All I can imagine is that you think that intentional states govern an agent in the same way that gravity governs a rock, and hence, that we must be puppets of our intentional states in just the way that a rock is a puppet to gravity. But that is the wrong picture entirely, for to be governed by one's own intentional states is, quite literally, to be self-governed; one's intentional states are not some foreign entity, but rather they are the very facts of one's own desires and values.
So you acknlowedge the significance of our minds' ability to conceive of possibilities. That ability is a big part of what makes up choice and free will. A falling rock doesn't do that. Not many things at all can do that. Certainly not everything. We can, though.
Would it be fair to say that the compatibilist position fixates upon the notion of "ownership" of a particular causal action to try and maintain a notion of self-causation?
Both MrMister and Yar seem to maintain that rocks and people are different kinds of things, that a people "chooses" and a rock does "something else". Yet they both claim to accept causal determinism in that in the sequence of events:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H
H was caused by G, which was caused by F, which was caused by E.
However, when articulating two causal series, they will both claim that there is a distinction to be made in the kind of causality occuring. In the causal series (billiard ball A hits billiard ball b, billiard ball b moves) there is a lack of specialness, selfness, which occurs in (biological need for food hits brain, brainstate "hunger" occurs).
The only difference I can discern, is that billiard ball A and billiard ball B can be interpreted to be independent entities encountering one another, whereas the biological need for food and "hunger" both occur within a particular wrapping of flesh. So, if we have two billiard balls hitting one another that is just causality. If those two billiard balls, however, occur within a particular wrapping of flesh, then free will is happening. Because, again, that's all brain-states and cognition are; particular amalgamations of chemicals in the brain. So "serotonin hits brain-transmitter" is the same as "billiard ball a hits billiard ball b".
Or not; I do not know.
I'm just trying to figure out how in a universe of discrete particulars causally interracting with one another MrMister and Yar and positing a "self" onto some particular amalgamations of particles while other amalgamations of particles are not selves. So when those two particles interract that's free will, but when those two particles interract that's just causality.
A believing that doing B will lead to X does not necessarily mean A will do B. A might do C. This is a given, people do this all the time.
By the same token, A believing that doing B will lead to X does not necessarily mean X will occur. The goal may not occur.
Cognitions and beliefs are policy neutral.
For Hume, yes. For Kant, No. Hume will say that there need be a desire to get the ball rolling, so to speak. But for Kant, simply understanding a means of attaining, say, X, will get one to start going for X if there is a rational requirement to do X.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
Not only that. MrMister has previously stated that not allowing this "doesn't make any sense".
Well, I think allowing it doesn't make any sense.
Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I don't think _J_ needs to explain. There are enough explanations of what's wrong with this already. The simulation wasn't targeting for you to have read the results of the simulation because it would need to results to calculate the results. And if it could do this infinite calculation and show you the result it would either settle on some stable time or, if your decision-making process was ultimately unstable (contrarian, for example) the feedback would cause the result to change constantly until you looked away.
You're saying that the answer would be in flux and there would be no single predetermined outcome. This denies determinism.
When I finally made up my mind to go outside and check the mail, it would suddenly report the current time. Again, looks like it was always based on my choice and there was no determined event. Even a machine with hypothetical access to all causal factors could not determine when I would go check the mail until the point at which I had definitely decided to do it.
I'm having trouble understanding how you think you're making a case against me, it seems you are making my points for me and agree with me.
I already headed you off here but you clipped off that portion of the post. If the simulation goes into flux until you look away, the real problem then becomes "when will you look away". And to answer that, you could run another simulation. And if you were watching the results of that one also and being contrarian, you'd have to look away to make a choice. And so on forever. Causality would not allow a choice until you broke your contrarian rule.
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I don't think _J_ needs to explain. There are enough explanations of what's wrong with this already. The simulation wasn't targeting for you to have read the results of the simulation because it would need to results to calculate the results. And if it could do this infinite calculation and show you the result it would either settle on some stable time or, if your decision-making process was ultimately unstable (contrarian, for example) the feedback would cause the result to change constantly until you looked away.
You're saying that the answer would be in flux and there would be no single predetermined outcome. This denies determinism.
When I finally made up my mind to go outside and check the mail, it would suddenly report the current time. Again, looks like it was always based on my choice and there was no determined event. Even a machine with hypothetical access to all causal factors could not determine when I would go check the mail until the point at which I had definitely decided to do it.
I'm having trouble understanding how you think you're making a case against me, it seems you are making my points for me and agree with me.
I already headed you off here but you clipped off that portion of the post. If the simulation goes into flux until you look away, the real problem then becomes "when will you look away". And to answer that, you could run another simulation. And if you were watching the results of that one also and being contrarian, you'd have to look away to make a choice. And so on forever. Causality would not allow a choice until you broke your contrarian rule.
Man, it's not that difficult. The premise of Yar's argument was that the machine could discern what was causally, necessarily going to happen (Yar goes to post office at time X). But then something happens which the machine did not discern.
So the fucking machine didn't fucking do what Yar said the fucking machine would do; the example is flawed given that the machine did not do that which it was defined to have done.
"What if a machine could predict the future but then that which was predicted did not occur?"
Well then the machine didn't fucking predict the future, now did it?
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
It feels weird to be agreeing with _J_ about something.
I'm not on his side so much as temporarily allying.
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I'm not sure if anyone posted something to this effect, but the other thing to remember about determinism (real, actual, coherent determinism) is that it is quite heavily reliant upon a conception of reality as billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, discrete particulars interacting in pre-determined, causal ways with other discrete particulars.
So even having this discussion about "people" is very fallacious if we understand "people" as amalgamations of constitutive parts. Because, causally, it will be the constitutive, atomistic parts being causally determined by other atomistic entities and not the “person”, the amalgamation, being “caused” to do anything.
So, “person eats steak” is a gigantic amalgamation of a wealth of discrete particulars, all of which can be said to “combine” in the action “person eats steak”, despite the number of particular, atomistic causal forces occurring between the irreducible particles which make up the “person” amalgamation.
So, really, a better argument for there being no free will is that there is no will; there are just sub-atomic particles hitting other sub-atomic particles in a causally deterministic manner.
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Donkey KongPutting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
Right, but people don't like that because it's depressing.
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reductionism is a place you can go, but i wouldn't advise it, since we do not yet know
a) whether there is a fundamental material level of reality
b) what it would be composed of
c) whether it actually follows logical, causal rules
C is especially tricky since we already have "particles" that are actually not "things" so much as a cloud of probability and so don't even really "exist" in the way we are used to thinking.
when discussing free will, i don't think you have to go all the way to hard causal physical determinism.
reductionism is a place you can go, but i wouldn't advise it, since we do not yet know
a) whether there is a fundamental material level of reality
b) what it would be composed of
c) whether it actually follows logical, causal rules
C is especially tricky since we already have "particles" that are actually not "things" so much as a cloud of probability and so don't even really "exist" in the way we are used to thinking.
when discussing free will, i don't think you have to go all the way to hard causal physical determinism.
