahead, Ben. I’m all for the possibility it’s the case, but it’s hard to see how we can take the analogy too far given the brain functions differently to any computer we have (it’s analogue, physical structures matter, lots of parallel processes, can’t run a brain on a brain, etc.) so I’m all for a demonstration of why the brain literally is a computer.
I’ll take the easy shortcut route.
Read up on the Church-Turing Thesis. In brief, it states that anything that can be computed can be computed by a Turing Machine. One might throw all sorts of attempted “gotchas!” at it, but it holds. For example, you might have a random number generator embedded in a computer’s CPU…but, logically, that’s just yet another input to the program — and, if nothing else, the program could iterate over every possible random value the generator can generate. Yes, that’s inefficient…but Church-Turing isn’t about efficiency but logical equivalence.
Church-Turing remains a thesis rather than a theorem…but, as Sean Carroll has so well put it and as I’m so fond of repeating, the laws underlying everyday physics are completely understood.
And that physics is perfectly computable.
As a worst-case, horribly inefficient scenario (and one, it must be noted, unimaginably beyond our current technology), you could create a physics simulation down to whatever scale might be necessary — certainly not beyond chemistry in the case of humans, but, if you object to that, you can take it all the way to Many-Worlds Quantum Mechanics if you really think you need to — and include an human brain in your physics simulation. Said brain will, logically, be indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood brain.
Now, there’re almost certainly more efficient ways to go about it. You probably don’t need to go past neurons and synapses, and you probably don’t need overly refined models of either. And you might even be able to get away with higher-level approximations of entire brain systems…
…but all that’s just a question of performance optimization.
The point is, you’ve still got two systems, one flesh-and-blood, the other a computer…and they’re both doing the exact same thing.
Cheers,
b&
(it’s analogue, physical structures matter, lots of parallel processes, can’t run a brain on a brain, etc.)
None of those are essential to classifying anything as a computer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
“A computer is a general-purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. Since a sequence of operations can be readily changed, the computer can solve more than one kind of problem.”
In fact, wetware computers already exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_computer
“A wetware computer is an organic computer (also known as an artificial organic brain or a neurocomputer) built from living neurons.”
And guess what neurons, which make up the nervous system, do?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron
“A neuron (/ˈnjʊərɒn/ nyewr-on or /ˈnʊərɒn/ newr-on; also known as a neurone or nerve cell) is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals. These signals between neurons occur via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons can connect to each other to form neural networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord–which together comprise the central nervous system (CNS)–and the ganglia of the peripheral nervous system (PNS) .”
Heck, we’ve even gotten to the point of making artificial neural networks of our own:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
“In machine learning and cognitive science, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a family of statistical learning algorithms inspired by biological neural networks (the central nervous systems of animals, in particular the brain) and are used to estimate or approximate functions that can depend on a large number of inputs and are generally unknown. Artificial neural networks are generally presented as systems of interconnected “neurons” which can compute values from inputs, and are capable of machine learning as well as pattern recognition thanks to their adaptive nature.”
Therefore, since the core components of the brain (neurons) are transmitting information and, in networks, carrying out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically due to how they’re connected up, it’s hard to see how one could deny that brains are computers.
Yes, this has been discussed on this site many times, so what surprises is the summary of the supposed compatibilist position. I cannot speak for everybody of course (the generalisation is another issue), but here is what I would believe to be a more accurate summary:
(1) I plainy disagree about the definition of free will, and especially with the belief that the compatibilist position is a recent invention. It has been in the discussion for thousands of years because people have assumed determinism for thousands of years, starting with the insight that determinism would be a logical consequence of an omniscient god (if one believes in such stuff).
(2) The incompatibilist view only makes sense because it assumes religious mind-body dualism, considering “us” to be little homunculi sitting in our heads, with the only difference to standard religious dualism being that the incompatibilists’ homunculus is a passively watching captive as opposed to pushing the body’s buttons. But in reality, there is no dualism, we are not such consciousness-homunculi, we are our bodies, and so when our bodies/genes/brain chemistry make a choice, we make a choice. I consequently consider the incompatibilist position to be based on a wrong model of the world.
(3) It is also inconsistent with how we usually talk and think about things. Claiming that ‘we’ don’t make decisions or don’t have freedom to chose between different options because laws of physics is no different from claiming that ‘we’ don’t walk or digest or sleep because laws of physics. Claiming that ‘could have decided differently’ is meaningless because at any given moment I could only ever have made one decision is no different from claiming that researching climate models is meaningless because at every given moment the climate could only have been the way it was. Because laws of nature! But every event could only ever happen once, and what we generally mean with ‘could have happened differently’ is ‘if conditions had been slightly different’, and in the case of free will that is ‘if I had wanted something different’. And we talk and think like that not because we ever assume that we can rewind the tape and things then go differently but because we want to understand the rules and influence the future.
I utterly fail to see how pointing these things out makes me like a creationist.
Thanks, Alex. Your point about what we can coherently mean by ‘could have done/happened differently’ is of course one that Dennett spends quite some time explaining in Freedom Evolves—and one that I have brought up in discussions here again and again. I have yet to see Jerry acknowledge that that concept even exists in compatibilist thought, much less criticise it in any serious fashion.
Yes, Peter (and Alex), this is what drives me nuts in trying to discuss this with the incompatibilists on this site. They just don’t seem to get…or least care about…the incoherence problem.
The compatibilist asks “Ok, given determinism, what can words and concept like our “having a choice” or “could have done otherwise” or “should do otherwise” actually refer to? Do we take the stance that given determinism such concepts can only be illusion – untruths? If we take THAT stance then there is a cascading problem of incoherence that eats through everything from everyday language to the very methods of scientific inference (which depends upon
acknowledging TRUTH value to alternative/contra-causal/if-then concepts).
I have yet to see any incompatibilist propse a cogent, viable method of using those terms
while rejecting their truth value, or showing how they would be replaced.
The compatibilist goes further, starts working it out and notices that concepts like “having a choice” and ‘could have done otherwise” and “should do X vs Y” can have truth values – not be “illusory” if you simply acknowledge the mode of logic involved: if/then thinking. IF you had done A Then B WOULD HAVE occurred is a true statement about the nature of some reality to which it refers (e.g. IF I had placed the water in the freezer, it would have turned solid).
We notice that this conceptual framework doesn’t contradict determinism in the slightest. Yes, I was determined to have left the water on the counter. But it is nonetheless TRUE to say IF I’d placed it in the freezer, it would have frozen solid.
Even further: we notice that it’s actually a NECESSARY way of thinking about and understanding TRUTHS about reality. You can not understand reality UNLESS you adopt abstractions like somethings “identity” or “nature” which we abstract, essentially piling into that thing series of observations
of it in various situations over time, to understand “what it is like” and “what it can do.”
And, just as important: we go on to ask “but does the conceptual framework we are talking about actually reflect how people think?”
It turns out: YES, it does! But of course it does…in a determined universe, this thinking would be NECESSARY to even understand the way things work, so it’s hardly a surprise that this is the mode of thinking we often naturally find ourselves in. We think in “If/Then scenarios: IF I don’t go to the store tonight, I won’t have milk tomorrow. We naturally “jiggle” reality, even if it’s merely implicit “I could have lifted that weight (IF I’d wanted to…).” If someone says we could not have lifted the weight, our first impulse is to walk over and lift it “see, you are wrong!” because we are thinking in general claims about our nature, our powers, over time NOT
about ourselves only considered frozen in an instant.
One is never going to understand this train of compatibilist reasoning by searching instead for alternate “motivations” (which are rarely if ever accurate IMO). The compatibilist has arrived at the position in just the way the incompatibilist believes he has arrived at his.
The issue on the free will debate, as we have pointed out again and again, is that the concept of “free will” is simply much richer and more complex than the incompatibiist seems to want to acknowledge.
“No, Free Will ONLY concerns whether you think there is dualism at the moment of a choice! This is like the Theists insisting that morality ONLY concerns whether an Abrahamic God has given a command to us, and refusing to acknowledge that there is a wider array of concerns tied to the concept of “morality” that are actually preserved when you acknowledge this and think about it.
Every time incompatibilists say things like “You couldn’t have chosen otherwise” “It SEEMED to you like you had a choice, but it was an ILLUSION” etc, it obfuscates this terrain, throwing babies out with the bathwater. Such expressions assume that when people ponder having a choice that
“spooky dualism” is sufficient to capture the assumptions inherent in their thinking, when there is a much WIDER phenomenon involved, like the modes of thinking I’ve spoken of above, which remain valid in a deterministic universe, and which compatibilists acknowledge is captured in our language and way of thinking.
Yes, agreed. To move the conversation on, I invite the incompatibilists to:
1) State what language and concepts they want to use about human social interactions and about what the rest of us call making “choices”.
I would really appreciate seeing an incompatibilist discuss that (not what concepts they don’t want to use, but what concepts they do want to use).
My thesis is that, if they tried it, they’d find themselves sounding exactly like compatibilists and thus becoming de facto compatibilists.
2) If incompatibilists think that society needs radical changes as a result, say to the justice system, please spell that out explicitly.
Not in vague “this would need to change” terms, but an explicit account of what they’d replace it with.
1) State what language and concepts they want to use about human social interactions and about what the rest of us call making “choices”.
We’re not language police. I’m perfectly capable of describing a kid who picks chocolate flavoured ice cream.
2) If incompatibilists think that society needs radical changes as a result, say to the justice system, please spell that out explicitly.
Here are two, one for justice system, one for human psychology:
No “retribution” justification to the justice system. No “punitive” justification to the justice system. The deterrence justification, with all logical underpinnings explicit, is as close as one can get. And lastly, a model closer to the one we apply towards medicine: prevention, alleviation, cure, quarantine, after treatment, and so on.
Open and widespread acknowledgement of the computational theory of human mind and a reappraisal of the logic behind human relationships that are taken for granted. The revenge impulse is one, but other impulses are on the table. Dispelling the myth of pure evil and replacing it with a conception of criminal or otherwise harmful humans in at least a similar way to how we perceive, say, dangerous wild animals as “unable to help it”.
“We’re not language police.”
But you are! Because you totally object to people who use the term “free will” about deterministic systems. You accuse us of “redefining” the term and of “bait and switch”.
When people gave up the idea of vitalism, should they have abandoned the word “living”, or instead just interpret it in a materialist way?
“No “punitive” justification to the justice system. The deterrence justification, …”
OK, but this is all vague, and often amounts merely to changing the commentary. Instead of locking someone up for “punitive” reasons you lock them up for “deterrence” reasons.
And yet deterrence is already a large part of it. So your changes might amount only to fairly minor changes to commentary.
Now, if you want any *radical* difference to what actually happens (not just commentary), then please explain it.
Take Paul, who robbed a bank and shot a policeman, and is now in jail for 30 years for deterrence & retribution.
You come along and say, yes, Paul should be in jail for 30 years, but just for deterrence, not for retribution.
That is a minor change in *commentary*, not an actual major change in the justice system.
If you want an actual major change, tell us about it.
OK, but this is all vague, and often amounts merely to changing the commentary. Instead of locking someone up for “punitive” reasons you lock them up for “deterrence” reasons.
And yet deterrence is already a large part of it.
Actually, wrong. Very wrong. To quote from Better Angels, page 650:
“The psychologists Kevin Carlsmith, John Darley, and Paul Robinson devised hypothetical cases designed to tease apart deterrence from just deserts. Just deserts is sensitive to the moral worth of the perpetrator’s motive. For instance, an embezzler who used his ill-gotten gains to support a lavish lifestyle would seem to deserve a harsher punishment than one who redirected them to the company’s underpaid workers in the developing world. Deterrence, in contrast, is sensitive to the incentive structure of the punishment regime. Assuming that malefactors reckon the utility of a misdeed as the probability they will get caught multiplied by the penalty they will incur if they do get caught, then a crime that is hard to detect should get a harsher punishment than one that is easy to detect. For similar reasons, a crime that gets a lot of publicity should be punished more harshly than one that is unpublicized, because the publicized one will leverage the value of the punishment as a general deterrent. When people are asked to mete out sentences to fictitious malefactors in these scenarios, their decisions are affected only by just deserts, not by deterrence. Evil motives draw harsher sentences, but difficult-to-detect or highly publicized infractions do not.”
The irreducible revenge imperative is a product of the peculiarities of our local, parochial environment of our ancestors, while deterrence is the universal principle that informs the sort of strategies living things evolve – but not completely. Retribution also includes motive policing, demonization, and a focus on dictating others’ survival in genetic competition rather than being morally justifiable in modern civilization. Retribution and deterrence are not synonyms and function differently as a result.
But this is less interesting than your focus on deterrence, which is itself a lower priority! I put in the medical model for a reason. I emphasized “punitiveness” not to emphasize “retribution”, but as a separate issue. That’s why I said “deterrence is as close as one can get” – because what I had in mind was an emphasis on rehabilitation, isolation for others’ protection, and fixing social problems so that crime rates are lowered at their source, hence the medical model I also put forwards. It’s similar to the contrast between Japanese and US prison systems as depicted in The Spirit Level.
And before you chip in that this still wouldn’t make much difference, keep in mind that most people view evil as something to punish and a reason to blame the criminal. My emphasis is on pointing out that the criminal is just as much a victim, because they turned out so due to processes beyond their control. Compared to the cultural attitude of “that bastard had it coming”, that’s unorthodox to the point of taboo, but it’s also the logical consequence of taking determinism – heck, physical monism – seriously.
The reason I said deterrence is as close as one could get is because, ideally, the point is not to rebrand retribution, but not to go that way at all.
(1) I plainy disagree about the definition of free will
When Ryle was writing about Descartes’ struggle between “two conflicting motives” in The Concept of Mind in 1949, it was explicitly about the fact that humans differ from clockwork “only in degree rather than kind”, which troubled someone who wanted to believe in a soul that could freely choose. This is a typical example of the debate between free will and determinism, relevant because free will is explicitly steeped in dualistic conceptions about mind vs. matter. I don’t know what definition of free will you and others think you’re using, but I don’t think it’s representative of what the debate is actually about.
(2) The incompatibilist view only makes sense because it assumes religious mind-body dualism
That’s not even wrong. Incompatibilist free will is dualist, not incompatibilist determinism (or indeterminism, come to that), which denies that dualist free will exists in the first place! If your position is that choices are determined by brain activity, then that’s not dualism. Compatibilism is the bizarre position that you can eat your cake and have it, and so far two people on this thread seem to be using it in a way that suggests a radically different definition of free will alone.
(3) It is also inconsistent with how we usually talk and think about things. Claiming that ‘we’ don’t make decisions or don’t have freedom to chose between different options because laws of physics is no different from claiming that ‘we’ don’t walk or digest or sleep because laws of physics.
Not even close. As I’ve said to others already on this thread, you’re confusing the phenomenon – people get up and choose what cereal they want – with the explanation – say, they do it because they have a mysterious faculty called free will – and as a result are equivocating. Sastra’s right: in the free will debate, it’s a deepity.
If you want to discuss whether using a term like free will is OK or not, fine by me. But at least recognize that that’s not the same thing as the debate on free will, incompatibilism, determinism, and all the rest of it. Such muddying of the waters is not accurate at all.
(1) Acknowledging that there might be different ideas of what the debate is actually about is a very good first step! Now perhaps entertain the possibility that your understanding may not totally obviously be the correct one, and that you are perhaps potentially somewhat conflating the debate with libertarians with the debate with compatibilists…
(2) Mere assertion isn’t helping. When our host or Sam Harris for example writes a sentence like “we are the puppets of our brain chemistry” or similar, what does that sentence actually mean? Unless one assumes that the ‘we’ in the sentence is different from brain chemistry, the sentence is gibberish: we are our puppets. For the sentence to have a meaning, any meaning, the writer has to have a dualist model of ‘us’, where we are an entity separate from our brain, whether they realise it or not. Conversely, to realise that our brain/genes/sum of the environmental influences that shape us is what we are is to realise that the above sentence and all its variants summarising the core position of incompatibilism, does not make sense.
(3) Again, we all agree on the explanation. The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is only about whether using a term like free will or choice or decision is okay or not. Check Wikipedia, check previous threads on this website (especially commenters Coel and Vaal), check people like Dennett. That. Is. The. Debate. There is no other disagreement.
Now perhaps entertain the possibility that your understanding may not totally obviously be the correct one, and that you are perhaps potentially somewhat conflating the debate with libertarians with the debate with compatibilists…
Compatibilism IS a position in that libertarian debate. It’s a position that involves redefining free will into something that is no longer at odds with incompatibilist non-free-will and then saying we don’t have free will when someone points a gun at our heads. It is precisely what Ben Goren above says it is: a bait and switch.
(2) Mere assertion isn’t helping. When our host or Sam Harris for example writes a sentence like “we are the puppets of our brain chemistry” or similar, what does that sentence actually mean?
Yes, it seems dualist, (strictly speaking epiphenomalist), but in context you can see that he’s arguing against libertarianism. When you’re arguing against that, you can’t half-ass it. Talk about free will to most people in the street, and I’m confident most of them will assume libertarianism. He’s emphasizing that no, no, no, there is no ultimate sense in which your choices are above or beyond the causal chains of brain chemistry. In a sense, you are a puppet to whatever inputs (internal or external) your brain receives.
But it does not summarize the core position of incompatibilism, deterministic or indeterministic. That core position is:
1. Either there’s a ghost in the machine, or it’s just the machine and whatever physics allows.
2. There’s no ghost in the machine.
(3) Again, we all agree on the explanation.
No we don’t, and that’s the point! Again, go out onto the street and ask most people about free will. Get it clear that redefining free will as “not having a gun pointed at your head” is muddying the waters and making it easier for people to sink back to instinctive ways of thinking, which will involve libertarianism and all the contradictions that involves. Get it clear that the debate is not about patently obvious phenomena, like people making choices, but about the explanation of said phenomena, which involves libertarian free will.
And in reply to your later reply: no, you cannot use a similarity of words like “compatibilism” and “compatible” as an excuse to wave away a strict definition of the word. Compatibilism means “believes free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive and can be reconciled”. My point is that this reconciliation either involves redefining free will and then mocking incompatibilists over their use of words like choice and agent, which is frankly cheap and dishonest, or trying to capture the metaphysical specialness of libertarian free will while also seeming to be full-blooded determinists, which if not explicitly libertarian sure walks and talks and smells like it, and sounds very much like accommodationism.
I’m sorry, but compatibilism is garbled. One minute, you lot are agreeing there’s nothing spooky and you’re obviously on the side of determinist incompatibilists, the next you’re taking potshots at us because we’re too cro-magnon dull-witted to understand the “rich, subtle, and complex” understanding of free will that you have, and apparently are stupid enough to deny that children can’t pick which ice cream they want, or a paralysed when trying to talk about everyday decision-making.
And you puzzle over why I believe I know better than compatibilists what they’re arguing for? Is it any wonder, when you come across as if you were theists who agree with atheists that there’s no bearded man in the sky and then seem to jump back and forth over different definitions of god as and when it suits.
Libertarianism and its contradictions are way too pervasive in society at large, most people would understand what was meant when discussing free will, and it’s more important to root out this kind of dualistic human exceptionalism, unconsciously expressed or not, than to redefine free will and give it yet another way to muddy the waters, switch goalposts, and generally avoid honest debate.
This is going in circles, and of course you are making it very easy for yourself if you assume that the other side is dishonest and doesn’t mean what they plainly say. But even if you assume dishonesty in the argumentation you could at least try to acknowledge when people describe what their stance is: Your summary of incompatiblism (no ghost in the machine) is also the basis for compatibilism, so the difference between the two must be elsewhere. Is that so hard to understand?
You don’t quite get my point with the dualism. That sentence doesn’t just seem dualist for strategic purposes, but it is gibberish, and the incompatiblist position doesn’t make sense, unless dualism is assumed. And if one were to accept that the dualism in that sentence were merely strategic, then incompatibilism couldn’t really claim the moral high ground because compatibilism supposedly only wants to keep the word free will for strategic reasons. Can’t have it both ways…
we all agree on the explanation.
No we don’t, and that’s the point! Again, go out onto the street and ask most people about free will.
I disagree with you about what people believe about free will, but that is besides the point. Even where most of them are supernaturalists (as in the USA), what does that have to do with the question whether compatibilists and incompatiblists agree on something? Random people on the street are irrelevant to that question unless they happen to be the former or the latter, and in that case they would by definition agree on the explanation because they agree on no ghost in the machine.
reasonshark,
Seeing your discussion further up with Coel I am getting really puzzled why you believe that you know better than compatibilists what compatibilists are arguing for…
Consider also that the term compatibilist means that they consider something to be compatible with something else. In that case, that is of course: the term free will is compatible with determinism. The label compatibilist alone thus demonstrates what the debate is about.
» Alex SL:
The label compatibilist alone thus demonstrates what the debate is about.
Or so one would have thought.
I disagree. To an IC, this argument sounds a lot like saying religion and science are compatible because I am a religious scientist. Don’t try to tell me what I think or should think. Don’t you know what the word compatible means? — I don’t think it’s unreasonable to respond to this argument with: if you think science and religion are compatible, you are either misunderstanding what science is or what religion is. In this case, it seems plainly obvious to us ICs that you are either misunderstanding what determinism is or what free will is. That’s why we can’t get past this.
Well said, Alex!
The problem is not so much the reality of the existence of “determanism” vs “free will”, but the necessity of using indeterminate language to describe what we think we’re talking about. Language is analogous and/or metaphorical, not precise ever. Even when two individuals think they are communicating about the meaning(s)of a particular word,it is entirely probable that they are conceptualizing it differently.
Another problem with language to convey sense is, as has been remarked on, meanings of words change drastically over time. A look at any word in the OED would confirm this. For example: “silly” once meant something akin to “crazy”. All our mental processes are largely “subconscious” and then elevated to “consciousness”. Our genetic makeup, the input by our “imprimers” (parents, teachers, friends), our experiences, etc., all go into composing our concept of reality. And, in these regards, we are all very different. The fact that we can “communicate” at all is amazing.
People generally believe in Contra Causal Free Will. They just don’t accept that circumstances not of our choosing would have had to have been different for us to have made a different choice.
What we should be interested in is how much harm this is doing. Someone does a bad thing and we judge them as if they alone could have behaved differently.
“that incompatibilists like myself still try to behave well, and do behave well—is irrelevant.”
What is irrelevant is trying to behave well since one does not have free will and cannot choose how to behave.
What is irrelevant is trying to behave well since one does not have free will and cannot choose how to behave.
Oh look, yet another poster who can’t distinguish phenomenon from explanation. I think you’re the fourth I’ve seen yet in this thread who comes from that camp.
I’ll refer you to my reply to Sean Carroll at #10. I’m certainly not going to repeat myself.
Thankyou for not repeating yourself. You’ve said far more than enough already – none of which is in the least convincing. If I have to choose between agreeing with you or Sean Carroll it’s Sean everytime.
Argument from authority!!!
/@
One can go on and on about, “semantics”, but it’s impossible to have any kind of logical exchange with another person unless they agree upon the meaning of certain words from the start.
I look at one of the dictionary definitions of the word, “free”: it is, “not affected by any outside condition or circumstance”. Have you ever made a choice or decision in your life in which the choosing or deciding was totally unaffected by anything, whether it be genetics, personal preferences, past experiences, instinct, etc.?
To claim that decisions and choices can be made that are NOT affected by any of these things is to claim that there is some “quality”; an “agency” (for lack of a better word); a, “ghost in the machine” that is immune to the influence of reality, an idea which flies in the face of the evolutionary development of the human mind. Our minds evolved the way they did because their structure is a response TO reality; there would be little “survival-value” in making choices and decisions that disregarded one’s circumstances.
I remember hating asparagus when young; now I love it (if it’s fresh-picked). I used to think of yoghurt as “rotten milk”, and wouldn’t touch it; now I eat it every other day. So- if I started out hating these things, out of my “free” will, and now like them, then obviously something (evidence from reality) caused a change in my exercising of that “free” will, which means that it wasn’t really “free” after all.
I don’t know if “Free will” is the right term, but one needs some vocabulary to note that the human mind contains what is sometimes called a “feedback loop” effectively like a camera pointed at it’s reflection in a mirror.
Douglas Hofstadter in “I am A Strange Loop” has especially interesting thoughts on this. Hofstadter argues that the human mind is self-referential in the same way that mathematician Kurt Godel showed is true of complex mathematical systems. The mind can make meta-statements about themselves in the same sense that there exist poems about the writing of poetry, or Seinfeld’s Kramer character wanted to write a coffee table book about coffee tables. (It really should be about coffee table !*books*!.)
Hofstadter argues that it is because of the self-referential nature of the brain, that the sense of self of an “I” emerges (rather than from some Cartesian dualistic “soul”).
This at at least gives the human self some kind of “will” (free or not) in a sense that a basic computer does not have one.
I have not read Dennett extensively on the subject, but if this is what he means by non-dualistic free will (and I’m not sure if it is or not), I think I agree.
There is a sense that what the neurons in my head are doing IS me (though I may not be entirely conscious of it), in a way that a gun to my head is not, and it is why moral responsibility is a meaningful idea.
Thanks for that summary of Hofstadter’s book. I just ordered it.
I’ve come to the exact same conclusion, myself, and I don’t believe that I was aware that Hofstadter had made the same point until you just brought it to my attention. I don’t think I’ve encountered it from anybody else before in any form…and, indeed, I’ve been frustrated with (for example) Sam Harris for coming this ==><== close to it and still missing it by a mile.
b&
Jerry,
As a practicing scientist, I like most of your stuff. However, the free-will denial is just wrong and in my opinion is sophistry. Big brains were selected in our lineage to do what? Think. Thinking is a real thing. You believe that my thoughts have a predetermined outcome because of PHYSICS. You will never be able to prove that. Ever. Therefore it is not a scientific theory. In any case, you cannot even predict in principle when a particular atom of U-236 will decay. You can give a probability distribution. That’s not even close to good enough to support your theory.
I’m sorry, but I disagreee, and think that you’re wrong. Do you believe in libertarian free will? If so, where does it come from–do you have an immaterial soul, or something that is able to override the physical workings of your brain? If not, what makes you think that you can make conscious choices different from the ones you made. And there is evidence for a lack of conscious choice, including first principles (laws of physics), and experiments showing that brain scans can predict not only the times of simple decisions, but what decisions will be made—BEFORE they are made. Other experiments show that we can manipulate peoples’ sense of choice, either making them think they have choice when they don’t (moving cursors on computers) or vice versa (ouija boards). Do you realize that big brains could evolve for the same reason big computers did–to process more complicated data and programs? As for quantum mechanics, I’ve discussed that at length, so it appears you haven’t read my posts. I’d be very curious to see what nonmaterial forces you think can give us free choice, because material forces can’t.
Finally, please adopt a bit more civility. What I have written is not “sophistry”, a term whose meaning you don’t seem to understand (look it up).
» Jerry:
Finally, please adopt a bit more civility. What I have written is not “sophistry”, a term whose meaning you don’t seem to understand (look it up).
Well, let’s see: Merriam-Webster says ‘sophistry’ means “the use of reasoning or arguments that sound correct but are actually false”. That seems to be what Robert is getting at. You, on the other hand, seem to suspect that what he is saying has another connotation—“in order to deceive people”, as other dictionaries in fact sometimes add.
Compare this with a word you yourself used about other people, some of them involved in this present debate: ‘trick’, which Merriam-Webster says means “an action that is meant to deceive someone”. It would appear, then, that you happily used a word whose core connotation is deception about some of us here and then complain that someone would use a word about yourself that only tangentially connotes deception. That would be quite the double standard—and very unfortunate, since first and foremost you set the rules of this place by example.
Jerry, thank you for the chance to debate. I posted a response because you said free will compatibilists like me are like creationists; surely those are provocative words begging a response! By the way, I meant the first definition of sophistry posted by Peter Beattie.
I am an atheist. I am not appealing to anything supernatural. I am saying that human thought and reflection are real despite being entirely physical in explanation. I cannot understand why you claim that strictly material forces preclude free choice. Why can’t there be emergent properties from such a complex system as the human brain? It is you who sounds more like a creationist citing the Second Law of Thermodynamics for why evolution is impossible.
Of course human thought is often flawed and easily fooled or manipulated. Subconscious parts of the brain (e.g. instincts) may affect results. At times, some people may be incapable of reflection and therefore may not have free will. For that reason we have the insanity and mentally incompetent defenses in law. I may over-estimate the degree of my rationality and my reflection on choices, but that does not mean that free will does not exist at all. You are using the either/or fallacy when the more likely answer is that degrees of free will exist. At its best, human rational thought is arguably the greatest natural phenomena in the known universe.
To recap, 1) you have a baseless faith that true thought cannot emerge from purely physical phenomena, 2) you generalize from some interesting failures and/or over-estimates of human rational thought to a faulty conclusion that rational thought does not exist at all.
I didn’t say “free will compatibilists like you” are like creationists UNLESS you are one of those who think that we need to tell people they have free will because otherwise they will begin acting badly. (Dennett is one of those.) If you think that, and give that as a motivation for compatibilist philosophy, then yes, you are like creationists in that respect. I did not say that such people are like creationists in every respect.
As for those “emergent properties” that arise from physical processes, well, they must be physical too; they are not “spooky” and they cannot be affected by anything non-physical. “Free” choice means that somehow we can make choices free of physical constraints, i.e. we could in any situation have done otherwise. That is what most people think of as free will, and most people are libertarians in that respect (see Sarkissian et al.’s survey).
My definition of free will is the same as Anthony Cashmore’s: “a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.” And because I don’t think there’s anything more to behavior than those consequences of physical law, then I don’t think there is free will. You’re simply muddling things up with the spooky notion of “emergent properties.” Such properties are completely consonant with the laws of physics. Water is wet, freezes at 32 degrees F, and both of those are “emergent properties” of a collection of water molecules, but they are completely consistent with physics and could be predicted. Nothing spooky there, as with all “emergent properties.” If you think about it, you’ll see that no emergent properties of a bunch of wet neurons in our head could constitute anything like free choice, for they still obey the laws of physics. And of course quantum indeterminacy, IF it plays a role in “choice,” can’t justify free will, because we can’t affect the quantum behavior of particles.
But if you think emergent properties of a deterministic system somehow can produce any kind of libertarian free will, take it up with philosophers like Dennett.
Jerry, OK the flaw in your argument is at the end of your post. You admit that you are unsure if quantum indeterminacy is an issue. But if it is, and I think that highly likely, then the universe is not deterministic. That was your major argument in the first place for why we can’t choose differently than we do. You then tried to dismiss this issue as not being a justification for free will. That is a red herring. I don’t need another justification if your argument is false, which it likely is.
My definition of free will is the ability to reflect on the behavioral choices and then being able to consciously choose. I claim that we have that ability, even if we don’t always exercise it. We are neither a ghost in a machine nor simply a deterministic robot. We are thinking machines. For the record, I accept that the universe is strictly physical, I don’t accept that it is fully deterministic, and I do accept that there are degrees of free will.
I’m pretty sure quantum mechanics is deterministic. What you are saying is that the universe is not clockwork predictable…that’s a completely different thing and determinists already recognize that.
Even if it’s not deterministic…where’s the will in randomness?
You can’t decide between an hot dog or an hamburger, so you flip a coin. What’s the meaning in that decision?
b&
I used radioactive decay as an example that has a probabilistic distribution, but individual decay events remain fundamentally unpredictable. I believe that Jerry would argue that the physical state of the universe is wholly dependent on the previous state. That is why he does not believe in free will. There is no evidence that radioactive decay depends on the previous state. It is immune to temperature & pressure, for example. Matter is affected by radioactive decay events as well as other quantum probabilistic events. Therefore, the universe is not deterministic and Jerry’s assumption is not correct. If the assumption is not correct, then the conclusion does not follow.
Sorry, but you clearly haven’t read what I wrote. I don’t believe in free will because I am a materialist. I admit that there are nonpredictable quantum phenomena without a definable “cause.” But I also don’t have any idea, nor do you, whether quantum-level unpredictability of this sort affects our behavior. But even if it does it can have nothing to do with free will, because we don’t produce those phenomena. I suggest you read what I’ve written about free will before making this kind of fallacious argument.
Stangely, whether quantum mechanics is deterministic depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which there are several. It is *indeterminate*, which is different from nondeterministic. Someone as prominent as Roger Penrose, whom no one has ever accused of being stupid, has proposed that consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules, which are tiny and important structures in cells, including brain cells.
Whether or not Penrose is right, it’s clear that our understanding of quantum physics is woefully lacking, and I find it hubristic for some to think that we have complete enough understanding of physics to suppose we could, even in principle, model mental processes, including free will.
Call me a skeptic.
I agree with your first point; MWI a is one such model.
But there are various reasons to think that Penrose and his chum are wrong.
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Specifically: brains are much too hot and much too messy for quantum effects to be relevant. If they were, we’d already know this from semiconductor design, which has blown way past the scale of neurons.
Quantum effects are relevant in semiconductors…but not in any way that aids computation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Quantum computing is a fascinating subject with much potential for all sorts of revolution. But it’s not something that can, even in principle, contribute in a positive way to a tangled mass of big, wet, gloppy neurons at a blistering 310 Kelvins.
It also, generally, seems to be inefficient for general-purpose computing and only really shines at certain specific tasks (such as factoring large numbers, or maybe solving the “traveling salesman” problem). The field is young, and perhaps there are ways to leverage its potential nobody’s even thought of…but all signs to date are that it’s about the least efficient way possible to do most of what we use computers for today.
b&
I think our understanding of quantum physics isn’t woefully lacking (just mine is). We have that whole quantum field theory thingy that seems quite nice, after all.
I think it’s fair to suggest that we have lots of different levels of understanding of physics.
At one level, as the LHC demonstrates, we’ve got the stuff needed for engineering dialed in to more nines than I can count, at least in polite company. That’s more understanding of Quantum Mechanics than Newton could ever even dream of for his own physics that he invented.
At another level, there’s a lot of disagreement and even some confusion about what it “means.” Many worlds? Undetectable pilot waves? Something else? Are we even asking the right questions? Physicists seem to be trending towards the Many Worlds Interpretation, but they’ve yet to achieve consensus amongst themselves.
…and, at a much more exciting level…we already know that the Standard Model is incomplete because it breaks down with quantum gravity and at singularities like the Big Bang and hasn’t yet explained dark matter or (especially) dark energy. This is where the real action is at these days…will the LHC at full energy find supersymmetry or something else beyond the Standard Model? Will somebody at NASA beat them to the punch and solve the dark matter or dark energy riddles?
Don’t touch that dial; stay tuned to find out!
b&
Even at the LHC level there are problems. The Higgs field doesn’t give neutrinos mass. What does?
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Ooooh…I either didn’t know that or it hadn’t registered. One can almost speculate that the answer to neutrino mass could help explain dark matter — that whatever gives neutrinos mass is also responsible for the as-yet-unobserved gravitational effects.
I smell several dissertations in the mean time and at least one Nobel in the offering for whoever figures that one out.
b&
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
— Richard Feynman —
Yeah, but that was a pre-QFT observation! 😝
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I’ll tell you who thinks he understands quantum mechanics — Deepak Chopra. That’s the company you’re in.
We’re still far away from a consensus on the correct interpretation, and quantum mechanics and general relativity haven’t been unified.
I made no assertion about !*my*! knowledge!
But enough to know that, as a quantum physicist, Penrose is a great mathematician…
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But, Shirley, you don’t expect that to remain the case forever? And would not Wan hope that we have a less-miserable understanding of Quantum Mechanics today than when the good Professor Feynman was still in the lecture hall rather than pinin’ for the fjords as he is today?
b&
Oh ok let’s give up then. Must be unknowable.
Maybe not unknowable, but as yet unknown, and we should stop pretending it is.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that we know what we don’t know. At least not any physicist I’ve been exposed to. To suggest that it is arrogant to comprehend what we do know (humans use QFT to make predictions and they use quantum mechanics practically) is tantamount to saying that We don’t know everything there is to know every Word in every language so we can never truly express ourselves and it is arrogant to think that we can.
We have enormous, gaping holes in our understanding of the universe, and it’s not just quantum mechanics. We know very little about complex, self-organizing systems, from things as common place as turbulence to as exotic as abiogenesis. Frankly, I find the attitude I frequently find in these comments, that our current science adequately accounts for something as puzzling as a theory of mind, to be naive at best. I’m a materialist. I think answers to at least some of these things can be found, while others may be out of reach, but skepticism in the face of ignorance and lack of evidence is my position.
Vroomfondel — or was it Majikthise? — put it best. We have rigidly defined areas of uncertainty and doubt, as demanded.
Or, in Rumsfeldian terms, we know what we know and what we don’t know.
The most pressing (and exciting!) things we don’t know right now are dark matter and energy, cosmogenesis, quantum gravity, and what lies beyond the Standard Model.
…but, we also know that the Standard Model is complete up to the energy of the Higgs — and that’s incredibly significant. It means that anything and everything that operates at energy domains less than that of the Higgs has, at its fundamental root, an explanation in the Standard Model with no need to go beyond the Standard Model.
The most obvious example of which is biology and all its big unanswered questions — especially, of course, abiogenesis and consciousness.
In all areas of biology, we can and should be absolutely certain (with however many nines as we do in the Higgs) that nothing transcends the Standard Model. And, indeed, for that matter…chemistry is as deep down the rabbit hole as you need to go and often not even that far.
Just as Newtonian Mechanics is all you’ll ever need to describe the trajectory of a baseball you’ve just thrown — no need in that example to invoke either Einstein or Schrödinger — you’ll never have to resort to anything other than chemistry (if even that) to explain what goes on in the human body, including the human mind.
We know what lies beyond chemistry: atomic theory. And beyond that is Quantum Mechanics. And neither is even remotely applicable at scales as hot and big and messy as what the human body operates at; anything that you might propose that could happen at those scales is going to get overwhelmed long before it reaches the scale of a cell…
…just as Relativistic Mechanics is only barely necessary to explain Mercury’s orbit and entirely irrelevant for Venus’s orbit and not even remotely applicable for your baseball.
Yes, of course — you can run the equations for biology using Quantum Mechanics, just as you can run the equations for your tossed ball with Relativistic Mechanics. But there’s no point; at those scales, the answers agree out to more decimal places than you have appendages to count with. It’s only when you get to much different scales where the answers start to diverge, and the phenomena in question simply don’t apply at those scales.
Now, of course, that’s not to even remotely pretend to claim that we know everything there is to know about chemistry or biology, of course. Lots of surprises lurk there to be discovered, with some we should anticipate and many we won’t know about until we discover them.
But we can and should be overwhelmingly confident that what lies underneath those surprises is plain ol’ Standard Model physics as we already know and love — which also places limits on what we’ll find.
…and those limits include everything ruled out by the Standard Model, which would mean any sort of hypercomputation or the immaterial souls the religious propose or the Platonic idealist mathematics of others in this thread or anything else of the sort. Whatever you propose must reduce ultimately to the Standard Model, which, for brains, means you’re limited to interactions using electromagnetism and nothing else. If you have to invoke something that falls outside of that…then, whatever it is, isn’t real.
Cheers,
b&
What Ben said.
» Ben Goren:
We know what lies beyond chemistry: atomic theory. And beyond that is Quantum Mechanics. And neither is even remotely applicable at scales as hot and big and messy as what the human body operates at…
And yet you, and all the other fundamentalist incompatibilists here, refuse to even engage with Sean Carroll’s point upstream about appropriate levels of analysis.
I think we have been engaging with like-minded people, and I think Coel’s example here really encapsulates the disagreement I have with Sean about this.
Compatibilists, we can empirically observe here, have a pretty diverse array of phenomena that they label with the term, “free will.” Many of these phenomena are real, but many aren’t. It’s also the case that a number of the phenomena are explicitly supernatural and / or dualistic, such as idealized Platonic conceptions of computation.
But the one thing that we incompatibilists keep asking…is whether or not any of those phenomena, real or otherwise, constitute freedom of the will. Not freedom of action, not freedom of choice, not willful determination, not sophisticated decision-making capabilities, not a recursive influential awareness of the decision-making process, not even the subjective perception of any of that.
All we’re asking is, “Is the will itself actually free?”
And, even in a classical Christian dualistic framework, for the will itself to be free is a self-contradictory incoherent proposition — and it’s exactly that incoherence that theologians themselves struggle with. Just as they struggle with the self-contradictory incoherence of omnipotence (how many allegedly-omnipotent gods are incapable of doing so simple as revealing themselves to humanity outside of the backwaters of ancient Rome?) or omniscience (how many had no clue that humanity would go so far astray?) or the rest.
Whatever the phenomenon in question is, if it doesn’t directly pertain to the freedom of the will itself, it’s not free will.
And, no. Of course no such phenomenon actually exists — and that’s the incompatibilist point.
In many ways, the compatibilist position is the search for a phenomenon, any phenomenon, on which to hang the label, “the freedom of the will.” The incompatibilist position is that that’s, fundamentally, a rather silly and ultimately harmful thing to want to do, so we shouldn’t even waste our time engaging in such linguistic exercises.
Yes, we should preserve freedom; that’s what the American Revolution and similar endeavors was all about. Yes, we should empower the will; that’s the main driving force behind cognitive behavior therapy and all the self-help books out there — not to mention the pharmaceutical research into depression and other mental illnesses that interfere with the will. All that and more.
But, really. Why do we have to keep looking for married bachelors just because we all love the institution of marriage as much as we love the wild rebellious freedom of perpetual bachelorhood?
b&
Ben: All we’re asking is, “Is the will itself actually free?”
It would be irrational to expect any will to be free from self. Therefore, everything that constitutes the self, including all of the self’s biological needs, all of the self’s history and experience, all of the self’s beliefs and values, etc. are necessarily presumed to be represented in that will.
Therefore one cannot rationally require a “free will” to be free from the self whose will it is.
Therefore one must discard any proposed definition that suggests that, if a will is to be free it must be free of the self, whose will it is.
And, since this is quite obvious to nearly everyone (except maybe the anti-choice determinists), I doubt that any theologian has ever, or would ever, claim such a freedom.
…and, yet…that’s exactly the theological point of the concept.