Sure, it's just very difficult to define something like "hungry for steak" as a causal force, when you think about it. Especially when they're arguing that a person is the amalgamation of its constitutive states of desire. Because as one person makes the move of "what you REALLY are is ___" then the next move is to just reduce whatever they just reduced to another reduction. And whoever gets to the smallest particle first wins.
Determinism requires that there be things causally interracting, which means there have to be things, which means that there would have to be a discrete "desire for steak" interracting with a discrete "hunger" which them prompts a discrete action by a discrete will.
Sure, but the frame of references is within an imagined hypothetical world which has no relation to the real, actual world. I can imagine what "could" would be were it to exist, but that does not mean that "could" actually does exist. I can imagine what "free" would be were it to exist, but that does not mean that "free" actually does exist.
So you acknlowedge the significance of our minds' ability to conceive of possibilities. That ability is a big part of what makes up choice and free will. A falling rock doesn't do that. Not many things at all can do that. Certainly not everything. We can, though.
In your massive wall of text, this is probably the most telling statement.
Your premise is that we are special, Yar. You are, in one had, declaring the universe to be deterministic, and in the other, declaring we have this special thing called "choice", and then in a third hand, arguing that the universe isn't deterministic, and in a fourth, final hand, claiming that you can contradict a machine that definitionally knows what you are going to do in the future.
I think you need to collect your arguments a little bit better.
Sure, but the frame of references is within an imagined hypothetical world which has no relation to the real, actual world. I can imagine what "could" would be were it to exist, but that does not mean that "could" actually does exist. I can imagine what "free" would be were it to exist, but that does not mean that "free" actually does exist.
So you acknlowedge the significance of our minds' ability to conceive of possibilities. That ability is a big part of what makes up choice and free will. A falling rock doesn't do that. Not many things at all can do that. Certainly not everything. We can, though.
In your massive wall of text, this is probably the most telling statement.
Your premise is that we are special, Yar. You are, in one had, declaring the universe to be deterministic, and in the other, declaring we have this special thing called "choice", and then in a third hand, arguing that the universe isn't deterministic, and in a fourth, final hand, claiming that you can contradict a machine that definitionally knows what you are going to do in the future.
I think you need to collect your arguments a little bit better.
I just want one of the compatibilists in the thread to give a coherent definition of choice which isn't fundamentally question begging.
I did not say X is a choice if one thinks about it. I said X is a choice if one considered D and E, and that this consideration of D and E, and his preference for one over the other, were major causal forces leading to X.
So, choice is thinking and consideration. Ok, what are "thought" and "consideration"? I get that, most likely, "thought is something a rock can't do". But i do not know
1) What thought is.
2) Why thought is special.
Same for "choice" and "consider".
I'd like to get to a common point at which we all agree and work forward from there. If the determinists and the compatibilists are all fine with causal determinism then, ok:
I'm not sure if anyone posted something to this effect, but the other thing to remember about determinism (real, actual, coherent determinism) is that it is quite heavily reliant upon a conception of reality as billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, discrete particulars interacting in pre-determined, causal ways with other discrete particulars.
So even having this discussion about "people" is very fallacious if we understand "people" as amalgamations of constitutive parts. Because, causally, it will be the constitutive, atomistic parts being causally determined by other atomistic entities and not the “person”, the amalgamation, being “caused” to do anything.
So, “person eats steak” is a gigantic amalgamation of a wealth of discrete particulars, all of which can be said to “combine” in the action “person eats steak”, despite the number of particular, atomistic causal forces occurring between the irreducible particles which make up the “person” amalgamation.
So, really, a better argument for there being no free will is that there is no will; there are just sub-atomic particles hitting other sub-atomic particles in a causally deterministic manner.
Sure, that's essentially what I believe. But then the other thing to remember is that you can't really do anything useful with this: let's say you want to simulate the system so that you can predict what happens with the objects in the system in the future, well, you'd need a Turing machine that's at least as large as the system (i.e. the observable universe) or you'd need to make assumptions about which particles are important and which aren't, which won't necessarily (in fact, will certainly not be) correct.
Therefore, you can't tell the difference between free will and the illusion of free will, or at least you can't do anything useful with that knowledge (which, pardon my engineer's bias, evaluates to the same thing as there being no difference), so I'm going to go eat dinner and shove the entire topic to the back of my mind, as if I was playing The Game or something.
WTF does "fundamentally" mean in that explanation? Nothing is "fundamentally" different from anything else, depending on how fundamental you want to get with your current brain configuration that is mulling around a concept of "fundamental." That isn't a meaningful stance on anything.
Hey, here's another twist to the determinism machine - take away any agent that can make choices, or any that can perceive possible futures, and the machine works fine. It can tell you about falling rocks all day with no problem. It's only the introduction of an agent who can conceive and act upon a consideration of possible futures that suddenly the machine is an impossible paradox and cannot produce an answer without relying on a variable of choice. I think that means that even wrt determinism, free will and choice are quite meaningful.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
WTF does "fundamentally" mean in that explanation? Nothing is "fundamentally" different from anything else, depending on how fundamental you want to get with your current brain configuration that is mulling around a concept of "fundamental." That isn't a meaningful stance on anything.
Hey, here's another twist to the determinism machine - take away any agent that can make choices, or any that can perceive possible futures, and the machine works fine. It can tell you about falling rocks all day with no problem. It's only the introduction of an agent who can conceive and act upon a consideration of possible futures that suddenly the machine is an impossible paradox and cannot produce an answer without relying on a variable of choice. I think that means that even wrt determinism, free will and choice are quite meaningful.
Actually the paradox exists even without this hypothetical agent, since the machine's presence in the universe will necessarily mean that the machine will interact with other objects in some way. So infinite recursion is inescapable for a determination machine.
I'm not sure if anyone posted something to this effect, but the other thing to remember about determinism (real, actual, coherent determinism) is that it is quite heavily reliant upon a conception of reality as billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, discrete particulars interacting in pre-determined, causal ways with other discrete particulars.
So even having this discussion about "people" is very fallacious if we understand "people" as amalgamations of constitutive parts. Because, causally, it will be the constitutive, atomistic parts being causally determined by other atomistic entities and not the “person”, the amalgamation, being “caused” to do anything.
So, “person eats steak” is a gigantic amalgamation of a wealth of discrete particulars, all of which can be said to “combine” in the action “person eats steak”, despite the number of particular, atomistic causal forces occurring between the irreducible particles which make up the “person” amalgamation.
So, really, a better argument for there being no free will is that there is no will; there are just sub-atomic particles hitting other sub-atomic particles in a causally deterministic manner.
Sure, that's essentially what I believe. But then the other thing to remember is that you can't really do anything useful with this: let's say you want to simulate the system so that you can predict what happens with the objects in the system in the future, well, you'd need a Turing machine that's at least as large as the system (i.e. the observable universe) or you'd need to make assumptions about which particles are important and which aren't, which won't necessarily (in fact, will certainly not be) correct.
Therefore, you can't tell the difference between free will and the illusion of free will, or at least you can't do anything useful with that knowledge (which, pardon my engineer's bias, evaluates to the same thing as there being no difference), so I'm going to go eat dinner and shove the entire topic to the back of my mind, as if I was playing The Game or something.
Well, we can tell the difference between free will and the illusion of free will. What persons have is the illusion of free will, as a result of some bizzare chemical reaction or as a result of god or whatever, and what actually is the case is particles bumping into one another. The useful aspect of what was articulated is that it is the way things are, so it has a use in its being indicative of the way things are.
If you want a practical consequent of the physical reductionist understanding of determinism it is that adopting it as true renders particular understandings of morality / ethics / punishment nonsense. If, say, a person robs a bank we cannot punish that person on the basis of the person's having the ability to not have robbed the bank; that particular amalgamation of particles must necessarily have done that which that particular amalgamation of particles did.
So if at the macroscopic level persons are compelled to punish persons who rob banks, the justification for the action cannot be based upon, on the microscopic level, that amalgamation's ability to not have robbed a bank.
Nothing is "fundamentally" different from anything else, depending on how fundamental you want to get with your current brain configuration that is mulling around a concept of "fundamental."
Wait.
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
Nothing is "fundamentally" different from anything else, depending on how fundamental you want to get with your current brain configuration that is mulling around a concept of "fundamental."
Wait.
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
Fundamentally, all four are merely definitions. This whole thread has been a massive No True Scottsman fallacy.
Edit: And fundamentally, that fallacy isn't a problem at all. It seems like you'd feel that it is, though.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
So you need a motivational concept. The problem is that all agency based motivational concepts: intentions, purpose, needs, desires, goalseeking etc are all teleological explanations.
This is called the Humean theory of motivation, and it is not an uncontroversial doctrine. Specifically, there is controversy both over whether certain beliefs can in and of themselves motivate--for instance, beliefs about the good--and also over what exactly it means to attribute a desire in explaining action. See McDowell, Platts, or Nagel, especially The Possibility of Altruism.
Teleological explanations take the form: A did B in order that X will occur. This is not compatible with causal determinism. X cannot do double duty as both cause and effect. You cannot identify the consequence as the cause.
If the above was controversial, this transcends controversy into just plain falsehood. Teleological explanations are completely compatible with causal determinism. This could be because you think, ala Donald Davidson, that reasons are causes. It could also be because you think, ala Michael Smith, that desires are dispositions, and dispositions are causal. In any case, it's not that one thing is playing both the role of cause and effect. The desire for, say, a drink of water is the cause, and the reaching for the water is the effect. The distinction is here between the aim of the action and the action itself.
But, it's worth stressing, that these are complicated issues being given an extreme summary gloss.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
There's that word "fundamentally." What does it mean? Choice and thought are physical processes and part of the causal order of the world, and so in that sense they bear a similarity to a rock falling or a comet hurtling through space. But they are also processes that are part and parcel of agency, and in that sense they are unlike a rock falling or a comet hurtling through space.
Sometimes people say things like "we're just a bunch of matter in motion!" And it's true, that is what we are, but the use of the word "just" betrays a misguided attitude. Water is "just" hydrogen and oxygen, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't also have important properties not had by either of its constitutive parts alone. The difference between water and its parts makes water drinkable even though its parts are not, just as the difference between a person and his organic matter makes him capable of choice and action even though his parts, were they to be separated, could do neither.
Guys. You've been arguing about the prediction computer for a while now. I'm here to tell you, we made one and it works. See my previous post about that psyche experiment:
SECOND STUDY: (I think this one's cooler)
Experimentalists take subjects and monitor their brain patterns in some sort of apparatus, I'm guessing MRI, but I don't remember. The subjects are instructed to push a button whenever they feel like it, and remember when they decided to push it. There is a scrolling disk with numbers around the edge that they are intended to use to indicate when they made the decision. After enough data is collected, the experimentalists could predict 3 seconds in advance of when the subject would push the button. There were cries that the experiment was not conducted well enough. There's just one button, they can see the disc rotating, etc.
So they did it again. This time, subjects had two buttons, and the images did not scroll, they just changed, and they were not numbers anymore. This time the scientists could predict, not only when they would push the button, but which button they would push, 7 seconds in advance.
So what happens if you TELL the person their choice? Certainly, CERTAINLY that person's brain will change, and his/her decision will change too. Now. That doesn't make it wrong. Withing a reasonable margin of error, the individual was going to make that choice. Now that person won't. Machine changes its answer. So as a tangent, if the machine can change its answer, is it changing its mind? Making a decision?
One thing about uncertainty and particles that is ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL! {edit} : (Fundamental is used here to mean an inherent property; something that is necessary in our expression or understanding of the term.)
These things ARE particles. They act like waves. Particle-wave duality is sort of a misnomer. What it is, is that the particle itself has a probability of being somewhere at XYZ time, at ABC speed. It really is a particle. It doesn't move like a wave. It's more like a field:
A proton has its proton field. At some time, the field has some excitation that specifies its location, energy, etc. This is based on other particle fields everywhere. That's your intro to Fock space. Have fun with that name, by the way.
Umm...So randomness is a fundamental facet of what we understand the universe to be. But with SOOO MANY particles, we can assume that a large system on the order of a fraction of a mol will act out its probabilities exactly. You can technically walk through a wall. A can of beer can technically fall over for no reason. But the beer would take 10^120 years to do so, and you'd be banging your head for a lot longer.
So for systems on the order that we are thinking, just assume that heisenberg doesn't play in to it.
If you want a practical consequent of the physical reductionist understanding of determinism it is that adopting it as true renders particular understandings of morality / ethics / punishment nonsense. If, say, a person robs a bank we cannot punish that person on the basis of the person's having the ability to not have robbed the bank; that particular amalgamation of particles must necessarily have done that which that particular amalgamation of particles did.