It might help to remember that it’s blindingly obvious that all sorts of other theological constructs are equally incoherent. Omnipotence, for example…an omnipotent entity is incapable of abdicating its powers or committing suicide or anything of that nature. For, if it did, it would clearly no longer be omnipotent, which also means that its earlier, allegedly-omnipotent self was also powerless to intervene in those future events, rendering its earlier self less than all powerful. But that means that it lacks the power to reduce its power, so it can’t be all powerful.
And it’s not like this is something extraordinary for us to consider. Indeed, we consider it a good thing when a ruler steps aside and makes way for the next generation…and yet such is impossible for an omnipotent entity to do, if the word is to have any meaning. An omnipotent god is one that will never have the joy of seeing its offspring surpass itself…and one that can never give to anybody a realistic hope of being, even for a moment, top of the heap.
The theologians, at some level, are obviously aware of this because much of theology is obsessed with creative ways to limit the limitless. “Omnipotence” doesn’t really mean all powerful, silly; it just means it can do…well, when you get right down to it, precisely diddly and squat. Not even make an anonymous call to 9-1-1 whenever one of its official agents starts raping yet another kid…
…and, you know why the gods are forbidden from doing that sort of thing?
Because it would interfere with our free will.
Yes, that same free will we’re discussing.
If free will is more powerful than even an omnipotent and omniscient god’s creative abilities can deal with, what makes you think it’s supposed to be self-consistent?
Just to drive the point home…theologians would believe that we all have some sort of idealized Platonic essence to ourselves, embodied by the soul, the will. And that essence has a nature that is either good or evil, with after-death accommodations determined by which it is. And we have the freedom to alter our nature to be one or the other, which is the whole inside-the-delusion point to the religion. (The real point, of course, is for the priests to have as much power and extract as much money from their marks and everybody else as possible.)
So, yeah. You’ve pretty much summed up why it’s incomprehensible, and your only fault is in giving the proponents of free will too much credit for being able to dismiss the incomprehensible.
Cheers,
b&
“…and, yet…that’s exactly the theological point of the concept.”
Nope. No theologian has claimed that one’s will is separate from and therefore free of one’s self. (Gee I hope you don’t find one and make me take that back! It’s much more fun to speak in absolutes when I can get away with it).
“It might help to remember that it’s blindingly obvious that all sorts of other theological constructs are equally incoherent”
Correct. But still no evidence they think the will can be divorced from the self. And this is not really a discussion of your issues with religion is it?
Their fear is the same as yours, that inevitability is an external force causing them to do things beyond their control.
You are both equally wrong.
Inevitability does nothing. Inevitability chooses nothing. It is merely the observation that events flow according to reliable causes and effects.
One of those causes is us, choosing of our own free will to do this or to do that. Our choice is our will at that moment. And our action upon that choice determines what happens next. We choose what gets to be inevitable and what remains mere possibilities.
You’ll have to define what you mean by both “will” and “self” in this context, because they’re typically used interchangeably by others.
I have no such fear, I’m afraid. I’m fully down with the recognition that I’m a meat computer. Indeed, I find it most fascinating…so many people wonder what it would mean for a computer to be conscious, what it would feel like for the computer if it’s even possible; I, on the other hand, realize that this is what it’s like and what it means.
b&
But you have one more choice, Ben. You can choose how you feel. And that’s done partly in how you choose the words that you use to describe yourself.
“Meat computer” demeans the complexity of the human body (“meat”) and mind (“computer”).
And choosing to say that you have no free will, but are only the flotsam tossed about, against your will, by the ocean is also demeaning, not to mention a lie.
Before WWII, computers were people who did complex arithmetic as a profession.
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Ben’s amygdala is in charge of feelings.
And I would guess his amygdala is influenced by hormones released in part due to prior conditioning. Memories and thoughts in general can influence how you feel, therefore they are triggering the physical result. And, since what you say to yourself can be chosen as well as what you say to others, you may find appropriate thoughts to trigger the feelings.
I think Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) is based upon this idea of reviewing what you’ve been saying to yourself and doing some editing.
…and all of that is just some extra bells and whistles and what-not added to the already-complex Rube Goldberg contraption.
If “free will” is “complexity beyond what I can hold in my head,” then that’s yet another bait-and-switch….
b&
Non no, everything comes into the brain via the amygdala. All the fun starts there. Ben cannot feel what he wants to feel. Now, his amygdala could be malformed and he may not fear much or his amygdala could be ginormous and he could suffer from anxiety disorder…but he cannot control these things.
From Wikipedia: “In complex vertebrates, including humans, the amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. Research indicates that, during fear conditioning, sensory stimuli reach the basolateral complexes of the amygdalae, particularly the lateral nuclei, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli.”
The word “conditioning” implies the response is subject to training. The amygdalae do not function to originate emotional events, but manages their storage for later recall.
So if you get bitten by a dog, you’ll be afraid the next time you see a similar dog. You can treat a phobia by slowly extinguishing the response through repeated exposure to nice dogs.
There are also biofeedback machines that can be used to help you relax also.
So you can choose to alter your feelings.
Look up how information enters the brain. You may be interested in reading about how much is edited out before it reaches the visual cortex as well.
“you may find appropriate thoughts to trigger the feelings”
True, you may find them. But only if they’re there. You cannot /will/ them there.
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Ant: “True, you may find them. But only if they’re there. You cannot /will/ them there.”
You can choose to see a therapist who will make new options available to you.
But you can’t /will/ yourself to choose to see a therapist.
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Ant: “But you can’t /will/ yourself to choose to see a therapist.”
Sounds like Zeno’s paradox. Are you suggesting that before someone can choose to see a therapist he must first choose to choose to choose to choose … ?
The self is interacting with its environment. Within the environment are new things to learn about each day. For example, if someone is experiencing depressive thoughts then they may notice meds being advertised on TV and in magazines and choose to ask their doctor about it. Their doctor would recommend a therapist.
I think I am. There are multiple new inputs all the time that can push you one way or another.
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PS. RET changes things significantly as it’s a congeries of new inputs.
Correct.
Tell that to somebody with a mental illness such as clinical depression (which, fortunately, isn’t me). Tell them that they can choose to be depressed or not.
See how well that goes over.
b&
No theologian has claimed that ones will is separate from and therefore free of ones self.
Well, thats obviously not true re ones /physical/ self.
Ah, souls, as the polite eagles didnt say.
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Ant, their “soul” functionally refers to the self. There is no theological claim to a will separate from the soul/self (at least none that I’ve heard of).
Well, that’s alright then. “Soul” isn’t at all dualistic.
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No, soul is definitely dualistic. My point was that the “self” is only in one place (either in the physical body or in the soul). So whether you believe in ghosts or not, there is only one true self. The dualists simply think the soul is not permanently located in the physical body like we do.
Fair enough. (I replied to your comment in email, without the context of your original statement.) But how does your dualistic self will your body to act on its decisions?
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I haven’t a clue. I grew up in the Salvation Army, an offshoot of the Methodists. I don’t recall discussing the issue of free will in church.
It wasn’t until my father committed murder and suicide that I ever questioned my beliefs. Then all of a sudden I had a direct interest in the concept of Hell. I eventually reach the conclusion that a God who would deliberately torture anyone for eternity could not, MUST not exist.
So I ended up spending time in the Richmond Public Library looking through the philosophy section. I suspect it was Spinoza that informed me of the supposed issue between determinism and free will. And then I suspect it was William James’s “Pragmatism” that provided the cure.
Anyway, I’m not familiar with the apologetics that explain the relationship of the soul to the body or any of that stuff. I suppose I left the church too young to be exposed to it.
So to make a long story a little longer, you’ll need to ask a dualist about how that works.
The closest I came was a letter I wrote to Oral Roberts asking what the soul was and whether it was the same as my self. They answered back that I should discuss it with my local minister. But that was my parents! And I figured they wouldn’t know.
Hi Jerry,
I hope you have time for one more comment from me. I have read more of your stuff as you suggested. You have three lines of argument that I can discern. All of them are flawed in my opinion.
The first is a thought experiment (“you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise”) that purports to show that physical determinism of behavior precludes free choice. According to the Health Physics Society website, an average person is experiencing 5,000 radioactive decays per second just from their own radionuclides like potassium-40 in their bodies. This is about 1 tenth of the natural background radiation from things like radon. Therefore, the deterministic interval between unpredictable decays or bombardments is less than one ten thousandth second. I suspect that other quantum interactions, such as photobiology, might randomly affect quantum states on much shorter time scales. We could argue about the latent period between cause and effect on behavior, but of course effects are cumulative and the concept of predetermined output is undermined nonetheless.
The second argument is that neuroscience has shown a disconnect between consciousness of our choices and physiological evidence of choices being made. That is not proof that our brains are always incapable of thoughtfully considering options and making free choices. Our evolved brains are not fully integrated systems. There is a range of consciousness. Some behaviors are clearly subconscious. Others, like writing a book on WEIT, are clearly conscious. You are erroneously trying to force an either/or verdict on the connection of consciousness with behavior.
The third argument is that there is no plausible mechanism to generate free will in a strictly physical world. Here is your 2012 formulation from USA Today: “True “free will,” then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works. Science hasn’t shown any way we can do this because “we” are simply constructs of our brain.”
In your 2013 WEIT post entitled “Two disparate views of free will”, you provided the answer: “The refutation is, of course, that rationality (i.e., the combining of evidence to reach good decisions) is a product of natural selection, which has ordered those “irrational atoms” into neurological programs that not only promote human rationally [sic], but also help us weigh evidence.” Processing and rationally weighing information is getting close to conventional concepts of free will. The missing component from your answer is how we might modify how it works. We do that all the time. Good examples are learning and meditation. Both are reprogramming our own brains to think and behave differently. We are really talking about consciousness, awareness, wakefulness, self-awareness, reflection, comprehension, or whatever you want to call it. Although we do not have a complete theory of consciousness, that certainly is not an argument that consciousness does not exist. Our brains are evolved analog computers that can rationally process, model, and weigh information. Our brains can examine the environment and themselves and their output. They have the ability to recursively reprogram themselves, both consciously and subconsciously. Therefore, the human brain is a perfectly plausible mechanism for free will.
I am not going to argue with you further about this except to point out, in response to what you say, that quantum indeterminacy provides no basis for conscious choice, since you don’t control it in any way. As for the second two points, that’s just the brain acting as an evolved computer. If, like Dennett, you want to call the actions of that computer “free will,” fine, but that’s not the way most people conceive of free will.
This is the end of the discussion.
“You believe that my thoughts have a predetermined outcome because of PHYSICS.”
Now, Robert, where does Jerry say that? Determinism ⇏ predetermination.
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I may be unusual, but I’ve never felt that I had free will.
To put it in perspective…we all often wish we had chosen differently, but how often do we really think that we actually could have, given the circumstances we found ourselves in?
Yes, of course, if you rewound the clock and kept your memories of the consequences of your decision, you may well choose differently…but, at the time, you were bereft of the full knowledge of those consequences. So how could you possibly have done otherwise?
b&
Yes; as I said early in reply to another, at that point, why would you have wanted to choose differently?
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Why? Generally because it’s already too late….
b&
* ealier
(I’m up way too late and catn ytpe.)
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** earlier (see?)
But that was really the point of the book: What does the world look like when you apply an austere naturalism, everything being fixed by physics?
One of the more interesting conclusions for me, given the creationist canard about the second law, was that evolution is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics!
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And some recent maths modeling work lends support to that down to the level of abiogenesis. It seems that life is much more efficient at creating entropy than non-living processes, and therefore that systems with a strong energy source (e.g. stars, tidal heating, etc.) may “naturally” tend to organize living systems.
Yes, I was going to mention that, but didn’t have the wherewithal to find the link.
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Prof Ceiling Cat Wrote:
“I had this thought about compatibilists—those philosophers and intellectuals who agree that while our thoughts and actions are controlled by the laws of physics (and so we can’t really choose differently from how we do), we still have some kind of “free will.” It’s just not the type of free will that most people think we have.”
That one jumped out at me, and I see Sastra and others have already commented. But to add to the pile:
The above quote still doesn’t represent the compatibilist position. The whole point is that in several important respects, we DO have the free will that most people think we have. That is what Dennett means when saying we have the “only type of free will worth wanting.” It’s mostly that alternative *explanations* such as dualism, are wrong explanations.
And as I’ve argued, the logic and assumptions that undergird our daily decision-making is for the most part preserved and explained.
Yes, there are *some* illusions to be dispelled. But, like the theistic illusions dispelled on the subject of morality to get at the REAL grounding of morality – not dispense with it – we can get at the *real* basis for conceptually coherent “freedom” in a deterministic universe.
Ultimately, this consistent misunderstanding seems to me to derive from the position held by the incompatibilist, in which “Free Will” must be restricted to some spooky dualism at the moment of a decision, vs compatibilists who hold that the concept of “free will” is much wider and richer and more complex than that, and that many of the concerns wrapped up into “free will” are preserved or clarified when worked out in a deterministic framework.
Jerry has said compatibilists are like creationists, but it just as assuredly feels the same from this side: from the compatibiilst side it can seem like incompatibilists will only acknowledge an over simplified, spooky dualistic concept as ‘free will” just as some Theists will only acknowledge a narrow supernatural conception of “morality.” NO amount of reasoning, or pointing to alternative evidence, seems to dislodge the incompatibilist’s desire to cling to a supernatural conception of free will, so there must be some other emotional motivation for clinging to it.
Now, if that description of incompatibilists actually rings false to the incompatibilists here…welcome to the club 🙂
The above quote still doesn’t represent the compatibilist position. The whole point is that in several important respects, we DO have the free will that most people think we have.
So we do have a ghost in the machine, then, an undefined and mysterious, possibly irreducible We who gets to Make Choices. That’s what most people would think we have.
We “only acknowledge an over simplified, spooky dualistic concept as ‘free will”” not because of some patronizing, psychoanalytical tosh about an emotional desire to cling to it. We acknowledge it because that is what the debate is about! It runs through our conceptions of free will – that there is something special about human decision making, about us, and that it can’t be answered with referral to the stuff of science, like neuroscience, computing, and mind sciences.
When “compatibilists” mock incompatibilists for not appreciating the subtle complexities of the word free will, suggest we’re paralyzed when trying to use words to describe a child picking ice cream, and suggest the best way to describe reality is using free will – as if the debate were merely about the phenomenon of choosing rather than the explanation for what choosing is – which means not having a gun pointed at your head, they sound EXACTLY like the kind of theist who mocks atheists for believing in the bearded man in the sky, or like the accommodationists who claim religion and science are perfectly compatible. I’m not going to sink to psychoanalyzing why that is the case, but at best I remain suspicious that “compatibilists” are claiming their determinist credentials and not trying to salvage something about libertarianism.
I’m not going to sink to psychoanalyzing why that is the case, but at best I remain suspicious that “compatibilists” are claiming their determinist credentials and not trying to salvage something about libertarianism.
Drat, let me rephrase that:
“I’m not going to sink to psychoanalyzing why that is the case, but at best I remain suspicious that “compatibilists” are claiming their determinist credentials and might also be trying to salvage something about libertarianism.”
“… as if the debate were merely about the phenomenon of choosing rather than the explanation for what choosing is …”
No, we compatibilists *agree* with you on the explanation for what choosing is. We “choose” an ice-cream flavour in exactly the same way that a chess computer “chooses” a move — both are entirely determined by the physical state of the system.
Please can we agree that that is what is happening?
The problem is that, no matter how many times the compatibilists explain their position, the incompatiblists simply refuse to assimilate it, and then suspect us of being closet dualists.
There is no “ghost in the machine”, nothing “mysterious” about “choosing” as a compatiblists understands it.
Really, there isn’t! Heck, we can even build machines that do it — chess-playing computers are an example! What do you regard as “mysterious” about a chess-playing computer and the choices that it makes?
Then put your incompatibilist money where your mouth is. I’ve just responded to your “challenge” elsewhere. I want to see what you make of it.
reasonshark,
“So we do have a ghost in the machine, then, an undefined and mysterious, possibly irreducible We who gets to Make Choices. That’s what most people would think we have.”
Of course not, and you are well aware we agree about that. The problem is that you are so focused on JUST THAT NARROW conception of free will that if anyone speaks of it in a wider sense, you will just refuse to acknowledge we are still talking about “free will.”
Yes, there is a “ghost in the machine” mistake held by many people. But that is only ONE aspect within the whole free will problem (and as I’ve argued before, I see dualism not as being “what free will is” but rather, like supernatural morality, a *mistaken theory* about how human choice operates).
Take a look at the Wikipedia page on Free Will:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
Look how wide-ranging the scope is of concerns and thoughts are on the subject, how little actually you see the “dualism” “ghost in the machine” actually mentioned among the other concerns!
And note that like every major article you can find on the subject of free will, it points out that the very definition – what it even entails – is under dispute. So, I’m sorry, this stance you incompatibilists keep taking that dualistic/libertarian free will IS “free will” is unwarranted. And appealing to what “many people think about free will” isn’t just the incompatibilist purview – MOST free will philosophical positions start with an examination of our common conceptions of choice-making from which to build the viewpoint. It’s not like
incompatibilists are the only ones paying attention to how people think about free will!
Take this line from the Wikipedia article on Free Will:
“The underlying issue is: Do we have some control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent?”
THIS is what I and others have been saying.
“Free Will” does not automatically mean simply “indeterminism” or “dualistic soul power.” Rather, “free will” embodies general SETS OF CONCERNS, like the above.
From the article:
“On one hand, humans have a strong sense of freedom, which leads us to believe that we have free will.[8][9] On the other hand, an intuitive feeling of free will could be mistaken.”
And so we have to examine our experience of “choice making” to see what, if any part, we might be mistaken about, what is illusion, what is true etc.
As I have argued, the experience of choice making is rich and complex. It does not reduce to “thinking I am an indeterministic entity.” At times that sensation, or even illusion, may be there…but it is far from the whole story, especially as it relates to the types of concerns mentioned in the Wikipedia article.
So if I am wanting to choose between driving to work or walking, I can stop and ask “do I REALLY have a choice? Could I REALLY do either action? Or am I MISTAKEN in thinking I could choose either course of action? Or that I “could have” chosen either course of action yesterday?
And, again, as I’ve argued, when you look at the various assumptions in this choice-making, “ghostly bits” play little part. It may be a sensation perhaps, but it’s not a central part of the logic of our reasoning.
We reason from abstractions over time, about the nature of ourselves and our world, and our powers and abilities in doing what we want. The necessarily abstract and “if/then” type reasoning we ACTUALLY USE does not require, or rely on indeterminism, or magic. It’s fully compatible with determinism (and would HAVE to be if this were a deterministic world. If we didn’t have some form of reasoning truthfully about the world – the world being deterministic – we wouldn’t be here. So incoherent magical thinking can not be as central to our experience of choice making and deliberating as some here seem to believe.
Ben,
Re definitions.
First “ghost in the machine” isn’t exactly a
clear or precise definition of free will.
As to compatibilist definitions, the concept has been stated plainly over and over here.
I’ll take this from Wikipedia’s page on free will as defined in compatibilism:
“compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one’s determined motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.”
And, slightly expanded:
“Compatibilists often define an instance of “free will” as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to his own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained.”
I would be very surprised if you do not recognize that this is the position so often expressed by compatibilists here.
We say this, and then it seems the retort comes: “But there’s nothing referencing dualism or ghost in the machine in there, so THAT’S not free will!”
And round and round we go…
Cheerio,
It’s been a while since I read Rosenberg’s book, but iirc, he embraces not only scientism, but also nihilism. He calls it, “nice nihilism”.
To follow Coel’s excellent suggestion, that instead of theorising motivations to compatibilists, why not just ASK a compatibilist why exactly he/she takes up his/her compatibilist position.
Here are the general reasons that I, as a compatibilist, hold my particular compatibilist view:
1) I find the arguments that incompatibilists put forward are extremely unconvincing and weak. In particular I find the incompatibilist stance exceptionally simplistic and extraordinarily reductionist. By their incompatibilist sort of thinking, any emergent properties as complexification, for example, could never exist at all- because a similar primitive adherence to the implications of the second law of thermodynamics “negates that possibility”.
In this reductionist thinking compatibilists completely discount any possibility that complexity in mental processes can ever lead to ANY emergent property that counters their most primitive definitions of causation in the physical world. In effect, instead of dealing with compatibilist argument they set up “causation straw man” that completely ignores the complex issues of mind. By doing this they do not address the issues we compatibilists raise.
2) Alternatively, I find the arguments of compatibilists on free will extremely convincing. I am particularly impressed my the arguments of Kane and Dennett of the mechanisms that can explain processes underpinning free will (as they define it), and the evolutionary path that would lead to the existence of such mechanisms. An understanding of Computational Theory ( my own field is Computer Science) also provides significant insights into how a free-will mechanism can exist in a totally physical environment.
3) I totally accept that just because “authority” leans toward one’s own particular conclusions on a subject one cannot necessarily assume one is on the right side of an argument, I still cannot ignore the fact that almost every scientist and philosopher that I particularly respect (with the notable exception of Jerry) also holds to my compatibilist viewpoint. This cannot but reinforce the feeling that my own detailed analysis and conclusions (given at length on other free will threads at WEIT) are valid.
“In this reductionist thinking compatibilists completely discount any possibility that complexity in mental processes can ever lead to ANY emergent property that counters their most primitive definitions of causation in the physical world. In effect, instead of dealing with compatibilist argument they set up “causation straw man” that completely ignores the complex issues of mind. By doing this they do not address the issues we compatibilists raise.”
So, *are* you arguing for contracausal free will? These seems like a straw-man straw man.
“the mechanisms that can explain processes underpinning free will (as they define it)”
This seems to be the sticking point. Is it useful to use “free will” as a label for “free will (as they define it)”; i.e., is that redefinition helpful or does it just muddy the waters?
I guess I’m an it-muddies-the-waters kind of guy. It seems we could all move on if we could admit that “free will” will never be truly free of it’s dualistic and contracausal impedimenta, put the term aside and just talk about “human agency” or some such.
But all of these deep arguments are straying away from Jerry’s point in the OP, if I understand it correctly, that Dennett (if not other compatibilists) are committing an “appeal to consequences” fallacy.
/@
“It seems we could all move on if we could admit that “free will” will never be truly free of it’s dualistic and contracausal impedimenta, put the term aside and just talk about “human agency” or some such.”
I don’t think this redefinition would help at all, for it would only move the argument onto the question of exactly what are the characteristics of “agency” with respect to causality. Perhaps we should better try to define what constitutes “autonomy” – is it possible for anything to be separate enough as an entity to be the principal effecter of it’s actions? By principal effecter I do not mean that “heredity”=”make up” and “environment”=”historic external causes” have no presence or effect, but only that the entity is sufficiently “self formed” or self-programed so that most of what it does is the by-product of this self forming, a by-product of that AUTONOMY. Dennet’s evolved “evitability avoiders” are such autonomous agents, as are Kane’s “self formed” decision makers. And I say that computational entities are also possible, without breaking physical law.
Now just to be provocative let me address the issue of “dualism” that you bring up. Of course both compatibilists and incompatibilists reject the classical interpretation of dualism. But on thinking about it – since the mind is exactly analogous to a complex multi-processing structure as a PHYSICAL entity, therefore mental processes of the mind are exactly analogous to the software that is executed in this structure. So it follows that, as with software, mind is a mathematical construct and NOT a physical thing. The “rules of behaviour” of the physical and the mathematical can overlap but are NOT one and the same. This is perhaps dualism in another form (NOTE: I am being playful here – but not incorrect) So accusing compatibilists as being dualists carries no weight – even if such a charge really was true (and it is not true).
As for consequences, I cannot but agree that the consequences of indeterminism are morally dire. But this is NOT why I reject incompatibilism. I do so because the arguments that in favour of incompatibilism don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Interesting that almost all the comments have been about the issue of free will and almost none about Alex Rosenberg’s book which covers that of course but also so much more. Perhaps most people on this list haven’t read it. If so, that’s too bad. It’s certainly one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the last 20 years or so and I was very interested to see you were reading it again. I hope you will be following up, Jerry, on your rather cryptic comment “will become clear later” as I would certainly like to hear more about your impressions of the book. I’ve read it twice now and given copies to my two sons. I can’t recommend it highly enough to others on the list.
Richard
Ditto. It has something of Saul’s stark beauty about it. It highlights a lot of areas (like “free will”/“agency”) where we have a lot of work to do to reconcile out intuitions about how the world works with how the world works.
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In contradiction to all of the above, our current best theory is that the universe is not deterministic at all, it is stochastic.
Of course, people above are only saying that the universe is “deterministic” because they are using another definition of “deterministic” which is IMHO wildly inaccurate and misleading.
I demand to be protected from this misleading definition with a safe space, preferably one with play-doh and cookies. And a My Little Pony.
Can we please have hot chocolate too? Perhaps with brandy?
You can have it, but I don’t like chocolate so I’ll need a safe space within the safe space to protect me from it.
Even if it is (and I for the moment agree), so what? That doesn’t get you contra-causal, just roulette wheel, at best.
Just curious, would you concede that there are at least some compatibilists who would agree with you on the moral implications of determinism but who also think there are good reasons to define the types of choices humans make as ‘free will?’
If you’re addressing me, the answer is that I don’t know of any such compatibilists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My experience has been that those who agree with me on determinism, which is most compatibilists, disagree with me on my view that this removes from humanity the idea of “moral responsibility.” And that idea of “moral responsibility” is one reason why people make up new definitions of free will.
Truly, I can’t see any good reasons to define what people do as constituting “free will” given the data showing that most people think of “free will” as libertarian, unconstrained by physics, and in that form is very important to them as a component of moral responsibility.
If you’re looking for a good reason, I’ll point you to my first comment :p
To briefly summarize there are good mathematical/computational definitions for decision making systems versus non-decision making systems and the concept it describes is wildly important (not just an arbitrary definition). The decision making distinction is why game theory is a field.
I’ll add one more thing.
You seem to be arguing from a position of semantic authority for libertarian free will. But I don’t see how libertarian free will has any more semantic authority than compatiblism. I could see an argument if free will had a long history of a well established definition that compatiblists were now trying to overturn. That is not the case though. First, I don’t think libertarian free will has ever been well defined. I think “libertarian free will” describes a theory of mind as much as “the crystal’s energy” describes a property of physics (that is, it doesn’t). Second, compatiblism isn’t a new idea. So on what grounds can an incompatiblist claim semantic authority? Why should we reject useful definitions of free will in favor of poorly thought out intuitions (assuming that’s even the most common colloquial view)? If your goal is emphasize the consequence of determinism, the compatibilist definition doesn’t prevent you from doing that.
In summary, the compatibilist view is not some new challenger, we can provide a very good formal and testable definition of it, I can provide good reasons that the concept of the compatibilist free will is important, and the points about determinism that you like are still able to made with it. Given that, why would you insist on the incompatiblist definition?
Lots of good points here, JM. Especially this:
If your goal is emphasize the consequence of determinism, the compatibilist definition doesn’t prevent you from doing that.
Dennett, for example, takes great pains in Freedom Evolves to underline exactly that point. But not even Jerry has felt the need to address it, or even so much as acknowledge it.
I strongly agree with you on the moral implications of determinism and I think they’re worth impressing on people because of how internalizing them will likely affect their intuitions regarding retaliation and justice. I also don’t support Dennett’s ‘little people’ argument and I think there are good reasons to believe that abolishing the idea of libertarian free will would make the world a much better place. However, I do think there is at least one decent argument out there for redefining ‘free will’ to the types of choices that intelligent agents make.
I don’t want to make my post too long but I want to touch on a couple things:
1. The moral implications with even libertarian free will being true would be nearly the same (though less intuitive). Unnecessary retaliation and ‘just deserts’ would remain irrational because of sunk costs fallacy unless they’re consequentially justified. Our intuition that some people ‘deserve’ to suffer still doesn’t actually survive rigorous scrutiny with libertarian free will being true imo.
2. We’re already creating a flavor of AI agents that have a type of ‘will,’ but, as of yet, that will is entirely dictated by humans. As AI agents get more advanced, I think we will need categories for the types of will that’ll exist and the term ‘free will’ will be great for describing agents like ourselves, whose decisions are dictated by preferences that weren’t ascribed to them by other agents. The term ‘free will’ fits well because that’s what ‘freedom’ already means to humans: that our existence isn’t dictated or controlled by other agents.
Someone picked up this conversation here: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/flickers_of_freedom/2015/03/are-compatibilists-like-creationists.html
I think I’m caught up on what everybody’s posted since yesterday…and there’s something that was really quite striking, and repeatedly so.
The incompatibilists are operating with an unambiguous definition of, “free will”: the popular libertarian misconception of a dualistic ghost in the machine.
Yet, even if you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what the compatibilist definition of the term is. Compatibilists go to great pains to reassure us that their understanding of “free will” isn’t the common one, and it’s more than merely whether or not you’ve got a gun to your head…but that’s as far as I’d feel comfortable going without mischaracterizing the compatibilist position.
So…I think it would do a great deal to move the discussion forward if the compatibilists here could come to first some sort of agreement on a dictionary-style definition of the term, “free will”…and then provide a convincing argument as to why that definition of the term is valid.
But, please, for the sake of all that’s unholy! Start with the definition, and limit its length to about that of this here sentence.
Cheers,
b&
Incompatibilists needs to explain why intelligent actors don’t have free will, because that’s my understanding of a compatibilist definition.
Where’s the definition of free will there?
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Yes, exactly. The only clear definition I’ve yet to encounter is the dualist “ghost in the machine” one, and that’s not even internally coherent once you poke at it. Might as well say that “free will” is what married bachelors do and be done with it.
So, give us a definition of “free will” that isn’t that one, and then maybe we can make some progress.
b&
» Ben:
Might as well say that “free will” is what married bachelors do and be done with it.
Your dogmatic insistence that a word you don’t like must never mean anything else than that which you find idiotic is…well, idiotic.
And if ‘free’ did indeed only ever mean a binary dichotomy, then things such as “degrees of freedom” wouldn’t exist—which you are perfectly aware is not the case.
So how about you stop being so self-servingly uncritical, and then maybe we can make some progress.
I would argue that something that exerts or attempts to exert a change in a system due to its preferences for the state of that system, and in accordance with those preferences and its perception of the state of that system, has free will and is exercising it.
Well, we know from physics that that’s not how the world works.
Like it or not, you are a meat computer, and the choices you make are computed with the same unrelenting obedience to input (etc.) as a pocket calculator.
…unless you’re also arguing that a pocket calculator has free will…?
b&
Wait, computer systems cannot perceive systems and express their preferences, and try to influence those systems to conform to them? I’m almost certain they can. I am not the first person this thread to claim that a chess program has a very rudimentary form of free will.
Then we are left with the same problem of either a semantic argument or a misconception of hidden dualism.
Give a chess computer the same inputs, and it’s guaranteed to produce the exact same outputs. Where’s the freedom in that? (And, remember: from the perspective of a computer scientist, the output from a random number generator is an input to the program.)
So, either you must think that a computer is free to override its own programming — which is supernatural fantasy dualism — or your idea of “free” means “perfectly lacking choice.”
b&
You can make claims about people believing in libertarian free will, but I think people believe people actions are predetermined by their personality. This is the entire concept of trust: I know a person so well I don’t think they would ever do something that could hurt me; therefore, I’m willing to make myself vulnerable to them. If I trust them, does that mean I don’t think they have a choice? Myt guess is most people would answer not “No, I guess most people I trust don’t have free will.”
For people to wholesale believe in libertarian free will, they could never trust anyone, because they could be capable of anything. Free will isn’t about choice, it’s about expressing preferences.
…then your “free will” is diametrically opposed to everybody else’s definition, at least as I understand them.
b&
Then I repeat: how could people who believe in free will ever trust anyone? They clearly don’t think of it in the same hard lines you do, or they wouldn’t be able to.
People who believe in dualistic free will are very, very confused. They think the mind is like a radio receiver for the soul, with the soul residing in a supernatural realm. And they’ve never thought about whether or not the soul is willfully obedient to its own nature or freely able to make any choice at any whim…and how the two are not merely incompatible but diametric opposites.
That’s why those of us who reject free will do so.
After all, we’re not the ones attempting to salvage an incoherent theological mess for some indeterminate secular purpose. We’re just pointing out that it’s an incoherent theological mess and rejecting it out of hand — the same way we do gods, an afterlife, and the rest of the schtick.
b&
Wait, you’re denying that human agents exert changes to the world due to their preferences for the state of that system in accordance with their preferences? This is precisely what humans do and that’s very well substantiated in terms of decision theory and game theory, regardless of determinism (in fact determinism may actually be necessary for one to make true decisions by that definition because if there is randomness, those decisions would be based on randomness and not on their preferences). You may not like calling it ‘free will’ but you’re absolutely incorrect to say this isn’t how the world works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
I’m not denying the significance of game theory.
I’m denying that there’s any freedom in the way the agents make decision.
And, “Duh!” The entire reason that agents can be modeled in such a way is because they’re not free, because they’re predictable! Game theory doesn’t apply even in principle to an actor that always makes decisions at random, regardless of input or rules.
b&
It won’t let me reply directly to your last message so I’m replying to my own. Hopefully it isn’t confusing.
I was mostly responding to your claim that he was wrong that the world worked in the way he described.
Beyond that, compatibilism is a mostly semantic stance (except when people use it to attempt to smuggle intuitive notions of ‘just deserts’ and retribution into it). There is freedom in it if it’s defined as ‘free will,’ by definition, and freedom doesn’t have to be absolute. I can’t fly through the sky, or walk through walls, but I still consider myself freer than, say, slaves, for instance. My will is much the same way.
If you want to see my argument for why I think free will should be defined in this way, please look a few posts above yours. I also agree with JM’s arguments below mine.
Such as a thermostat?
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I’ve already provided a definition here. Comments here don’t make it easy, but depending on how deep you want to go, we can break it down into mathematical formalisms. At a high-level summary though, there are meaningful computational properties of decision making agents versus non-decision making agents. These distinctions are very important in AI research. Also, from these formalisms of decision making we can also analyze whether an agent’s decision making system was designed with its consequences understood by a decision making designer or not, which seems like another useful property for whether an agent has free will or not. (For example, when responding to an agent, if it has a puppeteer of sorts, you may need to reason about the puppeteer too.)
Looking below at further responses to you, yes, this definition would entail that a chess solver has a rudimentary will. However, in response to these claims you seem to be moving the goalposts. Your original challenge was “can you provide a definition of compatibilist free will?” People responded giving you an answer, yet now your rebuttal is effectively “but I wouldn’t define that as a free decision.” Yes, we know that; we know incompatiblists reject definitions in which determinism exists… that’s kind of the debate :p But you’re the one who challenged whether compatibilists even had good definitions, and clearly we do. It’d be nice then if you conceded that your challenge was addressed.
Now you can say that you don’t like that compatibilist definition. Ultimately, no one can stop you from liking or disliking any definition, but it is a valid definition. Moreover, it’s a definition that expresses an important concept (as I said earlier, game theory is a field because of the concept of decision making agents). So let me ask you a question. Since there is a definition of compatibilist free will that describes a useful concept, on what grounds is the incompatibilist definition more useful? If it’s not strictly more useful, then I see no reason that anyone should *insist* that the incompatiblist definition is the one we should be using.
In short…yes, I reject your definition for the simple reason that there’s no freedom in the system. How can you have a free will that’s not free, that is guaranteed to always result in the exact same output for a given input? That’s the textbook definition of not free.
I am, in no way, denying that humans are complex computational systems that process all sorts of inputs into outputs, and that do so in ways that are labyrinthine and not amenable to analysis. Nor am I denying that there are all sorts of ways of making sense of the mess, with game theory an excellent way.
What I and other incompatibilists are rejecting is the notion that any of that even vaguely resembles what is typically understood by the term, “free will,” and especially that there’s any meaningful notion of freedom in any of it.
You can try to address the first, but you run smack dab into the problem that theologians and philosophers have, for millennia, framed the debate in exactly these terms, with your clockwork machinery being that which lacks free will and humans with whatever (falsely) presumed special essence we have defining that which has free will.
Or you can try to address the second…in which case you’re either going full Orwell and claiming that slavery is freedom, or you’re now imparting dualism to clockwork machinery.
So, let me turn it back on you.
Why on Earth are you so passionate about holding on to such a perverted and useless and confused term as, “free will,” to describe these phenomena? Why not just describe them as the spirits of the souls bequeathed unto us by the gods and angels and be done with it? What you’re doing is every bit as confusing and leaves the waters just as muddy — but, if you go full throttle, at least you’ll have some sort of poetic beauty to point to.
b&
“There’s no freedom” according to your definition of freedom. You’re beginning the question. That is, the question to be answered is what does it mean to have free will and we have given you an answer (to repeat in brief, an agent makes decisions and those decisions were free from—as in cannot be strictly reduced to—the decisions and intentions of a creator agent). You cannot defeat that answer using a different definition of the term to be defined.
You say you’re turning the question back on me, but you never answered mine or at least didn’t provide an example of additional value. If someone thinks the world is non-deterministic (even beyond the effects of quantum mechanics) a compatibilist can argue against this position. If a person claims there is a soul, a compatibilist can argue against this position. Insisting on incompatiblism doesn’t enable you to argue against more false claims that compatiblism does so you still haven’t explained what value is gained by insisting on that definition.
An no, compatibilism is not a “perverted” concept of free will. Comptabilism is not a new concept.
I’ve already explained why I prefer the definition of compatibilist free will. It describes a useful concept of the world (as in, knowing whether an agent possess the quality affects how I reason about them). In contrast, I do not see any use of the incompatiblist position that the compatiblist does not also share.
Let me simplify.
You are proposing that something that is guaranteed to result in an identical outcome every time is somehow “free.” This does not comport with any definition of the term, “free,” ever used in such a context. The closest you could get would be the “free” in “free fall,” but I think we can safely assume that that’s an entirely different definition of the word.
Therefore, while you may well be describing some sort of a will, that will cannot possibly be free. It is constrained. Ask it if it wants chocolate or vanilla based upon the current conditions, and the result is as guaranteed as the “2” that shows up on the calculator after you press “1 + 1.”
And I can’t offer you any meaningful definition of the term, “free will,” because the freakin’ term is a freakin’ incoherent self contradiction!
It’s like you keep insisting that we must absolutely find a way to apply the term, “married bachelor,” and refuse to consider for a moment that there’s no point in even thinking to salvage it. It’s bullshit! Why do we have to figure out some situation in which we can use the bullshit term? Why can’t we just drop it, the same way we don’t try to shoehorn “married bachelor” or “god” or “soul” into discussions of real phenomena?
b&
Again, so says you. It absolutely does confirm to a definition of freedom, one many compatibilists use. Again, when asking for a definition for something, you cannot challenge it by saying the definition is something else, you’re begging the question.
You are using the same reasoning I discussed in a previous comment. You want to to operate under the premise that your definition of free will has a priori semantic authority. It doesn’t. I’ll point you to my previous comment on the matter rather than repeat it:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/why-free-will-compatibilists-are-like-creationists/?replytocom=1165655#comment-1165461
As I just replied to Coel…if that’s “freedom,” then ignorance really is strength, and war peace.
b&
Ben, every single other usage of the word “free” is compatible with determinism.
Take “freedom of religion”. It means freedom from *external* social pressure and thus freedom to indulge ones *internal* desires. (It is not an appeal to dualism.)
So what’s wrong with the same interpretation of “freedom of the will”?
Or take the phrase: the fox struggled to free its leg from the trap”. That is not to do with violating physical laws, it’s to do with the fox moving the leg in accordance with its *internal* desires.
The problem is that the will can’t be free. It makes no sense! Free it, and all you’re left with is randomness.
Your objections make as much sense to me as if you said that a man must remain a bachelor even after he’s married, else how can he have sex? (And his children prove he’s getting it on!) Ergo, he’s a married bachelor!
NO!
You’re conflating multiple unrelated and often-contradictory concepts.
Just drop the theological nonsense and let it rot. There’s nothing worth salvaging there.
b&
» Ben:
The problem is that the will can’t be free. It makes no sense! Free it, and all you’re left with is randomness.
Shorter Ben Goren: “LALALALALA! I can’t hear you!”
Take the “freedom of religion” as the analogy.
The sticking point for my colleagues in seminar was that the supposed “internal desires” themselves are not freely chosen – on pain of infinite regress. (This is the problem with J. Fischer and M. Ravizza’s stuff on compatibilism.)
To add one more bit for clarity since you may have misunderstood something, while a chess program would have a rudimentary will, a calculator running conventional calculator tasks would not. Again, decision making is a specific kind of computational problem, not any computation.
If you don’t mind, let me ask for further clarification.
I think you’d recognize that a calculator will always return the same result for a given input.
Do you think a chess computer is different in that regard? Would you expect to feed the same input (in the sense used in computer science, meaning that the output of a random number generator is an input to the computer even if the circuitry is physically located in the same box) but get a different output?
If you answer, “yes,” then you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of computer science.
If you answer, “no,” then you have just demonstrated that a chess computer is no more nor less free than the calculator.
b&
A calculator is not processing information in order to achieve a programmed-in aim, in the same way that a chess computer is.
A chess computer is told the overall aim, winning the game, and is programmed to assess information to that end. Thus a computer program has a “will”, a will to win the game.
Now, if there is only one move to get out of check then, within the confines of the game, the next move is forced. There is no “freedom” to “choose”.
But, if there are twenty legal moves than the program is “free” to “choose” according to its “will” to win the game. That is free will.
If your reply is “but that’s not what *I* call free will”, then, yes, we know that. But you asked what *compatibilists* call free will, and that is it.
If your reply is “but it’s all determined by the programming and the information” then, yes, indeed so.
While I’m on:
“and it’s more than merely whether or not you’ve got a gun to your head”
No, that is *exactly* what compatibilist free will is!
We compatibilists say repeatedly and explicitly that compatibilist free will means whether you have a gun to your head.
But the incompatibilists are so *desperate* to accuse us of dualism that what they hear is “compatibilisist free will is *more* than whether you’ve got a gun to your head”.
I’ll repeat this to JM in a moment.