Of course we can; a system that does not punish bank robbers would lead to a system that produces more of them, just as surely as entropy increases in a closed system. It just means that your motives aren't punitive, but instead preventative and rehabilitative. And since your motives exist only in your head, that brings us right back to my original point.
edit: also I'm not entirely sure that "events aren't deterministic because quantum interactions are fundamentally random" necessarily implies free will rather than just, y'know, randomness.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
So you need a motivational concept. The problem is that all agency based motivational concepts: intentions, purpose, needs, desires, goalseeking etc are all teleological explanations.
This is called the Humean theory of motivation, and it is not an uncontroversial doctrine. Specifically, there is controversy both over whether certain beliefs can in and of themselves motivate--for instance, beliefs about the good, and also over what exactly it means to attribute a desire in explaining action. See McDowell, Platts, or Nagel, especially The Possibility of Altruism.
Teleological explanations take the form: A did B in order that X will occur. This is not compatible with causal determinism. X cannot do double duty as both cause and effect. You cannot identify the consequence as the cause.
If the above was controversial, this transcends controversy into just plain falsehood. Teleological explanations are completely compatible with causal determinism. This could be because you think, ala Donald Davidson, that reasons are causes. It could also be because you think, ala Michael Smith, that desires are dispositions, and dispositions are causal. In any case, it's not that one thing is playing both the role of cause and effect. The desire for, say, a drink of water is the cause, and the reaching for the water is the effect. The distinction is here between the aim of the action and the action itself.
But, it's worth stressing, that these are complicated issues being given an extreme summary gloss.
Re Davidson: Reasons are an amalgamation of motive and cognition. When you give your reasons, you are trying to describe to someone that you wanted something and what beliefs guided you to acheive what you wanted. You don't escape the problem I outlined by trying to smash two things into one and claiming that thing is now something different. You end up with more problems, for example, explaining why it is suddenly different. I don't agree with davidson because he's taken a misstep right at the start.
It's a redescription of the problem that doesn't answer any questions.
Similarly, I disagree with Michael Smith's stance that dispositions can be causes. When you say something has a disposition, you are trying to say that what something will do given a certain circumstance is an intrinsic property of that thing. That what something will do is part of what it is.
Take brittleness as a dispositional quality of glass. When we say something is brittle, we mean that if we drop the glass it will break. So we describe the glass as brittle and believe the question ends there.
However, brittleness doesn't help in explaining what it is about the glass that makes it likely to break.
Brittleness is the potential outcome and is conceptually distinct from the intrinsic state of the glass (the atomic structure).
Because dispositions are potential future outcomes, they cannot be antecedent causes.
Let's take a look at desire, which you take to be a causal concept.
Desire is a teleological concept. You have to desire some thing. There is no such thing as a desire without a focus. Desire is inherently towards something and hence towards a goal. To say that desires allow teleological explanations to be an antecedent cause is to say the same thing as teleological concepts can allow teleological explanations to be an antecedent cause. In either case, you are again claiming a future consequence is an antecedent cause. It's not just circular, it's recursively circular.
If that is not enough to throw out desire as causal, desire is also dispositional. As I outlined above, dispositions cannot be causal because they are descriptions of potential future outcomes.
Note that rejecting beliefs as causes is different from claiming that beliefs can direct someones behavior once they have already been motivated.
There's no problem in saying P did A because they believed that doing A will achieve X. It is only a problem if you try to claim that the belief is why P wanted to get to X.
P having a belief can direct P's actions, sure. It' just doesn't explain why P wanted to achieve X.
And nor does desire or any other teleological or dispositional concept.
I'm quite aware of the controversial nature of these arguments. I find fault with the arguments against them.
You need to keep your emotional head on your shoulders though, because you seem to believe, honestly believe, that just because a bunch of well known people don't like something this means arguing for it is automatically false. Something being controversial means precisely jack shit and I take issue with you pulling a giant argument to authority. Please stick to the arguments involved, I honestly do not care at all how much a bunch of people don't like something. I care what their argument is and only what their argument is. Try to keep this in mind before you spout off about falsehoods, alright? True and false kind of loses its meaning if you start talking about wether or not it's popular.
edit: Oh yeah I guess I should cite that my ideas and arguments were influenced by Maze, JR and Joel Mitchell. Dunno if you've heard of them though.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
I must admit that I am a little dismayed that the conversation keeps coming back to physical determination. I have, after all, argued that physical determination is not the real issue in play here--see section 3 and 4 of the original post. So I don't think that either whether the best science is deterministic or not or whether a computer could model the entire world or not actually matters. And really does it seem like it should matter--does it seem to make sense to wait for the latest particle accelerator experiment so that we can see if we have free will or not? I must confess that I would find that predilection faintly ludicrous.
But let's put that aside. Now I have a little more to say on conceptual analysis as it applies to the case of free will. I think this will do something to allay these sorts of worries, which have periodically cropped up:
And both of you keep arguing past each other about who is right. You're rejecting each others premises.
Here is one way the situation could appear: _J_ and I mean different things by a "free will," and so, in each of our own lexicons, we are both correct. So our apparent disagreement is not even a real disagreement at all, it is just a linguistic divergence. Sometimes this is indeed the correct way to dissolve arguments, but I do not think that it is appropriate here. The principle reason why not is that we take our different theories to have different practical consequence. Namely, _J_ takes himself to have shown that the notion of moral responsibility, and hence also retributive justice, to be vacuous and incoherent. I, however, take no one to have demonstrated any such thing. So it is not just a use of language over which we differ, but rather an attitude toward the right action.
So, what exactly are we doing when we argue over what freedom means? Well, in this case we are trying to repair a hopelessly defective commonsense concept. Here, I think, is a great explanation from Allen Wood in some unpublished notes:
Is there a common sense position on the free will issue? I think there is: Common sense, it seems to me, holds that we are free, that we are causally determined, and that freedom and causal determinism are incompatible. So common sense doesn’t... take any position that is even minimally consistent or defensible. So the first thing that I think you have to realize about the free will problem is that if you take any consistent position at all on it, you are going to be running up against common sense and you have to defend something that looks hard to defend. If you want to hold only views that agree with common sense, and you also don’t want to contradict yourself, then there is simply no position on the free will problem that you can take. No position on the free will problem is such that anybody can sensibly feel comfortable taking it. This is why the free will problem is a big problem and also probably why nothing you can say or do will ever make it go away.
In commonsense we find this concept, free will, which is intimately related to our concepts of responsibility and action. But the problem is that this commonsense concept is hopelessly incoherent--so no matter what we do with it, if we ourselves want to be coherent, then that will entail abandoning or modifying parts of it. This is, really, one of the great things that philosophy does, and one of it's practical applications--it takes a commonsense concept, shows its incoherence, and then offers ways of repairing it. Not only does this give us a warm glow of rightness, but it also often, as I've already mentioned, has important consequences. For instance, another hopelessly incoherent commonsense concept that philosophy has had a go at is the commonsense concept of race, and repairing that leaky boat has all the best consequences. There's also the concept of the triune god, but hey, let's not get too controversial.
Now, there are multiple ways to repair an internally incoherent concept, but usually it involves jettisoning one part in order to keep another. In this case, one way to repair the idea of free will is by insisting on a certain sort of freedom at the expense of the idea that we actually have it. This is what J does, and we see it here:
But that is not what "free" means. "Free" means uncaused, unstructured, uninfluenced, free. A "Free" Will would be a will which acts completely unprompted, uncaused, unstructured, uninfluenced. It would be a Will of randomness; a will which acts completely uncaused and completely without reasons, compulsions, or limits.
Another way, however, is to insist that we actually have free will, but at the expense of the idea that it requires a certain sort of freedom. That is what I do.
Given this dilemma, the first thing to point our here is that it's absolutely inappropriate for _J_ to insist that he simply knows what "free" means in this context. No one knows what free means in this context because it's embedded in an incoherent mess. That's the reason we have to investigate: to figure out something for free to mean that best honors our overall commitments and ideas, and which best fits the evidence we have.
But why do I think that my way of repairing the concept is better than his? Well, for starters, because his idea of freedom is absolutely nonsensical. If freedom entails freedom from reasons, then freedom is not even a quality that any rational being could possess. If it also means freedom from limits or compulsion, then it's doubtful that it could even be a property of something we consider to have a mind. In order to recognize something as having a mind we require that it display a certain sort of coherence in its behavior, and that coherence is mutually exclusive with having a J-free-will. So, on that notion of freedom it is simply logically impossible for a creature to have a free will, be it in this world or in any hypothetical other.
But, if that is true, then it follows that free will is logically impossible, in this world or any other. Which is just to say that it is also impossible in indeterministic worlds. So, it turns out, determinism is not a relevant issue; its truth has no bearing on whether we have free will. But determinism is one of the main arguments that J, and other fatalists, use to try to motivate their position. So their argument, if it succeeds, undercuts its own support. That is a sort of internal incoherency to which we do not want to commit ourselves.
One of the main motivations for compatibilism, I think, is the absolute confusion surrounding this sort of notion of a free will. The compatibilst often says, basically--free will, J style, makes no sense whatsoever. So clearly, if we thought it was important we were wrong. The way to fix our concept is not to hold on to it at the expense of our other commitments, but rather, to hold on to our other commitments at the expense of it. It is weird and gross; we would like to remove it from our thought.
the above is exactly why i was saying that freedom has nothing to do with determinism, and in fact has nothing to do with the will
i don't see the motivation for your project. you have already stated that the previous conceptions of free will were incoherent, nonsensical, etc. why do you feel the need to redefine free will such that it means something entirely different from the quasi-mystical nonsense that it usually refers to? what is the purpose of taking the term and applying it to a determined, caused mind?
Evil Multifarious on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
There's no problem in saying P did A because they believed that doing A will achieve X. It is only a problem if you try to claim that the belief is why P wanted to get to X.
P having a belief can direct P's actions, sure. It' just doesn't explain why P wanted to achieve X.
And nor does desire or any other teleological or dispositional concept.
Desires are not explanations of why an agent wants to achieve a goal; they are just statements of the fact that an agent wants to achieve a goal. Their point is not to explain why he has that goal, but rather to explain why he took a particular action. And they explain that action by showing it as directed towards a goal he is understood to have antecedently had.
Why people have the desires (goals) that they do is another question entirely, and one not intended to be answered by belief-desire explanations. That, indeed, would be circular.
You need to keep your emotional head on your shoulders though, because you seem to believe, honestly believe, that just because a bunch of well known people don't like something this means arguing for it is automatically false.
I don't list philosophers who disagree with you in order to prove that you are wrong. I list them in order to show that you are not being very careful; there is a significant literature which you are at best engaging with superficially. It is also a way of pointing out issues, and a depth of complexity, that might otherwise go unremarked on--not to mention giving people a starting point to research if they so desire.
So don't be a dick.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
i don't see the motivation for your project. you have already stated that the previous conceptions of free will were incoherent, nonsensical, etc. why do you feel the need to redefine free will such that it means something entirely different from the quasi-mystical nonsense that it usually refers to? what is the purpose of taking the term and applying it to a determined, caused mind?
In order to show how we can retain our concepts of control; of agency; of the voluntary versus the involuntary; of actions versus spasms, or mere bodily movements; and of moral responsibility. There are all sorts of concepts tied up with free will around the edges, and compatibilism shows how they can be made sense of without relying on something that is deeply incoherent.
Not to mention that it provides a good template for understanding how to reconcile the objective and the subjective generally. The View from Nowhere and all that.
i don't see the motivation for your project. you have already stated that the previous conceptions of free will were incoherent, nonsensical, etc. why do you feel the need to redefine free will such that it means something entirely different from the quasi-mystical nonsense that it usually refers to? what is the purpose of taking the term and applying it to a determined, caused mind?
In order to show how we can retain our concepts of control; of agency; of the voluntary versus the involuntary; of actions versus spasms, or mere bodily movements; and of moral responsibility. There are all sorts of concepts tied up with free will around the edges, and compatibilism shows how they can be made sense of without relying on something that is deeply incoherent.
Not to mention that it provides a good template for understanding how to reconcile the objective and the subjective generally. The View from Nowhere and all that.
why do we need to retain those ideas?
why does responsibility require free will or agency? responsibility can easily be the attribution of an effect to a cause.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Why do we need to retain any idea? Well, because I think that they represent real distinctions and categories. And so I go through the trouble to show how they can fit into an overall coherent and integrated worldview.
why does responsibility require free will or agency? responsibility can easily be the attribution of an effect to a cause.
Because we are not responsible for everything that we cause, as I've elaborated in previous examples, and so we need to explain how to draw that distinction. Agency, I have claimed, is a good starting point.
Why do we need to retain any idea? Well, because I think that they represent real distinctions and categories. And so I go through the trouble to show how they can fit into an overall coherent and integrated worldview.
why does responsibility require free will or agency? responsibility can easily be the attribution of an effect to a cause.
Because we are not responsible for everything that we cause, as I've elaborated in previous examples, and so we need to explain how to draw that distinction. Agency, I have claimed, is a good starting point.
for a second there i thought you were denying responsibility entirely.
i don't think the distinction can really be drawn in good faith. to do so you'll need to make an internal/external division that cannot be upheld.
i think that you can completely eliminate the concept of responsibility and establish a system by which to reach utilitarian objectives more consistently and more effectively.