If that’s “freedom,” then ignorance really is strength, and war peace.
b&
It’s the only freedom that actually exists, and it’s the sort of freedom that is intended by every other use of “free” in the English language.
To quote a blog post of mine:
Here are some common usages: Free speech; free press; freedom of religion; free style; free load; free radical; freed from jail; free lunch; free fall; free agent; free to leave; freed from slavery; free man; set the birds free; kick your legs free; free form.
Oxford Dictionaries defines “free” as meaning: “Able to act or be done as one wishes; not under the control of another”. It is only in the specific case of the phrase “free will”, out of line with most other usages in English, that “freedom” is taken to be about dualism and the non-operation of the laws of physics. Indeed, if I describe an object as “in free fall”, the whole point is that it is obeying the laws of physics.
Thus, the concept “freedom” has a sensible and coherent meaning in a deterministic world. That meaning is used commonly in everyday life, and is the one adopted by compatibilism.
…and you find victory in defeat….
b&
« “and it’s more than merely whether or not you’ve got a gun to your head” No, that is *exactly* what compatibilist free will is! »
So, compatibilists are adding no more to the discussion than lawyers would… ?
As I noted elsewhere (and nobody responded), people still have the ability to make choices, /even when they are being coerced/. So your definition seems too narrow to be meaningful.
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I really don’t have a misunderstanding of computer science. My PhD in computer science and my research expertise is in artificial intelligence.
If we remove from the discussion pseudorandomness that is not uncommon in AI algorithms (as in the physical state of the computer itself is also identical), the outputs will be the same for the same inputs. That doesn’t mean chess solving and arithmetic computation are the same computation. These are very different kinds of computational processes. A decision making system takes as input observations from its environment. It also has an objective metric for evaluating the quality of states (and possibly actions). The, the computational problem is to find a policy—a mapping from states/observations to actions (possibly being probabilistic) that maximizes the metric.
Whether a system satisfies this property is incredibly important. For example, if some other system is *not* a decision making agent, then I can use single-agent solving mechanisms, such as modeling the world as a Markov decision process. However, if they are decision making agent, then suddenly we wind up in game theory land where everything is much hard *because* they’re trying to maximize their value and that makes determining how to behave much harder. We wind up with things like Nash equilibrium as a result.
There is an actual important difference between decision making computational processes and ones that are not. Arithmetic is not a decision making computational process.
I must pick a nit with you there.
They maw well be significantly different algorithmically, but both are equivalent computationally. Turing machines exist for both.
…and that’s where a lot of this is breaking down. You would have me believe that some Turing Machines are more free than others, and there’s just no definition of the word, “free,” that I can buy off on that which can be used in that manner.
b&
My entire point is that I do *not* classify decision making as computation itself. I didn’t say “it’s computing and this isn’t computing.” If I did you’d be right to call me on that. I said the computational *processes* are different. An algorithm is a description. A computational process is the enactment of some algorithm. A system enacting arithmetic operations is a different kind of process than a process performing decision making.
This is similar to the distinction between software code sitting on your disk drive and active processes that are running. So when I talk about the differences between computational processes, I’m talking about important differences in what they do. The class of things they’re actively computing. There are important properties about decision making processes that will change how you should respond to them versus non-decision making processes
So no, I would not have you believe that Turing Machines are freer than others. In fact, I wouldn’t even say a Turning machine has a will, let a lone a free one, *Unless* it’s a machine performing a decision making process.
On top of that, it wouldn’t have a “free” will if its running process was designed and implemented by another decision making agent who created it such that its processes would result in specific desired decision that that agent intended.
Uh-oh…
So…I have a breadboard in front of me. I wire it up as a simple four-function calculator, fire it up, and it doesn’t have any free will. I power it down, re-wire it as a chess computer, turn it on…and now it has free will?
Sorry…but “DOES NOT COMPUTE.
…and this is where things really get sticky.
Which decision-making agent created humans such that our processes result in the specific desired action intended by the agent necessary for free will?
b&
“So…I have a breadboard in front of me. I wire it up as a simple four-function calculator, fire it up, and it doesn’t have any free will. I power it down, re-wire it as a chess computer, turn it on…and now it has free will?”
It would have a rudimentary will, potentially a free will depending on how much of your own knowledge of the decisions it would make informed its design.
Why would this be surprising? My definition regards the important property of what a computational system is. Take a human brain a “rewire” its material and you’ll be left with something very different, probably something that doesn’t even compute and acknowledging that distinction between a human and blob is rather important!
“Which decision-making agent created humans such that our processes result in the specific desired action intended by the agent necessary for free will?”
In all probability, none. Which is why humans have free will… because their decisions were not designed by another decision making agent. Did you think there was an agent that created us? Are you a creationists? Did you think I was a creationist? I’m not sure why you thought this was a meaningful question. If an omniscient god existed, then we wouldn’t have free will though.
Then your definition is…bizarre. An iPhone lacks free will until you install a chess app on it, at which point it gains a limited form of free will until you delete the app.
I’ll grant that you can, perhaps, construct some sort of internally-consistent something-or-other in the direction you’re going. I’m just at a complete and utter loss for what you think this has to do with “free will,” or why you’d want to saddle it with such a theologically incoherent term.
My question was a near-perfect paraphrase of your own statement. Your statement strongly implied that free will is something that must be endowed by a creator. Would you not expect to be challenged on something like that in a forum such as this?
b&
“An iPhone lacks free will until you install a chess app on it, at which point it gains a limited form of free will until you delete the app.”
You seem to be highlighting the ease to change what it does as if that’s important. It’s not. Bear in mind that processes are not imaginary, even though it’s easy to think of them as such. Running a process on a PC/phone is actually making really important physical changes in the device that changes what it does. PCs and phones are just, be design, really good at being easy to create physical changes enabling them to be altered to various computational systems. What matters is what it’s doing, not how easy it is to transform some device to make it do that important something.
“I’m just at a complete and utter loss for what you think this has to do with “free will,” or why you’d want to saddle it with such a theologically incoherent term.”
The term free will is not an inherently theological term. It concerns properties of mind and the mind—the human brain, for example—is just a computer doing specific things. Even if you believed in a soul, the soul will still have to be a computer, just of different stuffs. So naturally, if we’re talking about properties of mind, we’re talking about computational properties. That’s why it’s important.
“Your statement strongly implied that free will is something that must be endowed by a creator.”
No, I actually said the exact opposite of that. Reread what I posted. A sufficiently capable designer of a decision making agent is what means that they do *not* have a free will.
To give an example, we know humans are decision making agents under the definition I’ve given. However, if humans were created by an omniscient God, then we would *not* have free will. There is no omniscient God, therefore we do have free will. We are free because our decisions were not merely decisions of another agent; our decisions were made freely from the will of other agents.
So, to cut to the chase, you would argue that “free will” is a property possessed by a certain class of algorithms (when they’re executing) and only by algorithms of that class. You have a certain definition of what constitutes that class, and that’s all that matters for your definition.
I will grant that your definition can reasonably be coherent.
But I would most strongly suggest that what you propose is so unrelated to what anybody else considers “free will” that all you do is confuse the hell out of everybody by saying, “Free will is a property of certain algorithms.”
Why not say that the algorithms have souls? That the programmers who write them are gods?
More to the point, what on Earth is “free” about an algorithm?
Every algorithm has a corresponding mathematical function. Are those functions equally free? And what possible sense does it make to describe a function as “free”? What does that even mean!?
b&
_Turing Machine Farm_ : All TMs are free, but some are freer than others!
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» JM:
I really don’t have a misunderstanding of computer science. My PhD in computer science and my research expertise is in artificial intelligence.
As you can see—and he is entirely representative of the incompatibilists on this thread—Ben is really good at making unwarranted assumptions. Usually, that (making unwarranted assumptions) should give one pause and cause to try for a somewhat more critical attitude.
Then how do the processes calculate “value” and determine “maxima”?
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“…what you propose is so unrelated to what anybody else considers “free will”…”
I don’t see how it’s unrelated. The class of process that is important in my definition is a *decision making process* The concept of decision making seems rather important to any definition of free will. It’s not like I just randomly picked a computational process class out of a hat. All I’ve done is been very precise in what a decision actually is in mathematical sense and removed the vagueness over the idea.
“Why not say that the algorithms have souls? That the programmers who write them are gods?”
Because soul implies a construct made out of material different than the matter with which we otherwise interact and “god” implies the creation of more than just agents but a universe itself.
You might say “but free will implies a soul” or something else of the sort, but it doesn’t. Again, The libertarian free will definition does not have semantic authority. Compatibilism is not a new idea nor was libertarian free will ever a well defined concept that compatiblism arbitrarily challenged. By your own admission, you think libertarian free will not only doesn’t exist in reality, but is internally inconsistent. The semantic debate between compatiblism and libertarian free will is about as old as anything in philosophy. Neither has a prioi semantic authority. But I would argue that one defines a useful concept (compatibilism) and the other does not.
“Are those functions equally free?”
Again, decision making is one component of the definition and it—again—is a specific class of *processes*, not any arbitrary function. The other component for freedom depends on whether there is a creator and their role in the creation of the agent in question. For example—for the third time?—if we were created by an omniscient god, we would not have free will.
This would be a serious bone of contention by any dualist. Indeed, I can’t imagine any dualist who would accept that free will is possible in the absence of a soul. Worse, said dualist would use a soulless algorithmic decision engine as the perfect example of something that doesn’t have free will.
Now, you’d obviously disagree with the dualist on basically every point…
…but that brings us to what really pisses off us incompatibilists.
You see, you have your conception of “free will,” and it’s perfectly congruent with how dualists define, “no free will.” And dualists have their own conception of “free will,” and it’s perfectly congruent with how compatibilists define, “fantasy that has no bearing on reality.”
Notice the problem?
You’re arguing that we really have free will.
Dualists are arguing that we really have free will.
What you’re arguing we really have is what dualists are arguing isn’t the case.
What dualists are arguing we really have is what you are arguing doesn’t exist.
There’s just no way to have a sane, coherent discussion with each of you defining the term, “free will,” in, literally, diametrically opposed fashions.
And, as I indicated, that’s what pisses off us incompatibilists.
I don’t care if you can point to some real-world phenomenon on which you’ve slapped the label, “free will.” You can pick a kitten out of the pound and bestow upon it the name of, “free will,” and I’ll be pleased for you.
What I do care about is that you’re saying that we have free will, but it’s a bait-n-switch free will from the one that the dualists say we have.
So, if you want to avoid confusing the dualists (and, remember, they’re the overwhelming majority) and pissing off the incompatibilists, you’ll come up with some new term other than “free will” to describe your real-world phenomenon.
As I myself do!
I’m one of the first people to point out that there is a very real decision-making process common to all humans in which we imagine the results of various choices before us and make our real-world choice based on our internal mental analysis. It subjectively “feels” like Jerry’s “rewind the tape” example, but it all happens in the imagination. It’s what people are generally pointing to when they say they’re “exercising their free will,” but — and this is the key point — it is most emphatically not free will. The dualists would agree with me on that point: this decision-making process isn’t what they have in mind for what constitutes free will. They likely wouldn’t agree with my assessment that that’s what they’re doing during the periods they say they’re exercising their free will, but that’s a legitimate topic for discussion.
And…in that entire discussion, we’re all in agreement as to what the terms themselves actually mean.
We’re not engaging in “gotcha!” semantic games that try to convince somebody that they have “free will” because our “free will” is a pair of socks and we can see that, yes, indeed, they have a sock on each foot.
Cheers,
b&
Ben, incompatiblism isn’t somehow uniquely immune to this being a semantics argument. You’re actively rejecting a definition and advocating for another. That is a semantic argument. You cannot answer “does x exist” without defining x. The incompatiblist position is that “free will does not exist if determinism is true.” To hold that position requires defining free will. That’s semantics.
As to describing properties of reality, nothing you’ve argued for about reality demands that we use a definition of free will that does not exist. So pointing out properties of reality does not argue for your definition of it. If you want to argue about the consequences of determinism, compatibilistis can do that too. You use the word “determinism” just like you have been here. Shifting over to incompatibilism doesn’t buy you any argumentative power in that regard.
You’re free (hah!) to only use whatever useless definition of free will you want and remark on the fact that internally inconsistent ideas (by your own admission) don’t exist in reality. But I’m sorry, you’re not going to convince me to adopt a definition of it that describes a useless concept when I have a definition that isn’t and that fits the way many people have used the term since the dawn of philosophy.
No.
The incompatibilist position is that “free will” is fundamentally incoherent and that the typical examples of how it’s supposed to function are not consistent with how we understand the universe to actually works.
Again, that’s a really big difference between us.
You’ve decided that you want to use the term and went looking for a definition you felt comfortable with, no matter what congruency that definition has with other people’s definitions.
I’m just stopping at the point of calling bullshit on the term and I have no interest in trying to salvage it for any reason whatsoever.
Yes, of course the definition is useless.
You know what other definitions are useless?
Those of basically any and every theological concept in the book, from gods through to salvation and grace (as used in the — Coel and Vaal please note — context of theology). They’re incoherent.
Do you go looking for excuses to salvage those terms, too?
Do your algorithms go to heaven if they terminate with a successful return code?
If not, aren’t you doing yourself a disservice by clinging to a useless definition of “heaven” that doesn’t actually describe anything in the real world?
b&
He isn’t even arguing that a human would return a different result for a given input if all factors were the same. “Free,” is being defined here as one’s relationship to other agents; not one’s relationship to determinism or to any natural laws or limits.
…and, again: physics is somehow irrelevant in all of this? Agents operate in some magical supernatural realm where they can blithely ignore physics at will…?
b&
Dude… no. This is a profoundly bad strawman argument. No one has said agents operate outside physics. The entire idea of comptabilist free will is that its a definition that is *compatible* with the idea of a deterministic universe in which human behavior is a consequence of the laws of physics. That free will is a term used to describe a property that is independent from any determinism in the physics of the universe.
You have now been given the definition compatiblists use. You’re welcome to reject it and use whatever definition you want, but have the courtesy to at least accurately reflecting what our position and definition is rather than engage is such blatant strawman argumentation.
I’m rejecting your definition, and my honest interpretation of your words is why I’m rejecting it.
I honestly, truly, can’t get past this. I’ll take you at your word that you have in mind some sort of quasi half-breed freedom that’s free but not free…but my only conclusion is that you must be confused.
Your words are coming across as, “Free will is free from influence by things in the real world, but it’s not free from physics, which is part of the real world, but it’s not the sort of thing that free things are free from,” and so on.
Maybe free will is the type of a little bit of pregnancy that causes married bachelors relaxing anguish?
b&
Yes Ben, exactly, the word “free” is *always* about the absence of *some* sorts of contraints, it is *never* about the absence of *all* constraints.
In the particular case of “free will” it’s about the absence of constraints from other humans. It is not about the laws of physics, which do of course apply.
Really, this is not that hard a concept! Really it isn’t!
Please give some examples of the use of the word “free” that you would accept — pick any context you like. (Or do you want to abolish the word “free” entirely?)
For example, if a say “free-form dance”, it’s about the absence of some sorts of rules. It’s not about the non-operation of the laws of physics.
Or, if I say “free speech”, it’s about the absence of some sorts of rules and coercion. It’s not about the non-operation of the laws of physics.
Or, if I say “freed from slavery”, its about the absence of control by another human. It’s not about the non-operation of the laws of physics.
Ditto for another 28 usages of “free”. Really, it’s not that hard a concept!
Yes, Coel. Context is key.
I have a friend, Cory, who has a built-in suntan. And he’s been known to go on rants about being harassed by cops for Driving While Black (for example).
What do you think his reaction would be if I told him that it’s good that he’s in the black because that means he’s got a positive cash flow?
I don’t give a flying fuck that “free will” is a perfectly valid way to describe a no-charge estate planning service; that’s not the context in which this discussion is taking place.
The context of this discussion is the ancient one in which “free will” is, primarily, the theological response to theodicy.
…and, remind us, again…where do guns-to-the-forehead enter that context…?
b&
The problem I’m highlighting isn’t that you reject the definition I’ve given for free will. It’s that you’ve gone the complete opposite direction and put words in everyone’s mouths, words that are antithetical to the entire concept of compatiblism. You desperately need to brush up on your reading comprehension if you honestly think we believed the things you said we did.
I’m not putting words in people’s mouths; I’m trying my best to take them at their word and extrapolate the obvious conclusions.
A perfect example is that Wikipedia quote which can only possibly make sense if the agent in question is unconstrained by physics, or if we’re somehow otherwise supposed to ignore the role physics actually really does play in the real world.
You just can’t say that something is unconstrained by external forces…and expect people to ignore, say, gravity. But the problem with physics is that you can’t just stop at gravity, and there’s no line that you can, even in principle, draw between gravity and (to pick a favorite compatibilist bugaboo) another person.
What you’re objecting to me doing isn’t putting words in your mouths. It’s refusing to refrain from paying attention to the man behind the curtain. You might not have thought through the consequences of including physics in the consideration, but us incompatibilists haven’t.
And that’s the sort of thing that we’re trying to get you to understand. You can’t just handwave these things away, and we’re refusing to let you do so. Yes, if we’re willing to grant that physics is irrelevant, sure, you can have some sort of vague semblance of something kinda like free will — but that is the dualist position! But you say you’re not dualists…but you keep trying to separate out boundaries past which physics is and isn’t relevant…but that’s not dualistic…
…and I’m the one having comprehension problems!?
b&
Ben,
“Free will is free from influence by things in the real world, but it’s not free from physics, which is part of the real world, but it’s not the sort of thing that free things are free from,”
If someone says “the dog is running free in the yard” what do you think they mean? Are you confused by this? “What, you are saying
the dog is a contra-causal being, free of all causal influences in the universe???”
Is that how you react?
Presumably not. You understand that “free” has the context of things like “dogs being on chains, constrained from running in the yard” and that “free” refers to such local constraints. Right?
This everyday use of “free” in term of local possible sets of constraints is how “free” is being used in “Free Will.” How is this so hard to grasp?
The only reason it seems hard to grasp is that are fixated…very strangely from my perspective…on the conviction that “free” can ONLY mean “free from the physical universe.”
And it’s your unbreakable conviction that “free will” can ONLY reference this contra-causal impossibility, or it’s “not really free.”
The incompatibilists continually have accused compatibilists of “confusing” things by using the term free will. But (I believe) it’s closer to the other way around.
If you only understand the issue of free will to be about whether we have spooky powers or not, then you have ignored all the concerns that are actually wrapped up in the debate. And when you say to people “You didn’t REALLY have a choice” or “You don’t have free will” it is actually at least as confusing. Because you will mean only the spooky part, whereas there is a LOT more to answer for. People will start asking “Wait, what are you saying? Are you saying I don’t really have a choice to, say, keep the money I found or return it to the owner? Am I not responsible at all for what I do? Etc…”
Saying “you have no free will” doesn’t just clear the air – it actually will leave people wondering what you mean and what this entails. You’ll have just as much “de-confusing” to do – more I think – than if we keep the term “free will” and, like morality, “life,” etc disabuse it of the metaphysical mistakes and explain a natural foundation.
The problem from my perspective is that both the compatibilist and the incompatibilist have to respond to people’s questions of “do I still have a choice?” in the context of determinism. It’s just that I find the incompatibilist answers, thus far, woefully insufficient and incoherent, vs the compatibilist answers which outline what we mean by “free” in a determined world – both in how we *could* understand the terms and in how we *already* use the terms.
See my response to Coel.
Ask the proverbial man in the street why God lets bad things happen to good people, and the first words out of his mouth will be, “free will.”
If your definition of, “free will,” doesn’t make sense in that context, then, whatever you’re discussing, it’s not what everybody else is discussing.
b&
Ben,
“Ask the proverbial man in the street why God lets bad things happen to good people, and the first words out of his mouth will be, “free will.”
It’s not so easy Ben.
The apologetics, both from the higher ups in Christianity and the “man in the street” ALSO
make appeals that undermine the idea that freedom is all about the spooky ability to decide contra-causally, rather than being an issue of coercion or physical constraints.
How many times have you heard the bad apologetic that God is so hidden because “if He revealed Himself to us unequivocally, it would take away our “free will” in terms of choosing to believe or not?”
When atheists suggest all sorts of ways God could have reduced suffering and harm, e.g. by disallowing shooters to kill people etc, these PHYSICAL constraints are immediately flagged as harming our free will.
Ask the “man on the street:” If God suddenly whooshed everyone in the world into a Christian church, strapped them in the pews, eyes held open to the pages turning on the bible…would that be a violation of our free will?
You bet they would say “yes” which is why God allows the “freedom to choose.” In EITHER case they can believe that they have a soul, but the will STILL reflectively modulate what they think of as their “free will/freedom of choice” based on the PHYSICAL ability or constraints on doing what they themselves want to do.
It’s just not as neat and tidy as your arguments presume.
Erm..you’re exactly making the incompatibilist case!
All that incompatibilism entails is that “free will” is an incoherent mess that doesn’t actually refer to any real-world phenomena. Is it any surprise that all sorts of confusion surrounds the term, even amongst those who insist we have it?
If the true believers at all levels can’t even figure out what it means…what makes you think you’re so special that your yet-another-conflicting-interpretation is the only real one that’s really real?
It’s like gods. There are thousands of gods, and they can’t all be real, but they can all be imaginary.
There are thousands of conceptions of “free will,” and they can’t all be real, but they can all be imaginary.
b&
Ben, again, the entire concept behind compatiblism is that it’s a definition of free will that is *compatible* with deterministic universe that includes the workings of humans. If you only understand one thing about the compatibilist position it should be that. So yes, we have thought through the implications of physics; the term wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t. So, if your “extrapolation” of the compatiblist position is that they insist that humans are not subject to physics you are extrapolating an idea that is entirely antithetical to the most central idea. That should be a massive red flag that your extrapolation about our position is completely and utterly wrong and you need to do a much better job trying to understand the position.
I simply cannot emphasize how much of a failure of understanding this is on your part if you really don’t grasp that much.
That’s to me such an obvious exercise in the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy and related phenomena that I’m again not sure where to go.
You’ve clearly decided that “free will,” whatever it is, is real and important…and so you’ve gone looking for what you think is a suitable real-world phenomenon to which you can attach the label.
That might not be the point you intended to make, but it’s as straightforward an interpretation of that sentence as I can come up with…
…and its exactly what Dan has said he’s engaging in. Dan has explicitly stated that he’s worried about what will happen if people think they don’t have “free will,” and so he’s presenting to them “the only type of free will worth having.”
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see what’s so special about that pair of words juxtaposed in this context that merits such passionate attempts at salvation.
Can’t we just admit that what everybody else has been calling “free will” for millennia is just a bullshit theological construct that has no more bearing on reality than angels and devils and be done with it?
I mean, we’re fine with using “angel” and “devil” in casual conversation without attempting to imply that such-and-such a runway model really is an angel or such-and-such a corporate raider really is a devil, right?
So why do we have to insist that somebody really, truly has some form of free will (that just happens to perfectly fit the classic definition of what it looks like to not have free will)?
b&
On the contrary, I didn’t have a horse in the race with the free will debate for a very long time and didn’t advocate for any side for a long time. I came to embracing the compatibilist definition of free will because in my professional work—research in artificial intelligence—I found that compatiblism is actually a really important concept and one that will become increasingly important as AI technology develops, because the the status of an intelligent system will dictate how we handle it. In contrast, I’ve found no use for the libertarian definition and any possible value of the incompatibilist position was equally captured in the compatibilist position.
Your argument is increasingly becoming a series of blatantly false assumptions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations. You really need to stop.
I wouldn’t doubt that the phenomenon you have labeled, “free will,” has been important to your work.
This entire discussion is about whether or not your phenomenon is recognizable by anybody else as what they consider to be the phenomenon of “free will,” and the wisdom of adopting that label for your phenomenon.
b&
Yes, it fits in quite nicely with the views of plenty of other compatibilists and gets at the heart of what decision making is, a relevant component to any definition of free will. I’ve had plenty of compatibilists be entirely comfortable with how I’ve defined it. I’ve also had people who were more on the incompatibilist side decide that it was a useful concept worth adopting after listening to it.
So where’s your freedom not to be coerced?
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Perfect! Like the comparison someone made earlier that free will was like saying “freedom of religion”. Sure in a pedestrian sense that’s a understandable concept, if you’re free from societal pressure, but in this context religious choice is still determined by life experience, and physics. You have no control over that input.
JM, I still don’t see an actual definition of “free will” in your first para.
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I’ll restate it for you. An agent has free will if they engage in the computational process of decision making and when they were not created by another decision making agent that designed them to make the specific decisions that they do.
To drill down, a computational decision making process is a process that solves decision making problems. For example, Markov Decision Processes define one class of decision making problem and an processes that runs an algorithms to solve the specific problem (e.g., value iteration) is a decision making processes.
The concept of a decision making agent is critical to reasoning in general. For example game theory is a field precisely because of the unique properties of decision making agents interacting.
Thanks for that restatement…because it made clear what role the designer is playing in your concept.
…and because I’ll now challenge you on it from the other end.
If you fast-forward the clock several more iterations of Moore’s Law to the point that you now create a physical model of an human brain to the synapse level (or whatever deeper level turns out to be necessary), and that computer model of a brain functions indistinguishably from a flesh-and-blood brain…
…well, your definition would demand that this simulated brain doesn’t have free will.
And, again: I would argue that “free will” is incoherent and needs to be dropped from these types of discussions with extreme prejudice. But, I would also argue that, if humans have “free will,” whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be, then this model of a brain must also have it.
What does this “designer” actually add to your definition?
And, please, no weaseling on “specific decisions.” You’ve presumably either modeled it on the point-in-time state of some other human, “raised” it from “birth,” or some other variation on that theme…which puts its decisions under the exact same types of manipulation as any other human.
Did you really have a choice in the last election, or was it so obvious that you can’t imagine voting otherwise? Which puts right back to the ancient theological dualistic terms of the discussion.
b&
No, my definition would almost surely include a simulated brain as a free will agent. The fact that something is created alone isn’t sufficient to violate free will in the definition that I gave (if that were my position, then you could argue that giving birth is creation and therefore violating free will). It’s that the decision making agent that is created was created to produce specific decisions selected by the creator. In other words, the created agent has no free will when the decisions they make (and their enactment) is nothing more than an extension of the creator’s will itself.
Being able to simulate a brain is insufficient to meet that criterion. You’d also have know what the outcomes would be of that agent’s reasoning in the world was and have designed it that to make the specific decisions that you wanted.
For very narrow simulated domains I can do that. For example, in a “grid world” I’m able to program an agent that will through a decision making process make exactly the decision in every state that I intended them to make.
If a person is ever able to design a human brain with that level of control then in that case the crated human wouldn’t have free will, just a will. I’d also be profoundly impressed by the creator.
I’m sorry…but your whole discussion just smacks of dualism. I know you insist that that’s not what you’re proposing…but your language and reasoning is, to my eyes, inseparably dualistic. For example, you’re imparting significance to the intentions of some other third party, when the exact same function carried out without such intention fits a different classification.
May I suggest?
I do believe you are at least a bit confused about the subject, and especially the relevant physics…and most especially the significance of the intention of some third party.
When you actually dig down into these things…the world just simply doesn’t work the way you’re describing, even if you’re creating computer models that might bear some semblance to them.
Worse…what you’re describing really is the world that the dualists describe — or, at least, its logical equivalent….
b&
I’m not confused, but it seems you are. I’ve described for you a classification of a system that is based on the system as it is and the history of events that led to its existence. The definition of a classification itself is in no way a statement about reality. I have no idea what you think I’ve claimed about reality that isn’t how reality is. That decision making processes exist? That it’s possible for me to implement a simulated agent in a simulated environment that will make the exact decisions I intend for it to make?
Let’s start with the obvious point of confusion.
According to your definition (which, incidentally, I’ll agree with Ant is still incomplete), you can have two systems, logically identical down to the last circuit-equivalent. One of them was the product of mindless evolution; the other was carefully and intentionally crafted by a product of mindless evolution.
The former has free will, the latter does not.
If that doesn’t smack of intentionalist supernatural dualistic essentialism, I don’t know what does.
…and, yet, you insist you’re not a dualist, not a supernaturalist, and so on.
So, either you don’t know what those terms mean, or you don’t realize that the inevitable consequences of your definition place it squarely within the realm of those terms.
A fair characterization of either option would be, “confusion,” no?
b&
lol How does that entail anything supernatural? Speaking of confusion, do you even know what supernatural means? A classification that is a function of a history of events doesn’t mean a person claims supernatural properties about reality.
The supernatural bit comes in the fact that you’ve got two entities that would seem to satisfy the identity principle for the purposes of this discussion, but the one has been inexplicably imbued with the power of free will and the other has had the free will sucked out of it.
Plato could do a good job of explaining that in the context of his twisted metaphysics, I’ve no doubt.
But it just simply can’t be rationally done in the modern world with everything we know about how the universe actually works.
To take it another step further: your definition must entail that, after the transporter accident, the “original” Kirk retains his free will, but the one who went through the transporter had lost it.
What you’re proposing is that there is some property of “free will” that’s in addition to physics as we know it, and somehow independent of it. But we know that there’s nothing relevant to human cognition that’s not accounted for by physics as we know it; therefore, your free will, whatever it is, is beyond nature, thus supernatural, thus imaginary and nonexistent in reality.
b&
Formulated another way…with your definition, it is impossible, even in principle, to devise a test that can distinguish which agents do and don’t have free will other than by appealing to the intentions of the creator at the moment of creation.
When Bob created widget A, he intended it to function thusly; when he created widget B, it was after he had a bad fight with his wife and he was just mindlessly going through the motions and didn’t give a damn if the bloody thing even turned on.
It so happens that Bob had enough rudimentary skill that, when he created widget B, it happened to function properly and the same as A, but that sure as Hell wasn’t his intention when he did so.
By your definition, his “I don’t give a fuck” attitude endowed widget B with free will, whilst his careful consideration when creating widget A robbed it of any possibility of ever experiencing the joys of true free will.
There’s nothing whatsoever in physics that can even remotely justify that. And the only place you’ll find anything even remotely comparable…
…is in supernatural dualism, where the scenario as I’ve just laid it out is a perfect fit for Sastra’s definition of the term. It’s Bob’s mind that controls the destinies of the widgets he creates, not mere pedestrian physics.
b&
Not “inexplicably;” perfectly explicably. Again, it’s a classification of a history of events. Does the concept of “age” strike you as supernatural? How about distance traveled?
There are any number of classifications we can imagine that depend on a history of events. Free will is no different; I’m giving you a definition, of what it means and providing you a definition doesn’t mean I’m claiming anything supernatural about reality.
The only thing I can image you’re thinking is that I’m saying that in the evolution case things behave different than in the designed case. But no where have I said that. Again, a classification doesn’t entail anything about reality. It’s a concept.
Now what would be fair to ask is “is it useful to know whether an agent’s decisions were selected by another agent?” Absolutely. Trivial example, suppose I designed a robot that I knew would make decisions leading to the death of another person. If you knew this robot didn’t have free will, that it was designed with the purpose to kill the person, then you damn well better be concerned about the person that made it to do that and respond to them.
If it was a person with free will who did the killing however, then you don’t have to do the same.
I’m sorry, but your example doesn’t at all make sense to me.
Bob creates a robot that represents a lethal hazard. Whether Bob intended to do so or not doesn’t matter to the proximate concern; we’ve got a lethal robot on our hands.
Once we know that Bob was responsible for creating the robot, we can hopefully learn more from him about the nature of the lethality. If it turns out that the lethality was intentionally designed into the robot, we can charge him with first degree murder; if it was an honest mistrake, manslaughter of some variety. Either way, he’s never designing another robot ever again. In a truly just system, it would only determine the nature of the attempts to rehabilitate him.
I truly don’t understand what any conception of “free will” — yours, the dualist one, Coel’s “gun to the head,” or any other — has to do with such a situation.
Now, let’s take your concept a step further.
The difference between an evil murdering robot and a friendly wouldn’t-harm-a-fly robot is a single flip of a single bit in ROM. Maybe there’s a morality subroutine, and the bit switches a critical comparison from an “equals” to a “not equals,” or whatever.
Bob is aware of the critical importance of this bit. He’s very careful to make sure that none of his robots have the evil bit set. None of those robots have free will, according to your definition.
One time, Bob gets distracted and accidentally flips on the evil bit and it passes QA. This robot is evil, and it has free will.
One of Bob’s not-evil robots has that memory location struck by a cosmic ray. It turns evil, and gains free will at that instant.
Bob falls under the influence of an evil wizard. Bob loses his free will. Based on the orders from the wizard, Bob now starts flipping the evil bit on some of his robots. These evil robots, unlike the earlier ones, don’t have free will.
Two of the evil robots come in for routine maintenance, at which time the flipped evil bit is detected and fixed. One of the robots had free will before, but neither has free will when they leave.
One of Bob’s intentionally-evil robots gets hit by a cosmic ray. It’s no longer evil, and it now has free will.
Can you not see just how profoundly incoherent this whole notion of “intentionality” is, at least with respect to how you’re attempting to define “free will”?
b&
Then you just conceded the point about the utility of the concept. In the case when Bob intended the lethalness, you decided on first degree murder charges. In the case of unintentionally, you decided on manslaughter. Ergo, that concept of Bob’s intention in the design of the lethal robot was important because it affected your decision.
Is the point of your convoluted scenario that if people’s intentions wildly flip back and forth, knowing what it was when the robot was created stops providing information? Yes, in such world where people’s motivations are random, by definition you cannot gleam information about their current state from the past state. If such a world ever exists, the value of the concept of a free will agent versus an agent without free under my definition will be purely academic. I don’t know about you, but I hope such a nightmare world never comes to pass.
<sigh />
Now, we’re right back to where Vaal and Coel are…with taking precise legal definitions of certain terms of art and conflating them with theological terms that include many of the same words.
How ’bout you? Will you acknowledge that I’m Black because I have no debts and significant assets? And, if you don’t, can I accuse you of racism?
b&
I’m not conflating any legal terms with philosophic terms. The fact is your decision was different depending on what Bob’s intention was. When a piece of information—the value of a variable—affects the decision, the information has utility. That your particular decision was a legal one in nature is immaterial to the point that the information affected your decision.
I don’t understand your race question. Common definitions of “black” regard either one’s skin color or possible their genetic heritage. I’ll acknowledge you’re black if you satisfy one of those conditions.
Have you not heard of the phrase, “in the black,” indicating positive cash flow?
Do you not accept that that’s a valid and common use of the word, “black”?
If so, how can you possibly reject that I with my lily-white sunburn-prone skin am truly Black? After all, I have the bank statements to demonstrate my financial net worth, and it’s not negative.
My point about intention and the relevant criminal charge was entirely limited to the legal context — just as I’m only “black” in a financial context (and, even there, the language doesn’t scan quite right).
In a racial context, of course I’m not Black.
So, why would you use the legal fact that I don’t have a gun to my head as I type these words, indicating that I type them of my own free will…why would you therefore do a bait-and-switch to claim that I therefore also have some other property you’ve identified with the words, “free will”?
…or maybe you really are willing to admit that I’m Black after all, since my mortgage and credit cards are all paid off and I’ve got money in the bank?
b&
That’s still not a /definition/ of “free will”. A definition begins, “Free will is…” (And this is not just smart-arsed pedantry. It’s exactly the formula that the Methodologies people in our firm insist on when we are defining technical terms in our reports.)
What you did write describes “an agent [having] free will” does, not what “free will” *is* such that having it enables decision making. At the moment all I can extract from your statement is: “Free will is the capacity to make decisions.” But I’m loathe to put words into your mouth. (For simplicity, ignore the “created to make specific decisions”-type qualification; let’s restrict the definition to people and put questions of if or how it extends to cybernetics or computers aside. I’m not going to go down Ben’s Turing machine path.)
What you wrote also lacks reference to “coercion” or “restraint” that figure elsewhere in the discussion… Are they irrelevant? If not, where do they fit?
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Free will *is* a property of a system, that is why I described it that way.
I don’t see why you’d want to ignore the part about a designer, but sure we can ignore it for now. I’m reluctant to accept your definition of “is the capacity to…” because I’m not sure where you’re going with “capacity.” If you want to restrict the discussion to decision making, then we can simply test whether a system runs a decision making process.
The only form of “coercion” my definition would consider is with respect to my discussion of a creator.
JM, I wasn’t offering that as a definition; that’s just what I inferred from your statement.
All I have from you now is: “Free will is a property of a system…” And?
A designer seems irrelevant if we’re interested only in the free will people have, which am I, for now. We know people aren’t designed!
I don’t *want* to restrict the discussion to decision making; but that was all *you* were talking about … add anything else that defines free will to *your* satisfaction.
So, you’re definition of free will is different from other compatibilists that do reference “gun to the head” scenarios, then?
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(Did I mention? We’ve got at least as many compatibilist definitions of the term as we have compatibilists. Which one is the True Scottish Compatibilist, and why is his haggish porridge more pure than everybody else’s?)
b&
I don’t know what you’re asking me to fill in. I’ve already described what makes something a decision making process. Free will is a property, a classification of a system, that is true when the system is a decision making process and when its existence isn’t due to a creator under the conditions specified. I have nothing further to add to the definition. That’s it.
I wouldn’t say the (lack of) designer condition is irrelevant. If you were having problems understanding what I meant by it, then it seems I’d have to elaborate further. Theists naturally disagree on the lack of creator so it’s also rather critical for me to include even when in the context of people. However, if you feel you understand what I meant, we don’t have to spend time on it.
Regarding gun the head, no, I wouldn’t classify the person as lacking free will in that case. The person is still making decisions, it’s just that the set of possible outcomes they can realize are limited as a consequence of the person with the gun. Similarly, if someone gave me retractable wings, I wouldn’t say that my free will has been increased.
I think recognizing the property that someone can limit another’s possible outcomes important and related, but I think it’s better to keep that as a separate idea.
Ant, this formulation of the definition might satisfy the form you were looking for and is about as concise as I can make it.
Free will is the act of decision making that was not designed and decided by another agent.
I can expand on it from there if you want additional clarification.
I think you, at a minimum, need to define, “agent.”
You would, presumably, exclude the laws of physics as an agent, yet I (and, I doubt, Ant) can imagine valid grounds for such an exclusion without invoking ghost-in-the-machine dualism.
Ditto Evolution. How is Darwinian Evolution not the ultimate proximate agent on Earth?
b&
I’m using agent in this case as shorthand for “decision making system.” Same definition of decision making applies. I suppose we could also add the condition that it’s an agent when the results of the decision making system affect the rest of the world from which observations defining the context of the decision were derived.
“Physics” isn’t a system, so it’s not an agent. Physics are the underlying rules by which a system operates. You can create different computational systems, including decision making systems, by constructing different configurations of the elements on which the physics operate (in our case, electrons, bosons, etc.).
Regarding natural evolution, no it is not an agent. There is no stored metric it uses to compute the value of outcomes and the expected value of different actions that is used to output the an action.
Then, first, we must keep digging deeper down the rabbit hole. What is a “decision” in your language? And would not a simple thermostat decide when to turn the A/C on and off?
I do believe our host would suggest that you’re mistraken there. What else is genetic survival but a metric that computes the values of outcomes?
You frequently harp upon the significance of a designer in your distinctions between when something does and doesn’t have whatever it is you think is “free will.” Are you not aware that Evolution is, far and away, the most fantastically successful designer known to humanity?
Would you care to attempt to design even a “simple” bacterium, all by yourself? A tiny skin mite? An elephant?
How can you so blithely ignore the most spectacularly successful designer in all of known history on the one hand whilst privileging the clumsy and ham-handed design decisions of rank amateurs on the other?
b&
Skipping over your poor attempt at illustrating equivocation, what bait and switch did I do? Or what terms have I equivocated if you think I have? Why are you brining up “gun to the head” comments when I have not made any comments about that. You seem to be confusing me with someone else.
I will repeat myself, since you do not appear to have addressed what I said the point was. The fact is your decision was different depending on what Bob’s intention was. When a piece of information—the value of a variable—affects the decision, the information has utility. That your particular decision was a legal one in nature is immaterial to the point that the information affected your decision.
To be more blunt: I don’t care how terms are defined legally, that has absolutely nothing to do with my point.
My point is that there are many different terms with entirely different definitions that happen to be composed of the words, “free,” and, “will.” You brought up the criminal example, in which questions of legal culpability depend on the legal definition of the term, and I replied accordingly.
That “of one’s own free will” has a clear and coherent definition in a court of law is entirely irrelevant. A lawyer could also offer a coupon for no-charge estate planning with every prenup, and that would also be a valid example of a “free will.”
What’s not coherent is “free will” as put forth by the theologians and philosophers and as “understood” (and I use the term advisedly) by the general population.
Your own definition of “free will” is neither the legal one nor the common one — and, indeed, would typically be used as an example of something that isn’t free will.
That’s a bait-and-switch.
Theologian: “We must have free will, for it alone can explain the evil we see in the world.” Me: “Don’t be silly. Both your ‘free will’ and the divinity you’re attempting to excuse with it are incoherent fantasies.’ You: “Of course you have free will! It’s an essential property of any algorithm that wasn’t actually designed with a particular purpose in mind.” Theologian and me, in unison: “What the fuck, dude!?”
b&
The situation I brought does not have anything to do with legal terms. It has to do with the fact that *your decision* changes depending on the value of the information. I am in no way invoking anything about what law is or how the terms are defined in law. If the law defined free will as eating pudding on Tuesdays, my point would be the same because my point has nothing to do with what the legal terms are! You’re projecting a position that I am not making. I’m not sure how many straw mans this is for you, but if you engage in it again, then I’m going to start ignoring you.
I have no idea how you reach the conclusion that I’ve done a bait and switch by telling you what my definition of free will is when you asked for it.
You asked about a madman who created an assassin robot and what the response should be. Of course I included legal prosecution of such an individual.
If it’s not obvious to you why a legal perspective is essential in considering the societal impacts of madmen who create assassin robots…I ain’t got nothin’ for ya’, pal.
b&
(Sorry Ben, I initially posted this under the wrong comment)
Ben,
Re definitions.
First “ghost in the machine” isn’t exactly a
clear or precise definition of free will.
As to compatibilist definitions, the concept has been stated plainly over and over here.
I’ll take this from Wikipedia’s page on free will as defined in compatibilism:
“compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one’s determined motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.”
And, slightly expanded:
“Compatibilists often define an instance of “free will” as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to his own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained.”
I would be very surprised if you do not recognize that this is the position so often expressed by compatibilists here.
We say this, and then it seems the retort comes: “But there’s nothing referencing dualism or ghost in the machine in there, so THAT’S not free will!”
And round and round we go…
Cheerio,
Actually…your second definition is of a ghost in the machine. Indeed, it’s the archetypal example of such!
To wit:
…and the laws of physics are, what? Chopped liver?
Either the laws of physics work as we understand them to, and they restrain every step of the action of the agent in no uncertain terms…or the agent is free from the laws of physics and the very epitome of a ghost in the machine.
So, is the compatibilist definition that agents are free from restraint from anything other than the laws of physics? Again, whatever you might propose that’s other than physics…is the very definition of the supernatural.
So, I’m sorry…but, if you want me to take that definition seriously, then my only possible conclusion is that you’re a dualist of one form or another. Maybe it’s not because you think the theological conception of a soul applies, but it’s certainly because you think that the laws of physics are inapplicable when it comes to questions of agency.
b&
No, because the term “free will” is not about laws of physics, so it doesn’t imply the absence of constraints from the laws of physics.
The term is about social interactions, so it’s primarily about constraints from other humans. Things like guns to the head, being put in jail, threatened with blackmail, et cetera.
Okay. Let me flip it another direction.
A Catholic walks into the room. You reassure her that, yes, indeed, she does free will, as evidenced by the absence of firearms aimed at her cranium.
What have you accomplished, aside from confusing the Hell out of everybody in the room?
b&
When talking to a dualist I’d be clear to distinguish between the very different concepts dualist-FW and compatibilist-FW.
And, what I accomplish by compatibilism is a language and set of concepts for understanding what we mean by “choice” and “decision” in a deterministic world.
Then, quite simply, I disagree (profoundly) with your semantical aesthetics. I think you’re doing nothing but confusing things hopelessly with your attempt to re-brand “free will” to mean exactly that which it, for millennia, has meant the opposite of.
b&
And once again, the compatibilist interpretation of the term has an equally long history.
I know I’m asking for it by wading in here but to me and I think other incompatibilists, there is always a gun to the head. It’s just that that gun is metaphorical.
Honestly,mi think compatibilists agree on most things and that it is the term “free will” that is the problem.
Diana,
We agree in broad terms that we are determined by physics, though you want to represent this “metaphorically” as a “gun to the head.”
But, really, when you look more closely, isn’t this quite a problematic conception – really just playing too loose with metaphors?
Let’s say a lawyer was representing a defendant who put a gun to your head, and ordered you to hand over your money or else he’d blow your head off.
He argues that the defendant isn’t “really” guilty because after all, you gave him the money. You chose to do it, right?
You object that you only did so under threat of your life, because “He held a gun to my head!”
The Lawyer replies: “Sure, but in the end we ALL have a gun to our head in this deterministic universe…why are you quibbling about this?”
That of course wouldn’t fly with your or anyone for a second, would it? Yes, one could use the imagery of a “gun to the head” to represent determinism, but it’s another thing entirely to say that merely using this imagery entails that there is no qualitative difference between “the overall constraints put on us by physics” and the “specific types of constraints in certain cases one person may put on another, like holding a gun to their head.” It would be pretty short-sighted to confuse the two, right?
I mean, this sort of falls into the level of thinking where the Christian says that since we all have *some* beliefs we can’t “prove” then we all have “faith” – as if it makes the defensible assumptions held by atheists on the same footing as the indefensible supernatural assumptions held by theists.
As to “Free Will” the term itself being a problem, I agree. It’s clearly problematic in some ways, and I have no particular attachment to it. If getting rid of it would actually clear up the issues surrounding free will, I’d be fine dumping it. The problem is, IMO, there are so many ideas and issues wrapped up in Free Will that it’s not nearly so easily and cleanly disposed of. Done crudely, it seems as apt to sew more confusion than keeping it. Sort of like when we discovered that “living things” did not depend on a elan vital force. If someone suggested “since there are misconceptions related to living things, let’s just do away with the terms ‘life’ and ‘living,’ that would be more apt to confuse things and be unworkable. Because the term
was already useful in applying to real world differences we observe – things we call “alive” are clearly substantially different than things we’ve been calling “dead,” just not exactly for ALL the reasons people had assumed.
If we assume “free will” is ONLY about dualism, we will make the mistake of sewing more confusion than is necessary by declaring “Free Will doesn’t exist!”
The difference is the gun to the head is a legalistic way of saying you weren’t coerced by anyone. That doesn’t mean that a deterministic universe left really no other choice for all involved.
Vall, “of one’s own free will” is an entirely different term than the one under discussion. “Of one’s own free will” is a legal term with its own precise definition, and the only thing it shares in common with the “free will” under discussion are the words.
You do understand, do you not, that the same words can have entirely different and unrelated meanings?
Again, my example: Cory bitches about Driving While Black, and I tell him that it’s good he’s in the black because he needs positive cash flow.
Your whole courtroom scene is as much of a non-sequitur as that previous sentence.
So don’t do it crudely!
“Free will” — the variety under discussion — is an essential point in discussions of theodicy. But we can dispense with those by just realizing that there aren’t any gods — or are you going to want us to “salvage” the concept of a god so we can keep using “free will” in discussions about theodicy?
“Free will” often comes up in contexts of the justification for punishment. But that’s entirely irrelevant, and usually just a mask for somebody’s bloodlust. You don’t need to even mention “free will” if you’re trying to construct a just and healthy criminal justice system, so can’t we just drop it from that context?
And on and on and on.
Yes, the religious think “free will” is essential to all sorts of very important topics. But so what? They also think their gods are. But is that any reason to cling to some sort of notion of divinity just to discuss, say, marriage equality?
b&
The difference is the gun to the head is a legalistic way of saying you weren’t coerced by anyone. That doesn’t mean that a deterministic universe left really no other choice for all involved.
But I suggest that is really just skirting reflection on the difference.
Again, think about why it is you would be outraged if the Lawyer attempted to downplay the relevance of the gun to your head by referring metaphorically to the entire universe as “gun to your head.” Yes we are constrained by physics, but you wouldn’t for a second accept this as a justification for downplaying the relevant difference between, say, lending money to a friend because you wanted to, vs someone threatening to kill you if you didn’t give them money.
That these differences DO become a legalistic issue – that we see the difference as so dramatic and substantial that we’d say one is “wrong” and we’d jail the perpetrator, where we’d have no such reaction to the uncoerced money-giving scenario…just underlines how important these issues are to us – how general appeals to “the constraints of physics” just aren’t helpful on the scale of interaction in much of our lives.
My reaction to your saying “metaphorically the constraints in the universe are like a gun to our head, just like a person holding a gun to our head” is just like your reaction would be to the Lawyer making the same equivalence in the trial. Sorry bub, but there are very relevant differences involved here that such generalized metaphors just aren’t useful for describing.
The lawyer would be in serious jeopardy for contempt and maybe even disbarment for so gratuitously abusing a precisely-defined legal term in such a manner.
Now, can we please limit this discussion of “free will” to the actual term as is used in contexts such as the one we’re ostensibly in?
Or would you blather about profit-loss ratios in response to my friend Cory if he told you about the time the guy at the bar as much as told him they don’t serve “his type” there?
b&
But there is a metaphorical gun to the head! Compatibilists and incompatibilists are arguing about two different things!
The lawyer WOULDN’T downplay an actual gun to my head if there was one but no one because the trial would be about the ACTUAL gun to the head. The defence, however, may show that they gun holder had a mental illness so he had a metaphorical gun to his head too.
I don’t think you’d argue with any of these things as they seem completely consistent with both the compatibilist and incompatibilist positions.
The real problem is what compatibilists call free will confuses things. It needs to be called something else.
Ben,
“Now, can we please limit this discussion of “free will” to the actual term as is used in contexts such as the one we’re ostensibly in?”
The thread is about compatibilism.
You have explicitly asked compatibilists for their definition (and defense of) “free will.”
My response to Dianna’s metaphor continues the process of explaining the type of distinctions important in compatibilist free will. Why we do not think the general appeal to “the laws of physics” and determinism is sufficient to undermine the concept of “freedom.”
You did ask for compatibilists to explain themselves, right? What other context did you think is taking place here?
This has gone the way it usually goes. Ben you start out accusing compatibilists of flat out mushiness and incoherency. You ask for the compatibilist concept of free will to be explained. It’s explained. You start identifying it as incoherent. We point out that it’s only become incoherent to the degree you are not listening to OUR version, but substituting your preferred concept of Libertarian Freedom.
Once this is pointed out, it seems you ignore that you haven’t found the inconsistencies you claimed…or you barely admit “ok, so maybe in the context you are using free will it isn’t inconstant or incoherent…BUT THAT’S NOT REAL FREE WILL!”
Now, we know you will only recognize one concept of free will – it’s spooky and that’s it. This is the point at which we must part.
But can we at least flag this: Can you admit that the compatibilist concept of “free” as we apply it to “free will” is not “spooky,” does not entail denying or contradicting physical reality, and is at least internally consistent?
You think the free will “most people think they have” is something different. But can you at least acknowledge now with the definitions I supplied and further explanations, that compatibilist freedom isn’t so mysterious, inconsistent, spooky, etc?
Because it seems we always get to this point, and then it’s all forgotten and we are back at square one again with “compatibilism isn’t even coherent…what do you guys even mean?” declarations, each time this comes up.
Anyway, we’ve again reached diminishing returns and I’m outta here. (And I want to stress as I have before, I don’t sit here thinking my viewpoint on free will is just air tight, and just so “obviously right” and incompatibilists are wrong. I’m just calling it as I personally see it thus far and I’m open to changing my mind).
Thanks for the fun! You are an asset to the WEIT 🙂
Cheers,
Yes, if you’ll similarly acknowledge that I’m Black because I have a positive cash flow.
What I won’t admit is that your non-spooky “free will” is the same as the “free will” which dualists resort to as an explanation for why bad things happen to good people.
Will you also admit that your “free will” is completely unrelated to the dualist “free will,” and refers to something that doesn’t even vaguely resemble it?
If so…won’t you please acknowledge the confusion that your compatibilism causes by using your not-dualistic-free-will definition in discussions about dualistic free will?
b&
Ben,
You are confusing things by first asking what free will is on compatibilism, and then
importing your own concept of “free” to say the compatibilist version is confused.
It should be screamingly obvious, only stated a million times by now, that the compatibilist understanding of “free” is NOT related to “free from ALL POSSIBLE CONSTRAINTS – e.g. free from the constraints of the physical universe! So that CAN’T be what the words “restrained” refer to, in the compatibilist understanding of “free will.”
We’ve been through this so many times. We are talking of being free of *particular constraints* related to any *given choice*
as it relates to our doing what we want to do.
Example: I’m sitting here typing a reply – I’ve freely chosen to do so. Does this mean – *on the compatibilist view which is what you asked for* – that I mean “free from ALL restraints, e.g. the effects of the physical universe? No, of course not.
I’m free, as the definition references, insofar as I am not being coerced – e.g. threatened by physical harm/gun to my head etc. Another way of forcing me against my will would be to either constrain me physically either to the chair, or constraining me physically from setting in the chair to type the reply. Then I wouldn’t be “free to do as I want.”
This is everyday talk of “freedom.”
How you make the inferential leap in reading that definition from “not coerced” (clearly by the intent/actions of another agent) to then presuming “not constrained” suddenly means “free from how the physical universe works” is utterly beyond me. Especially given we are talking of compatibilism which you know accepts a determined universe anyway.
These merry-go-round conversations seem utterly doomed by the unshakable conviction
on the incompatiblist side that “free” can ONLY mean “free from all possible physical causes” or it’s not really “freedom” at all.
You take an incoherent view of “free” and automatically shove it into the compatibilist argument, as if to make the compatibilist argument incoherent…on the grounds it isn’t employing your incoherent notion of “free.”
Which is the most bizarre, self-defeating view of “freedom.” And, as has been argued, it’s not even very consonant with the everyday use of the term “free” “freedom” etc to begin with.
It is a bizarre state of affairs to be expressing a view that freedom can be understood in a deterministic frame work that does not challenge anything we know scientifically about the nature of reality.
And then to be conversing with dissenting folks who will only take “freedom” to mean something supernatural or it ain’t real freedom…but who also characterize the compatibilists as the ones acting like the religious!
It is “a little bit pregnant”!
That may be your problem. You’re trying to turn a binary dichotomy into a subjective continuum.
b&
So you’re asking about the *compatiblist* notion of “free will”, and yet you’re continually imposing *your* constraints on what it means!
Who said that the *compabibilist” free will must be binary? Compatibilists do not say that!
» Coel:
So you’re asking about the *compatiblist* notion of “free will”, and yet you’re continually imposing *your* constraints on what it means!
‘Oh, but my authoritarianism is employed in the interest of truth, so it is obviously justified. Surely you can see that?’
“It is “a little bit pregnant”! ”
The “little bit pregnant” of course meaning “impossible” or “incoherent.”
So, then, Ben is it a “little bit pregnant” to say:
The dog was running FREE in the yard.
The slaves were given their FREEDOM.
In this country we espouse FREEDOM of the press.
I am FREE for lunch on Thursday.
The inmate worked FREE of his handcuffs.
After serving his time, the inmate was a FREE man. Or FREE to leave the prison.
Etc.
What *exactly* is your appraisal of these uses of the word “free?”
Do you disavow all of them as impossible, incoherent concepts? Explain how you aim to overhaul language.
Or..if you recognize those are completely rational, coherent, useful concepts within even a determined universe – that they can describe one REAL LIFE condition vs another…what in the world are you on about with this “little bit pregnant” stuff?
Really, it isn’t some emotional dissonance that drives people like me to compatibilism, it’s the baffling incoherency I find in other views that make me reject them. I can’t just accept a viewpoint that I can not make any sense of, any more than you can.
Vaal, I’m an immaculate conception compatibilist. I think the immaculate conception is real and compatible with atheism. There’s no need to invoke god or original sin. That’s just silly. Everyone knows they are stupid and wrong. But immaculate means very clean, neat, tidy, flawless, perfect… That’s how we use that word ALL THE TIME. Do we need to stop using the words immaculate, neat, clean, etc, just because you can’t divorce it from its theological meaning? When I talk about the immaculate conception I’m talking about a perfect, flawless, clean fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm. Don’t let the Catholics win by allowing them to take away our perfectly good definition of the word immaculate (Sastra’s argument). And stop telling me that the immaculate conception means something other than what I’m saying it means or that I’m confusing people. Obviously there’s no god and no original sin – I don’t know why I have to keep repeating that. The immaculate conception has NOTHING TO DO with god or original sin. Why is this so hard to understand?!?
pacopicopiedra,
While I enjoyed the effort put into your reductio ad absurdum, unfortunately it misses
the target due to some confusion.
The one-time event referent of Christianity’s “Immaculate conception” does not infiltrate our everyday language, interactions, nor does it have across-the-board-to-everyone bearing on issues like self-hood, responsibility, ability-to-choose etc. Free Will is a concept used outside of Theism and Christianity. Which is why not only Christians but people across all faiths and lack of faith have philosophical interests to solve on the subject of Free Will. And further, the concept of Free Will is used by both religious and non-religious
to identify non-supernatural differences in states of affairs (e.g. staying at a house of one’s own free will, or being confined there by force).
“Immaculate Conception” has nothing like this rich, VARIED and infiltrating reach both linguistically or conceptually. The term and concept of “immaculate conception” is not one used by theist and secular alike.
A more fitting metaphor for the Free Will-like state of affairs would be:
If many people thought that ALL conceptions were magical in the sense of requiring God’s deliberate, magical input to inseminate eggs or produce the sperm/egg pairing.
Would we throw out the word “conception?”
If someone says “If it’s not MAGICAL conception, then conception doesn’t exist.”
Then this is just another confusion on that person’s part to be clarified. Because clearly their referent – one we all use “conception” – DOES refer to real things happening in the world. Humans ARE conceived and born. There is clearly a non-magical part of the referent – in fact the most RELEVANT part of the referent – that does not itself just vanish when you realize the magical part is wrong.
Would it make sense to GO ALONG with the confusion of someone making the above claim and say “Ok, you’re right, conception doesn’t exist?”
No. We’d try to disabuse someone of their incorrect magical *explanation* for how conception operates. Just as we did for the word “life” and what most secular philosophers (and regular secular folk) do for the term “morality.”
Cheers,
Vaal, I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but my main point is that your argument that the word free has meanings when used in free man, free choice, even free will in other contexts that will become meaningless unless we take the compatibilist position fails when applied to other words which have different meanings in different contexts. So I gave an elaborate example. Words and phrases can mean different things in different contexts. Why do you keep insisting that we must abandon the word “free” if we declare free will is false? Even the phrase free will remains fine and useful in the context of the law and contracts, etc. We don’t need to rid the language of the word free when we acknowledge that free will is an illusion.
I think this is one of the best explanations of the compatibilist position I’ve seen. I think it is good because it describes how it isn’t talking about being free from the laws of physics, which is where incompatibilists get confused about the compatibilist position.
Honestly, i really think it is the term, “free will”, that is the problem. We shouldn’t use it at all – let the dualists have it! We need to talk about determinism and how dualistic free will doesn’t exist.
Yes!
The point that the compatibilists are missing…
…is that the definition they’re using for the term, “free will,” is (radically) different from the definition that everybody else is operating from.
The phenomenon the compatibilists may be referring to with the words, “free will,” may be real; it may even be desirable or have any of the other properties compatibilists claim of it.
But, what we can all agree upon…is that is most emphatically is not the same phenomenon (real or imaginary) that everybody else means when they use those words.
Compatibilists defend their confusing and non-standard definitions (and, let’s not kid ourselves — we’ve seen as many different compatibilist definitions of the term in this thread as we’ve seen compatibilists) by all sorts of appeals…such as wanting to have some real phenomenon they can point to when they use those words, to salvage it for some reason or another, or because there are not-dissimilar turns of phrases in the language.
But those same excuses would fall flat for any other theological construct.
Must we claim that heaven is real, but that it’s not some place you go in the sky after you die but rather the feeling you have after a really satisfying shit? Won’t people behave immorally if they don’t think there’s a real heaven? And there’s an incredibly long history of using the term, “heavenly,” to describe the intensely pleasurable, so how can we possibly object to identifying “heaven” as the feeling you have after a really good shit? And isn’t there something fundamentally mysterious about how a shit can feel so good?
I know the compatibilists will object to that preceding paragraph as a straw man caricature of what they’re trying to do…but, honestly? I can’t see the difference.
b&
This is why I keep saying that compatibilists are really claiming *moral responsibility* and such is (are) compatible with determinism, not “free will” per se. I.e., that the things that free will “gets you” (that are “worth wanting”, in the case of Dennett, too).
I don’t think you’ll win much support from incompatibilists with that sort of language, either.
“Moral responsibility” smacks of a blame game with righteous retribution as the end goal, and many of us want nothing whatsoever to do with that. It’s every bit as primitive as the metaphysics of duality typically used to justify it…and it’s exactly that really nasty dark side that so many of us point to as the horrific real-world consequences of clinging so desperately to the notion of “free will.”
b&
» Ben:
The incompatibilists are operating with an unambiguous definition of, “free will”: the popular libertarian misconception of a dualistic ghost in the machine.
Yes, the incompatibilists are indeed operating with an unambiguous definition—one that from the outset defines the phenomenon that is supposed to be under discussion as silly, and then they criticise compatibilists for holding a silly position. I don’t think that is an intellectually reputable tactic, to put id mildly.
And of course you keep repeating over and over again that this ridiculously prejudicial definiton is “popular”, “what most people believe” etc.—while curiously never pointing to a single shred of evidence for that assertion and similarly pretending that evidence to the contrary is non-existent. See the above para for what that tactic is not.
The incompatibilists aren’t the one who have defined the term in a silly manner. It’s the philosophers and theologians who’ve been defining the term thusly for millennia, and we’re just running with it.
It’s the compatibilists who have this strange compulsion to de-sillify this fundamentally silly concept, and us incompatibilists are trying to get the point across to you compatibilists that you’re just making yourselves even sillier in the process.
b&
Still all blustery assertion, no evidence or critical attitude.
Perhaps we can move past this if we can come to agreement on a simple question.
If you were to poll a representative sample of Americans on the reason why bad things happen to good people, would you or would you not expect a significant majority to include “free will” as part of the response? (And include those who consider it an option worthy of serious consideration even if they don’t settle on it as their final answer in your counts.)
If you would, then that’s all the evidence you need to get a feel for the sorts of confusion the compatibilist position creates.
If you wouldn’t, you have a radically different perception of the common state of affairs than what us incompatibilists have, and there’s likely not reasonable common ground on which to base a discussion.
b&
So your proposal is to pose a question whose relevance you can’t or won’t explain but simply take for granted (I think I spot a pattern there) and then declare the rules to be ‘Heads, I win; tails, you lose’.
Tempting, but I think I won’t bite quite yet.
Sorry, but I’m not seeing what’s unreasonable about this.
If you want me to go do scholarly research to support the proposition that most Americans think that “free will” is of essential relevance to the matter of theodicy…sorry. I’m not going to jump through those kinds of hoops for you.
And if you seriously think that that’s not the case, then I’m going to dismiss you as being seriously out of touch.
Of course, it could be that I’m the one who’s out of touch, but the end result is the same — namely, that there’s no meaningful common ground on which to base a conversation.
So…do you really think it’s unreasonable to suggest that “free will” is essential to theodicy in the minds of the majority of Americans, and that that and similar contexts are the main ones in which “free will” is relevant to a discussion?
b&
Ben, anyone who has been on WEIT for any length of time recognises that your definition of anyone whose argument is “silly” is anyone who disagrees with YOU. You don’t do the case for incompatabilism any good whatsoever by representing yourself as one of the debaters who argues for it.
““free will” is essential to theodicy in the minds of the majority of Americans, and that that and similar contexts are the main ones in which “free will” is relevant to a discussion?”
…. and, it is not a sign of rational competent debate to ask other debaters precisely what they mean by a term and then, because that definition does not suit one’s argument, to bring up totally different definition of the term as a straw man.
The dishonesty is the bait-and-switch act coming from the compatibilists.
Everybody both the compatibilists is debating the existence of dualistic free will.
Then a compatibilist comes along and reassures everybody to not worry, because, yes, we all really do have free will — only it’s the type of free will that’s explicitly defined as not free will by everybody else having the discussion.
b&
Arguing over whether free will is compatible with determinism or not is futile, It doesn’t even make sense since it depends how you define free will.
We’d do much better to divide ourselves up into those who think belief in contra causal free is doing a lot of harm and those who don’t.
I’d say it is. If I’d been born one minute later I’d have a very different life for better or worse. Sheer luck. This reasoning can be applied to every choice, since I would have made a different choice if causal antecedents going back to my birth and beyond had been appropriately different. (assuming determinism).
Belief in contra causal free will can be put as the denial of this luck.
It’s unkind and unfair to deny this luck so it’s a malignant illusion.
I’d actually take it a step further and say time is better spent convincing people about the truth of determinism. Perhaps this is just another way of saying what you are saying. I think believing that we are ghosts in the machine, who operate outside physics, has caused loads of suffering. It’s what makes people think mental illness is the fault of the sufferer and that those people should just stop behaving the way they do.
Good point Diana.
Against my better judgement, I’m going to make a comment.
Earlier in the thread I expressed my approval of Sean Carroll’s take on compatabilism. His analogies of emergent physical properties like pressure and temperature, while apt, are lacking something when we’re talking about free will, or at least the feeling of free will, and other properties of mind. If we have knowledge of the microscopic state of a gas, we can compute pressure and temperature from physical principles; but if we have microscopic knowledge of brain states, down to synaptic and even molecular levels, we can’t compute emergent phenomena of mind, such as thoughts, emotions, desires, quailia, the feeling of free will, and the essence of consciousness.
Suppose one picks up a hot plate and one’s microscopic brain state is known. The response of pain receptors can be modeled, the cascading effects through the nervous system can be predicted, leading to a response of dropping the plate and yelling “OW! OW!”. What can’t be modeled is the feeling of “hot”. That conscious experience seems completely superfluous and unnecessary to what’s going in a physical description, but nevertheless it’s real. In my opinion, subjective mental phenomena are forever outside the realm of physical explanation. They’re emergent phenomena from physical processes — there’s no dualism, no deepities — but they’re inexplicable, at least within our current understanding of physics.
These discussions back and forth tend to get personal, and I have no appetite for that.
I have a strong hunch that a book that I just ordered that’s due to arrive tomorrow would address your objections — at least in principle, though, certainly, we’re hopelessly far away from addressing them in practice.
The book is Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. According to descriptions, it put forth a proposition that I at least think I’ve independently arrived at: that consciousness is a recursive model of a system that includes itself in the model.
A character in a computer game isn’t conscious. That character would become conscious if in included subroutines that (roughly) modeled its surroundings in the game, in addition to itself, including its model of its surroundings that includes itself.
The various models need not be precise nor detailed; our own conceptions of our surroundings and ourselves are certainly lacking and flawed. But they’ve got to be there and recursive.
The better the models, the better the awareness. A model that can be virtually run forward and backward and reset permits the type of analysis that we subjectively perceive as “exercising our free will.”
Put that all together, and it should be obvious how the subjective is entirely amenable to physical explanation. Indeed, you can stop with your explanation long before you have to invoke physics, or even chemistry. The physical hardware upon which the agent and its model are running upon are irrelevant; all that matters is that the model is there and recursively inclusive.
…but, again, that’s my own formulation of it and I haven’t yet even received Hofstadter’s book, let alone read it.
Cheers,
b&
My hunch, also, is that recursion is fundamental to a theory of mind, but it’s only a hunch.
I think we can safely go beyond a mere hunch that it’s fundamental.
Quick question: what’s on your mind?
…now, explain how you can answer such a question, even in principle, without resorting to recursion. And what could be more fundamental to consciousness and a theory of mind than the ability to answer how it’s hangin’?
b&
It’s possible, even likely, that computation transcends physics.
Erm…I don’t think I can buy off on that one. It is, no exaggeration, a statement in support of supernaturalism, if I’m reading you right.
We can start with Church-Turing, which states that anything that can be computed can be computed by a Turing machine. We can add to that the fact that, as Sean Carroll puts it, the laws of physics underlying everyday life are perfectly understood — and, to boot, perfectly computable.
Bear with me a moment as I invoke one of those “But you can’t prove me worng!” insane paranoid conspiracy theories.
Imagine a Matrix-style computer simulation, and we’re inside the simulation. As such, we have no idea how big or sophisticated the computer actually is. It needn’t be limited to the physical constraints of what we can build here on Earth inside the simulation; it could, quite reasonably, have more logic circuits than the entire universe as we perceive it has coordinate points in spacetime.
In other words, imagine a computer as much “bigger” than our universe as a PC is “bigger” than a game of Sim City.
Something that big would be logically indistinguishable from how we understand physics — which is where the insane conspiracy theory part comes in. “But you can’t prove me worng!” The hallmark of such insanity, because there are literally infinite variations on such, and each can be infinitely nested within the other…and, to the point, we have no reason to even suspect any of them in the first place or reliably test the theory even if we did happen to guess right.
…but, again. It would constitute a Turing-equivalent machine that computed our entire experiences down to Planck Length and Planck Time — and, perhaps, even some decimal places beyond, just for good measure. All the Many Worlds, even, if that’s what you think physics really is.
Now, that may be what you mean by “computation transcends physics”…but the straightforward interpretation of the phrase implies that you’re going the other direction with it: that, through computation, you can do what physics alone cannot. That the mind has powers that cannot be explained by mere physics.
And that is pure supernatural dualism, the archetypal ghost in the machine. And, because we’re not actually paranoid deluded insane freaks who think we’re living in the Matrix, and we instead know that physics really is complete at human scales and significantly beyond, we know that there isn’t any such thing as supernatural dualistic ghosts in the machine.
Cheers,
b&
I’m not getting sucked into this. Computation is different from physics, while derived from physics, whether transitors or synapses. I’m not a dualist, and don’t call me one. End of discussion.
Erm…that’s really where the dividing line in the definitions of the terms comes down to.
Either minds are what brains do and wholly part of the physics known today as the Standard Model, or minds are that plus something else. Whatever that something else is, it’s, by commonly-agreed-upon definition, supernatural and dualistic.
Or: if you think physics is incapable of explaining minds in the same way it explains biology (indirectly through chemistry, etc.), then you’re a supernatural dualist. There’s the component of the physical body we can all see and touch, plus the non-corporeal non-physical component that’s inexplicable by physics. That dual nature…is what dualism is all about.
If “physics can’t entirely explain minds” really is your position — if I’m not misunderstanding you — and if it makes you uncomfortable to see that equated with dualism…then you really owe it to yourself to do some soul searching as to what it means to you that you think there’s something beyond the natural (“supernatural”) that better explains minds than physics.
b&
It’s frustrating to see so much arguing over the definition of free will. What matters is that there is an illusory version of free will and it makes a lot of sense to think it’s malignant.
The illusion can be put in the form of a denial. What people deny on mass is:
1) To have done otherwise circumstances not of our choosing would have had to have been different.
2) If circumstances not of our choosing had been appropriately different we would have done otherwise.
It’s bad to deny this is what people with my view say. That’s what matters, that’s what we want to see change.
“If “physics can’t entirely explain minds” really is your position — if I’m not misunderstanding you — and if it makes you uncomfortable to see that equated with dualism…then you really owe it to yourself to do some soul searching”
Mind has a “hardware” basis, just as a computer does. The hardware is physical. The function of mind is analogous to the software that runs on that computer. Software is a mathematical construct, not a physical one. So yes, “physics alone can’t explain minds” but physics AND mathematics can. This is NOT however dualism as the traditional term is used. Once again Ben, you are changing the definitions in arguments to set up a straw man. However, we are not holding this discussion in the sixteenth century – the place you feel most comfortable in making the points in your argument.
Then you’re reifying mathematics as the spooky component.
/@
Not spooky Ant, just not physical.
It is of course an interesting (and separate) question of why so much of physical law can be explained mathematically but that doesn’t mean that mathematics is a physical entity. Not at all.
Yeah, that’s what “spooky” means: “not physical” What !*is*! your “mathematics” that it can interact with the matter and forces (fermions and bosons) that make up the physical brain?
Just because you can’t imagine how physics alone can explain consciousness &c. doesn’t mean that there’s another “entity” involved: That is a “mathematics of the gaps” argument!
/@
What !*is*! your “mathematics” that it can interact with the matter and forces (fermions and bosons) that make up the physical brain?”
Gosh Ant, that’s indeed a question so reminiscent of the mind-body causal interaction problem of Descartes day. But we know so much better now. Just think of an arbitrary AND Gate within a computer – does the gate itself control what signals are being logically calculated upon it? No, once a primitive hard-wiring is established to make the overall entity a computer – the gate is just a passive physical component for executing the logical AND function (a mathematical entity). It is SOFTWARE that determines the logical variables presented to the gate at any time. And surely by now we all know that there is such a thing as Input/Output – the interface between executing software (mathematics) and the wider physical world. You deal with the hardware/software divide every day, e.g. with your phone, perhaps even your oven.
The point I am making is that if we think of free-will as a “hardware function” we instinctively tend to oversimplify it’s capabilities in our minds. If we see free-will instead as software (mathematically) related we can appreciate the fact that the functionality is open ended. The point of this debate is to determine if the software of the human brain is sophisticated enough to meet the compatibilist definition of free will. OUR definition that is, not Ben’s straw man definition.
No, that doesn’t fly; “software” is not “mathematics”, it’s bits encoded in magnetic or optical media (all matter and forces still); and AND gates work by electricity (flows of electrons; ditto).
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Yes.
You can construct an AND gate out of water pipes and valves. Make the pipes out of clear tubing and add some bubbles and bits of dye and the like and you’ve got a great educational tool.
I don’t think anybody would make the mistrake of saying that it’s not the plumbing doing the work but some magical mathematical mystery tour.
You can only get away with that sort of thing with electronics because microscopic electricity is spooky — especially when you’ve got so many billions of such pipes and valves in a tiny little black box the size of your fingernail.
Mathematics is an incredibly useful analytical tool for computer science. It functions a lot like Newtonian Mechanics for engineers. It may well be useful for an engineer to model some component as a frictionless sphere…but no engineer would be crazy enough to think that it’s the frictionless sphere that’s really real as opposed to, say, the cow that the frictionless sphere is standing in for. The cow isn’t actually a frictionless sphere…but, at the same time, you can use Newtonian Mechanics to calculate what the maximum velocity would be for a frictionless sphere and know that your cow will never go faster than that — and that sort of answer is often all we’re really looking for.
b&
You’re really going to hate me for this…but your free will as you’ve just outlined it?
It is the dualistic supernatural free will that Ant and I and the rest of the incompatibilists are trying to tell you and the theists doesn’t exist.
You’ve just substituted mathematics for the heavenly plane in which souls reside, is all. Spirits as functions rather than ectoplasmic ghosts.
And that’s not even a particularly original substitution, as it’s basically the same original formulation as what Plato was working with all those millennia ago.
Really, the only difference between your position and the Christian one is that the spirit derives from math, whereas they claim that math derives from the spirit. And this is radically anti-dualistic…how…?
b&
This discussion seems to be going into the area of consciousness. If consciousness is the outcome of complex systems then it isn’t something that can be broken down but is a manifestation of that system.
Are you saying we can’t determine if we have free will until we solve the hard problem of consciousness?
Sorry, but I gotta call bullshit on this one.
That’s not only not true, it’s supernatural dualism — no different, in fact, from a Christian soul.
Software doesn’t exist without hardware, period, full stop, end of story. You might as well try to talk about weather that exists in the absence of an atmosphere, demographics that exist in the absence of individuals, Sastra’s reified Mind Love, or even just plain ol’ garden variety Platonic Idealism where there’s a really real ideal rabbit that you could touch if you got in your rocket ship and made it somewhere past Uranus’s orbit without being smitten by the gods and which is the template for all our terrestrial rabbits.
All software exists as patterned arrangements of matter. When you “buy” (typically, license — but that’s a topic for another rant) software on a CD, you’re buying a piece of pitted aluminum embedded in Lexan. The pits can be trivially translated into a really, really, really big binary number, and that number can be interpreted as a certain Turing machine.
…but the translation to a Turing-like machine (not an actual Turing machine since they can’t actually exist in the real world) is done entirely with real physical hardware, including lasers, fuckin’ magnets, and transistor arrays in the form of integrated circuits. The latter might not seem very physical, but it’s still clumps of electrons moving to one side of the transistor or the other or in or out of it entirely.
Shannon and Nyquist and others have made this most explicitly clear. No energy exchange, no communication. No physical variation, no information. No hardware, no software.
Of course, from an engineering perspective, it’s quite useful to imagine that software is some sort of magical essence. In my day job, I certainly don’t go around shepherding individual electrons from transistor to transistor; I sling code — and, often, rather abstract set theory code, at that.
But, again, that’s no different from a meteorologist describing the projected path of the hurricane.
Claiming that the hurricane in some sense “really exists” absent the atmosphere which makes it up?
Might as well invoke Aeolus and be done with it.
b&
Software doesn’t exist without hardware, period, full stop, end of story.”
Total nosense. Software is algorithmic mathematics. Mathematics is not physical.
What you are saying is that Addition does not exist unless you have a computers Arithmetic Logic Unit, or that an ellipse does not exist without a planetary system, or even that no mathematics can exist at all without a physical host. Yes- you can REPRESENT mathematical things with physical things e.g written equations. But you do not need to write out the equations to make them exist.
I’m sorry, that just Platonic bollocks.
Equations /don’t/ exist until they’re written out. No ellipse exists except in things that are elliptical. They’re our mental constructs, our models that very successfully approximate the real world.
No electron solves Schödinger’s equation. No planet solves Newton’s.
The behave as they behave entirely /because/ of the physics.
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And, I might add: it is this form of Platonism that typifies the disconnected-from-reality ivory tower stereotype of certain classes of academics.
That ellipse is a fantastic tool in predicting where the planet will be at some point in the future. But to scribble the equation for the eclipse on the chalkboard and somehow proclaim that that scribble really, truly, fundamentally actually is the ultimate reality of the planet’s orbit, and what we see in the night sky is just some pale shadow of an approximation of reality?
Doesn’t even pass the sniff test unless you’re already high on the acid of the ancients.
b&
“that just Platonic bollocks.”
Sorry Ant…. Mathematics actually IS Platonic. In mathematics for instance there is the perfect circle, the perfect straight line, hyperreal numbers etc. etc. etc. These perfect entities never exist in the physical world.
“They’re our mental constructs, our models”
….which exist in the form of mental software.. i.e. in mathematical terms
“No electron solves Schödinger’s equation. No planet solves Newton’s.”
Well Ant, just explain then WHY physical laws behave to mathematical rules. You can earn both a Nobel Prise and a Fields Medal for that explanation
“These perfect entities never exist in the physical world.”
True, but they don’t *exist* anywhere; only the /concepts/ exist, and only in our minds. Just like unicorns; you don’t actually have tiny horned horses trotting around inside your skull.
“which exist in the form of mental software.. i.e. in mathematical terms”
That’s egregious question begging!
“just explain then WHY physical laws behave to mathematical rules”
That’s exactly backwards. And it reifies physical laws, which are really only strong principles that fall out of our models. Is it that surprising that humans have constructed a system of mathematics that reflects and describes the world in which we live? Not really.
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“Is it that surprising that humans have constructed a system of mathematics that reflects and describes the world in which we live?”
Well Ant, since mathematics can be spoken of as a form of description, or in other words a “language”, why not tell us the exact physical basis for the nature of LANGUAGE and the physics that imposes that nature of Language
We’ve been telling you, Howie. You’ve been ignoring us.
It’s patterns encoded in either the neuronal arrangements of the brain or the circuitry of the computer or whatever other physical system is doing the languaging.
You don’t think there’s a little man inside your computer who’s painting these words on your screen, no? You do realize that, at some (and, indeed, many) points between my keyboard and your display, every time I type the letter, “A,” there is a pattern of electrical pulses of ASCII 0X41 = 0100 0001 = low voltage / high voltage / low voltage / low voltage / low voltage / low voltage / low voltage / high voltage?
Those varying voltages are your exact physical basis for the nature of language and the physics that imposes that nature of language.
…as very clearly and unambiguously demonstrated by Claude Shannon, Harry Nyquist, and others.
They’ve even given us the math that describes it — and how can you, of all people, question their math?
b&
The exact physical basis? Matter and forces. Ultimately, quantum fields. Exactly that; nothing more.
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…and it is the insistence that physics isn’t enough to explain a particular given phenomenon that defines supernaturalism and, frequently, dualism.
You can reject the notion that physics is all there is…but such a rejection also necessarily entails a claim that the LHC failed to fully account for everything influencing its observations. That might seem like an innocent enough claim to the uniformed…but it’s actually a claim equivalent to one that you need more than mere Newtonian gravity (with footnotes by Einstein) to explain planetary orbits.
Few people these days would reject the validity of Newtonian (etc.) physics with respect to orbital mechanics…yet it seems practically everybody is all too eager to reject the validity of the Standard Model with respect to chemistry, biology, physiology, and the rest. They still pile on “but you still can’t explain why the planets don’t stop or go off in other directions without the shepherding of the gods” on top of Newton, all whilst insisting that that doesn’t mean they’re not Newton’s bestest budz and totally down with him.
b&
Because, if math wasn’t useful for describing physics, we wouldn’t use math to describe physics.
Duh.
I’m amazed by just how little scratching it takes to reveal an hidden dualist beneath the skin of a compatibilist. It very much reminds me of the — honestly sincere, I’m willing to concede, in all directions — vigorous assertions by certain (especially) Christians that they’re not religious at all, that they have no religion and, indeed, no church…they instead have a personal relationship with Jesus that they share with their family.
I’m willing to grant the fervent sincerity that there really is a meaningful distinction between dualism as conceived by a Christian theologian and compatibilism as conceived (differently, it must be noted) by everybody participating in this thread
What I’m increasingly reluctant to grant is that compatibilism is distinct from dualism as defined by incompatibilists.
There’s always this “one little thing” extra added on top of science — Howie’s mathematical Platonism on display here, JM’s intentional agency last night, Coel’s freedom of action but not of desire, Stephen’s computation that transcends physics…none of them are, even in principle, compatible with physics as we understand it. They are all supernatural — and, to boot, supernatural in a way that includes some ill-defined essence that constitutes a more real reality than the one physics describes…which is another way of describing dualism.
I think the lot of all y’all should spend some time, as a thought experiment, exploring what it would mean to take seriously the proposition that physics really, truly, actually, is all there really is at the base of everything — because that is what the results of the LHC experimentation tell us to more nines of certainty than I have fingers.
Don’t insist that you’re sure that there must be more. Work with the experimental results that make plain that there isn’t. If whatever you’re holding to either contradicts or requires an addition — no matter how seemingly ephemeral or inconsequential — to physics, let go of it — again, just as a thought experiment — and see where it gets you.
You just might like what you find….
Cheers,
b&
Howie: “Well Ant, just explain then WHY physical laws behave to mathematical rules.”
Ben: “Because, if math wasn’t useful for describing physics, we wouldn’t use math to describe physics.”
No, no, no.
READ what I said…..
You need to answer this question by saying exactly why physical systems behave mathematically, NOT why we use mathematics if that fact applies
Duh indeed.
Again, you’re putting the cart before the horse.
Imagine that physical systems didn’t behave mathematically. Would we still use math to describe them? Clearly not.
This is as clear an example of the anthropic principle as it gets.
Ignoring the initial origins of language in the mists of deep evolutionary time for the moment, it’s pretty clear that we add on to our language when the need arises. When we encounter something that we don’t have adequate language to describe, we invent new language to describe it.
In ancient times, we used language to describe the world around us in terms of intentional agents — the volcano erupted because the god that lived in it was hungry for virgin flesh. The language and the concepts encoded by the language described what has happening…but very poorly and inaccurately.