But why do I think that my way of repairing the concept is better than his? Well, for starters, because his idea of freedom is absolutely nonsensical. If freedom entails freedom from reasons, then freedom is not even a quality that any rational being could possess. If it also means freedom from limits or compulsion, then it's doubtful that it could even be a property of something we consider to have a mind. In order to recognize something as having a mind we require that it display a certain sort of coherence in its behavior, and that coherence is mutually exclusive with having a J-free-will. So, on that notion of freedom it is simply logically impossible for a creature to have a free will, be it in this world or in any hypothetical other.
Here's my reply: Let's say that Yar wants to be "wealthy", but "wealthy" means "has $75,000". Yar does not have $75,000, but wants to be wealthy. Either Yar can accept that his lack of $75,000 renders him not wealthy, OR Yar can redefine "wealthy" to mean "has $X", where X is the amount of $ Yar has.
I think that when persons use the word "free" what they mean is what I have articulated: Some uninfluenced, irrational, uncaused, metaphysical, magical freedom of self-actualization completely estranged from any restrictions. Once we start to think, we realize that "free" is impossible. But we still want free just as Yar, in the example, wants to be wealthy despite his lack of weath.
So, instead of abandoning the pursuit of "freedom", we instead change the definition but keep the word. And the reason we keep the word is that we still think the word to be related to that thing we initially desired. Just as Yar maintains the word "wealth" despite his lack of the $75,000 which would constitute wealth.
Moreover, I think that to engage in this conversation requires something of an opposition: There is "free" and there is "not-free". When we start to think about it, we realize that "not-free" means caused, determined, influenced, restricted. So, necessarily, "free" is the opposite of those things; the only sensible way to even begin the conversation regarding freedom and determinism is to set up a X & ~X relation, and when we do that, when we honestly do that, the only sensible definition of free which can serve as an opposite to the determined is the "free" I defined.
So, for my part, I am entirely confortable with "free" as an impossibility, because I think that the impossible definition of freedom I maintain is the only sensible definition to maintain in order to make the free / determinism opposition sensible. And not only to maintain the opposition, but to genuinely articulate that which is being discussed. If we want to say "slaves are not free", then free must be that which a slave is not. It makes no sense to say "slaves are influenced" and "free agents are influenced", and then quibble over the differences in "influence" pertaining to slaves and free agents. Just set up a binary opposition where slaves are influenced, and frees are not-influenced.
But, if that is true, then it follows that free will is logically impossible, in this world or any other. Which is just to say that it is also impossible in indeterministic worlds. So, it turns out, determinism is not a relevant issue; its truth has no bearing on whether we have free will. But determinism is one of the main arguments that J, and other fatalists, use to try to motivate their position. So their argument, if it succeeds, undercuts its own support. That is a sort of internal incoherency to which we do not want to commit ourselves.
"Free", as I defined it, would not be impossible in an indeterministic world; it would be the fundamental state of being for all entities in an indeterministic world. Problem being, of course, there could be no beings, as beingness itself would be a limitation, and so not free. So, in an indeterministic world, within which there was freedom, there could be freedom...there would simply be no beings instantiating that freedom.
One of the main motivations for compatibilism, I think, is the absolute confusion surrounding this sort of notion of a free will. The compatibilst often says, basically--free will, J style, makes no sense whatsoever. So clearly, if we thought it was important we were wrong. The way to fix our concept is not to hold on to it at the expense of our other commitments, but rather, to hold on to our other commitments at the expense of it. It is weird and gross; we would like to remove it from our thought.
It is not that my notion of freedom makes no sense; it is that my notion of freedom is impossible. It is entirely sensible, intelligible; it's just impossible. And I have no problem with there being things which are impossible to actualize in our reality. I have no problem defining and X which cannot be actualized in this reality.
I understand what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it, and I applaud your ability to articulate your project in a sensible way. I just think the project fundamentally flawed, in that it redefines a term to pertain to that which the term does not actually pertain.
Basically, i think you are doing what Yar does in my example. You really want to be wealthy, and wealthy means "Has $75,000", but you do not have $75,000. So instead of saying "Well, guess I can't be wealthy" you redefine "wealth" to be whatever you can has.
The only difference would be that, with regard to freedom, it's not that just Yar cannot be free, or just MrMister cannot be free, or just _J_ cannot be free; no one and no thing can be free.
Which is entirely fine. We have created a concept for a thing which cannot be actualized in this reality, kudos to us. If we want to talk about things which can be actualized in this reality? That's fine...but why in god's name are we taking the term for an impossible thing and redefining it to be something which is possible?
Just pick a different fucking word for christ's sake.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
There's no problem in saying P did A because they believed that doing A will achieve X. It is only a problem if you try to claim that the belief is why P wanted to get to X.
P having a belief can direct P's actions, sure. It' just doesn't explain why P wanted to achieve X.
And nor does desire or any other teleological or dispositional concept.
Desires are not explanations of why an agent wants to achieve a goal; they are just statements of the fact that an agent wants to achieve a goal.
And they explain that action by showing it as directed towards a goal he is understood to have antecedently had.
According to your first statement, desire is a description, not an explanation.
If you want to claim that it is an explanation, this is not a coherent position because:
1). In order for a goal to be antecedent, it must be in the form of a belief/cognition. Beliefs and cognitions are policy neutral for the reasons already outlined.
2). If you are saying that it is not a belief or cognition but that a person can have a goal antecedentally, how it is that this person is thinking about the goal or acting towards a goal that is not part of their beliefs or cognitions. The stance that people just have "goals" that are automagically non cognitive is not an acceptable stance to take when you are dealing with causal determinism because the entire point of determinism is that everything has a cause and can be explained in this manner. Nor is it an acceptable stance to take for appealing to choice: if you just "have" goals, how on earth are they enabling choice? You end up with determinism.
Why people have the desires (goals) that they do is another question entirely, and one not intended to be answered by belief-desire explanations. That, indeed, would be circular.
In that case, desires and goals are descriptions not explanations. If you want to use them as causal explanations, a plausible causal mechanism for where they come from and how they can be antecedent is required, as the concepts desire and goal are not justified alone. They require further support.
It is not "besides the point" it is the entire point. If you can't justify them you have an empty concept.
I don't list philosophers who disagree with you in order to prove that you are wrong. I list them in order to show that you are not being very careful; there is a significant literature which you are at best engaging with superficially. It is also a way of pointing out issues, and a depth of complexity, that might otherwise go unremarked on--not to mention giving people a starting point to research if they so desire.
What? I know you were doing this.
This is not what annoyed me.
If the above was controversial, this transcends controversy into just plain falsehood.
This annoyed me.
It was quite inflammatory and gave the distinct impression that you were conflating popularity with wether something is true or false. If you were not, then fine, I accept that you were not.