Over time, we’ve refined both our understanding of the world and the language we use to convey that understanding.
One particularly powerful form of language is mathematics. If you’re fluent, you can easily express things with the language of mathematics that are difficult to express with even the technical (but non-mathematical) language of physics…
…but, even still, it’s just another language.
I can say that an object that’s moving has a kinetic energy that would be the same as if you chopped it in half and then piled on a great many of those half-objects…or I can just write kE = 1/2 * m * v^2.
But note! There’s nothing magical about that particular formula, save that it happens to be the right language for describing kinetic energy. I could just as easily write kE = 1/3 * v * sqrt(m)…and now it’s gibberish. It has no bearing on reality whatsoever.
The math is a description of what we observe when you accelerate a mass. Accelerate a mass, and you note that its kinetic energy increases, and those increases can most accurately and easily be expressed in the language of math.
…but, to claim that it’s the math that’s real…now you’re mistraking the map for the territory, the rookiest of rookie mistrakes.
b&
No, no, no.
Physical systems behave /physically/.
We’ve just developed the maths to model that behavior.
Your assertion is tantamount to saying, “landscapes behave cartographically”.
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I may steal that, or some variation thereon…and I’ll apologize in advance for the likelihood that I’ll forget that it was you whom I stole it from….
b&
Then you really are a supernatural dualist.
Naturalism is the proposition that everything at its base is just physics. A chemist rarely has to delve into the physics of atomic theory and Quantum Mechanics and the like, but, if she wants a complete explanation of chemistry, that’s where it’s to be had. Similarly, biology is, at its base, just chemistry; physiology is just biology; sociology is just physiology; and so on. Once you declare that a phenomenon in question doesn’t eventually rest upon physics, you’re making a claim that there’s more to reality than mere physics…and that’s exactly what supernaturalism is.
Similarly, dualism is the proposition that there’s some sort of pure supernatural essence that embodies the true nature of a physical entity…and that’s exactly what your reified mathematics is.
There are, of course, all sorts of ways of doing arithmetic and geometry without ALUs and solar systems — but, yes. No math exists without a physical system doing the math.
Just as no weather exists without an atmosphere.
And no societies exist without people.
And no water exists without hydrogen and oxygen atoms — and no atoms exist without quarks and electrons.
How could it coherently possibly be otherwise?
To bring it back to the computer analogy…when you write software, it gets compiled to assembler which translates to machine language which gets translated into the bytecode of the CPU which again translates it to its own internal instruction set…and, if you keep going far enough, eventually you get to charges moving around the circuitry.
What you’re proposing is that, at some as-yet unspecified step in this process, there’s more to a given bit of code than its source — and that you can’t understand its true essence unless without this something more.
And that’s just pure woo-woo.
It may help to think of it this way.
Geometry says that you can’t draw a triangle with two right angles on that sheet of paper laying on your desk — at least, not without playing games with the geometry of the paper itself (such as wrapping it around a sphere).
But it’s not like there’s some magical geometry faery that’s flying around your pencil and preventing you from moving it where you want to.
What we call, “geometry,” is just a description of the physical reality of the constraints of the system. Geometry not only doesn’t have any idealized existence of its own, it’s simply incoherent to think of it outside of the context of its system.
What is a tornado in the context of a Bach partita? A tornado in the context of Kansas makes perfect sense; it’s a powerful vortex of air driven by the updrafts of thunderstorms — and we could keep going with descriptions of thunderstorms, El Niño, and so on. But in a Bach partita, tornadoes just simply don’t exist.
Stop confusing the map with the territory, in other words.
b&
” — but, yes. No math exists without a physical system doing the math.”
If you know any mathematicians Ben, why don’t you just tell them exactly that. Mathematicians enjoy a good joke
“What you’re proposing is that, at some as-yet unspecified step in this process, there’s more to a given bit of code than its source”
No… why don’t you read what I’ve said – that s software driven system can exhibit much more complex functionality than the underlying hardware that executes belies.
Sorry. Not buying it, any more than I’d buy any other miracle — and this one is even more blatantly ludicrous than what you typically get from even the sleaziest of televangelists.
Sure, if you want to take it as a deepity…my iPhone is, superficially, just a rather plain hunk of plastic, glass, and metal with a couple buttons on it. Not the slightest hint of complexity to it until you turn it on and start surfing YouTube or what-not.
But there ain’t a damned thing it actually does that doesn’t have a perfect analogue in the very real very physical arrangements and patterns of electrical charges in its circuitry.
You seem inordinately confident of this assertion you just threw out. If it has any basis in reality at all, you should be able to toss out, just off the top of your head, an example so obvious that it’ll rock me back on my feet. Go for it, if you can.
b&
“You seem inordinately confident of this assertion you just threw out. If it has any basis in reality at all, you should be able to toss out, just off the top of your head, an example so obvious that it’ll rock me back on my feet. Go for it, if you can.”
I’ll make my example very simple, just for you Ben. Lets look at the logic of an ALU (remember now, that’s an Arithmetic Logic Unit). For a 32 bit computer that would be around 15000 transistors minimum (I was a senior manager at intel so I’m familiar with this sort of figure). Let’s take a single 32 bit arithmetic instruction in software memory – 32 bits=so around 180 transistors. The expansion factor of software to hold an instruction to the hardware to execute it is around 85 to one in this example… e.g. expressing this instruction in terms of software represents a function 85 times more complex in terms of hardware to execute it. And that’s just ONE instruction…. imagine the expansion function with a whole program.
I assume you’re sufficiently rocked.
Letter to Ben:
Ben, it’s clear that we (collectively) have got nowhere near an understanding, despite multiple posts. This is a desperate last attempt to explain the compatibilist perspective.
The basic point is this:
“Compatibilist free will” is not about dualist free will.
It is not about it at all. It is not a version of d-FW, it is not a commentary on d-FW, it is not a reaction to d-FW, it is not about d-FW at all.
Every time we explain c-FW you interpret it as being “about” d-FW. That’s where the accusations of “bait and switch” come from.
You interpret c-FW as being “about” d-FW, and then notice that c-FW isn’t d-FW, and then accuse us of having baited-and-switched from d-FW to c-FW.
But we haven’t, because c-FW is not “about” d-FW in the first place. c-FW is about a deterministic universe. It’s about how to understand things like human social interactions in a deterministic universe. The starting point is human experience.
It should thus be judged on those terms, as being about determinism. In those terms it is entirely clear, sensible and coherent.
So why is c-FW FW at all?
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Because if you ask how the word “free” is used in the English language it is entirely compatible with determinism.
In Vaal’s example of a dog “running free in the yard”, the term “free” does not mean “is violating the laws of physics”, it means “not on a leash”.
And, if you ask what the word “will” means in the English language, it is entirely compatible with determinism.
We humans have feelings and desire, we have a “will”. That will is the product of the physical machinery in our brains.
If I say: “do as you will”, it is not an instruction to violate the laws of physics, it is informing you that I will not seek to prevent you.
And, further, if you then put the words “free” and “will” together you get phrases like: “did you sign this contract of your own free will, or were you coerced?”. And nothing in that is about non-operation of the laws of physics.
Thus, the c-FW is entirely in-line with how the English language works and in-line with how a deterministic world works.
That’s why.
But of course the incompatibilists insist that when you put the two words together then — poof! — a magic reaction occurs, and the words can no-longer be interpreted in their normal sense, but can only be taken as referring to some dualistic woo that doesn’t exist.
Trouble is, there is just as long a history of using the phrase in the c-FW sense.
And because, when people realised that being “alive” didn’t need vitalism, they ditched just the vitalism, not the whole language.
And because, when people realised that being “moral” didn’t need gods, they ditched just the gods, not the whole language.
And, similarly, when we realise that what goes on in our heads doesn’t require dualistic woo, we ditch just the dualistic woo, not the whole language.
And lastly, when incompatibilsits talk about human “choices” and “decisions” in everyday life, they adopt compatibilist language and attitudes.
Yes they do, it’s easy to catch them at it! They might say “appearance of choice” in a carefully worded blog post, but the rest of the time they say “choice”.
So, it’s clear that c-FW is distinct from d-FW. (And both “compatibilitists” and “incompatibilists” agree that d-FW is incompatible with determinism, right? Which is why those terms obfuscate the real differences between the camps.)
But you use “FW” because c-FW is consistent with legal-FW.
So, is c-FW just the /same/ as legal-FW, since it has the /same sense/ in idiomatic English? If your position is only that we can have “FW” in a legal sense, I don’t see that that’s contentious for “incomatibilists”.
But that doesn’t seem to comport with Sean’s statement: Legal-FW isn’t really about mental agency/decision making capability as something that emerges from the brain in a deterministic way; it’s about freedom from coercion and constraint/restraint by another agent, /however/ decisions are made. Thus, legal-FW is something that has currency /even if/ d-FW is true.
And is the freedom to make your own decisions when nobody is pointing a gun at your head really Dan’s “the only type of free will worth wanting”?
Furthermore, there’s a mismatch (a) when you can freely choose /not/ to be coerced, and (b) when you’re constrained/restrained. as then you’re still free to choose, just unable to physically act on those choices.
So not only is c-FW distinct from d-FW, it’s also distinct from legal-FW, even though in the latter case the plain English meaning of the words is the same.
So what /is/ c-FW and why is it still “FW”?
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“So, is c-FW just the /same/ as legal-FW, since it has the /same sense/ in idiomatic English?”
Yes!!
“If your position is only that we can have “FW” in a legal sense, I don’t see that that’s contentious for “incomatibilists”. ”
We don’t see it as contentious either! Which is why these discussions are rather frustrating!
“But that doesn’t seem to comport with Sean’s statement:”
Yes it does!
“Legal-FW [is] about freedom from coercion and constraint/restraint by another agent, /however/ decisions are made.”
OK, true. But if one adopts determinism then Legal-FW becomes c-FW.
And compatibilists do adopt determinism, and thus c-FW is L-FW plus determinism.
“Thus, legal-FW is something that has currency /even if/ d-FW is true.”
True, but this is a discussion among determinists, where accepting determinism is the starting point of the discussion.
“And is the freedom to make your own decisions when nobody is pointing a gun at your head really Dan’s “the only type of free will worth wanting”?”
Yes!
“Furthermore, there’s a mismatch (a) when you can freely choose /not/ to be coerced, …”
I don’t understand that. If you’re free to choose not to be coerced, it isn’t coercion.
“and (b) when you’re constrained/restrained. as then you’re still free to choose, just unable to physically act on those choices.”
But “choose” really means “act on your preference”, not just “prefer”.
“So what /is/ c-FW and why is it still “FW”?”
c-FW is determinism plus L-FW.
…thus revealing that you are, in fact, even if unwittingly, referring to purely dualistic free will in which there’s some “free” “you” that’s disconnected from the rest of reality.
Can you choose your preferences?
If you don’t have freedom to change your preferences, who gives a damn about whether or not you can carry out your preferences?
b&
“Can you choose your preferences?”
No. “Man can do as he will but not will what he wills” (Schopenhauer 1819, which is one reason why compatibilism is not recent).
“If you don’t have freedom to change your preferences, who gives a damn about whether or not you can carry out your preferences?”
Every human that has ever lived gives a damn about whether they can act on their preferences! That’s what “preferences” means, it means things we prefer.
So, freedom is the ability to choose any color you want, so long as it’s black.
And the planets have freedom to follow their orbits in any manner they choose, so long as they choose orbits described by Newton with Einstein’s footnotes.
I think that last one really might help you understand where you’ve gone off the rails.
You’d agree with me that the orbits of the planets are, for all practical purposes and with all the necessary caveats about perturbation theory and what-not, fixed? And that, over the span of sufficient millennia they’re actually rather complicated and dynamic?
The arc of your own life is even more complicated and dynamic, but its trajectory is no more subject to intentional manipulation than a planet’s orbit. Just as Jupiter inevitably swings slightly farther away from the Sun whenever Saturn is near, you will inevitably choose a cup of coffee over a poke in the eye with a sharp stick when the situation arises.
The only difference, really, between you and a body in free-fall is that you have your own internal simulated model of your orbit, and that model is recursive in a manner that gives you the illusion of being able to fast-forward and rewind the tape of history…
…but that’s a difference in degree, not in kind. You’re still as firmly rooted to the track as the planets; it’s just that your own track has all sorts of extra loops and twists and whirls that the planets don’t get.
b&
“The arc of your own life is even more complicated and dynamic, but its trajectory is no more subject to intentional manipulation than a planet’s orbit.”
This is determinism. Don’t most compatibilists agree with this?
” you have your own internal simulated model of your orbit, and that model is recursive in a manner that gives you the illusion of being able to fast-forward and rewind the tape of history”
This seems to me to be the distinction that compatibilist think is worth making. There is an awareness of past action and a sense of future consequence, and an impression that one is choosing.
Yes, many point to this as being what they really want to talk about.
Problem is, it’s exactly that which “free will” is typically contrasted with, with what the compatibilists are discussing explicitly being what “free will” isn’t.
So it comes down to semantics. Compatibilists, in short, want to redefine “free will” to mean its opposite.
And, compounding matters, typical compatibilist explanations of why we have what they’re describing as “free will” and why it’s important…inevitably themselves wind up going down the supernatural dualistic rabbit hole.
We can very reasonably discuss the computational components of how the various systems at play interact. We can even informally use dualistic language to do so…but not if we start insisting that that informal use of dualistic language somehow demonstrates that the informal language really does represent reality.
b&
“So, freedom is the ability to choose any color you want, so long as it’s black.”
Nope, freedom is the ability to choose whatever colour you do want.
“And the planets have freedom to follow their orbits in any manner they choose …”
Planets are not goal-oriented decision-making entities in the same way that cats and chess-playing computers are.
But that’s just it. You’re going to choose a color, and the color you’re going to choose is black. And you don’t have any choice about the fact that you’re going to choose black.
It doesn’t matter that there are fifteen other colors on the lot. The one-and-only choice available to you is the choice you make, which was going to be black from the moment you set foot on the lot.
Let’s go back to the evil neuroscientist example for a bit. If the evil neuroscientist manipulates your desires, you’d still have your funky “free will” to act on these desires that the evil neuroscientist has planted in your brain, right?
So you’re perfectly free to do whatever it is that you want to do, so long as it’s what the evil neuroscientist has told you that you want to do.
I don’t think anybody can realistically call that free will, no matter the definition — yet it’s perfectly consistent with the definition you’ve been using.
We therefore have a contradiction that inevitably arises using your definition. Most people would recognize that as a nonexistence proof by contradiction — that, whatever it is that you were trying to refer to with your definition simply doesn’t exist.
Now, maybe you’ll try to say that you wouldn’t have free will when the evil neuroscientist manipulates your desires, but you do have free will when the evil neuroscientist leaves you alone…but then what about all the advertisements you’re bombarded with on TV? What about all the desires for food and water and companionship and what-not that Evolution has genetically endowed you with?
In other words…go that route and you’re now 100% in the realm of spooky woo-woo supernatural dualism whereby the evil neuroscientist can deprive you of your free will, but a passionate speaker can’t.
b&
“You’re going to choose a color, and the color you’re going to choose is black.”
This evening I could — if I wanted to — go out to a restaurant, or a cinema, or stay in. I have the ability to do whichever of those I prefer. In that sense I am “free” to act on my preference.
Someone who is in jail does not have that freedom. Even if their preference is to go out to the cinema, they cannot act on that.
The crucial concept there is a preference, a desire, a wish to do something (and note that planets do not have it).
Do you want to reject that entire concept? If you do, then you’re going to reject just about all language and concepts about humans and human society.
If you accept that concept, then you should accept my above concept of “freedom” to act on one’s preference as coherent and sensible.
Now, the fact that my preference is determined, and that the external constraints are determined, and thus that the actual fact of the matter of what I actually end up doing this evening is determined, does not make any difference to the above concept of “preference”. It works just fine in a deterministic world.
“If the evil neuroscientist manipulates your desires, you’d still have your funky “free will” to act on these desires …”
Well, you may or may not have that freedom. Freedom is not about where the desires come from, it’s about whether you can act on them.
Suppose the evil neuroscientist manipulates the brain of a prisoner to make the prisoner “want to go to the cinema”.
Then the prisoner is *not* free to do “what the evil neuroscientist has told you that you want to do”, because he’s locked in jail.
Sheesh Ben, this is not a hard concept, I’m utterly baffled that you don’t seem to get it.
Again:
Freedom is *not* *about* the physical, deterministic brain machinery that generates desires.
Freedom is about constraints preventing you from acting on your desires.
“We therefore have a contradiction that inevitably arises using your definition.”
No, not at all, you have once again simply misunderstood the whole concept.
“Now, maybe you’ll try to say …”
No Ben, if you think I’d try that you’ve misunderstood the whole concept.
Suppose the evil neuroscientist rigs your will so that you want to go to the cinema. But also suppose that you are in jail.
You want to go the cinema, but the door is locked so you can’t. You are thus not remaining in that prison cell “of your own free will”.
That fact that the will to go to the cinema was put into you by the evil neuroscientists does not change that one iota. Really, it is utterly irrelevant.
You only have that freedom in a dualist system where “you” are somehow independent from physics as we understand it.
In reality, whatever you wind up doing tonight is already inevitably fixed, even if you yourself aren’t yet aware of it and even if you have the illusion of influencing the decision.
No, you don’t have a choice in the matter of what you’re going to do tonight — any more than the Sun has a choice of where it’ll set while you’re doing whatever you wind up doing.
That you insist that you could choose anything other than what you’re going to wind up choosing…that’s dualism, pure and simple.
Now, can you construct logically coherent hypothetical universes that closely resemble ours in which those different scenarios play out? Certainly. And, indeed, that’s essentially what you’re doing when you go through the motions of making a choice. But there’s no choice to be made, just the trajectory to follow through, complete with the side loops of imagining what it would be like to act out the different options…and the tracks take you unswervingly through each millimicrosecond of those imaginations through to your final destination with no option for you to ever pick otherwise.
b&
“You only have that freedom in a dualist system where “you” are somehow independent from physics as we understand it.”
No Ben, I have “freedom” in the usual sense of “free” in the English language.
Thus, a dog that is “free” to roam the yard is one that is not on a chain; it is not one that is independent from physics as we understand it.
Your usage of “free” as meaning “independent from physics” is simply at odds with 99.9% of the usages of “free” by English speakers.
But this has all been said multiple times, so I now give up.
That our language is infused with presumptions of dualism is well known and acknowledged. That it’s sometimes convenient to roll with the language, likewise.
But you’re cutting out the critical step of “this is just a shortcut because we’re stuck with the language we have.”
And you did it again right here when you implied that a dog who’s not on a leash really is really free. Restrained by the leash? No. But still not free — and there is no line that can be drawn in this sand where “not-free” becomes “free.”
You refuse to understand that, presumably because of the same category of misunderstanding of physics that, for example, Howie is displaying with his reification of mathematics.
Not all chains are forged of metal. The metal ones are the easy ones to break. The chains that ultimately matter can’t be broken. You — and the dog — are still chained. You seem to think that the fact that you can’t see the chains matters…and, yet, like the water the fish swims in, they’re all that matter….
b&
“Restrained by the leash? No. But still not free — and there is no line that can be drawn in this sand where “not-free” becomes “free.” You refuse to understand that, …”
No Ben, you are the one refusing to understand. You are still stuck in the dualistic mindset. You are still stuck in the dualistic mindset that the only two possibilities are “free” and “not free”.
But, these things are not binary, they are a continuum. There is no point at which adding once cent to someone’s wealth changes them from “poor” to “rich”, but someone with very little income is still “poor” and someone with a lot of income is still “rich”. These things are continua.
Now freedom is a continuum. Yes Ben, freedom is a continuum. It’s not a binary yes/no, it’s a continuum.
A dog not on a lease has more freedom of action than a dog on a lease. Not perfect freedom, not ability to act independently of the laws of physics, but more freedom than a dog on a lease.
Because “freedom” is a continuum. If you think it’s not then you’re still stuck in a dualistic mindset.
Thus a dog that is “free” to roam the yard is indeed “free” because **some** constraints (the lease) are absent.
Of course other constraints are still present (such as the laws of physics). But still, by comparison with the dog on a lease, the leaseless dog is “free”. It’s a *relative* term about *degrees* of constraint.
The word “free” simply does not mean “independent of the laws of physics”, because nothing is independent of the laws of physics, so it’d be a useless word.
[But, I presume you want to abandon the word, as you do most of the concepts that we use about humans?]
If you actually look at what the word “free” actually *means*, none of the usages mean “independent of the laws of physics”. They really don’t!
You are simply totally wrong on that. Here’s the English Oxford Dictionary definitions of what “free” means:
“Able to act or be done as one wishes; not under the control of another”
“subject neither to foreign domination nor to despotic government”
“Not or no longer confined or imprisoned”
“Not physically obstructed or fixed”
“Not subject to engagements or obligations”
None of these say: “not subject to the laws of physics” do they? You’re simply wrong on what the word “free” actually means, and based on that everything else you’ve said here is wrong.
Coel, your entire argument is about whether or not freedom exists.
It entirely ignores the question of whether or not the will is free.
As you yourself might have originally quoted or paraphrased, you can will what you want, but you can’t want what you will.
The will itself, even by this description, isn’t free.
Yes, there may be varying constraints on the effective ability of the will to carry out its desires…but the will itself?
It ain’t free.
And if the will isn’t free — as you’ve as much as admitted, how can a non-free will be free will?
It’s a married bachelor. Marriage is real. You’re arguing till you’re blue in the face that I must be blind to refuse to acknowledge that marriage is real. And then you’ll turn around and do the same thing with bachelorhood.
But my objection isn’t to either marriage or to bachelorhood. Both are fine concepts, most useful in their respective contexts.
My objection is to merging the two into a single incoherent unholy hole-ridden whole of married bachelors.
b&
“Yes, there may be varying constraints on the effective ability of the will to carry out its desires …”
Exactly. Thanks for acknowledging that. Now, what term might we use to describe the different degrees of constraint? How about differing degrees of “freedom”?
And, “free will” doesn’t imply the ability to will the will, it implies the ability to *act* on the will. Thus “free will” is short for “freely acting will”.
Are you quite deliberately trying to misunderstand this?
No, I’m trying to pound it into you that “free will” can only possibly mean “a will that is free.”
You’re admitting that the will is not free, yet still claiming that “free will” is real and pointing to both examples of freedom and will.
Marriage is real. Bachelors are real. Married bachelors are not.
Freedom is real. The will is real. Free will is not.
b&
“No, I’m trying to pound it into you that “free will” can only possibly mean “a will that is free.” ”
Yes, a will that is free to act. (Not a will that is free to will itself.)
Again, it is not the case that something is either free in *every* regard or in zero regards. The word “freedom” is always about *some* sorts of freedom, because nothing has every conceivable freedom.
And, compatibilist freedom is about a will that is free to act. It is not a claim that the will can re-will itself.
You seem to me to be playing a game of trying to invent the most perverse misunderstandings of compatibilism that you possibly can.
Coel, dualistic free will has always meant that the will itself is free to will itself. That’s the whole freakin’ point of it, and why Jesus supposedly somehow gets off the hook for letting bad things happen to good people. They have free will, so they can freely choose to be good wills or evil wills, and they suffer the consequences of their freely willed choices.
And it’s the same freedom typically presumed by many compatibilists when they desperately attempt to prevent people from realizing that it’s all bullshit. Free will, we are told, is essential for moral responsibility…and, without moral responsibility, people will devolve into murderous rampaging raping atheist Commie pinko thugs. But, with free will, they have moral responsibility and an obligation to will themselves to be good moral free-will-embracing people as opposed to evil amoral free-will-denying scumbags.
And it’s even the freedom you yourself are defending. You have the freedom to go to the movies tonight or stay home, right? But you can only have that freedom if you can freely will yourself to want the one or the other. Otherwise, your will has already dictated that you’ll do the one or the other, and you have no freedom to do otherwise because your own will has chained yourself to itself.
And the reason that doesn’t make sense is because free will is incoherent.
Remember? Assume one tiny little contradiction and you can trivially derive anything you like from it?
Why else do you think it so obviously follows that, if the will is the foundation of freedom but isn’t itself free…you can therefore draw any any every conclusion imaginable?
b&
“Coel, dualistic free will has always meant that the will itself is free to will itself.”
I don’t give the tiniest damn. I’m not talking about *dualist* FW. I made that explicitly clear. Do you ever take any actual notice of replies?
“And it’s the same freedom typically presumed by many compatibilists when …”
No. It. Is. Not. Always, always, always, always, always you keep interpreting *compatibilist* free will as though it were dualist FW, or about dualist-FW. It isn’t. Really. It. is. not.
Can you please try to catch up with where compatibilists were 200 years ago: “Man can do as he wills but not will what he wills”.
That *doing as he wills” is what *compatibilist* FW is about. It is not about the “willing what he wills”.
“You have the freedom to go to the movies tonight or stay home, right?”
Yes.
“But you can only have that freedom if you can freely will yourself to want the one or the other.”
Noooooooooo!!!! AArrghhh! This is so painful! c-FW is about the freedom to *act* on ones will! What part of that sentence is unclear?
Once again. Nothing is ever free from ****all**** constraints. The term “free” refers to *particular* constraints.
In the case of c-FW it’s about constraints preventing you from **acting** on your will!
It is not about willing your will! It is not about willing your will! It is not about willing your will!
The part where you’re presuming that action is independent of will.
I think you’d agree that, at least in your paradigm, action is the result of the product of the will and the constraints you describe as “external” — the dog’s leash.
And your “free will” describes the constraints external to the will and entirely ignores the will itself and however it may or may not be constrained.
All okay?
But the problem is that “product” word.
You can have a yard without a chain…but also without a dog. Clearly, there’s no free will there, because there’s no dog to exercise it.
You add both the dog and the chain, and you as a compatibilist would claim that there still isn’t any free will because the chain permits zero degrees of freedom.
You now claim that by removing the chain, the dog has free will because you’ve added degrees of freedom through removing the restriction…
…but you can add infinite degrees of freedom by removing the chain or whatever, and the dog still has zero free will if it’s, say under the control of some CIA mind ray.
Well, obviously, we need to get rid of the CIA mind ray, too, before the dog can enjoy its freedom…
…but you can’t, because, at the foundation of it all, there’s still that big fat zero of the dog’s will itself.
Zero times anything is still zero.
Even more prosaic: imagine the dog has half a dozen chains and ropes and what-not, maybe of varying lengths. You can remove one of them, but does that give it any more freedom? Clearly not; it’s still chained.
…and here comes the dualism you insist you reject: the only way that it makes a difference if the chains are made of steel or the laws of physics…is if there’s something more to the sense of being chained than can be explained by physics.
Just from that formulation itself, it’s clear that your “c-FW” doesn’t exist. What bigger constraint is there from you acting on your will…than your will itself?
Your own will is the constraint that removes all freedom from any conception of will.
Again: are we free? Sure, given certain contexts, to certain degrees.
Do we have wills? Yes; I don’t think that’s at all controversial.
Are our wills free? You yourself as much as admit that they’re not — and then, in the same breath, you insist that we still nevertheless have free will! Because of some incomprehensible disconnect whereby that which determines all action is not free but the actions it determines are free.
b&
…aaaaaannnnnddddd….
Yet more inherent dualism.
Your statement about being free to act on the will that you have can only make sense if the will is distinct from the individual — if you’ve got a “free will” organ somewhere, presumably in your brain, that dictates what your conscious “you” that acts upon those orders does.
There may be strong perceptual cues to make one feels as if that’s what’s happening…
…but we know for certain that that’s all illusion.
You are a meat computer. Any perceptions you have of will or desire or anything else arise from the state of computation in your brain. There is no “free will” module anywhere in there; it’s just you, which is perfectly one-to-one congruent with your body. Your will isn’t some distinct force that guides your actions…and, if that’s what you think, as is pretty much the only coherent way to parse that sentence…then we’re right smack dab in the face of dualism again.
b&
That’s helpful, Coel. Now we have well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
I’ll respond to what I still see as dubious and uncertain, somewhat out of order.
| “Thus, legal-FW is something that has currency /even if/ d-FW is true.”
| True, but this is a discussion among determinists, where accepting determinism is the starting point of the discussion.
Well, /this/ discussion is, but one of the issues is the confusion likely, or at least possible, when we’re discussing these concepts amongst a wider audience. And that, I think, is one of the issues that bugs “incompatibilists”.
| … c-FW is L-FW plus determinism.
Hmm… I think there’s a category error here … which is what I had in mind when I said:
| “But that doesn’t seem to comport with Sean’s statement:”
| Yes it does!
Show your working!
What did Sean say?
“In my case, it’s because talking about people as agents capable of making decisions is the best description we have of them at the emergent level where it’s possible to talk about “people” at all. On this view, denying the existence of free will because the underlying laws are deterministic is a non sequitur…”
My reading of that is that Sean is talking about free will as agency, a decision making capability that emerges from the underlying laws that govern functionality of the human brain. A mental faculty, /not/ a (legal) principle regarding the absence of constraints imposed by other agents. Sean doesn’t mention such constrains at all. (Rather like JM and his definition of c-FW elsewhere.)
What would be /your/ reading of Sean’s statement that /does/ comport?
(Perhaps Sean himself can clarify if he’s still around.)
| “Furthermore, there’s a mismatch (a) when you can freely choose /not/ to be coerced, …”
| I don’t understand that. If you’re free to choose not to be coerced, it isn’t coercion.
OK, maybe we should flip this: When you are coerced, when you sign at gunpoint, you are still making a decision; your decision making capability hasn’t been taken away. You are /deciding/ to be coerced; “there’s a gun at my head” is a new input; you are making multiple evaluations – “is this worth dying for?” “will she really pull the trigger if I don’t sign?” before you (decide to!) put pen to paper.
| “and (b) when you’re constrained/restrained. as then you’re still free to choose, just unable to physically act on those choices.”
| But “choose” really means “act on your preference”, not just “prefer”.
Must it? Can it not mean just “make a decision based on your preferences (and other inputs)”?
In any case, you make the same point elsewhere in reply to Ben, and far more explicitly:
| And, “free will” doesn’t imply the ability to will the will, it implies the ability to *act* on the will. Thus “free will” is short for “freely acting will”.
It seems that what you’re label as “c-FW” is really “free action” or “freedom of action”. And that statement is inconsistent that “free will” has just it’s plain English meaning. Eliding a word changes things significantly!
Now you’re cheating us and cheating us very badly.
This definition of “free will” tells us /nothing/ about our will at all.
/@
PS. Plus, legal-FW is distinct from the action: Someone acts of their own free will. There is clear water here between action and deciding to act.
Precisely! Incompatibilists and compatibilists agree on everything! Honestly, on everything from what I see!
The problem is we are arguing about completely different things and it’s this word “free will” that is muddying things up. Let the dualists have “free will”. We need to come up with another word for what compatibilists are describing because it isn’t dualist free will.
Yes, incompatibilist disbelievers and compatibilists agree. This is an absurd situation because almost nobody is going to understand them. People will assume they are disagreeing.
So what’s the way out? Well it’s to say they are both wrong. And they are because there is an assumption that there is one thing the term free will should be used for. Well there isn’t.
We just need to say we have CFW and Don’t have CCFW.
I also think we need a clear definition of CCFW. It’s an incoherent concept so we can’t say what it is and make sense but we can say what it’s the denial of. It’s the denial of the following two statements:
1) To have done otherwise circumstances not of my choosing would have had to have been different.
2) If circumstances not of my choosing had been appropriately different I would have done otherwise.
This definition is important because it’s not just dualist who believe in CCFW.
I’m a determinist. Everything that happens is inevitable. Yet it remains true that within this deterministic universe, there inevitably arose biological organisms with the capability of choosing for themselves what they will do next. And their choices determine a lot of what becomes inevitable: from the insignificant choice between chocolate and vanilla, to the choice to allow behavior that continues to raise the temperature of the planet.
To imagine that we somehow are not part of reality is a mental error, a fallacy. We are not separate from causality. We are a cause.
Who says that we are not part of reality, or that what we do affect other organisms? I fear you’re attacking a straw man here, for nobody, least of all I, have said anything like that. And what do you mean, exactly, by “choosing for themselves,” which implies that they could have chosen otherwise. What you mean, I think, is that they do stuff that was itself determined.
“Choosing for ourselves” is what we do. It’s what you did when you responded to my comment.
At the beginning of every deliberate decision (one that involves actually considering two or more options and estimating the results of choosing one over the other) the decider is uncertain what the choice will be. If the decider had no uncertainty then he/she would skip over the whole deliberation thing.
But at the beginning, the decider can honestly say “I do not know for sure what I will decide to do, I could end up choosing A or choosing B”.
And that is the whole logical meaning of “they could have chosen otherwise”.
After the decision is made, the decider may reflect upon the reasons and the feelings that he/she went through, and conclude that this or that choice was indeed inevitable. (Or there may still be some uncertainty as to what is best even though there is certainty about what to do now).
What do you find confusing about “choosing for themselves”?
Yes. We know.
Indeed, that’s the point we keep trying to make, but that you keep dismissing as irrelevant.
You’ve got your own special phenomenon that has nothing whatsoever to do with free will that’s got you really excited to talk about every time anybody else talks about free will.
You know that phenomenon where some kid has a near-death experience and his parents get him to make it into a book about how Heaven really is for realz?
Let’s say we were having a discussion about that, and some compatibilist barged in and started telling us that, yes, in fact, Heaven really is for realz.
You’d start ripping him a new one, right? Even — if not especially — after he insisted that his Heaven is the only one worth wanting to go to?
And then the compatibilist lets slip that, to him, “Heaven” is that feeling you have after taking a really good shit, so we should all eat high-fibre diets.
Wouldn’t you rip him an even bigger one at that point?
And wouldn’t you get thoroughly disgusted with him as he kept trying to hijack the discussion about the boy’s fantasy of meeting Jesus and his aborted sister with repeated exhortations to eat a tasty bran muffin?
So I’m glad that you’re at least at the point where you’re openly admitting that your definition of “free will” is for some entirely unrelated phenomenon that nobody was talking about until you arrived.
Can we now move on to an admission that it’s not only different, but irrelevant?
Or are we still going to get the fibre police shoving celery in our faces every time we point out that the kid’s description of his dead uncle Jack whom he’d never met is a perfect match for Jack’s photo on the wall?
b&
Hi Ben,
“So I’m glad that you’re at least at the point where you’re openly admitting that your definition of “free will” is for some entirely unrelated phenomenon that nobody was talking about until you arrived.”
You’re simply factually wrong to say that nobody was talking about **compatibilist**-FW until recently.
You’re simply wrong to say that the dualists own the phrase “free will”.
“Can we now move on to an admission that it’s not only different, but irrelevant?”
It’s irrelevant to *dualist*-FW, yes, indeed so.
It is not irrelevant to humans, nor to human experience. And nor is it irrelevant to the issue of how to interpret human experience, as it has been discussed for thousands of years.
Coel,
I appreciate the attempt to clarify, but…in hopes of clarifying further…I can still see an area of possible confusion.
“Compatibilist free will” is not about dualist free will.
Is of course absolutely correct! Compatibilism is a naturalistic non-dualistic explanation of Free Will, so equating it to dualism is simply a mistake.
So long as it’s understood properly IMO. Unfortunately, without explanation, it can still be misunderstood in terms of the inferences some can (and do) draw from such a statement.
Someone can look at your statement and infer something that sounds almost the same, but which has in fact very important significance to the debate. They can look at your statement:
“Compatibilist free will” is not about dualist free will.
And it can re-compute in a similar but significantly different version:
“Compatibilist free will is not about the free will dualists think they have.“
The problem is that in sense, the sense of your original sentence, the above is still true. But in another sense, it’s false.
Because the “free will that dualists think they have,” as we have argued, goes beyond the issue of mere “dualism.” There are all sorts of real things happening, real-world concerns and realities, that the dualist has tied up in “free will” which do not go away
when the dualism part goes away. If they think that “if my choices aren’t magical, then I don’t really have choices” they are confused, simply wrong, which is why we try to disabuse anyone of that error. And why Dennett has his “we have the free will worth wanting” line – that is, we have the important things contained within the concept of “free will” that people worry would be lost if the magical part were gone.
The problem is, some of the incompatibilists here seem to refuse to acknowledge this. They go with a “free will is ONLY about magic dualism” stance. For someone who will not waver from this, and who refuses to acknowledge otherwise, and who sees acknowledging this problem as entering into “confusion” instead of the clarifying belief that free will is simple and dualistic…well…there’s little ground left for conversation.
And, btw, this attempt by Ben etc to paint everyday uses of “Free Will” into some “legalistic” box as if it were hermetically sealed off in law completely glosses over the point.
It’s not like lawyers are operating in some sort of conceptual vacuum from the rest of the world’s concerns. Why WOULD the difference between coerced behavior – referred to as Free Willed or not – be so significant as to become codified in our law…so significant as to signify the difference between “bad” (impeding someone’s will to do as they wish through threat) and “good’ (allowing someone to do as they want, without threat or restraint)? It literally divides moral and immoral behavior – we think impeding someone’s freedom to do as he wills can be so
serious as to send you to jail. “Free Will” – being able to do as you will without threat or restraint – is significant in the courts because it’s a significant (and NON-MAGICAL) long running concern for us human beings!
It’s fascinating to watch incompatibilists ignore the language challenges concerning “freedom” “choice” “could do otherwise” you (and I and others) put to them over and over. As you say, they can’t really answer it without trodding onto the road of compatibilism.
Over ‘n out.
Just to add some more thoughts on this:
Re Ben (and others) attempt to downplay the concept of Free Will in society, as if it reduced only to appearing in some legalistic
venue.
First of all, it’s patently false: the concept of free will as it relates to “doing as one wills, not restrained from doing as one wills or coerced against one’s will” are concepts that are plainly appealed to outside the law.
Secondly, even if one grants a prevalence to “Free Will” used in legal settings, we would have to account for how that would have entered the law in the first place! Why that term of choice???
If, as Ben and others claim, Free Will is clearly and unambiguously understood by most people as a reference to ghost/magic/dualism, then why in the world would the concept “Free Will” end up in the legal profession when referring to patently non-dualistic/non-supernatural differences in states of affairs, with the term “Free Will?” (E.g. the contract is null because it was not signed under her free will; she was threatened physically and in that sense was given no choice…)
This can be easily explained simply by realizing something pretty obvious: the concept of “freedom,” including “free will” when it comes to our choices, typically does not reference any sort of supernatural or dualism in the calculation. People’s language and concepts have ultimately HAD to incorporate reality into the proceedings, recognizing that we are physical beings, that we have things we want to do, and we have to navigate and describe situations in which we are able to do as we will, vs not do as we will. We will necessarily have to end up referring to things like physical constraints on our actions, and the influence/threats from other agents on doing what we want.
That’s why the concept of “freedom” and “free will” have naturally incorporated this non-magical set of concerns when talking about our choices and freedom. In fact, in most of the real-world concerns we have about our freedom to choose or not, the ones we have to describe, these calculations are the ones that matter and feature! It’s going to be inescapably wrapped up into any questions of human “choice.” As it ever was. (And even within the context of belief systems like Christianity, this takes hold. Go back as far as you want and you see even theologically, appeals to God limiting our physical options would be imposing limits on our freedom/free will, just as Christians continue to argue today in apologetics).
So this claim that free will is just obviously, simply about dualistic powers is
pure bull-feathers. It just doesn’t hold up to reality, or explain what it would need to explain. What DOES explain the variety of talk about Free Will is that it comprises more elements than simply concerns about dualism.
Now, sometimes folks like Ben have actually apparently accepted this and then said “Yes, right! See…the concept of Free Will is so bound up with various ideas it’s just a source of confusion, so why keep the phrase?”
Which is a perfectly fine discussion to move on to. But it has to be noted that you’ve conceded that Free Will IS more complicated and inclusive than mere questions of dualistic choice. You can’t have it both ways – argue that Free Will is narrow and simplistic dualism and that’s all…but when convenient switch to “Ok, it’s so much more complicated than that, which is a reason to abandon the phrase!”
For the exact same reason that most insurance policies have language describing “Acts of God.”
Are you now going to tell us that God is real because the insurer wouldn’t pay on the policy because it was an earthquake that sent the building crashing to the ground? Except, presumably, “God” isn’t an old man in the sky with a beard, but rather the personal embodiment of the laws of nature — the ground of being, one might suggest.
And, while we’re at it, might as well call us Christians because we write, “2015,” on our checks celebrating the 2,015th birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ…except, of course, it’s some sort of metaphorical Lord Jesus Christ who really just represents peace and love for all mankind.
…need I continue…?
b&
Ben,
The “acts of God” reply does not answer the challenge I posed: to get into the nitty gritty and really look at the logic for why the concept of Free Will is being applied (even in the legal arena) to acts of coercion.
Examining the “acts of God” phrase, we can see it as a left over of a Theistic milieu, where God is seen to control the things man can not be in control of – e.g. the forces of nature.
So the logic of why “act of God” is invoked in one case and not the other is explicable this way. If your house is flooded because you left the tub on upstairs, that was something under human control – your control specifically, hence you are responsible and “act of God” is not invoked.
But if the sea rises and floods your home, that was something not in our control, it’s seen as (or was traditionally) in God’s control. This variable explains why “Act of God” is invoked in this second case.
Now, do some similar explaining for the variables explaining the use of “Free” or “Not Free Willed” actions. You want to say that the concept of Free Will is focused on non-material, spooky forces. Yet the first thing to notice is this can’t be the case. The concept of “Free willed choice” and “not free willed choice” is appealed to by Christians right? Christians already believe we have spooky soul forces within us
that help us make our decisions. And yet, when someone is *physically* coerced or constrained from doing what he wants, THAT is when even the Christian starts describing Free Will as being diminished, not being sufficiently operative. The difference isn’t between “someone who has a soul and someone who does not.” The difference being described by “Free Willed choice” and “Not Free Willed Choice” are differences in PHYSICAL states of affairs, where what someone wants to do is overridden by the coercion or constraint of another’s actions.
So the motivation and logic for invoking the free willed concept here is clearly one based on discrimination between Physical facts and states of affairs…NOT on some metaphysical or dualistic consideration.
But, I think that’s enough anyway…
Wikipedia:
“Dualism is the position that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.”
Is Free Will a physical mental phenomenon?
Is moral responsibility a physical mental phenomenon?
Incompatibalists, like me, seem to deny both.
For me freewill is a sometimes useful illusion created by physical mental phenomena.
Every example I can remember in this thread from a compatibilist of what “free will” is either explicitly includes something non-physical (see Howie’s Platonic math or Stephen’s more-to-consciousness-than-physics) or can only scan if that’s the case (a chained dog is not free but the other invisible chains of physics and evolution and the rest don’t limit the dog’s freedom). All of them involve some scenario in which physics doesn’t enter the equation for whatever reason.
So…I’ve reached a provisional conclusion that compatibilism can only be understood as a form of dualism. It’s not the Christian dualism of souls that go to Heaven…but it’s still dualism.
b&
“… but the other invisible chains of physics and evolution and the rest don’t limit the dog’s freedom”
Of *course* those things limit the dog’s freedom! State the bleeding obvious!
But that point is so utterly obvious that it’s pointless to state it. The language is there to be *useful*. Thus the concept “freedom” is about things *that* *vary*.
Whether the dog is on a lease is something that *varies*. Thus it is *useful* for the language to be about that variation!
Having the term “freedom” being about whether or not something is subject to the laws of physics is spectacularly *not* useful, because *everything* is subject to the laws of physics! So it needn’t be stated!
If you think that compatibilists describing that a leaseless dog as “free” somehow implies that it is not subject to physics is an utterly absurd misunderstanding of compatibilism.
So the dog is free of the leash, but not free of physics.
Is it free of its genetics? Is it free of its conditioning since birth? Is it free of its memory of the time that kid that’s approaching kicked it? Is it free of its memory of the scolding it got for giving the kid what it deserved?
Is it free of all the other elements that go into its decision-making process?
So you’ve loosed one chain. Big deal. As I already noted, it was the weakest of all the chains controlling the dog.
Again, we’re not discussing freedom in isolation…we’re discussing the freedom of the will. Is the unchained dog free to run about the yard? Of course. Does the dog have free will that directs the dog whether or not to run and in what direction? Most certainly and emphatically not.
b&
“So the dog is free of the leash, but not free of physics.”
Exactly. Now, was that so hard?
“Is it free of its genetics?”
Nope.
“Is it free of its conditioning since birth?”
Nope.
“Is it free of its memory of the time that kid that’s approaching kicked it?”
Nope.
“Is it free of its memory of the scolding it got”
Nope.
“Is it free of all the other elements that go into its decision-making process?”
Nope.
“So you’ve loosed one chain.”
Yep!
“Big deal.”
Exactly! It makes a significant diference to the dog. Similarly the difference between put in jail and freed from jail is quite significant to a human.
Really, it is! Just watch someone hire expensive lawyers to try to avoid jail. It matters to them. Really, it does! And that’s what language us about, it’s pragmatic and about what matters.
“As I already noted, it was the weakest of all the chains controlling the dog.”
It matters to the dog, ok? Being put in jail matters to the human, ok?
“Is the unchained dog free to run about the yard? Of course.”
Exactly! Thank you!
“Does the dog have free will that directs the dog whether or not to run and in what direction?”
Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking. Does the dog have a will to run in a particular direction? Yes. Is it free to act on that will? Depends on the lease. If no lease then it has freely-acting will, or “free will” as we call it.
(Don’t bother telling is that the will is not itself a product of will, we know that.)
Still dodging.
Never mind if the will is or is not a product of the will.
Is the will free?
You’ve just written that the will is not free, that the will can’t will itself.
So will you please acknowledge that the will is not free, in language as such?
And if the will is not free…then there is not free will.
There can be freedom.
There can be will.
There can be marriage.
There can be bachelors.
There can be no married bachelors, and there can be no free will.
b&
“So will you please acknowledge that the will is not free, in language as such?”
The will is not free to will itself (as stated by compatibilists back in 1819).
The human is often free to act on their will. So doing is summarised as “freely acting will” or “free will”.
Free will is the freedom of the will that is not free.
Very Zen, that…but if you can’t see the deepity-infused Orwellian incoherence of the freedom of the chained…well, again. Whether intentionally or not, you’re pulling a bait-and-switch at absolute best.
…and that’s before you start to get into justification of how freedom arises from the not-free will, which is where the dualism inevitably gets invoked by compatibilists.
Maybe you’d like to take another stab at that?
The starting point is the will that is not free. Where does the freedom enter the picture? How, exactly, is it that you liberate that which cannot be extracted from the bedrock? While, obviously, of course, simultaneously leaving it embedded in the bedrock, even though you’ve waved your magic freedom wand upon it and freed it.
b&
Look, it really is not hard.
A dog has desires.
The dog is not free to will its desires.
But the dog can be relatively free to *act* on its desires (say, bounded by the walls of a yard).
Or it can be more constrained (say, on a lease).
The compatibilist concept of “free will” is the degree to which the dog is free to *act* on its will, and is thus about the differences between the previous two sentences.
It really, really is not a hard concept.
Unless one is being willfully perverse.
“Maybe you’d like to take another stab at that?”
Nope, I can’t be bothered.
…which is the one thing that actually matters, that actually does decide what the dog does and doesn’t do.
Sure, ignore the one factor that matters and you’re off to the races!
b&
“So…I’ve reached a provisional conclusion that compatibilism can only be understood as a form of dualism. It’s not the Christian dualism of souls that go to Heaven…but it’s still dualism.”
Ok, I’m outta here.
Coel, good luck.
That’s also my conclusion.
Ben is a one trick pony.
He really is totally incapable of arguing the case for incompatibilism with rational counterargument. So he resorts to the smokescreen of calling any argument for compatibilism an argument for “dualism” – as if this charge alone, silly as it may be in any particular circumstances, will get him out of the hook in having to say something relevant in response.
We have all seen this trick Ben, and we are not impressed.
Coel,
““So will you please acknowledge that the will is not free, in language as such?”
The will is not free to will itself (as stated by compatibilists back in 1819).
The human is often free to act on their will. So doing is summarised as “freely acting will” or “free will”.”
There is more to it. To have free will compatible with determinism we need to be free to select a different option as well. That seems to be missing from your analysis.
So in cases when we did not do what we should have done, we needed to have been able to have chosen to have done it. So able to have had a different will some how. So I’m able to take the lift or the stairs. Someone who suffers from claustrophobia isn’t.
Anyhow what matters is people believe in contra causal free will. There is little doubt about that, otherwise there wouldn’t be such resistance to compatibilism.
Contra causal free will can be defined as the denial of the following two statements:
1) To have done otherwise circumstances not of my choosing would have had to have been different.
2) If circumstances not of my choosing had been appropriately different I would have done otherwise.
Sheer luck in the above sense.
What those like me, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris and so on emphasise is denying it’s sheer luck in the above sense is a bad thing when blaming people for what they did. Saying “we know it’s just the luck of the draw but we need rules with penalties and we need you to pay”, is very different to saying “you deserve it”. It changes how we think and feel about it a great deal.
The point being belief in contra causal free will is not good.
Spending all this time arguing over the definition of free will is just missing the point.
No. Wrong. That is simply not what *compatibilist* free will is claiming.
The “freedom” is the freedom to *act* on ones will. It is not the ability to re-will ones will.
Yes, some people do believe that (or, rather, people have a confused mix of ideas regarding that). And, yes, it is a wrong way of thinking, and it is important to disabuse people of dualism.
That, though, is nothing to do with the debate about compatibilist FW because c-FW is not about d-FW.
Coel, in my lift example the person is not free to choose to get in the lift despite the fact she would get in the lift if she chose to. So ordinarily it’s considered that she doesn’t take the stairs of her own free will, she has to. So your compatibilist definition is unusual and doesn’t capture even the compatibilist meaning of free will. Every person in court could have done what they should have done if they chose to. We are not only interested in that, we also want to know if they were able to choose to.
CFW is not about CCFW. But the problem is incompatibilist disbelievers and compatibilists agree on the facts. The difference is all or nearly all a semantic one
Because of that it’s not a sensible way to divide the topic up. Look how much posting is going on between people who basically agree.
A more interesting division is over the difference it makes if we don’t believe in CCFW but only believe in CFW. Does how we treat ourselves and each other improve if we get it right. That’s the real issue.
(Sorry about my name if it changes, not meaning to confuse or anything)
“Coel, in my lift example the person is not free to choose to get in the lift despite the fact she would get in the lift if she chose to.”
If all you’re saying is that she is not free to will her will, then yes, agreed.
But, for the thirty sixth time, compatibilist FW does not claim that.
And, yes, *dualist* FW may indeed claim that, but c-FW is not d-FW.
Coel,
I’m pointing out we are interested in what is preventing people from selecting a particular option.
So if I take the stairs I’m free to take the lift. I’m prevented from taking the lift by my reason to take the stairs, let’s say it’s one floor and it’s quicker. So I’m free to take the lift.
But the person with claustrophobia is not free to take the lift.
My point is you’ve left that out of your theory.
It’s not only that we need to be able to do otherwise if we choose to. We also need to be able to choose to in a way I can and a person with claustrophobia can’t.
Otherwise everyone in court is morally responsible because everybody is free to behave otherwise if they choose to.
This is why Dennett defines free will as moral competence. The agent needs to be able to choose to do the right thing too.
So you differ with a lot of compatibilists and your theory would be no use in a court room.
Desperate last attempt re Ben:
Parable of the House Bricks
Me> This house brick is supported by a table. That house brick is not, and is in “free fall” under gravity.
Ben> But the falling brick is still constrained by gravity, isn’t it? It’s following physical laws.
Me> Yes.
Ben> So it isn’t really “free” is it?
Me> It’s “free” in the sense that there is no constraining table.
Ben> But its motion is still constrained by gravity, isn’t it? So it isn’t “free”.
Me> “Free” is a relative term. The table brick is constrained by the table *and* by gravity, whereas the free-fall brick is constrained only by gravity.
Ben> So it isn’t “free”. We should only call it “free” if it is entirely independent of the laws of physics.
Me> That’s simply not what the term means. Since nothing is ever independent of the laws of physics, it would be pointless having a word for that state.
The language is there to be useful, and it is useful to distinguish between **degrees** of freedom.
The term “free fall” distinguishes between the presence or absence of the supporting table.
Ben> But it totally ignores the fact that it is not “free” from gravity!
Me> No-one would interpret the term as implying that it was!
Ben> Your term “free fall” totally ignores that the gravity is a major determinant of what the brick does — in both cases!
Me> Yes, and that is understood by those using the term.
Ben> No, no! By using the term “free fall” you’re implying that the brick has some magic dualistic property that enables it to ignore gravity, aren’t you?
Me> No I’m not. I’m really not.
Ben> Yes you are! You are claiming it is “free”. I can only interpret that as a claim that it is free of the effects of gravity.
Me> Why can’t we take “free” as implying that it is free from *one* constraint (the table), while accepting that it is subject to many others (such as gravity)?
Ben> Because you’re saying it is “free”! So which is it? Are you claiming it is free or not? You keep equivocating on this point.
Me> sigh.
Ben> Why don’t you admit that the brick is not “free” of gravity?
Me> I admit that.
Ben> So it’s not “free” is it?
Me> No English speaker would interpret the phrase as implying it is ignoring the physical laws of a deterministic universe.
Ben> I can only interpret what you’re saying as dualistic, that there is some magic “free fall” module that enables the brick to ignore gravity.
Me> sigh.
Ben> How can you call the fall “free” unless that fall is independent of the laws of gravity?
Me> Because the “fall” is “free” of the constraint of the table.
Ben> But it’s still constrained by gravity, isn’t it?
Me> Yes.
Ben> And gravity determines what it will do, so it’s not “free” is it?
Me> Not of gravity, no.
Ben> You dualists are saying that house bricks can ignore gravity! How else can the fall be “free”?
[Conversation to be continued ad infinitum.]
Marvelous Coel.
If we were on Facebook your comment is totally worthy of a LMFAO, however as we are on a more elevated plain here at WEIT (NOTE: of our own free will that is) all I then say is a hearty Well Done!
But no one is ready or instinctively eager to interpret bricks as being special in their freedom, whereas they’ll fall headlong into the muddle when it comes to people’s choices. That’s why descriptions like this are a problem:
Since nothing is ever independent of the laws of physics, it would be pointless having a word for that state.
People who believe in the supernatural – or in Platonic perfections, come to that, or mind-body dualism – would disagree with you, and that’s the problem. In using “free will”, nearly everyone would interpret the term as implying that the free will is “free” – if I may use it as a stand-in for physics – from gravity. Even though you’ve gone out and explicitly, unambiguously defined free will as the absence of external constraint, it’s still going to connote libertarianism, whether you intend it to or not.
Surely, a more important development of the free will debate is to get it into the mainstream, popular culture, and policy that we are neural computers in a deterministic system, and banish spooky libertarian or libertarian-like beliefs to the contrary (and their resulting actions and policies, stated or not).
Well, if it is political ends you are seeking reasonshark, instead of resolving our scientific/philosophical debate here, I would advise you that it would be a far better political strategy in banishing mainstream “spooky libertian” belief to only argue for the Compatibilist view of free will.
It is bad enough that we tell the poor buggers that they have no hope of getting any help or consolation from any divine being, that there is no reward in heaven for the evils they suffer on earth, and that they and their loved ones are doomed to extinction and then add to this the news that they are robots.
Ah — more of Dan’s appeal to consequences! 😉
/@
Indeed. We are enlightened enough to be able to muddle through despite knowing the truth — but don’t you dare take away the crutches of all the rest of the dumb schmucks.
b&
Coel, your brick analogy is a perfect strawman.
Let me attempt an entirely different angle, one that has yet to be broached in this conversation.
And, a warning: I’ll start lighthearted…but this is going to get very, very dark. Others might feel compelled to add a “trigger warning” of some sort or other, but there’s nothing here that would “trigger” anything. But it’s still not going to be an happy post.
But, as I promised — a bit of levity to start.
Coel, have you ever eaten a potato chip?
Yes, of course; I’m sure you have — but that’s not what I mean.
Have you ever opened a new bag of potato chips, opened the bag, eaten exactly one single delicious chip, closed the bag, and walked away?
Maybe you have, though I’d bet a…well, a bag of potato chips, that you haven’t.
And, even if you have, you can probably see where I’m going with this.
Have you ever opened a large bag of potato chips with the intention of just eating a single portion…and, soon thereafter, to your chagrin, discovered that you’d eaten the whole bag?
Or maybe potato chips aren’t your “thing.” Maybe it’s chocolate, or ice cream…or a bottle of wine…or, for the truly unfortunate, hard drugs or another pull of the one-armed bandit. Or maybe just one more reply to that idjit Ben on WEIT before you go to bed, and then another and another and another?
If you’re at all human, you’ve had this experience, of doing something that you really wish you’d stop doing but you just can’t seem to manage to stop.
Or worse. Much worse.
Have you ever wanted to get out of bed in the morning after a long night’s sleep…but just couldn’t manage to rouse yourself?
I’m fortunate in that I’ve never suffered from major depression…but I’ve had enough brief cases of “the blahs” to have some idea of what that’s like. You probably have, too.
And, to hear the accounts from those who have suffered from full-on full-blown drawn-out major depression…it’s heartbreaking. This one woman…she lay in bed, ten in the morning after getting in bed at six the night before. She’s really late for work. She has an understanding boss, but she knows she’s pushing the limits. It’s not like she’s chained to the bed — there aren’t any kinky velvet-lined handcuffs restricting her movement and her limbs are all in perfect working condition…but she is utterly hopeless and powerless to push aside the covers, swing her legs over the side, sit up, and get out of bed. Even just thinking about it is too painful for her to consider.
She wants nothing more in the world to just get out of bed, already, damnit. She desperately wishes she could work up the will to force her body to move. She remembers with longing that, not that long ago, it wasn’t that much of a chore. Indeed, once upon a time, she practically launched herself to the ceiling the instant she was awake. And she has some glimmer of hope that this will pass and someday, maybe next week or next month, she’ll be able to drag herself out of bed with some better regularity and ease…
…but, right now?
She can’t get out of bed.
I think we can all agree that those are all examples of the force of will — and, specifically, failures thereof. There’s no gun to the head, no chains tying us down, none of the other restrictions that would deny us of the freedom of will that compatibilists insist we have and that’s the only one worth wanting.
And…I’m sorry, but I gotta get crude at this point.
Fuck that noise.
Tell that woman lying helplessly there in bed that she’s got the only type of free will worth wanting, when the only thing she wants in the whole world is the damned will to get out of bed…and that’s insulting and insensitive in the worst possible way.
The only freedom of will anybody ever wants is the freedom to change the will. Why do you think the largest section of the bookstore is the self-help / inspirational motivational one? How is it that motivational speakers and life coaches and spiritual advisers can so easily get so stinkin’ rich?
Chains don’t matter. It may be a First World problem…but, within rounding, exactly 0% of the Western population is held back from our idealized “true” potential by chains.
We ourselves are our own biggest obstacle, and the greatest struggles in life are the ones to overcome the obstacles of the self.
What is it that sets all the great musicians, athletes, inventors, and the rest apart from everybody else? They have the willpower to dedicate themselves to tireless devotion to their craft. They’re the ones spending hour after hour in the practice room, at the arena, in the lab…
…and do you really think that they have any choice in the matter, either? Or that the rest of us do?
When it comes right down to it, your compatibilist free will, in addition to being utterly irrelevant and dismissive and contradictory of the facts…is the ultimate “blame the victim” accusation, especially when it comes to matters of mental health.
“You aren’t handcuffed to anything! Therefore, you have compatibilist free will, which is the only type of free will worth wanting! So stop doing what you’re addicted to, stop being depressed, get out there, and exercise your compatibilist free will and go get ’em, tiger! Be healed! In the name of Jay-zeus, as you lay one hand on the TV and write me a check with the other!”
Now do you understand why your dismissal of the inability to will what you want is so profoundly irrelevant?
If you still doubt me…well, then, let me just open this bag of chips for you. It’s all yours.
b&
OK Ben, I’m puzzled.
Here you present a lengthy account of someone who is *not* able to will her will.
The Compatibilist-FW account says that we are *not* free to will our will.
Everything you say here is in line with that. A depressed or mentally ill person is *not* free to simply re-will their will and stop being depressed.
Thus, everything you say here is fully in accord with the c-FW account that I’ve been promoting.
You then say:
“Therefore, you have compatibilist free will, … So stop doing what you’re addicted to, stop being depressed, …”.
No. That is the opposite of what the c-FW account says. The c-FW accounts does not say you are free to re-will your will.
Nothing that you’ve said is an argument against the c-FW account.
“Now do you understand why your dismissal of the inability to will what you want is so profoundly irrelevant?”
I am not “dismissing” the inability to will ones will, I am *stating* the inability to will ones will.
The inability to will ones will is an important feature of the world.
No-one says that the freedom to *act* on ones will (which is all that c-FW claims) is the only important feature of the world.
Progress, of a sort.
I’m arguing that the obstacles you’re presenting as ones that might hinder compatibilist free will aren’t merely not the only important feature of the world…they’re irrelevant to the discussion, irrelevant to the will, and not even of any real importance to people in the first place.
Yes, yes. It makes a difference if you’re chained to a wall or not.
But, in the real world we all live it?
We’re not chained to walls, and the other chains you’re so obsessed with are so far down on the list of what limits us they’re not even blips on the radar.
Let’s go back to your dog in the yard. He’s tied up two ways. He’s got one of those spring-loaded lightweight leashes with at least 20′ of cord, and he’s in an iron straightjacket. Both the leash and the straightjacket are firmly bolted to the same bollard.
You’re so focused on the liberty afforded to that friendly walkabout leash that you’re missing the iron straightjacket. You’re telling us all how wonderful it is that the leash doesn’t hinder the dog’s movements, at least not until he gets to the end of the line, and look at how free he is! And, of course the straightjacket restricts his movement; nobody’s questioning that. But the straightjacket isn’t a leash, and your definition of freedom boils down in the end to whether or not the dog is on a permissive leash.
Again, consider the potato chip.
Which is more important: your will to limit how many you eat, or the physical constraints involved in eating the chips? Have you ever been physically restrained from eating just one more potato chip? When you’ve stopped eating chips even though the bag’s not empty, has it been because somebody grabbed your arm, or because your will to keep eating potato chips vanished?
All throughout the potato chip episode, you’ve had perfect compatibilist free will…and yet that free will says absolutely nothing whatsoever about whether or not and how many potato chips you eat.
…and said fact really ought to clue you in to the irrelevance of your compatibilist free will to questions of will….
b&
Again, Ben, no-one ever said that c-FW has the only important issue. No-one ever said that c-FW was always the most important factor.
If you want to focus on other factors that affect how we act then fine, go ahead.
But that discussion is not about c-FW.
And, there is still a difference between a dog on a chain and a dog free to roam in the yard.
But, no-one ever said that that it the only thing that affects how the dog acts, nor that it is the necessarily the most important issue for any particular discussion.
Once again you are interpreting c-FW as though it were d-FW, and in some conceptions of d-FW the d-FW might indeed be the over-riding factor.
But c-FW is not d-FW. We are not looking to c-FW as a replacement for d-FW. Nor does it do the same job as dualists think that d-FW does. c-FW really, really, really is not about d-FW.
I think we may well be narrowing our differences.
If I may, permit me to present a summary of points I think we agree upon.
* Compatibilist free will is not the same as dualist free will.
* Most people except for compatibilists themselves, in the context of religion and philosophy, use the phrase, “free will,” to refer to the dualist version. (This explicitly excludes other contexts where, for example, “free” might mean, “no charge.”)
* The “will” in compatibilist free will is not free to be modified, even if the compatibilist claims it is still free to act.
* The constraints that compatibilist free will is free of are rarely, if ever, the actual limiting factors in the choices people make.
* The will itself — a will, again, that is not free to change — is always the ultimate limiting factor in the choices people make.
* The freedom of the will that everybody yearns for is the freedom to change the will itself — again, an ability we agree does not exist.
If you agree with all that…we once again come to the exact same challenge the incompatibilists have been presenting from the start. If it’s not freedom of the will itself, if it’s not the “free will” everybody else is referring to, if it’s generally irrelevant to making choices in day-to-day living for choices large and small, if it’s not the “free will” everybody wants but nobody has…
…why are you calling it, “free will,” and how is it at all relevant to the discussion?
b&
Hi Ben.
“* Compatibilist free will is not the same as dualist free will.”
Yes!
“* Most people except for compatibilists themselves, in the context of religion and philosophy, use the phrase, “free will,” to refer to the dualist version.”
No. I’d say that “most people” have a confused mix of different concepts of FW.
“* The “will” in compatibilist free will is not free to be modified, even if the compatibilist claims it is still free to act.”
Yes. The will can’t re-will itself.
“* The constraints that compatibilist free will is free of are rarely, if ever, the actual limiting factors in the choices people make.”
No, I’d say that such constraints are pretty common. But, all outcomes are a complex convolution of all factors, so we shouldn’t try to over-simplify. The concept c-FW is one useful concept in understanding humans, but of course lots of other factors are important.
“* The will itself — a will, again, that is not free to change — is always the ultimate limiting factor in the choices people make.”
In the sense that if we have no desire to do something then we don’t do it, yes.
“* The freedom of the will that everybody yearns for is the freedom to change the will itself — again, an ability we agree does not exist.”
I disagree that “everybody yearns for” that ability. I guess that some people don’t particularly like themselves, and don’t like their own personality, and would want it to be different. But I think it’d be wrong to extrapolate that to most people, let alone “everyone”.
To most people, what does matter to them is that they can express themselves, live how they want to live, be themselves, do what they want to do.
Just compare, say, someone living as an openly gay person, compared to the previous situation of having to live their whole lives hiding who they were owing to social pressures.
I’d suggest that the difference is hugely important to them. I’d also guess that for most of them, desire for that freedom, to live openly in accord with their personality, dominates over the wish: “I wish I could wish myself to be straight”.
But I also accept that there are some people, say very depressed people, who really do wish they could have very different natures. Those people have my sympathy. But I think that is a minority of people.
Just focussing on the disagreements, for obvious reasons…
Amend that to, “Most people who believe we have something called, ‘free will,’ have a confused mix of concepts relating to what that property is,” and I’d agree with you.
But the stronger, more relevant point I’d make is that, amongst those who believe we have free will, most of those concepts, however muddled they may (often of necessity) be…they’re (explicitly or implicitly) supernatural and / or dualistic.
With me?
If you’re on the fence…consider a survey of Americans that asks them why they think evil exists. What percentage of responses are going to indicate the importance of “free will” to their answer? Do you really think the “free will” that they’re indicating as an important reason for the existence of evil is your own compatibilist free will?
Then give an example of one from your own life. Not an hypothetical of a prisoner in solitary confinement cruelly chained to the wall, but a constraint that fits your definition that you yourself are meaningfully limited by.
I’ll give you a clue: unless you’re a competitive athlete, you’ll be hard pressed to come up with such an example.
I’m not just referring to major aspects of one’s life like your example of sexual orientation.
I’m referring to the everyday struggles we all face.
Don’t you wish you exercised more, or were a better housekeeper, or spent more time with your family, or something along those lines? Don’t you beat yourself up when it comes time to exercise and you find yourself doing something else, when you rush through cleaning up the kitchen so you can get back to the TV before the commercial ends, when you tuck in your kids and realize it’s too late to read them a bedtime story?
If those aren’t failures of will…what is?
If your will isn’t the limiting factor in not just those instances, but all the ones where you do succeed (Yay! I actually remembered to brush my teeth before going to bed!)…then what is?
It’s not like you’ve got anybody putting a gun to your head preventing you from doing some push-ups, or chaining you to the wall preventing you from doing the dishes, or gagging you so you can’t read to your kids.
…and…aren’t these failures of the will the very things in your life that you most wish you could fix, that which you most yearn to change?
Don’t you wish you had the freedom to will yourself to be a better person?
Maybe you’re already perfect, but I rather doubt it. Maybe you don’t give a damn about your failings or you’ve resigned yourself to your inadequacies…but isn’t that an even bigger failure of the will?
Ask people — including yourself — what they most wish they could change about their lives…and, once they get above the level of poverty where they don’t know where their next meal or bedroll is coming from, they’re mostly concerned with making themselves better, not with external circumstances. That is, they want the freedom to change their wills such that they have the willpower to do all the things they want to do but never seem to actually wind up doing because they lack the will to do them.
b&
“… consider a survey of Americans that asks them why they think evil exists.”
Yes, I agree, if you ask abstract philosophical questions like that, you tend to get dualistic answers. But, if you watch people in everyday-life situations, their thinking is often, de facto, fairly compatibilist (even if, when asked to give abstract commentary on their actions, they reply with dualism).
It’s also worth remarking that Europeans would be significantly less likely to give dualistic answers to that question than Americans.
“Then give an example of one from your own life.”
Speed limits! I don’t obey them “of my own free will”, I’m usually coerced by the possible legal consequences. 🙂
“…and…aren’t these failures of the will the very things in your life that you most wish you could fix, that which you most yearn to change?”
Well, I must admit, no I don’t. Maybe I’m just weird! The sort of things you refer to are there, yes, but they’re not “what I most yearn to change”.
“Maybe you don’t give a damn about your failings or you’ve resigned yourself to your inadequacies …”
Or just realised that a lot of angst about things I can’t change is not going to achieve much. I think that liking how things are, as opposed to wanting them to be very different, is the secret to contentment.
And, yet, there is no variable governor on your car’s throttle that prevents you from exceeding the prevailing speed limit. You are perfectly physically possible to do so, and the only thing that actually prevents you from speeding is…
…wait for it…
…your will!
Try again?
Then what, if you could pick anything at all about yourself, do you most wish to change or improve upon?
What’s your most challenging hurdle you’ve yet to overcome?
Or do you lack ambition entirely?
b&
Coel..”The Compatibilist-FW account says that we are *not* free to will our will.
“Ben…I think we may well be narrowing our differences.”
Sorry to break the accord chaps, but as a compatibilist (perhaps of a somewhat different variety than Coel) I cannot accept Schopenhauer’s little dictum on will. The statement is merely a constructed self referential logical trap – it essentially defines itself to be true by definition (not terribly unlike the ontological argument for god’s existence).
What we have in “will” are instincts, desires, goals, values and decisions. We can’t change our instincts – those are hard wired. Changing desires takes a LOT of iterative “reprogramming effort” but it is possible and is done quite a lot, and goals and values are changed all the time. Decisions are based on these other factors. “Will” to me applies to desires and goals = changeable entities. And self-formed in many instances as Kane would have it.
Of course we can be blocked from being able to take certain decision paths – physically or psychologically and these situations in certain individuals are equivalent to “gun to the head constraints”. But that isn’t normally the case in the decisions that we ordinarily make every day and confirm to us that we really do have a capacity to choose.
Of course values are what make up moral systems – upon which Dennett places such particular emphasis in our FW.
…and that’s an huge part of the problem right there.
Just as there are at least as many pantheons as there are believers…there plainly exists, as evidenced by this thread alone, at least as many compatibilist free wills as there are ecompatibilists.
And at most one of you can be right.
In stark contrast, we have unanimity amongst the incompatibilists. “Free will,” like the gods, is, at best, a literary construct that has no actual basis in reality. In fiction, it serves as the motive power of the individual and the excuse for divine incompetence and personal retribution. But, in reality? At best we get deepities from some compatibilists and supernatural woo-woo from many compatibilists and all dualists.
When the compatibilists can agree on a definition of “free will,” that’s the time for incompatibilists to begin to take y’all seriously.
b&
When the compatibilists can agree on a definition of “free will,” that’s the time for incompatibilists to begin to take y’all seriously.”
That is a totally pointless rejoinder Ben. It’s blindingly obvious that people who don’t believe that something exists will “agree” on it’s nature – it’s nature, in their opinion being “non-existent”. Those who believe that something exists will always have nuanced interpretations about that something’s nature.
You are still playing that same old game that Coel parodies so well, and it’s really very very boring.
Hi Ben,
After all this time you are still not understanding the basics of what the c-FW conception actually is.
“You are perfectly physically possible to do so, and the only thing that actually prevents you from speeding is … wait for it… your will!”
Exactly. My will when operating under threat of legal sanction, as oppose to my will when there is no legal sanction for speeding.
It’s the same as my will operating when a gun is held to my head, versus my will when no gun is held to my head.
The whole c-FW conception is about interactions between humans, about social constraints, about **some** sorts of influences in what I end up doing.
You keep insisting that we must include all such influences or none of them.
But, often, in human life, it is useful to consider *some* influences, and use words to refer to *those*.
Thus “c-FW” is about threats of legal sanction and guns to the head — but not, for example, factors such as “my car won’t go that fast”.
That’s just the way the term is used, and it’s used that way because it is useful.
>That’s just the way the term is used, and it’s used that way because it is useful.
Coel, I tried to ask this once before, but probably did a poor job. I understand you use cFW or freedom to act where some enviornmental/genetic constraints are present and others aren’t, right?
I just don’t understand how making this distinction is useful in formal conversation on the subject. I would really like to.
I understand how in casual conversation, it is built into our culture so in talking to my Grandma, I’m not going to establish a philosophical base and change terms when I want her to choose between soup and salad.
Likewise I understand but disagree with the position that the “little people” must think they have freedom to act. I don’t ever want to be a “little person” so would hate to think that someone would make that decision for me and thus would not do for someone else.
So, how, in formal conversation and resulting policy is making the distinction you make to consider some constraints but not all of them useful?
Coel, that’s just garden variety freedom. It’s not freedom of the will, as you yourself admit. It’s just…freedom. Every time you start insisting that freedom is freedom of the will — which is what you do when you pair those two words together — you’re dishonestly, if innocently, doing the exact same bait-n-switch that dualists use to get a foot in the door for the existence of souls. Yes, you stop long before the notion of the soul as something real…but you’re just taking the first chapter of the dualist playbook and discarding the rest.
I still don’t understand what you think you’re trying to accomplish by tacking the “will” on to the freedom that nobody is challenging, but, as should be palpably obvious by now…it’s not at all convincing and it’s really not doing the cause of freedom any good.
b&
“Coel, that’s just garden variety freedom. It’s not freedom of the will, as you yourself admit. It’s just…freedom.”
As I’ve repeatedly clarified, by “free will” the compatibilist means freedom to act on ones will.
In the same way “free speech” means the freedom to voice one’s opinions.
The “freedom” in “free speech” is not about the formation of the opinion, it is the freedom to voice that opinion.
Similarly, the “freedom” in “religious freedom” is not about the forming of the religious opinions, it’s about freedom to act in accord with that opinion.
The phrase “free will” is thus entirely in line with the phrase “free speech”.
And even you are not going to suggest that there is anything dualistic about “free speech” (I hope!).
As you do again and again and again and again, you keep interpreting c-FW as though it were about d-FW, which really is about “freedom” in the *formation* of the will. c-FW is not.
You’re cheating us again, Coel. And, I think, yourself.
| by “free will” the compatibilist means freedom to act on ones will.
As I said elsewhere, this is really “free action” or “freedom of action”.
| In the same way “free speech” means the freedom to voice one’s opinions. | The “freedom” in “free speech” is not about the formation of the opinion, it is the freedom to voice that opinion.
Well, I agree with you here, but I think you’re arguing against your self. Speech is an action. Voicing your opinion is an action.
So, “free will” is !*not*! “entirely in line with the phrase ‘free speech’”.
In line with your argument elsewhere, you would have to say that “free speech” is shorthand for “freely [xxx-ing] speech”: Yet here the expansion must be “freely speaking [xxx]”. How do you reconcile that?
Speech is an action, just as much something that flows from will – “the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action” (note: /not/ the action itself!), if we are to take it’s plain English meaning – as an other action.
Attempting to shoehorn “action” into “free will” is egregious linguistic fraud.
A few things to end with, addressing a variety of comments:
1. Using “free action” for “freedom to act according to one’s determined motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions” [Wp] in place of “free will” would be (a) far clearer and (b) far less contentious. I don’t see any benefit in retaining the term “free will”, despite the long history of this usage. “Free action” can be Dan’s “only freedom worth wanting”.
2. Compatibilism seems to be a truism: “the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas” [Wp] is not really a strong or interesting philosophical position if you are simply adopting a definition of “free will” that is compatible with determinism. (As you said elsewhere: “c-FW is L-FW plus determinism.”) I don’t see any evidence of incompatibilists saying that “freedom to act…” on your decisions, however they were made, is incompatible with determinism. (Taking as a given that actions are constrained by logic and physical laws; no drawing square circles or building perpetual motion machines.)
3. By focusing on the “freedom to act…” rather than the mental faculty, the decision-making capability that initiates action (or speech!), compatibilism seems to shift the focus from the really interesting and important part of the discussion: How /does/ that decision-making capability – the seeming ability to conceive of the world in terms of how it might otherwise be, to consider options, and choose amongst them – arise from deterministic processes in the brain?
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That’s freedom of action, not freedom of will.
A rock in free fall on a ballistic trajectory doesn’t change shape or color or size or mass or density or any other property, save its location (and presumably orientation) with respect to the Earth.
That’s why the rock is in free fall rather than free form.
b&
Hi Lowen,
“So, how, in formal conversation and resulting policy is making the distinction you make to consider some constraints but not all of them useful?”
First, c-FW is not some great and radical important philosophical stance. It’s basically determinism; that’s the basic philosophy in a nutshell.
c-FW is primarily about human social interactions. To answer your question let me take the analagous “free speech” as less fraught.
Free speech is about *some* types of constraint. These include the threat of being put in jail or of being violently attacked if you say certain things.
Free speech is *not* about other types of constraints in your speech. For example it is *not* about the fact that your speech is limited by how fast you can speak or type. And it is not about the fact that your ability to construct Hungarian speech is near zero because you can’t speak Hungarian.
[Ben is going to insist that speech is only “free” if you’re able to speak at a million words a minute in 36 languages simultaneously 🙂 ]
Now, presumably you don’t need me to explain why designing the construct “free speech” to include *some* sorts of constraints on your speech, but not others, is useful?
It’s the same with “free will”, which is primarily about social interactions and coercion from other humans.
Most of the criticisms of c-FW just way, way over-analyse the whole thing and so end up misunderstanding what c-FW is all about.
So lack of money then limits my compatibilist free will just like lack of money limits my ability to speak as freely as the Koch Bros?
I’m a simple guy, but this seems obvious, but I don’t know why it matters.
I want to do something (or say something) in a certain way, place, and time and I can – so I have have free will (speach) there even if I don’t end up doing it. But if for any reason I can’t (including my genetics, past experience and current environment including assets), I don’t have free will (speach) in that area?
I don’t understand why this distinction matters. I can choose to eat less and eat better and exercise more. I want to do that, but I don’t. I am free to do it, but I don’t. Sure that’s different then someone who does not have the assets to acquire food or the legs to exercise. But why does this distinction matter?
Making the distinction you make, how does our society policy change?
I know I’m missing something, but I can’t figure it out.
Actually…freedom of speech only means that the government doesn’t engage in restraint of speech either before or after the fact.
There’s lots else that it doesn’t entail, such as the freedom to force a third party to publish your speech.
Yet your free will encompasses the freedom of everything except the will…which would be akin to “free speech” that can’t actually be spoken, but that could be acted out by interpretive dance or underwater basketweaving.
b&
Well, this is fascinating. Apparently Ben wishes to downplay the freedom referenced in c-FW (and referenced by most people) as if it pales in comparison to not being able to choose our desires.
So, on one hand there are kids growing up in a “good families” wherein they are given plenty of freedom and support in pursuing their interests…
On the other hand there have been children literally kept in tiny cages, unable to leave, virtually none of their desires met for comfort, food, friendship, freedom etc.
Just the type of physical constraints on doing what one wants, referenced by c-Free Will. (And referenced by most people).
But really, the difference between those two conditions for children? Irrelevant. Not important, really. If we can’t choose our desires, the differences in the situations described above are “not important.”
People don’t “really care” about such differences, apparently, on Ben’s argument. They only care if they can change their will.
I’m just trying to imagine which world you are currently living in, Ben.
Further, please remember…once again…that the conceptions of free will are all over the map, despite your desire to over-simplify. Even among dualists, who think we have spooky souls making our decisions – e.g. Christians – the exact nature of this free will is in dispute. Some are (Theistic) Libertarians who believe
our choices are completely uncaused, including our wills. OTHERS are (theistic) Compatibilists, who believe we can NOT CHOOSE what we will, we act driven by a (sin) nature we can not change. But we have free will insofar as we can act to fulfill what we will. (You think Christians and other dualists haven’t ever noticed how hard it can be to change what we will???).
You may think both accounts are daft, but the point is that this continued declaration on your part that outside of us nutty compatibilists Free Will is easily and simply understood in dualistic Libertarian terms, especially among the religious” is just naive.
There are all sorts of different conceptions of compatibilist free will, libertarian free will, and incompatibilism. You just don’t have the grounds you assume you do to keep declaring if free will doesn’t meet some narrow version of libertarianism you’ve latched on to, that you can tell everyone “That’s not the Free Will people believe in!”
Back out….
Oh, puh-leeze.
The percentage of the population raised in cages, especially in the West, has so many zeroes to the right of the decimal point that you’d have to take off your shoes just to count them.
And, obviously. If you’re chained to the dungeon wall in the lair of the evil compatibilist, yes, that’s a really bad thing.
But — and here’s the important part — the freedom you’ve been deprived of is not the freedom of your will.
Vaal, you’re arguing that freedom is important. We all agree upon that. No question.
But you’re still doing a bait-and-switch by equating basic freedom with freedom of the will.
Maybe all I should do is just repeat this next bit until it gets pounded into the heads of the compatibilists?
Freedom is real. The will is real. The will is not free, and freedom is not willful.
Vaal, will you agree with me that freedom is real? Will you agree that the will is real? Will you agree that the will is not free? (You as much as have.) Will you agree that freedom is not willful? (How could it be?)
If you agree with all that, you should be able to make the obvious incompatibilist conclusion that, though freedom is real and the will is real, because the will is not free (and freedom isn’t willful) there is no such thing as “free will,” just as there’s no such thing as a “married bachelor” (even though marriage is real and bachelors are real.)
Really, that’s all you have to do if you want us incompatibilists to stop beating up on you. Drop either the “free” from your discussion of the will, or drop the “will” from your discussion of freedom.
You can then wax poetic all day long about the importance of freedom and the significance of the will, and you’ll never hear nary a peep from an incompatibilists.
The only thing that gets you in hot water with us is the juxtaposition of two contradictory words into a single incoherent term — a term, it again must be noted, which is most commonly used as the theological answer for the question of why the gods let bad things happen to good people.
Freedom: Yay! Hooray!
The will: Wonderful! Fantastic!
Free will: Boo! Hiss!
That’s it!
b&
Ben, thanks for keeping up the fight. I have neither the time nor the energy. I appreciate your effort. It is truly exhausting – especially since there are some many fronts on which to engage (since there are so many different kinds of compatibilists). Anyway, I don’t always agree with Ben Goren, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.
Thanks! Look me up, and I’ll buy you that beer….
b&
I made this for you.
I’ve been memed! First time, too, I think.
b&
Nice!
Vaal,
There is a free will illusion. When people look back on what they or others could have done, it seems like we’re thinking about the agent behaving differently with the rest of the universe just as it was.
That’s how it seems to almost all of us I think. This coupled with the concept of the choice being up to us gives us the idea it’s entirely up to us. In other words nothing out of our control would have had to have been different for us to have done otherwise.
Also we know people believe in moral responsibility which we just don’t have. They believe it could make sense for god to judge us after we are dead for what we have done, for no reason other than we deserve it.
The important question which you seem to ignore completely is how much harm is belief in CCFW doing?
Coel
For me it’s easy to understand that some actions occur free of some specific/local constraints. That seem obvious to me and your brick analogy makes it clear.
It also seems to me clear (though less binary) that people and animals to a degree have “decision making” algorithms that taken into account past experience and anticipated future consequences before acting.
I consider myself a determinist. Since we are all determinists does holding these views also make me a compatibilist? How will I be different now? Will my personal philosophy or my view on societal practices now change?