I would have more to say except that Evil Multifarious and _J_ have already outlined the same objections.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
However, when articulating two causal series, they will both claim that there is a distinction to be made in the kind of causality occuring. In the causal series (billiard ball A hits billiard ball b, billiard ball b moves) there is a lack of specialness, selfness, which occurs in (biological need for food hits brain, brainstate "hunger" occurs).
If you're going to put words in my mouth, use the ones I've given you explicitly several times now. It's different because one involves a reasoned consideration of possible outcomes and a decision in order to attempt to effect one of those outcomes. The other doesn't. You've already acknowledged the significance of one's consideration of possibility. You've granted the "specialness" yourself. It's a significant difference worthy of its own set of names and words, words like "choice," and your notion that it's all "fundamentally" the same thing is no longer valid unless you also simulataneously admit that your notion of free will is invalid.
Beyond that, I've never asked or required anything like "magic" or "selfness" or anything else you keep insisting. But I still wonder, and you've never answered, who is it really that requires "selfness" here? If you are, as I interpret now, denying the existence of self, then who are you attempting to claim doesn't have free will? There is no self which can have or not have it.
I'm just trying to figure out how in a universe of discrete particulars causally interracting with one another MrMister and Yar and positing a "self" onto some particular amalgamations of particles while other amalgamations of particles are not selves. So when those two particles interract that's free will, but when those two particles interract that's just causality.
Because that's what we do, we take groups of discrete particulars and give them names. That is all of ontology. Without that, nothing exists, nothing you are even capable of conceiving can possibly be said to exist. As long as you are not employing solipsism, as long as you are willing to accept that we group various discrete particles together and allow that group to be called a "cat" because of certain vague properties that non-cats don't have, instead of insisting on just referring to it as those particles, and denying the existence of the cat... well then that's all we need to deny your entire argument here. We can group together certain events, certain sets of causes and effects, and call them "choices" or even "free will" because of certain vague properties that grouping has that other groupings don't have (the properties I've given you repeatedly already). That's all there is to it. That's all there is to anything your mind is capable of. Determinism cannot possibly affect anything. It cannot be used to support or refute any argument or any claim we are capable of making. When you achieve a non-sloppy, coherent understanding of determinism, you will realize this and understand why saying "determinism" doesn't disprove any concept our minds can create, not even free will or choice.
I already headed you off here but you clipped off that portion of the post. If the simulation goes into flux until you look away, the real problem then becomes "when will you look away". And to answer that, you could run another simulation. And if you were watching the results of that one also and being contrarian, you'd have to look away to make a choice. And so on forever. Causality would not allow a choice until you broke your contrarian rule.
This doesn't change anything I've said at all. You're still on my side here. However you want to imagine the infinite recursion and inability to form an answer, the result is the same. Just like travelling back in time, physical determinism, at least the unrefined beginner's concept of determinism, presents an immediate paradox. That doesn't necessarily mean it isn't possible, but it does mean we have to get pretty damn tricky with how we think it would actually work in our universe of cause and effect. Otherwise, this rough concept of determinism fails utterly when faced with a being that can understand and imagine possible futures and make decisions.
Man, it's not that difficult. The premise of Yar's argument was that the machine could discern what was causally, necessarily going to happen (Yar goes to post office at time X). But then something happens which the machine did not discern.
No, the machine discerned it. It knew I would look at the printout and do the opposite of what it said. Stop being dense. This is pretty simple. If you want me to give you the version you are able to wrap your mind around, it goes like this: "what if I traveled back in time and killed my younger self?" Your answer seems to be, "well, then you wouldn't have traveled back in time, the end. You hypothetical says it's about time travel but really it's not because you died instead and didn't travel back in time" And you're ignoring the obvious next response, which is, "well if I didn't travel back in time, then I would not have been killed, and therefore would have travelled back in time."
This is no different. The machine runs a simulation, and then I read the result and I do the opposite of whatever it predicts. It predicting that I will do this does not in any way enable the machine to give a more accurate answer. Your challenge that "you say it predicted what you would do but then it didn't" is quite a weak and thoughtless challenge. Think harder. As others here have tried to suggest, the machine will be incapable of making an answer until I make certain choices (and yet these people dumbfoundingly think they are arguing against choice). I rather think that the very idea of the machine is a paradox. Your rough concept of determinism is a paradox, and it actually can't be used to make the arguments you think it can be used to make.
Your premise is that we are special, Yar. You are, in one had, declaring the universe to be deterministic, and in the other, declaring we have this special thing called "choice", and then in a third hand, arguing that the universe isn't deterministic, and in a fourth, final hand, claiming that you can contradict a machine that definitionally knows what you are going to do in the future.
I think you need to collect your arguments a little bit better.
I think you need to try harder to understand them. You guys keep wanting to use the word "special." I am not requiring anything be special anymore than anythign else we give a name to. Is the collection of a particles that make up a cat "special" because we gave it the name "cat?" If "special" is the word you have to use there, fine. A cat is "special" because its group of constiuent particles creates some recognizable features and we gave it a name "cat." When a thinking being considers future possibilities and acts towards one based on desires, I guess that is also "special" and we call it "choice." Trust me, you guys are the ones who think the latter one there is "special," not me. You guys are the one who suddenly think that free will and choice actually don't exist simply because they can be reduced to more basic elements, despite the fact that everything our minds are capable of observing or conceiving can be reduced to more basic elements. Why does choice not exist simply because we can explain and reduce it, whereas a cat still exists even though we can explain and reduce it, too? Who here is the one who thinks something is "special"?
I'm not going to respond to anymore attempts for you to put words into my mouth that blatanty and dishonestly leave out parts I've repeatedly identified as significant. You've had enough chances. Learn to discuss things like a mature academic or leave the thread.
First, you get "rock" out of it, then I'll get thought out of it. As long as you're playing reductionism, then my thoughts and your rocks are only the same because neither exist.
I need you or someone else to define "special" for me. That is in almost every post now and I don't think anyone using it understands why they are using it or what it is supposed to mean.
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
Sure, if you use a definition of "fundamental" that renders all existence and language meaningless.
That's the crux of this debate and the essential failure of your argument. You think that because you can break down a choice or free will into its constituent parts, or because you can say that we only think it exists, or because you can say that it is "fundamentally" the same as something else, then that means it doesn't exist. But those same things can be done to any concept. Any word or thing you can possibly utter or visualize, I can break it down into constituent parts, or prove that you merely think it exists, or show how on some fundamental level it is no different from other things. What about that makes choice special? And unlike you guys, I actually have a meaningful explanation of what I mean by "special" when I ask that question: how does deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism particularly disprove choice and free will, other than in the exact same manner in which deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism disproves absolutely everything?
Why does choice not exist simply because we can explain and reduce it, whereas a cat still exists even though we can explain and reduce it, too?