I see the distinction but it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference.
That would be because the distinction being made is irrelevant.
Coel is pointing to freedom, yes…but not freedom of the will. The freedom he’s pointing to is as irrelevant to the discussion as the freedom of the brick he’s so obsessed with, or the purported freedom of the markets or the freedom of a promotional handout or charity lunch.
We can all point to people demographically similar enough to us as makes no difference…yet they’re either significantly more or less successful than we are. They’re the same age, have the same number of limbs, come from similar social backgrounds, and so on. Yet the one is greatly successful at accomplishing various goals whilst the other struggles mightily just to get out of bed in the morning.
Their physical constraints, the ones that Coel keeps harping on, are indistinguishable. Nothing’s holding the one back that’s not holding back the other; nothing’s pushing on the one that’s not pushing on the other.
Nor are their desires different. Both yearn for success and happiness and all the rest. They both want the same thing.
What does differ is the will…and each is equally helpless to change that will. And it’s the will and the will alone that accounts for the difference between the two.
So, really. Who cares if you got your leg blown off by a roadside bomb overseas? That’s not stopping you from running marathons, as evidenced by the hundreds of amputees who race competitively. It’s one of Coel’s obsessed-over physical chains…but it’s most emphatically not what’s stopping you.
It’s your will that’s stopping you — and your will is not free for you to change.
That doesn’t mean that you can just give up, either, of course. Why? Your will won’t let you….
b&
I apologize for being late to the party–yet again.
The phrase “free will” is so full of metaphysical and theological baggage (and garbage) that it is high time it joins luminiferous æther in the graveyard of useless concepts. However, what do we then call that general attribute of human beings that allows us to plan, strategize, become aware of our unconscious biases, unquestioned assumptions, learn from our own–and other’s–mistakes, and as Steven Pinker has put it, “pursue goals in the face of obstacles”?
Some might suggest “critical thinking,” and yes, that is certainly involved, but as someone diagnosed as “hyperactive” (circa 1969) long before it was called ADD/ADHD, and then diagnosed again 38 years later (and this time they did call it ADHD), “critical thinking” fails to capture, at least for me, what I am doing when monitoring my own cognition and the surrounding environment in my struggle to stay organized, focused, on-task, and manage my time effectively. I have heard “self-awareness” criticized elsewhere because in some senses–though I would argue not in every sense–the”self” is also an illusion.
Smugly pointing out to someone trying to quit smoking, manage a psychiatric condition, or break a long-term pattern of getting into relationships with the wrong people (and we all know people like that), that “free will” is an illusion–and leaving it at that–is reckless. Even stripped of its supernatural and metaphysical baggage, for many people, the idea that we do not necessarily have to keep making the same mistakes and poor choices is part of what they might call “free will.”
For victims of domestic violence it can take all the courage and determination (i.e. their “will”) they can muster to free themselves from the “will”–the desire to control and manipulate them–of their abuser. Telling such a person that “free will” is an illusion–with no further elaboration–is not merely reckless, but contemptible. No less contemptible is Ben’s hypothetical compatibilist telling someone battling depression (or my example of an abuse victim) that while determinism is true, they still have something called “free will” that, while being impotent in overcoming their condition, is still somehow worth having.
Be honest with people by all means, tell them that “free will” is an illusion, but then don’t use that phrase again and don’t let them use it either. I really liked Ben’s observation that “We ourselves are our own biggest obstacle, and the greatest struggles in life are the ones to overcome the obstacles of the self.” Amen! I work with veterans that have significant barriers to employment and I every day I see people that are crippled by the Dunning-Kruger effect, the result of a lack metacognitive skills. Ben’s poignant description of a woman suffering from depression is a great example of a condition that we now know something about what is going on at the neurobiological and behavioral level. We have drugs that can relieve some peoples’ symptoms; we know that in many cases, vigorous exercise can be just as effective as antidepressants. Understanding and applying what little we do know about how our brains actually work, and sometimes do not work, is something more valuable, and useful, and more rewarding to me than any kind of “free will”–be it compatibilist, libertarian, or dualistic–could ever be.
Personally, the two words I use in place of “free will” are “self-awareness,” which includes an awareness that the unitary “self” that we usually experience is an illusion. We know it is an illusion because it can be shattered by damage to specific areas of the human brain. So while the “self” is an illusion, it is one that has been shaped by evolution and is actively constructed by our brains, on-the-fly, almost in real-time, without which, to use again the words of Steven Pinker, we would not occupy the “cognitive niche” nor could we “pursue goals in the face of obstacles.”
As atheists and secularists, we all want to make the world a saner, safer, more rational, and just place. I was disabused of the whole idea of free will (of any variety) by reading the books of V. S. Ramachandran, Steven Pinker, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (the authors of The Invisible Gorilla), Michael Shermer, and others. Perhaps my experience was not typical, but I cannot help but think that learning about how our brains actually work might be a better way to accomplish our shared purpose. I cannot do otherwise than at least try to point out that by allowing ourselves to be caught up in the hamster-wheel of the “free will” wars we may be losing sight of our (hopefully shared) goal of, in Carl Sagan’s beautiful words, holding out science (and reason) as a “candle in the dark.”
And Blessed are the Cheesemakers…
Thanks for the thoughtful words and kind praise.
I don’t think we have a bumper sticker term for it…and I’m not even sure that we should want one.
Rather…I think we’re best off doing exactly what you just did: explain that “free will” is an incoherent self-contradiction that doesn’t even make sense in the first place…but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have real thoughts, feelings, desires, motivations, and all the rest. Just because some nonsensical fantastic theological construction traditionally invoked to explain human cognition has no bearing on reality doesn’t mean that human cognition is as much a fantasy as the fantasy used to explain it; it means that we need to grow up and address reality without resort to fantasy.
…and then you can get down to business with the details, just as you did.
Cheers,
b&
I’m always quite amused when incompatibilists make statements like “free will is an illusion” and then go about their day-to-day lives somehow putting this out of their minds and BEHAVING as though they have free will. I wonder if it right for a rationalist to behave thusly? If one counters that “they can’t help having that illusion” how can they then be rationalists?
I hope you’re making progress reading “I am an Endless Loop” Ben. You need to.
ps: the substitution of “Endless” for “Strange” is just one of my quips Ben. You needn’t come back on that….
The point I am also making here is that if there is no difference between a human and a robot what does “morality” really consist of? How can we be moral actors? Rules that robots create for robots behaviours surely involve an incoherence.
We all have the illusion and of being a moral actor. That we behave like a moral actor and that we wish to be a moral actor doesn’t mean we are a moral actor.
Only empirical science is capable of eliminating these illusions. Philosophy cannot do such thing because our mind is an illusion creating device.
And exactly what sort of life is it that forms the “reality” of the incompatibilist view. We are robots – perhaps a bit more sophisticated than the robots that we can currently build ourselves with the technology we presently have mastered, but robots nevertheless.
It is not just the concept of free will that gets eliminated with the incompatibilist viewpoint, so does our moral agency and even our ability to consider ourselves as rational agents as well. “Achievement” is hardly anything but predestination. Consciousness is nothing more than watching the unraveling of a predetermined script – and there is no real difference between attending a theatrical play and the living of our own lives except that we are one of the characters in OUR play. As in a play we don’t “suspend disbelief” by having our “illusions”. It’s a glum picture.
Before you accuse me of argument from consequences let me say that empirical science and its demand to seek reality are also what most motivates me. I am a compatibilist only because I believe it expresses reality. My free will is not libertarian free will, but it is real, and as Dennett puts it is well “worth having”. We compatibilists have the good fortune of having reality without any illusions.
So, howie, what is the difference between a human and an autonomous, “Asimovian” robot with an equally complex “brain”?
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Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
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Well Ant, in the incompatibilist world we are robots, and the Asimovian robots are robots. In the compatibilist world we are humans and the Asimovian robots need to be treated as if they too were human.
Curious. You’d treat robots differently from humans…how? And why, exactly?
Are you in the habit of abusing tools, of mistreating them and not caring for them? Are you the type to try to tow a yacht with a subcompact by looping a rope around the fender? Do you never develop a sense of attachment to a tool you’ve worked with for so long that it feels like an extension of your own body?
And do you not have even more respect for machinery the more sophisticated it is?
Are you the type to abuse “dumb animals” because they’re not human?
One would hope not, but there’s certainly a quite long history of dualists who do exactly that and use their dualism as the excuse for their inexcusable behavior. Is your half-dualism of compatibilism half an excuse for abuse?
b&
“Curious. You’d treat robots differently from humans…how? And why, exactly?”
Answer me these few questions first…
1) What moral obligation do we owe to a robot?
2) What inhibits us from programming a robots behaviour to be anything we damn please?
3)Is it possible Ben, for you to produce 10 successive sentences without using the word dualist?
Cheers
1) Moral obligation only extends to members of a society, and I’m not yet aware of any robots that are capable even in theory of meaningful participation in human society. Yet moral obligation is entirely irrelevant to questions of the sorts of barbarity you’re impugning unto us. I don’t care if you’re an human, a non-human animal, a robot, or a geological formation; wanton destruction and abuse and the like is just plain…evil, for lack of a better word.
2) Seriously? You need me to explain why it would be a bad idea to intentionally program a robot to be an homicidal maniac or suffer from terminal depression?
3) I’ll stop describing your position as dualistic when you stop defending it in dualistic terms. I mean, seriously? Drawing a line between robots and humans without invoking dualism? Just how the hell is that supposed to work without a soul mucking about somewhere?
b&
Ben: “Moral obligation only extends to members of a society, and I’m not yet aware of any robots that are capable even in theory of meaningful participation in human society ……”
Robots are indeed made to work for the benefit of society. But they are simple “mindless” automatons and deserve no moral concern from us. We can dispose of them or reprogram them as we wish. Only our own selfish economic considerations need guide us. But what is the nature of their “mindlessness” particularly to the incompatibilist? It is not just their simplicity. As “state machines” they only do things that are totally prescribed by external programming and previous historical input. The incompatibilist does not consider that ANY robot, even with the added capability of sophisticated self-programing is any different. Therefore there is no need to ‘be considerate’ of any value that any self-programing has to the robot itself (even we humans are said to have no self in this context says the incompatibilist) Why should that internally developed program so derived be considered unique, worthwhile or intrinsically of any special value from the incompatibilist point of view? Why should the advanced robots views of its own condition, and the state of its affairs in society be considered of any worth or consequence? And how and why could a robot ever be asked to be able to contribute to developing robot morality? With respect to robots this indeed leads to a slaveholders viewpoint of the “robot condition”.
The problem is, that to the incompatabilist WE are essentially robots too. We create a Clockwork Orange world with respect to human morality
Ben: “Yet moral obligation is entirely irrelevant to questions of the sorts of barbarity you’re impugning unto us. “
This is not MY barbarity Ben, it’s YOURS. This is the optimal ESS condition of the game theoretic morality that YOU demand. If you don’t like the implications you had better change the criteria for constructing your moral imperatives…. although I don’t really see how as an incompatibilist you can choose any other system.
Oh, bloody hell.
Why is it that all you authoritarians are so blindedly incapable of comprehending that this really is a two-way street?
You seem to think that “the society” can do whatever it damned well pleases without consequences, and that the math or whatever somehow supports this.
But, from the individual’s perspective, “the society” is a single entity to bargain with, just like any other individual.
All you’re doing is having “the society” play the role of the strong-armed thug, and magically assuming that the thug is invincible and irresistible. “Do what I say or I’ll chop your hands off if you’re lucky.” And you think individuals are just going to meekly submit to that sort of bullshit?
Imagine you’re creating a new society from scratch. “Hey, everybody! Come join our new group where we’ll kill and dismember you if you so much as sneeze!” How many takers are you going to get?
Imagine you’re trying to transform an existing society with similar language. Even if you do it the slow “boil a frog” way…how long do you think it’ll be before you’re besieged by resistance and revolution?
That this sort of thing isn’t blindingly obvious to you from the start tells me that you not only haven’t a clue about what game theory is beyond the most trivial introductory examples from which you’ve extrapolated incomprehensibly…but that you really don’t understand society or humans all that well, either.
b&
Ben -“You seem to think that “the society” can do whatever it damned well pleases without consequences, and that the math or whatever somehow supports this”
Well YOU are the “morality from game theory” proponent and supporter, not me. Then I tell you the consequences of your conviction and you go into a rant. My presentation of the implications of Evolutionary Game Theory are absolutely correct. If you want evidential confirmation of this in the real world that backs up the maths look to the worldwide crime rate statistics on theft etc. Crime rate in Saudi Arabia is number 116 out of 132 countries measured. The countries having even lower rates have similar stringent punishments. Of course I do not endorse the morality of such severe penalties. If you feel the same you should withdraw your statements on where morality should come from.
Ben- “That this sort of thing isn’t blindingly obvious to you from the start tells me that you not only haven’t a clue about what game theory is..etc..”
I have been a guest lecturer on Evolutionary Game Theory at a University level symposium Ben. What are your credentials on the subject? You also seem to tell people who have advanced degrees in computation that that they too don’t know their subject. It begs the question of whether you yourself can recognise when someone is making a technically correct statement.
Howie, your argument from authority is worthless. That you seem incapable of understanding that individuals have an incentive to rebel against repressive society makes me question whether you were even awake in your junior high school history classes…and, if your game theory doesn’t take such rebellions into account, you have no business lecturing anybody on the subject.
If a credentialed lecturer in biology started spouting Creationist nonsense, I’d have no problem calling him on it even though my most advanced credentials in biology are that I’ve read Jerry’s book.
Similarly, if a credentialed game theorist doesn’t understand simple defection and the circumstances in which it’s likely to arise…well, I’ve no use for such authority, either.
b&
Are you HowieInTheUK on YouTube? He does seem to be a “morality from game theory” proponent and supporter.
“I have been a guest lecturer on Evolutionary Game Theory at a University level symposium” : Where and when? I couldn’t find any hits online, but maybe “kornstein” is not your real surname. And what’s your background that you were invited?
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“I have been a guest lecturer on Evolutionary Game Theory at a University level symposium” : Where and when? I couldn’t find any hits online, but maybe “kornstein” is not your real surname. And what’s your background that you were invited?
As I specifically brought up the symposium Ant, I will answer your question. The symposium where I gave a lecture on Evolutionary Game Theory was “Darwin in the World of Ideas” Feb 2007 at the University of Birmingham in England organised by Professor Mark Pallen. Why I was invited had to do with the fact that I had mutual contacts with Professor Pallen through in the University of Birmingham’s School of Mathematics and he had asked them for a speaker on the subject.
As for any further personal information I don’t really think it is appropriate to ever be asked for any such information any by other WEIT participants.
As for Evolutionary Game Theory in general, anyone who knows the subject would agree that all animal behaviour is underpinned at a base level by its implications. However suggesting that in the complex social relationships that exist in human society, that resolutions of moral behaviours directly do arise, or should arise from implications of game theory is quite absurd… and dangerous. Ben and I were discussing levels of punishment in crime deterrence where I was showing him that his counting on game theory in any way leads to a dire morality.
“As for any further personal information I don’t really think it is appropriate to ever be asked for any such information any by other WEIT participants.”
Of course it’s appropriate to ask, especially so when a commenter supports their opinion with their real world credentials! However, I’d never insist; you’re very welcome to respectfully decline. But I don’t see any need to get huffy about it.
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Further: any time one plays credentials in an attempt to establish authority, you damned well better be prepared to present those credentials for verification.
A cop can’t just flash a badge and (legally) expect to get access anywhere. The cop has to be prepared for the flashee to inspect that badge to verify that it’s authentic, and perhaps even wait while the flashee calls the police to confirm that the person in question really is the rightful owner of the badge and is on official business.
b&
The most generous evaluation I can offer for that statement is that you have some very narrow, focussed, and specific term of art in mind that completely ignores the most blindingly obvious basic principles of the field in general.
Again: do you not understand the concept of defection within the context of game theory, the role it plays, the sorts of circumstances that can spur defection, and the consequences of widespread defection?
Would you not defect (in the sense of game theory) if faced with a gang of thugs masquerading as a society that was as brutal as you describe?
If your “implications of game theory” doesn’t take any of that into account, then either it’s considering some radically different system from humans or it’s truly bizarrely incompetent in a way that even a novice would have difficulty managing.
b&
Sorry, howie. That was unnecessarily pompous.
However, that symposium seems to have left no footprints in the æther.
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“Sorry, howie. That was unnecessarily pompous.”
And I apologise Ant if my response seemed at all shirty. Didn’t mean to.
Cheers
» Ben Goren:
Why is it that all you authoritarians are so blindedly incapable of comprehending…
I got a very good laugh out of that. Thanks, Ben! 🙂
But what about the real world?
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Morality is best understood as an optimal strategy, in the sense used by game theorists, for an individual living in a society. Such a strategy, when applied over a sufficiently large sample of individuals across enough generations and so on, will optimize both the individual’s chances for success within the society and the society’s chances of providing maximum opportunities for the success of individuals.
You don’t need any sort of free will of any definition — and don’t even need consciousness, for what matter, when it comes down to it.
…and, of course, what you’re really doing is making another “little people” argument with a fallacious appeal to consequences…”Tell the little people they don’t have free will and they’ll abandon all morality.”
You could try to stop being so damned afraid of letting go of superstition, you know.
b&
“Morality is best understood as an optimal strategy, in the sense used by game theorists, for an individual living in a society.”
Ah….. then if this is all that morality is in your incompatibilist world then we had better SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASE all penalties now, because the amount of unwanted behaviour(defection) in game theoretic terms, (i.e. the percentage of defectors in a population) is equal to B/C where B is the benefit of the defection and C the penalty (potential cost of the defection).
Yes folks- in Ben’s Morality its “hands cut off” for all thieves. But that’s ok -we are only cutting off the hands of robots.
Tell me that you’re not really getting your ideas for morality from reading “A Clockwork Orange” Ben.
…and having your hands chopped off represents an optimization of the individual’s chances for success…how, exactly?
Did you even bother to actually read what I wrote, or did you see the words, “game theory,” and instantly fabricated some bizarre fantasy involving Stanford prisoners pushing fat men in front of trains at the order of Stanley Milgram?
No. Don’t bother answering. Your earlier response makes it clear you did the latter, not the former.
b&
“…and having your hands chopped off represents an optimization of the individual’s chances for success…how, exactly?”
No Ben, in game theoretic reasoning the potential of chopping off the defectors hands decreases the chances the defector will ever choose to defect. Having no chance of future success by losing his/her hands is part of the deterrent cost C for the thief. Having handless thieves decreases your chances of being robbed, increasing YOUR chances of success.
So – fewer thieves in the population (B/C), AND more successful non defectors. An incompatibilists paradise on earth….
This however is YOUR game theoretic sort of morality Ben.. it isn’t MY idea of morality
Howie, you are blithely ignoring the fact that, in every post on this for as long as I’ve been posting on the Internet (back to the days of USENET, even), I’ve defined this as a two-way street. A society that disregards the individual for the sake of the society is every bit as much a problem as an individual that disregards the society for the sake of the individual.
Specifically, a society that performs amputations out of anything other than medical desperation (infection, frostbite, etc.) is one that is minimizing the individual’s potential for success. This is not moral; this is immoral. Moral is maximizing the individual’s potential for success.
b&
if there is no difference between a human and a robot
In what sense? As far as causality goes, yes, but that’s actually pretty banal. Somehow you seem to think it’s something else, as if there was literally, physically no difference at all between a human and a drinks vending machine, which is why you think you can get away with nonsense lines like “Rules that robots create for robots behaviours surely involve an incoherence.”
what does “morality” really consist of
Don’t tell me you sincerely believe morality – or rules, or behaviour regulation, or decision-making – will vanish in a puff of logic just because there are no ghosts in the machine.
What do you think morality consists of? There are plenty of candidates: pain and pleasure, freedom from coercion and oppression, material and “spiritual” security, exercising valued behaviours called virtues… there’s no shortage of moral systems that have been dreamed up over the centuries.
None of them involve free will. They do involve decision-making or agents making choices, which is not the same thing. Again, explanation vs phenomenon.
We call something “good” if it meets a real need that we have as an individual, as a society, or as a species.
The moral person seeks good for others as well as for him/her self.
Ethics are the rules we employ to help assure the best good for everyone. We judge rules to be moral or immoral according to the benefits and harms that result from adopting this rule (e.g., slavery) rather than that rule (e.g., no slavery).
A “just” penalty attempts to (a) repair the harm, (b) correct the offender’s behavior, and (c) until corrected, protect the rest of us. The offender has a right to a penalty that does no more than is reasonably necessary to achieve (a), (b), and (c).
Free will refers to the mental process by which we choose for ourselves what to do next. The goal of correction is to give the offender another option and something new to think about next time that he/she is choosing whether to commit the crime or not.
That is the point of free will within the context of justice. Correction affects the next choice.
Free will refers to the mental process by which we choose for ourselves what to do next.
But if you’re going to call the phenomenon of decision-making or choice “free will”, what word is left for the dualist notion that explains this phenomenon as being due to some mysterious process above and beyond physics, and which has the dualist implication that minds and matter are ontologically, fundamentally different views.
I agree with the compatibilists I’ve spoken to on this thread that decision-making and choice (the phenomenon) play a key role in morality. I disagree on calling it “free will”, which comes with an implicit or connoted dualist interpretation that’s well-known. I especially disagree when someone like howiekornstein seemingly can’t tell the difference.
This is an important point.
The argument is /not/ compatibilist v. incompatibilist. We are all (well. mostly) incompatibilists re contra-causal free will.
The non-compatibilits amongst us just disagree with the compatibilists that “free will” is a useful or appropriate label for “freedom to act according to one’s determined motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions” [Wp].
I’d be less unhappy with JM’s definition of “compatibilist free will” as “the act of [I’d prefer ‘capability for’ or ‘capacity for’] decision making that was not designed and decided by another agent” (the latter proviso, it think, to divest “c-FW” from thermostats, car-assembly robots, and so on). (For a sense of “free” that means “not pre programmed”. But I’d still deprecate the label as confusing as many will intuitively conflate it with notions of contra-causal free will.
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» Ant:
But I’d still deprecate the label as confusing as many will intuitively conflate it with notions of contra-causal free will.
And nobody could do much more to sustain that confusion than the incompatibilists on this thread who insist with fervent dogmatism that ‘free will’ must never mean anything else than spooky, dualist, libertarian free will.
I have yet to see anyone address seriously the point that has been again and again about how we have come to use different concepts for the unchanged labels ‘species’ and ‘gravity’. Somehow, in those cases, we have been able to see that it is within our power to educate people about the misleading interpretations of those terms that would have to be avoided in future.
“Free will” must mean freedom of the will if it is to mean anything. It just so happens that the only way that one can even conceptualize a will that is free is to decouple well-defined structure from definition and structure, which is why the only formulation there is of “free will” is libertarian and dualist.
Come up with a “free will” that’s freedom of the will but not dualist, and we’ll talk…but that’s like suggesting that you could come up with an omnipotence that’s really all-powerfule and could exist.
You know how theists always complain about us atheists criticizing their gods for being omnipotent yet incapable of doing even the most trivial things? “Why are you so hung up on “omnipotence” meaning the ability to do anything, even the impossible?”
That’s the same argument you’re engaging in now, basically.
b&
But “free will” can never imply freedom from self, because there is no will at all without the self.
No, the ones who are confused about it the most are not the incomplatibilists but the general public who mostly believes in dualistic free will. When they hear that materialists proclaim “free will is for realz” they immediately think their ghost in the machine has been vindicated.
…and why do they do that? Not just because they’re being reassured that free will is for reals, but that the will itself is free.
Even though many of the compatibilists themselves are pretty adamant that that’s not the type of freedom they’re referring to, the compatibilists keep equivocating and substituting and baiting and switching…”The will is free because you don’t have a gun pointed to your head.” Non-sequitur, and a deepity…and the unfamiliar hear it as confirmation that the will itself is free.
b&
Yes, but most compatibilists (at least, of those here) claim or imply that that is not the commonest understanding among the public.
But Jerry already addressed this, elsewhere on this page: “That is what most people think of as free will, and most people are libertarians in that respect (see Sarkissian et al.’s survey).”
Yes, as Coel said, “We’re all determinists here.” But a majority of the people we’re taking this argument to aren’t. Our terms of art need to be as unambiguous as possible and we should avoid overloaded terms.
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I agree completely.
Oh, Good Grief! Free will is a SECULAR concept. It refers to someone choosing for themselves what they will do versus someone else making that choice for them.
And dualism offers no escape from determinism, since reasons are causes, and any “soul”, whether embodied or floating in the ether, would choose according to their own reasons.
Determinism is a characteristic of the “rational world”, not just the physical world.
Before you haughtily exclaim at what I’ve written, you might want to look at the survey Jerry mentions; most people see free will as dualism. This is a fact. You muddy the waters if you simply take that term and redefine it.
If most people view the world as dualistic (spirit distinct from matter)then that is a measure of the success of that point of view. Since it comes with the promise of eternal life, it sells well in the market. No surprise there.
It is also true that most people believe they have free will. And since this appears to be an objectively observed phenomena of the real world I would guess that few people dispute it with any rational basis.
But since they are independent ideas, which deserve attention in their own right, those who are “muddying the waters” would be those who “stir them up together”.
I for one have free will. And I also believe I am a biological organism existing in a totally deterministic and totally physical universe.
Hold it — stop right there.
Please describe the objectively observed phenomenon that you’re labeling with the term, “free will.”
Dollars to donuts it’s something entirely mundane (like the decision-making process or legally-protected freedom of expression) that does not actually constitute freedom of the will.
Either that, or you’ll be revealed as a dualist after all….
b&
The objectively observed phenomena is the “entirely mundane” mental process that I go through every day as I make choices. It is objective in that you too have observed this mental process in yourself.
It is further objective in that a person can make a written record of their considerations, how they felt about this option versus that one.
It is further objective in that it can happen in a group of people, like the Parent-Teacher Association at your local school, where options are discussed publicly and votes are taken.
We make these choices and participate in these groups “of our own free will”. Or, you may be attending PTA “against your will”, because your wife insists it is your turn.
Free will is nothing more than our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do next.
It requires no dualism and no religion and no God and nothing supernatural. It requires absolutely no indeterminacy (screw QM).
It is only us, choosing for ourselves which option becomes inevitable and which option remains a mere possibility.
The fact that someone else can know us well enough to precisely and reliably predict our choice in advance (e.g., an omniscient God or your wife) is irrelevant.
It remains true that the choice is ours.
Right.
And that process typically involves creating a private virtual reality in which you imagine the outcomes of various options and base your final decision on your analysis of those presumed results. Subjectively, it even feels like Jerry’s example of rewinding the tape and choosing differently.
But…here’s the thing.
That’s just an entirely straightforward computation of a deterministic Turing-equivalent computer. You could model it with a Rube Goldberg contraption of sufficient complexity. And the result is guaranteed to be the same, given the same set of inputs (including, it must be noted, the input of stored memories from prior history).
In other words, if that’s free will…then the thermostat also has free will, as do airplane autopilots and chess computers. All are processing inputs into outputs based on a particular algorithm, nothing more and nothing less.
…and, for that matter, not only is there no freedom in this, there’s precious little will, either. If you’re depressed, you may well go through all of that to decide that, what you most desire at that point in time, is to get up out of bed and go about your day. You likely even desire that more than anything else you’ve ever desired in your life…and, yet, you lack the will to do so. No freedom, no will — even though you’ve gone through your entire decision-making process that we both agree is entirely really real.
…so…you’re referring to the decision-making process as free will when it’s neither free nor willful…why, exactly…?
b&
Ben: “But…here’s the thing. That’s just an entirely straightforward computation of a deterministic Turing-equivalent computer.”
Sure. And if the decision is complex I may enter my data in an Excel spreadsheet to assist me compute the best choice.
The obvious difference between me and Excel is that I get to choose what Excel does, and it does NOT get to choose what I do.
That’s why we say that I have free will and Excel does not. (And the same goes for your thermostat).
Ben: “…so…you’re referring to the decision-making process as free will when it’s neither free nor willful…why, exactly…?”
Because clearly free will requires a willful self. And neither Excel nor the thermostat has a willful self. They serve my will, not their own.
Not really, since Excel (or Numbers … please!) is just your extended phenotype.
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It isn’t a measure of success of a point of view it’s a reaction to a powerful cognitive illusion.
Do you think we should say there is a god too except that “god” means there is no god just that god is really nature? That’s been, according to your criteria, a successful point of view as well.
…and one common real-world instance of your example is pantheism and its variations….
b&
That’s panentheism, isn’t it?
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Pretty much, I think.
Again, I don’t wish to discuss religion.
Free will is a concept relevant to the real secular world. It has significant moral and legal implications. These are secular matters.
You’re balking. The scenario I propose is he same thing. If not religion what about democracy then? Saying we have free will but it’s not the free will people think we have is tantamount to saying we have a democracy but no one votes for their representatives and the state just appoints party representatives who represent the party who in turn represent the people. That’s the kind of democracy we have. Fear not China. You are a democracy.
The free will that “people we think we have” is precisely what I’ve said. It is our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do next.
If you check the dictionaries, you’ll typically find the preferred or most commonly used sense of the word “free will” to be consistent with that. And you will also find, in the number 2 spot, your version, the version kicked around in philosophy discussions surrounding what I like to call “the silly paradox”.
So your position is people generally don’t believe in a ghost in the machine and that they aren’t dualists?
Diana: “So your position is people generally don’t believe in a ghost in the machine and that they aren’t dualists?”
No. I suspect that most people believe in life after death and so have a dualistic view of the body being different from the soul.
But they are not the only ones who believe we have free will. There are a lot of us determinists who find free will to be an inevitable product of evolution. And that us making choices determines a lot of what becomes inevitable.
But only anti-choice determinists believe we have no free will. And only anti-causal free-willers believe they are exempt from deterministic inevitability. Both are equally wrong.
But the thing is, calling what you call free will is not what most people think of when they think of free will. Why adopt that word? Most will stop listening after they hear, “fire will is for reals”.
That’s an inflammatory remark!
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It scares me that my iPad has free will & is potentially an arsonist.
Most people know what ordinary free will is without invoking the names or strange theories of philosophers or theologians.
It is simply our ability to choose for ourselves rather then someone else choosing for us.
In legal settings there is sometimes the question whether the offender’s ability to choose for themselves was compromised by mental handicap or age.
In the case of statutory rape, an underaged person is judged not competent to choose for herself whether to engage in sex. So the older person is held responsible rather than the victim.
These concerns about responsibility are valid in a totally secular setting. They arise from practical concerns, not theological ones.
If a person acted of their own free will, they are treated differently than if they were forced against their will, or if they had mental defect, or if an older person convinced a youth to participate in a crime.
Surely you are familiar with “free will” and “choice” and “responsibility” in these settings.
You keep asserting that, while living in a world that punishes for revenge and treats the mentally ill like they have a choice in being depressed, schizophrenic, etc.
You have a lot of work before you to show that is not how people think.
You cannot fix those things (punishment for revenge and mistreatment of the mentally ill) by going after them indirectly through free will. After all, you’re going to need to hold people teaching revenge responsible for the attitudes they bring about in society. And if you undermine yourself by claiming no one is responsible …
No. That approach is too confused to be effective. YOU are too confused to be effective.
Every moral person is potentially the ally of every other moral person. And if you want to address a moral issue effectively then you had best be making allies of those who profess publicly to be moral, and to care about the welfare of others. And that would include your Christian neighbors.
I grew up in a Christian church. And we were never taught to seek revenge. “Revenge is MINE saith the Lord” was what we were taught. We were taught to love both our neighbor and even our enemies. We were taught to care for the sick and elderly, not blame them for things beyond their control.
And it was my Christian morality that caused me to reject a God who created Hell.
“And it was my Christian morality that caused me to reject a God who created Hell.”
I have always been fascinated about what motivates fellow atheists make their break from religion. It is most often the problem of evil… sometimes it’s just a love of the scientific viewpoint and its demand for evidence (reason for MY break). So the choice is either one of high moral standards or an unwavering commitment to rationality – that is for anyone who is a compatibilist, otherwise the decision was just inevitable.
Everything is universally inevitable. However, that fact is pretty useless. There are no helpful implications that can be drawn from universal inevitability.
And the implications some people wish to draw are usually falsely derived by mental errors. For example:
1) Knowing that our choice will turn out to have been inevitable provides no help in making any decision. We cannot know for certain what we would have chosen until we actually finish our deliberation and make the choice. After our decision, if we reflect upon our thinking, we may then see that our reasons and feelings did inevitably lead us to this choice. But we still had to go through that mental process to get there. The fact of inevitability was useless to us.
2) There is no way to take the fact of inevitability into account while making the decision. If it appears that option A is to be our inevitable choice, can we decide in spite to choose option B instead? Well, if we do then option B was actually inevitable. So now we choose option A … etc. It is an infinite loop. Again, inevitability is a useless fact.
3) Some people think deterministic inevitability removes free will. But here we are, thinking and choosing what we will do next. We cannot simply sit back and watch the inevitable happen, because our choices cause what happens next, and choosing to sit and wait is also a choice that changes what happens next! What becomes inevitable is unavoidably still in our hands.
4) Some people think that inevitability means that no one can be held responsible for what they do. But it cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card”, because it always operates equally on both sides. If you say, “But judge, it was inevitable that I did the crime”, the judge will say, “And it is also inevitable that you be penalized”.
The only reasonable option is to acknowledge universal inevitability and then ignore it. At best it is a useless fact. At worst it’s misuse causes false conclusions and confusion, often in the most intelligent minds.
A very well constructed argument Marvin. I really enjoyed reading it.
But I (and Dennett) would argue with your use of the word inevitable. The word is used describing something retrospectively, but the choice to be made exists before there can be a “retrospective”. At that point the future is EVITABLE. In the future, looking back on the situation including the implications of the choice makes the use of the word inevitable, in context it is used, is quite meaningless. For it would mean that the event is both evitable and inevitable.
Perhaps I should let Dennett make explanation for me…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utai74HjPJE
Hmmm. Interesting. Then my determinism is actually harder than Dennett’s. I’ve got his book but haven’t bothered to read it yet.
I allow for the future to be fully knowable by a theoretical omniscience. And yet we are always acting of our own free will as we create that totally predictable future.
The fact that it is predictable is useless to anyone ill-equipped to predict it. And whenever we attempt to take the fact of this kind of inevitability into account, that attempt was also predictable.
Therefore this universal inevitability, while true, is totally useless to us, and irrelevant to any choices we might wish to make.
The best we can hope for is to take advantage of our deterministic universe to discover the causes of those events that are relevant to us, like how to avoid the next big meteor coming close to earth, or how to cure cancer using a modified polio virus, or how best to correct harmful behavior in criminals with the least damage to freedom and dignity, etc.
These are practical matters that actually mean something to us.
But there is no logical way to employ the fact of our next step being inevitable. All we can do is choose what to do next and then say, “Ah! So that was my inevitable choice!”
» Diana MacPherson:
the general public who mostly believes in dualistic free will
As you keep asserting without any evidence to substantiate it…
Jerry’s posted the survey results here before, I’m pretty sure.
And it’s not in any way an extraordinary claim, especially considering the religiosity of the public.
Ask the proverbial man on the street why he thinks bad things happen to good people, and an overwhelming majority are guaranteed to include a reference to “free will” somewhere in the answer. That tells you right there that it’s a theological construction, and a supernatural dualistic one at that.
b&
Duh. See my comment, posted March 29, 2015 at 10:48 am
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Where I’ve asserted before I’ve referenced Jerry’s reference within this thread. Here is Jerry’s fuller article with those references.
Perhaps you just don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation… 😉
More seriously: 1. I’m not sure that gravity is a good analogy. Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity are different models, and the Einsteinian model is a closer approximation to reality across all scales, but it converges with Newtonian at low energy scales, such that the Newtonian model gives accurate results. That is very different from contra-causal free will v. compatibilist free will. 2. Both interpretations of gravity still describe the same thing – the way massive bodies influence the motion of other massive bodies. But that is not the case with free will – one interpretation is about the decision making process the other with freedom to act on decisions (following Wp and Coel and others; but not JM).
I certainly don’t !*insist*! that “‘free will’ must never mean anything else than spooky, dualist, libertarian free will”. My contention is that it is a contentious (given the number of comments here, that’s hard to dispute!) and misleading (given the switch from [loosely] “freely deciding” to “freely acting on a decision” – “will” NE “action”).
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There’s a more significant way in which gravity differs from free will.
At its beginning, gravity referred to the trivially-observed phenomenon that things fall down. We now know that it’s an attractive force between massive objects and is what you need to describe the motions of the wanderers in the night sky…but, even without all that, you can observe that things want to fall down and that it can be hard holding some things up so they don’t fall down.
The will is a bit harder to observe, but not much. It’s what compels you to get out of bed in the morning and do what needs to be done. Just as gravity can be interrupted by, for example, your hand, the will can be interrupted. You can, for example, become depressed such that you can’t get out of bed and do what needs to be done. You can become so discombobulated and confused that you don’t know which way is up and can’t make a decision. And your will can be strengthened, such as by example of others or a rousing and inspirational speech or what-not.
But the problem with “free will” isn’t that we’re asking whether or not the will exists and what its properties are, as is the parallel case with gravity.
We’re asking about the freedom of the will itself.
The better example would be luminiferous aether.
We can observe light and have had a pretty good idea of what it does ever since Newton. For some time, we thought that there was this stuff called “luminiferous aether” that was a good explanation for light’s properties and how it functioned and the like. Nobody was questioning the existence of light, but we weren’t entirely certain that luminiferous aether was a real phenomenon…until Michelson and Morley inadvertently settled the question in the negative.
We still can observe light, but we know there’s no aether luminiferating it.
Same thing with free will. We can still observe the will, but, by now, we know that there’s no meaning to be had by associating any sense of “freedom” to the conception of the will itself, any more than there’s “freedom” in a thermostat or calculator or smartphone or any other computational device.
The will still remains a real phenomenon, but “free will” is long past its pull-by date.
b&
» Diana MacPherson:
most people see free will as dualism. This is a fact.
Is that one of the things that becomes a fact by dint of being asserted evidence-free often enough? Just wondering…
Is the contrary position something that becomes a fact by dint of your ignoring the survey that Jerry mentioned often enough?
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Shift the argument to a strawman concerning my evidence (I’ve cited it several times and I’ve just given you a link). Are you going to complain about my grammar next and change the argument to be about that?
» Ben Goren:
Ask the proverbial man on the street why he thinks bad things happen to good people, and an overwhelming majority are guaranteed to include a reference to “free will” somewhere in the answer.
Surely.
(That’s a snarky Dennett reference.)
» Ant:
I certainly don’t !*insist*! that “‘free will’ must never mean anything else than spooky, dualist, libertarian free will”.
That is true, and to that extent I apologize for including you in that statement. Others on this thread, however, come very close to doing just that.
It’s not an a priori insistence on our part, but rather an observation coupled with a solid theory to back it up.
Just in this thread, there are quite a number of compatibilists defining free will in non-religious terms that are nevertheless in stark contrast to physics as we understand it, in ways that can only reasonably be described as supernatural and dualist. This includes, for example, math and computation as idealized Platonic entities outside the realm of mere physics. Others have included as essential parts of their definitions a distinction between restrictions imposed by an intelligent actor and the exact same restrictions imposed by a mindless accident of nature…if Hannibal Lecter cut off your arm, that’d be a restriction on your free will, but it wouldn’t be a restriction to lose it in a rock-climbing accident, for example.
And it’s obvious to wonder why even non-religious compatibilism so seemingly inevitably either skirts to or goes right over the edge of supernaturalism…and the conclusion would seem to be blindingly obvious, once one notices that the popular conception of the phenomenon is supernatural and that, by the very nature of the incoherence of “freedom of the will,” it has little choice but to require all sorts of other contradictions in order to sustain itself.
Thus, incompatibilism. There’s nothing there worth salvaging, so just dump the whole mess and address the real phenomena as we really observe them.
And, yes, those real phenomena include both freedom (and lack thereof) and the will (both strong and weak). The Constitution really does guarantee freedom of expression. Somebody who is severely depressed really does lack the will to get out of bed. But nobody has freedom of the will.
Cheers,
b&
» Ant:
But Jerry already addressed this, elsewhere on this page: “That is what most people think of as free will, and most people are libertarians in that respect (see Sarkissian et al.’s survey).”
So you’re basically saying that the evidence for the claim that almost everybody believes in spooky free will is Jerry’s insistence that they do, based on his passing off of Sarkissian’s interpretations as “fact”. Why am I not convinced?
(By the way, I just re-read Jerry’s post on the Nahmias and Sarkissian papers. To insist that any interpretation of those data is simply a fact, would be completely disingenuous.)
Well, you’re free to criticise the significance of Sarkissian, that’s at least at least a step forward from blithely asserting that “contra-causal free will” is /not/ the majority opinion.
But where is your contrary data?
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Indeed.
In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a majority view; even if it’s only a large minority, we still need to take account of it.
A 40% rate of evolution denial (thus, a minority view) was enough reason for Dawkins to write _The Greatest Show On Earth_.
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» Diana MacPherson:
Where I’ve asserted before I’ve referenced Jerry’s reference within this thread. Here is Jerry’s fuller article with those references.
And in that thread, Eddy Nahmias points to more research, one paper of which even says: “We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’.”
To reference that thread, which points to nothing but contradicting interpretations, and insist that it is just a fact that most people believe in spooky free will, cannot, to put it mildly, be taken seriously.
In that post, Jerry even makes the mistake of conflating ideas about moral responsibility with compatibilism, which is another non sequitur. They need have nothing whatever to do with each other, as I have pointed out above.
Actually, dualism offers no escape. Reasons are causes. Rational beings do things for reasons. Therefore determinism is not limited to the physical universe, it is a characteristic of the “rational universe”.
So even God’s choices are inevitable. If you had a second omniscient being hanging around, it would be able to reliably predict God’s future behavior. (Assuming that behavior was rational).
I’m a pretty strict determinist. And I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural.
But I am also a biological organism fully equipped to choose for myself what I will do next. And as long as I am left free to make that choice for myself, I clearly have free will.
And I can make the same argument for “God”, but since that is not really my problem, I should leave it to those who believe in ghosts.
Things that people choose on their own (their “will” at that moment) are different from things imposed upon them by others (someone else’s will). Therefore, since “free will” has always been the term used to make that real world distinction, it should continue to be used explicitly for that purpose.
I’m a incompatibilist, and I do not deny that we suffer from the same libertarian Freewill illusion.
Only empirical science is capable of eliminating these illusions. Philosophy cannot do such thing because our mind is an illusion creating device.
Some of these illusions can be useful in reality, most of them have also negative consequences. See f.i. Sam Harris analogy with the illusion of visual continuity.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-and-free-will
The illusion of contra causal free will is malignant, so many of us say including Dennett.
But arguing over the definition of free will just deflects attention from that.
Also if people go around saying free will is an illusion without being specific that probably is harmful too.
Well, Sam’s argument on this link is just a rehash of the old refrain that the libertarian explanations behind free will are not true and we have no right to alter our explanation of the mechanisms that lead to free will. But how can someone so committed to empirical science as yourself accept this sort of argument? We change the explanation of what is behind phenomena all the time in science. Gravity was once considered a force field between objects, now it is described as the effect of mass on space-time. In either case we can still fall down. Or perhaps you insist that we shouldn’t be using the term gravity because of its historic connotations and the fact that most ordinary people think it is a force of attraction?
If we have a better explanation for an observable phenomenon then we should of course accept it.
Sam is just contrasting Daniel Dennet’s color vision analogy with his own and the problems with redefining libertarian freewill. I happen to agree with Sam.
And from my point of view:
God does not exist why should we try to redefine god. Freewill doesn’t exist why would we try to redefine freewill.
Harris description of compatibalism:
“Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings”
And an Argument From Consequences:
A lot of people suffer because of this false belief.
“Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings”
And Harris is doing nothing but complaining about an “assertion” with an assertion.
I like that.
But you must not forget freewill comes with a lot of responsibility.
» howiekornstein:
We change the explanation of what is behind phenomena all the time in science. Gravity was once considered a force field between objects, now it is described as the effect of mass on space-time. In either case we can still fall down. Or perhaps you insist that we shouldn’t be using the term gravity because of its historic connotations and the fact that most ordinary people think it is a force of attraction?
The day will come that Jerry or another of our fundamentalist incompatibilists here actually engages with that point…
Except we have. Several times. I’ve pointed out at least five times the difference between phenomenon and explanation: free will is not the phenomenon of making decisions, but an explanation (albeit a faulty one) of how it works. Co-opting the word for the phenomenon is asking for confusion, like confusing gravity with any particular theory of gravity. That’s why we still use the word “fire” (phenomenon) but not “phlogiston” (explanation); because the explanation has been superseded by a better one, which is valuable for further study and discovery.
You have used the terms. But you haven’t addressed either Howie’s or Sean’s point. As to your point, the only one susceptible to it, as far is I can see, is Jerry, who actually does say that because free will is impossible there are no choices.
Reasonshark: “…free will is not the phenomenon of making decisions, but an explanation (albeit a faulty one) of how it works. ”
No, you and Jerry are both moving the goal posts. The definition that Jerry used originally in his piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education is:
“The term “free will” has so many diverse connotations that I’m obliged to define it before I explain why we don’t have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise.”
That does not say free will is some sort of immaterial dualistic spooky thing. If dualism were the definition of free will, then I would have no argument with you, for I do not accept immaterial dualistic spooky things.
Rather, I am saying two things: 1) strict physical determinism cannot be accepted as true, and 2) human reflective consciousness and awareness can be accepted as true. That is why I “could have chosen otherwise”. You can call my conscious decision to comment here mere computation, but so what? I still processed the information, weighed the choices, and made a decision. I myself am beginning to question if it is a good decision given the intransigence of all parties still here on this thread. But I made it of my own free will. 😉
Do you call “altering your views slightly” the same thing as “moving goalposts”? The former is honest reassessment of things, the latter is taken as shiftiness. I guess you prefer to accuse me of the latter, but you’re wrong: I’ve stated explicitly that I’ve modified my definition in light of quantum mechanic, which in a given situation repeated could make you do otherwise IF quantum mechanics affected brain output, and we have no idea that it does (though you seem to know for certain).
Human reflective consciousness is just another word for “our brain behaving deterministically”. Just admit it, we are meat robots whose onboard computers are very complex, and you call that complexity free will. Your definition of free will clearly allows computers to have free will, because they can process information and weigh choices and make “decisions.” SO you think computers have free will. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t comport with the definition of free will that everyone has.
I would maintain that it is the compatibilists who have moved the goalposts, for they’ve simply changed the definition of free will that most people adhere to.
And where is the “Freedom” in your deterministic, brain-computer will? If we have that kind of freedom, so do computers.
But I don’t want to discuss this any more, and I’d advise you to simply end this for now.
“Just admit it, we are meat robots whose onboard computers are very complex”
No thank you.
Then…you are a supernaturalist and a dualist, even if you don’t realize that that’s what your claim evaluates to.
We know far more than is necessary about physics and biology to know that brains are, indeed, computational engines that have exact theoretical equivalents in particular Turing Machines. Rejection of this fact amounts to rejection of the Standard Model of physics, which we have far more confidence in today that Newton could ever possibly have had in his own Mechanics (including gravity).
That means that you’re suggesting something outside of physics, outside of nature, that would account for cognition…and that is the very definition of supernatural dualism.
Even if, in your own mind, whatever it is you think constitutes “free will” obeys the laws of physics…your rejection of the proposition that we are meat robots is a flat-out rejection of the laws of physics.
Cheers,
b&
My rejection of people being called “meat robots” is a matter of aesthetics. It is a demeaning description of a human being.
Any assumptions beyond that are from your own imagination.
Demeaning how?
But never mind that.
We are biological computation engines. Does that please your aesthetics any better? Do you agree or disagree with that assessment, even if you don’t like its aesthetics?
b&
No one ever thinks about how the robots feel…
“Oh, God. I’m so depressed. I have this awful pain in all the diodes down my left side. The first million years were the worst. …”
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My first thought, too.
I remember laughing the first time I read to the end of the fourth book in the trilogy. The second time, though…I was so distraught and upset that I could barely see through the tears. Something in the years between those two readings made me realize that Marvin wasn’t a comic character, not in the slightest…but one of the most tragic figures in all of literature.
Depressing, really.
b&
I felt bad for Marvin right away but I laughed at the brilliance of the conscious choice to create a depressed robot and have it in a sci fi novel where robots are normally psychotic killers or interesting friends.
“We are biological computation engines. Does that please your aesthetics any better?”
Well, you see we already have a rich set of useful concepts in play, and they have been modeled identically in many languages.
In English, we are called “persons”. And rather than “computing” we call what persons do “thinking”.
And we can give many examples of the differences between following pre-programmed instructions like a computer does and the personal choices we make of our own free will.
The key differences are an innate biological will and a highly evolved neurological integration capable of independent thought, planning, and choosing.
Again, more dualism.
Your arguments only make sense if physics is horribly broken…and, yet, we have more justified confidence in the Standard Model than Newton ever possibly could have had about his mechanics and gravity.
b&
Arguments from incredulity? Or consequences? A logical flaw in any case.
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“I’ve stated explicitly that I’ve modified my definition in light of quantum mechanic, which in a given situation repeated could make you do otherwise IF quantum mechanics affected brain output, and we have no idea that it does (though you seem to know for certain).”
I don’t even think you have to make that modification. QM appears stochastic, but we don’t know that it is at a fundamental level. But if we say that repeating a situation is repeated, the inference is that that situation is exactly the same, down to any quantum effects. If a quantum event occurs immediately prior to the moment of decision, then it’s no longer the !*same*! situation. Or if the situation is !*exactly*! the same at the putative fundamental level, no new quantum events will happen.
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Robert,
1) Determinism is an observed characteristic of the real world.
2) “Human reflective consciousness and awareness” are also clearly and objectively observed phenomena in the real world.
Therefore, there can be no conflict between them. The sense of conflict is merely an illusion.
The mental error that leads to the paradox is the sense that we are somehow separate from causality, becoming essentially its victim as it forces us to make decisions according to its will rather than our own. But causality is not a “thing”, and certainly not an “agent” with a will of its own.
We ARE causality. We are biological (or spiritual, if that is your thing) organisms having an innate will to satisfy our basic needs of survival and having a mind sufficiently evolved to imagine alternative ways to deal with these needs in our environment.
Sometimes we choose to change our own behavior (like stepping carefully from rock to rock to cross the stream). Sometimes we choose to change the environment (like building a bridge across the stream).
But we actually get to choose which option becomes inevitable and which options remain mere possibilities.
Again…we’re basically on the same page.
The main difference is that you want to label the conscious decision-making process (or whatever) the freedom of the will. Which you’ve already agreed is incoherent.
So why the insistence on labeling real phenomena with an incoherent theological construction?
b&
You want to go out to play, but you don’t want to wear your jacket. Your mother says you’ll either wear the jacket or you won’t go out. So you wear the jacket, but against your will.
You’re older now, and your mother no longer makes these decisions for you. You step outside. It’s friggin freezing! So you go back in and get your jacket. You didn’t have to, but you chose to wear it of your own free will.
So Ben, show me the “incoherent theological construction” in that scenario.
But that’s freedom of action, not freedom of will. With a liberal does of the quite different legal construct, “of one’s own free will,” which, again, is not the same as theological / philosophical “free will.” (Note the necessary addition, “of one’s own,” in such formulations.) You could also point to a no-charge promotional offer for estate management services as a “free will,” with as much relevancy to the discussion ostensibly at hand.
And we’ve had this discussion upthread with others already.
b&
Well, freedom of thought is pretty much a given, so if I want to demonstrate to you a free choice versus an unfree choice I have to give an example of one that produces a visible action. (The kid forced to wear the jacket against his will).
If we are not talking about a choice that involves an action, then we are not talking about willing, but rather “wishing” or “hoping”.
One’s will is one’s intent to produce a specific future result. That implies the ability to take the action you choose.
If someone else prevents you from acting on your will, they are said to “make the choice for you”.
Again, the kid unable to go outside without his jacket is another real world situation using real world definitions of ordinary free will.
If you have some other definition of “free will” which makes some actual difference in the real world, then lay it on the table. If your definition is “impossible” then it should be treated as a straw man. If your definition makes no actual difference in the real world, then it ought to be treated as irrelevant.
That’s the heart of the argument.
I (and Jerry and Ant and Diana and many others) reject free will out of hand as either fundamentally incoherent or a bait-and-switch with something mundane that already has a perfectly good label of its own.
How ’bout I try the same with you with, for example, “omnipotence,” another incoherent self-contained contradiction? If I told you that your definition of omnipotence is a straw man because it’s impossible, would you find that at all persuasive?
b&
Ben: “That’s the heart of the argument.
I (and Jerry and Ant and Diana and many others) reject free will out of hand as either fundamentally incoherent or a bait-and-switch with something mundane that already has a perfectly good label of its own.”
Well, I’ve been perfectly consistent in my definition of free will. Once more, it is nothing more or less than us choosing for ourselves what we will do. It is called “free” will to distinguish it from cases where someone else is making the choice for us and we are forced to do something against our own will.
To me that is perfectly coherent to nearly everyone.
The alternative definitions of free will seem to arise from a mistaken fear of deterministic inevitability, shared by both the anti-choice determinists and the anti-causal free-willers.
The anti-causal free-willers invoke magic (spiritualism) in the mistaken belief that if they can escape the physical then they can also escape inevitability. It is mistaken because their choices are based upon reasons, and reasons are causes. To be rational requires determinism.
The anti-choice determinists embrace fatalism and its depressive implications, somewhat like the Stockholm Syndrome as a defense.
Compatibilists realize that it is actually us making choices for ourselves that determines what becomes inevitable. We are not separate from causation, we are smack dab in the middle of it, we do it ourselves, we cause stuff.
» Jerry:
the latter is taken as shiftiness
So is your accusation of playing “semantic tricks”. I hope this is not a Iovi/bovi thing.
» reasonshark:
free will is not the phenomenon of making decisions, but an explanation (albeit a faulty one) of how it works.
Maybe you should tell that to Ben Goren, who insists throughout this thread that free will is a phenomenon…
Um, because it’s nan illusion. The self is an illusion too – let’s all laugh at the funny people who go around thinking they have a self.
I laugh every day at my self
Me too but it’s mostly at the absurdity of having a self.
I’m always quite amused when incompatibilists make statements like “free will is an illusion” and then go about their day-to-day lives somehow putting this out of their minds and BEHAVING as though they have free will.
Do we? What does that consist of: using words like “choice” and “agent”? Because that’s like saying we plainly don’t believe in evolution because we talk about how animals are well-designed, or like those theists who think God created the world and atheists are idiots for thinking otherwise because we know the world exists, ergo God. It confuses phenomenon with explanation.
And even if we did somehow behave libertarianistically, hypocrisy is not a good counterargument. That’s nothing more than lazy ad hominem.
Reblogged this on anti-choice determinist.
“This makes compatibilists like creationists. After all, one of the motivations—perhaps the main motivation—for creationists to keep attacking evolution is that they think the theory has inimical effects on morality. If we think we evolved from beasts, they say, we’ll act like beasts. And so evolution must be denied lest the moral fabric of our society disintegrate. You hear this over and over again from creationists and fundamentalists.”
What can it possibly mean to act like beasts? Not all beasts act the same and so there is no meaning in the statement.
“That’s how many compatibilists feel about free will. The observations, from both experiment and observation, that determinism does not make people immoral—and that incompatibilists like myself still try to behave well, and do behave well—is irrelevant.”
Quite simply, those of us who “behave well” do so precisely because of determinism. Prior experience shows us that it is not in our best interest to do immoral acts because that tends to hurt us individually and as a group.
Ben:
The situation as I see it, is that it is the incompatiblists who really are the dualists. The problem is in their having to deal with the “illusion of free will” (as they describe it). They acknowledge that they actually suffer such an illusion – all humans do, so they say. But they then go on to ACT as if this illusion were actually REAL. They blithely go about their business in making their decisions and changing their goals exactly as if they were compatibilists. And they accept this behaviour as “normal”. They “can’t help it”. But behind all this is the ILLUSION. Now Decision Theory shows us that we cannot make decisions without every influence in that decision being accounted for, as it has a calculable effect on the decision reached. Therefor a factor in incompatibilists every decision is an operative illusion. But what is an illusion? It is something that is unreal and has no substance – it is not physical. It is “spooky”. So without any doubt all incompatibilists are dualists. There is no escape from this if one remains an incompatibilist, except to become a compatibilist. This dualist situation does not exist for compatibilists as their feeling of having free will is by definition not an illusion.
Be warned Ben- in future I plan to bring up the situation of your being a dualist every time you make any remark.
Cheers
Howie
“This dualist situation does not exist for compatibilists as their feeling of having free will is by definition not an illusion”
I don’t think anyone here is saying that the !*feeling*! is an illusion; the feeling is real.
But it’s still just a feeling though, eh?
@
“But it’s still just a feeling though, eh?”
It’s both a feeling about an illusion AND an illusion itself. Good try though Ant.
You’re not as big a dualist as Ben is.
Well, it’s good to know how you feel.
Clearly there is feeling-illusion duality…
And anyway, Ben’s a duellist.
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Hello again all. As I hinted in an earlier comment, I am someone that is just fascinated by what we know about how our brains actually work. Granted, we don’t know much, but we do know a great deal more than we did when I was born (gulp…) a half-century ago and we still have most of this particular iceberg yet to explore. My interest in this area of science comes from (primarily) two directions. The most recent source of my interest is related to my day job of helping military veterans with mild to severe barriers to employment find a way over, under, around, or through those barriers.
The second reason for my fascination with (as I call them) the mind/brain sciences is personal. In my first comment on this thread, I noted that before I entered kindergarten I was diagnosed as “hyperactive” and then, nearly 40 years later (2007), I was again formally diagnosed with adult ADHD, with one of the diagnostic tests used being the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III (WAIS III) IQ test. When all was said and done, the various test results indeed confirmed a deficit in working memory that was typical of ADHD, but that was not all I learned about myself that day. The truly mind-boggling part was that my IQ was above the 99th percentile. My initial reaction to this totally unexpected revelation was the NSFW version of “Say what???!!!” During my k-12 academic career I was never aware that any of my teachers thought I was never anything other than “average.” In fact, my biggest fear, knowing I had been given a full-blown IQ test by a psychologist, was that I might not be cut out for collage after all.
I asked the neuropsychologist how that was supposed to work, but all he could tell me at the time was that it was not entirely unknown.
So I started reading.
I have avoided (with a few exceptions) taking part (or sides) in the free-will discussions here on WEIT (I do love this site though). One of the reasons I have engaged as little as I have is there is little or no discussion about how our brains actually work, or not work, as the case may be, in this and the other threads on the subject of free-will here at WEIT. With the thread now at nearly 700 comments, I thought I would do a little experiment. In my comment earlier in this thread, I noted my eventual dropping of the phrase “free will” arose from having read the books of, among others, Steven Pinker and V.S. Ramachandran, both of whom are mentioned in the index and/or references/citations of the other’s books. Specifically, I will be using the e-book versions of Pinker’s How the Mind Works (HtMW), and Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (PitB) and The Tell-Tale Brain (TT-TB). In alphabetical order, I will go through the indexes looking for entries about specific brain regions or named syndromes and then do a search for those words in this thread, noting how many times (“hits”) that term appeared in the discussion.
With that… “Allons-y!”
“Agnosia”-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“Amygdala”-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–8 hits (that was a hopeful sign)
“Apraxia”-in Ramachandran, TT-TB–0 hits
“Autism”-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“Basal ganglia” in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“Broca” (as in Broca’s area)-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
Capgras (as in Capgras’s syndrome)-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“Cortex” (anterior cingulate, visual, etc.) in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–1 hit
“Cotard” (as in Cotard’s syndrome [or delusion])-in Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“dendrite”-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
“Executive” (as in “executive function”)-in Pinker, HtMW-and Ramachandran, PitB–0 hits
“Gage” (as in Phineas Gage)-Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0
This is taking longer than I thought, so I’m jumping to “M” for one of my favorites…
Mirror (as in “mirror neuron”)-Ramachandran, TT-TB–0 hits
“Pseudocyesis”-(i.e. false pregnancy)-Ramachandran, PitB and TT-TB–0 hits
There has been a lot of terms from computer science, which is relevant, but how can there really be a discussion about what makes us “us” without talking about the physical brain? To me it is a bit like an argument over the nature of Saturn’s odd appearance in 1700, without anyone ever mentioning what this guy named Huygens actually saw when he looked at Saturn through a telescope-almost 40 (or so) years earlier.
I’m just sayin’…
We’ve been “us” longer than we’ve been neurologists.
(emphasis added)
So let’s see,
(1) (Some) incompatibilists anthropomorhize the laws of physics, so that the latter “control” us rather than simply describe us.
(2) (Almost all) incompatibilists take the wild-and-crazy non-naturalist dualist theory of free will to be the very definition of free will.
(3) But compatibilists are supposed to be the theologically influenced ones.
There’s so much irony here, US Steel should start a mining operation.
If it really was true that the laws of physics control us, then it really would follow that we can’t choose differently than we do. But it isn’t, and so it doesn’t.
“If it really was true that the laws of physics control us, then it really would follow that we can’t choose differently than we do. But it isn’t, and so it doesn’t.”
So, you’re arguing for contra-casual free will?
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No. Quoting myself:
Implication: in my view, the laws of nature describe us. And for all I’ve said, or all I know (not being able to rule out deterministic interpretations of QM), the laws of nature may be deterministic. Which is fine!
I’m a compatibilist. The whole point of compatibilism is that we don’t need contra-causal anything to explain free will.
Anthropomorphization or no, there’s no freedom in the description.
If we can agree that there’s no freedom in the physics, then only two options remain: freedom as an emergent property or freedom that comes from outside physics.
But emergent properties don’t work like that. You don’t get an emergent property that’s the opposite of the property of the foundation; rather, the property simply doesn’t apply at all to the foundation.
That leaves contra-causal supernatural dualistic explanations for the origin of the property, which physics also rules out.
b&
Ben,
I believe there was a Popular Science article many years ago about a mobile robot that could seek out an electric outlet to recharge itself when it’s batteries were low.
Although it was not sophisticated enough to be called conscious, it was physics and it was free (unless someone deliberately got in its way).
So freedom, per se, is certainly not prohibited by physics.
Now, with sophisticated biological organisms, like us and the cats, squirrels, monkeys, etc. there is a built in biological will, a drive to satisfy the multiple needs of a living organism PLUS a complex neurological system capable of planning and choosing among our needs and among our options for satisfying them in a varied and complex environment.
Of those organisms, those of us who can form words and speak have assigned words and phrases to certain functions.
One of those words is “free” and another is “will”.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see the freedom in that system.
When the sensors report such-and-such a voltage, the robot will inevitably switch to an outlet-hunting algorithm, no? And put the robot in a particular location in a particular orientation and it’s always going to follow the same path to whichever outlet it finds, no?
So how is this robot, in any sense of the term, “free”?
b&
The robot is free to roam about the house looking for outlets. Presuming no one gets in his way, in what sense is the robot not free?
Then a thermostat is also free — free to choose the exact millimicronanosecond at which it turns the heat on or off, so long as nobody comes along and fiddles with its dial. In what sense is the thermostat not free?
b&
As you may have noticed Ben, the thermostat is screwed to the wall, and has no means of locomotion. The self-charging robot, on the other hand is free to roam about the house searching for electrical outlets.
One of the problems of anti-choice determinists is that they forget how the English language works.
They forget that the conceptual framework was created by people who think and choose for themselves what the meanings of “free” and “choice” will actually be.
If you undo “free will” then you also undo “will”. If you undo “will” then you undo “self”. If you undo “self”, then there are no more “persons”.
All you’re left with are the atoms and molecules following the rules of physics. And they have no need of words.
But we are all hydrogen atoms plus 13.8 billion years.
There is no material (or immaterial!) difference between a thermostat and the human brain.
Only complexity; no new physics. We “follow the same rules”.
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Obviously there is material difference between the thermostat (metal) and the brain (tissue).
The physics is the same, but the functions are quite different. That’s the thing about atoms. You can combine them in many different ways to produce things which are different.
Yes, it is true that humans are capable of logical feats that are beyond thermostats.
But — and this is the key point — there is no freedom in the computation.
If you would claim otherwise, you should be able to point to an example of such a computation that is free, as opposed to the computation of the thermostat that you agree is not free.
I’ll point you in an appropriate direction. As part of a typical decision-making process, we will often create imaginative internal virtual worlds to try to predict the outcomes of various options before us. Frequently, we’ll run through one after another such simulation serially. This has the perceptive effect of “rewinding the tape,” but it’s just a very complex series of computations such as a sufficiently advanced silicon-based computer could carry out…and it is no more free than the computation of “1 + 1 = 2” that your calculator might perform.
So…with that out of the way…where, again, do you see freedom entering into the mix…?
b&
I think you’re violently agreeing with me…
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Then, by your definition, Stephen Hawking has no free will save when he’s in his chair with the batteries charged. Doesn’t seem like a very useful definition to me, if all it takes to rob one of the day’s greatest physicists of his free will is a short circuit in his ride.
Erm…no.
Marriage is real. Bachelors are real. But there are no married bachelors.
Freedom is a useful construct in many instances, especially to describe a degree of freedom on a particular axis with respect to a range of values. A door, for example, may be free to move through an arc of roughly 90°, even though the door itself has no freedom to will itself to move or to resist movement (save through inertia) when acted upon by some other force.
The will is also a very useful construct, as anybody who’s ever regretted after the fact gobbling down an entire bag of potato chips can attest…or those who have experienced the crippling paralysis of depression that can rob one of the will to even get out of bed.
But those two examples demonstrate the incoherence of the notion of the freedom of the will. If the will itself were truly free, then everybody would stop after eating a single serving of chips and nobody would suffer from depression. Similarly, those who do restrain their chip intakes or are highly motivated and successful…they didn’t choose to have such strong wills any more than those who lack them but wish they had choose to have weak wills.
As for the self…that is, indeed, in many ways an illusion. Or, if not an illusion, our conceptions of the self are rarely clear. When you struggle with yourself over a difficult decision…who’re you actually fighting?
And personhood…I’m not at all sure what you might be referring to with this. The obvious answer is that there’re these lumbering hunks of meat wandering around and each is a distinct person. That you would dismiss their existence tells me that you must have some entirely different conception of what a person is.
Besides which, if I did grant you all your undoing of undoings…that’s still just an appeal to consequences. You don’t like the idea that the self is an illusion, so you’re not willing to consider seriously an observation that makes such a conclusion inescapable. That’s cognitive dissonance (and faith) at work, not reason and science.
b&
The issue was freedom, not free will. The mobile robot was free to move about the house.
If Steven Hawking’s wheelchair batteries run down, then he will no longer be free to roam about the house either.
That is the meaning of “freedom” and it is clearly consistent with physics.
The utility of the meaning of “free will” is to distinguish someone who is able to choose for himself what he will do next from a person being forced to act against their will.
That is clearly a meaningful use of the term “free will”.
If someone wheels Steven Hawking’s into the bathroom against his will and locks him in, then Hawking would have little freedom of either sort. On the other hand, if Hawking’s wheeled himself into the bathroom of his own free will, then everything would be okay.
How do you plan to make that distinction without the term “free will”?
In order to take down your “silly free will”, you have to also take down the useful, meaningful “free will”.
That’s the problem with your position. You insist that free will must be free from causation, which no one else does. You insist that the decider is not actually making any choices, when clearly he is making the choice.
You are the one calling persons “lumbering hunks of meat wandering around”. You are the one saying that “the self is an illusion”.
There is no scientific basis for such a position. Science can certainly help us understand how it all works. It can explain us, but it cannot explain us away.
The point of the dismissal of the notion of “free will” is that “choice” itself is an illusion.
We do not choose.
We compute and the outcome of those computations direct our actions, but there is exactly as much “freedom” and “choice” in that process as there is in a thermostat or a pocket calculator.
“Freedom” only exists if you selectively pay attention to only a subset of the controlling forces and deliberately ignore the rest of the forces. But, as you fill in the model more and more, you loose more and more degrees of freedom. By the time your model is an accurate representation of reality, there is no more freedom.
If not acted upon by other forces, a thrown ball is in free fall and follows a parabolic path relative to the Earth. But every ball ever thrown has always been acted upon by other forces — especially aerodynamic forces and the electromagnetic forces of whatever it contacts at the end of its flight.
The same can be applied to human behavior. “All else being equal” — but all else is never equal, not in the real world.
And that’s why “free will,” even if it could have a coherent meaning unto itself (which is impossible), can’t possibly exist in reality.
b&
I suppose you will continue to hang onto that little mantra, “if it is caused then it is not free”, as long as it seems to pay off.
And perhaps you will continue to try to remove “free”, “choice”, and “self” from the vocabulary.
But there is nothing in the concept of universal inevitability that justifies such irrational conclusions.
1) Knowing that our choice will turn out to have been inevitable provides no help in making any decision. We cannot know for certain what we would have chosen until we actually finish our deliberation and make the choice. After our decision, if we reflect upon our thinking, we may then see that our reasons and feelings did inevitably lead us to this choice. But we still had to go through that mental process to get there. The fact of inevitability was useless to us.
2) There is no way to take the fact of inevitability into account while making the decision. If it appears that option A is to be our inevitable choice, can we decide in spite to choose option B instead? Well, if we do then option B was actually inevitable. So now we choose option A … etc. It is an infinite loop. Again, inevitability is a useless fact.
3) Some people think deterministic inevitability removes free will. But here we are, thinking and choosing what we will do next. We cannot simply sit back and watch the inevitable happen, because our choices cause what happens next, and choosing to sit and wait is also a choice that changes what happens next! What becomes inevitable is unavoidably still in our hands.
4) Some people think that inevitability means that no one can be held responsible for what they do. But it cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card”, because it always operates equally on both sides. If you say, “But judge, it was inevitable that I did the crime”, the judge will say, “And it is also inevitable that you be penalized”.
The only reasonable option is to acknowledge universal inevitability and then ignore it. At best it is a useless fact. At worst it’s misuse causes false conclusions and confusion, often in the most intelligent minds.
What is causality but a chain? You’ve a most peculiar notion of “free” if it can be a property of something that’s chained.
Have you read nothing I’ve written? I’ve repeatedly explained the domains over which such terms are valid. Just as I would not remove those words from the vocabulary, neither would I remove “married” nor “bachelor,” even if combining the two results in a phrase every bit as incoherent as “free will.”
So? Now you’re just appealing to consequences because you’re unhappy with facts.
And equating computation with “free will” is where the compatibilist argument goes off the rails. There’s no more “free will” in computation when it happens inside your skull than there is in a smartphone, pocket calculator, or thermostat.
That depends on what you mean by “held responsible.” Empirically, as you’ve just demonstrated so clearly, it’s just code for, “let’s make the bastard suffer,” which is, indeed, unjustifiable. The justifiable answer to criminal behavior is rehabilitation, but “free will” is generally used to diminish the value of such. If that’s what “free will” is good for — justifying the torture of fellow humans — then I’ll appeal to the consequences, myself, and say, “Thanks, but no thanks. You can keep all the ‘free will’ to yourself.”
Again, empirically, when you think making reality irrelevant is to your advantage…reality has a way of making you the irrelevant one, instead.
b&
I don’t agree there’s no freedom in the physics. Similarly, I wouldn’t agree that there’s no lift and drag in the 10^(30-something) electrons and quarks that make up an airplane wing and the surrounding air. Just because you can’t intellectually “see” an emergent property at the lowest level of description of an object, doesn’t mean the property isn’t there. It just means that the relationship between emergent properties and particle-level physics is highly complex.
The thing is…for an emergent property to be real, it has to actually emerge at some point. And I’ve repeatedly challenged other compatibilists to indicate the level at which freedom emerges, without even worrying about an explanation for the mechanism by which it emerges…and they’ve refused to do so.
Maybe you’d care to take a swing at it?
Is a single neuron free? Are two neurons? Dozens of neurons? Millions? Does freedom only emerge when the neurons are split across many skulls?
The other half of this problem…is that emergence only applies to properties that aren’t applicable at the lower levels. Emergence never means low-level properties becoming their opposite at higher levels. Individual water molecules aren’t wet, of course; but neither are they dry. Snow can be dry, and a glass of water is wet, but the concepts of “wet” and “dry” simply aren’t applicable to individual molecules.
…and that, incidentally, is where your analogy of the emergence of lift and drag in an airplane wing also breaks down. Lift and drag are perfectly reasonable properties of individual atoms, as they’re just electromagnetic interactions. Yes, there’ll be various quantum effects going on at such small scales…but still lots of familiar Newtonian action / reaction going on — and that’s all that lift and drag are.
So…again. You’re claiming that “free will” is an emergent property. Where does it emerge?
b&
But you imply we can choose differently than we do? How does that work then?
And, at a given instant, with the state of every quantum field exactly the same, everything exactly as it was, with our needs and preferences exactlythe same, why would we chose different?
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* ly
Ant,
Sorry I missed your post earlier. I’m afraid it’s on you, the incompatibilist, to show why it can’t work. You are the one claiming that there is a logical implication from “human action is casually determined ” to “no one can do differently “. So, produce the alleged proof. Before attempting it, please read up on the modal fallacy : http://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/modal_fallacy.htm
Erm…”causal determination” means exactly that — for any given starting condition, there is exactly one resulting resulting condition.
It’s the same thing as planetary orbits, really. Assemble a solar system with bodies of the same masses as those in our own, put each body in the same position and with the same angular momentum…and its clock will play out the same as ours.
Or, if you prefer, a computer. Install the same software on two computers, feed the same inputs to each (including the results of any random number generators), and they’ll produce the exact same outputs.
Maybe you could give an example of a causally determined system that doesn’t behave in such a reproducible manner?
b&
“Maybe you could give an example of a causally determined system that doesn’t behave in such a reproducible manner?”
Well, for example a chess playing computer with analog to digital input sensors, or one that uses your allowed random generator as a execution process terminator, or a system which contains any Turing non-computable subroutine function, or computers with maths units of different numerical precision…. I could go on and on…..
But Ben, we have been asked by Jerry to terminate our discussions here if we have been posting an excessive number of messages as defined by the rools… and I believe we have. So in respect Jerry’s request I’m exiting this thread. I’m sure another free-will discussion will arise where we can lock horns once again.
Cheers.
Yes, we should probably get off the bus at this stop.
I’ll leave you with this Wikipedia article which logically addresses every one of your objections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-deterministic_Turing_machine#Equivalence_with_DTMs
Note especially the section on equivalence.
b&
But it’s not casual at all!
And I reject the “incompatibility” label, per my comments elsewhere.
Anyway, Jerry’s already guillotined further discussion, so I’ll say no more.
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Ant,
casual / causal – embarrassing typo on my part. I apologize for misclassifying you as an incompatibilist. As far as guillotine of further discussion, I thought that was aimed at people flouting The Roolz, i.e. dominating the discussion and doing lots of one on one debate. But ok.
Can you help me with a technical issue about this website? I seem not to be able to post from my home computer. I’m logged on to WordPress under this name, but nothing happens. I’m posting on my phone now. What gives? If anyone has had a similar problem and solved it, please explain.
Ben,
On the issue of at what level free will emerges, ask yourself at what level personhood emerges. The answer will be the same, and for mostly the same reasons.
As far as your proof, it’s missing some premises or reasoning steps or both. You can’t show that the outcome is necessary or inevitable, unless you can show that the earlier events are necessary or inevitable. Sure, there is a one to one correspondence, in accordance with the laws of nature. But neither end of the causal thread is necessary, full stop. They are only “necessary” relative to each other.
I’ve been led to believe that we’re supposed to wind down this discussion, so I’ll let you have the last word.
Ant, it is never true that everything is the same except the first time around. The first time around can never be different because it is in the past.
The question, “why would we choose differently the first time around”, is meaningless.
As to the deliberate choosing the first time around, it must always begin with some uncertainty. The decider can truthfully say at the beginning that he may possibly choose A or he could end up choosing B.
That is all that can be claimed on behalf of free will. And that is all that really matters.
The decider cannot possibly know how his deliberations will end until he makes his choice. At that point, knowing the reasons for his choice, he can say it was inevitable. But at the beginning, as far as the decider was concerned it could have gone either way.
“That is all that can be claimed on behalf of free will.”
Well, implicitly, I was considering the “classic” “rewind the taps” thought experiment.
I inferred from your early statement that you meant we could choose differently if we rewound the tape. If that’s not what you meant, then we are in agreement.
Except about the utility of “free will” to describe anything related to what is actually going on.
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Free will refers to the ability of a person to choose for themselves what they will do next without being forced to do something against their own will.
That is the utility of the phrase free will, to distinguish one’s own control versus the control of another.
I’m sure that is no surprise to you.
Yes, that’s the phenomenon under discussion.
And the claim of those of us who reject the notion of “free will” is that no such freedom actually exists, even if there are situations in which we have the illusion of being unconstrained.
b&
But that sense has nothing do do with the process of choosing between options A and B that you described earlier!!!
So, thanks for making my point for me.
/@
But such is not the case.
The decider can truthfully say at the beginning that he predicts an equal probability that he will choose A or B, but the fact of the matter that there will inevitably unfold an inescapable chain of events that will result in a particular choice. The more you know about the events in the chain the better you can predict the most likely outcome, with it often becoming obvious to all shortly before the outcome comes to pass.
But that’s a computational limitation that could, in principle, be overcome by sufficient resources.
Granted, said resources may well require more “stuff” to throw at the computing than has ever been available since the Big Bang…but even that’s best thought of as an engineering problem. Any time you’re within a given system, it’s guaranteed that you lack the resources to model the system in perfect detail. It’s also guaranteed that you cannot, even in principle, rule out all possibility that your system is but a smaller part of an even larger system.
As such, we could conceivably create a computer-based simulation-like world of self-aware intelligent agents who could ponder questions of the nature of their own reality akin to what we ourselves are pondering. They’d be incapable of answering them, even in principle…but we’d be able to trivially answer them.
That we are unable to answer the questions for ourselves is no more relevant than the inability of the subroutines in this hypothesized simulation to answer the questions for themselves. They and we are incapable of ultimate answers, but the answers are not themselves fundamentally unanswerable.
b&
Yes. The fact of the matter is that whether the decider chooses A or B will be do to his own reasons and feelings, his own beliefs and values, and so forth. The process of deliberation is about sorting these things out and applying them to the problem at hand. One option will prove better than the other after he completes the mental process.
Therefore we know that the choice will be inevitable. But that fact is useless and irrelevant to the decider. He cannot possibly know at the outset which choice he will make. If he had that certainty at the outset, he would skip the deliberation process altogether.
So from the decider’s viewpoint, at the outset, he may choose A or he may choose B. He does not know yet. And it is only this uncertainty which is claimed when someone says, “I could have chosen A or B”.
It is only your nonsense (I’m using “you” generically to refer to all of the philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people that have lost themselves in this illusion) that insists the initial uncertainty requires rewinding time.
And I’ll toss that right back at you. It is equal nonsense to equate uncertainty and a lack of knowledge with freedom. Indeed, had you full knowledge you would have very likely chosen differently — and, as such, the ignorance costs you the “freedom” to make the optimal choice.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never pounded much on the “rewinding time” bit, except insofar as the deliberative process subjectively resembles it. But Jerry might take issue with you describing it as “nonsense”….
b&
I suspect that Jerry also will continue to spout attention-getting nonsense so long as it sells books. But I’ll not waste time or money on it.
I suspect that Jerry will not tolerate such attacks on his work and his character. If you wish to remain a guest in his living room, you would do well to apologize for this outburst.
b&
Everybody here who has posted too often, be aware of the rules that limit the amount of one-on-one discussion, or derailing, that I’ll permit (I’ve only recently gone over this thread).
As for Marvin Edwards, who said this:
“I suspect that Jerry also will continue to spout attention-getting nonsense so long as it sells books. But I’ll not waste time or money on it.”
I’ll waste no more time on you; this is a rule violation (and wrong to boot–I’ve sold no books that have anything about free will in them) and so I will waste no more time on you. You are a rude and offensive man, so go over to the other sites where you can be as rude as you want, and diss me as much as you want. I don’t want any of your business.
Well Ant, you are making a statement that is not true in quantum physics. Starting at the exact situation again that existed in the quantum world will NOT necessarily lead to the same outcomes. Doing this “experiment” repeatedly will only exhibit the “wave function” which describes the resulting cluster of probabilities of possible outcomes.
And noghost is right, it is almost impossible to predict an emergent behaviour just by looking at the quantum level of behaviours and trying to interpolate upwards, especially as emergent behaviours tend to stack up in a hierarchy, with a new emergent behaviour arising from the physics of an emerged behaviour etc etc. This is essentially why reductionist analysis needs to confined to the immediate levels of any emerged behaviour.
“Indeed, had you full knowledge you would have very likely chosen differently — and, as such, the ignorance costs you the “freedom” to make the optimal choice.”
A totally irrelevant point Ben. Decisions in Decision Theory only relies information of the particular variables that are being considered in the problem at hand, not a knowledge of the operation of the entire universe. The “freedom” that exists in a decision is the range of choice that exists with the information on the variables at hand. The optimal choice that exists is the optimum choice with the information available about those particular variables.
Before you bother to reply incorrectly Ben, please read the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum
I’m at a loss to imagine a more Orwellian definition of “freedom.” Quite literally, the less you know and the fewer your options, the freer you are.
I guess Henry Ford’s early customers had the most free choice of vehicle color in the history of the automotive industry. After all, each and every one of them made the locally maximally optimal choice with the information available about the particular variables.
b&
I’ve addressed that elsewhere. But if you insist on folding in quantum indeterminacy, how is rolling the quantum dice choosing?
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Well, no. It’s not physics. It’s psychology and sociology.
There is no way to map the spin of a specific electron to the choice to buy a hybrid car rather than a small gas-efficient model.
The effect of a single particle is pretty much irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
But two things remain true. (1) A rational universe is deterministic. (2) Free will (the ability of a sufficiently evolved biological organism to choose for itself what to do next) is a product of that deterministic universe.
Both are true. And both are simultaneously true all the time.
The only illusion is that they conflict. They don’t. They never have. They never will.
“There is no way to map the spin of a specific electron to the choice to buy a hybrid car rather than a small gas-efficient model.”
Electron spin is probably too low level. But what else accounts for that preference than the formation of trillions of synapses connecting billions of neurons and the movement of countless numbers of ions.
We have no way of modelling that such that we can look at the structure and activity at that level and show what choice you would make.
But that mapping is exactly what the brain does. Or what the brain is.
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PS. Electric every time. Tesla Model S. Expensive, but it can out-accelerate sports cars costing 10× as much. 😃
You’ll get a kick out of this article, then:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/1/8320189/zombie-222-electric-car-1968-mustang-texas-mile
b&
“The free will that “people we think we have” is precisely what I’ve said. It is our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do next.”
Marvin,
That is not true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why all the fuss?
There is an illusion that everybody experiences. It’s that we CHDO in the actual situation. This gives the impression that we CHDO without the need for circumstances not of our choosing to have been different.
If we view this from the point of view of determinism we see that the distant past would have had to have been different for us to have made a different choice and the picture changes dramatically because we see the distant past was not of our choosing and yet we’re relying on that being as it needs to be to make good choices. Some get lucky some don’t and we should recognise this, it’s morally wrong not to.
“The free will that “people we think we have” is precisely what I’ve said. It is our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do next.”
Marvin,
That is not true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why all the fuss?
There is an illusion that everybody experiences. It’s that we CHDO in the actual situation. This gives the impression that we CHDO without the need for circumstances not of our choosing to have been different.
If we view this from the point of view of determinism we see that the distant past would have had to have been different for us to have made a different choice and the picture changes dramatically, because we see the distant past was not of our and yet we’re relying on that being as it needs to be to make good choices. Some get lucky some don’t and we should recognise this, it’s morally wrong not to.