My guess is that you understand the (appearance / reality) distinction, or the Kantian (Practical Point of View / Scientific Point of View) distinction, or the Sellarsian (Manifest Image / Scientific Image) distinction. One of the problems in this thread may be that we keep jumping back and forth between two contrasting points of view, so confusing the situation. So, let's clear things up a bit.
Appearance: Cat
Reality: Particles
I think a good starter definition is that appearances are those things which have yet to be reduced, and the most real, most existent thing is that thing which is the more irreducible; particles are more real than cats given that cats are simply amalgamations, constructs, of particles. If you take a cat and cut it up into the most discrete, atomistic, irreducible particles, then the particles are the most real as they were there both in the "cat" situation and the reduction, whereas the cat only existed prior to the reduction.
I think this works fairly well with physical entities, with entities the constituent parts of which can be perceived and conceived. But it gets really weird when we do:
Appearance: Choice
Reality: [causal determinism]
I guess my initial answer to your question would be cat:particle::choice:____, the problem is that I do not think there is anything which has the relation to a choice as a particle relates to a cat. Cats are amalgamations of particles because, well, i can take a cat and cut it up into really tiny pieces. Choices cannot really be cut up in the same way; I can cut a cat in half but I cannot cut a choice in half.
(This is not to say that I cannot reduce a choice, but rather that the reduction is not quantitative in the same way that the cat / half a cat reduction is quantitative. I can reduce a choice in the sense that I can say "a cat is really X + X + X". Choices can be articulated as very confused pseudo-amalgamations of discrete, causal particulars. But, ultimately, the whole notion of choice eventually gets dissolved by this process. More on that in a bit.)
So, I can say that what is "really going on" in "choice" is a wealth of particular, discrete, causal events; there is no such thing as choice but, rather, there is simply causal determinism. The problem is that, in the reduction, there does not seem to be an ability to discretely divide a choice in the same way that one can discretely divide a cat. I can quantify and divide a cat fairly easily; I cannot quantify and divide a "choice" as easily.
So, it's really not as if, in my arguments, i'm actually starting by granting "choice" and then reducing it. Really, I'm just flat-out denying choice but trying to be nice about it. So I'm trying to say "well, sure, we have the appearance of choices but REALLY it's just bla bla bla", except that very move of reduction fundamentally denies there ever being a choice in a way which is different from, say, physically reducing a cat.
Because, again, we can cut cats in half, and then cut each half in half, and keep cutting. But "choice" does not really divide as easily. So we can quite easily reduce it by saying "it's just reality", but articulating that division quantitatively is fucking difficult.
Which is why when we start to do it we really just need to say "I'm just denying your premise that there ever was choice, because causality."
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
Sure, if you use a definition of "fundamental" that renders all existence and language meaningless.
That's the crux of this debate and the essential failure of your argument. You think that because you can break down a choice or free will into its constituent parts, or because you can say that we only think it exists, or because you can say that it is "fundamentally" the same as something else, then that means it doesn't exist. But those same things can be done to any concept. Any word or thing you can possibly utter or visualize, I can break it down into constituent parts, or prove that you merely think it exists, or show how on some fundamental level it is no different from other things. What about that makes choice special? And unlike you guys, I actually have a meaningful explanation of what I mean by "special" when I ask that question: how does deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism particularly disprove choice and free will, other than in the exact same manner in which deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism disproves absolutely everything?
Reduction does not "disprove everything", reduction reduces all things which can be reduced. Eventually there is something irreducible, because Western Philosophy.
It may be that I, and others, were simply being too nice; we were trying to grant the premise of "choice" and then argumentatively divide it and re-articulate it as an amalgamation of smaller components. But, really, we just needed to flatly deny choice because "determinism" and flatly deny compatibilism because, well, compatibilism maintains premises which are contrary to the premises of determinism.
It would be cool if we could articulate a set of premises with which we all agree and then suss out whether choice is in there, but I think that the problem is going to be that, ultimately, determinists do not grant the "choice" premise and compatibilists need the "choice" premise. And, sadly, there is no way to build "choice" up out of any of the premises determinists would grant.
So, here's my starting assumption for this argument: The basic, fundamental "stuff" of existence is atomistic, indivisible, particles which causally, deterministically, interact with one another.
I don't understand how anyone could get "choice" out of that, given that it presents reality as simply very, very, very tiny billiard balls bouncing into one another completely without agency, intention, thought, or anything else compatibilists need to make their argument.
So, here's my starting assumption for this argument: The basic, fundamental "stuff" of existence is atomistic, indivisible, particles which causally, deterministically, interact with one another.
I don't understand how anyone could get "choice" out of that, given that it presents reality as simply very, very, very tiny billiard balls bouncing into one another completely without agency, intention, thought, or anything else compatibilists need to make their argument.
I'll take it further: even if there are nondeterministic random interactions between particles at a quantum level I don't see how that necessarily implies free will. A Turing Machine with a true random number generator attached to it is not fundamentally more powerful than a Turing Machine by itself.
Of course, I'm not entirely certain of what the practical consequences of free will vs. the illusion of free will are (if any).
I guess my initial answer to your question would be cat:particle::choice:____, the problem is that I do not think there is anything which has the relation to a choice as a particle relates to a cat. Cats are amalgamations of particles because, well, i can take a cat and cut it up into really tiny pieces. Choices cannot really be cut up in the same way; I can cut a cat in half but I cannot cut a choice in half.
[...]
So, it's really not as if, in my arguments, i'm actually starting by granting "choice" and then reducing it. Really, I'm just flat-out denying choice but trying to be nice about it. So I'm trying to say "well, sure, we have the appearance of choices but REALLY it's just bla bla bla", except that very move of reduction fundamentally denies there ever being a choice in a way which is different from, say, physically reducing a cat.
Because, again, we can cut cats in half, and then cut each half in half, and keep cutting. But "choice" does not really divide as easily. So we can quite easily reduce it by saying "it's just reality", but articulating that division quantitatively is fucking difficult.
"Choice" is the name of a process like a punch or a bike ride is a process. Unless you want to argue that reductionism denies the existence of bike rides, I'm not sure this argument gets us anywhere.
It would be cool if we could articulate a set of premises with which we all agree and then suss out whether choice is in there, but I think that the problem is going to be that, ultimately, determinists do not grant the "choice" premise and compatibilists need the "choice" premise. And, sadly, there is no way to build "choice" up out of any of the premises determinists would grant.
How about this: particles are deterministically knocking around in the brain, and they form the thoughts "chicken" and "steak" in turn. Downstream of further knocking, the brain causes the mouth to say "steak please."
Isn't this what determinists think happens? This is what compatibilists think happens. They call the process "choice" and consider it part of the self.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I guess my initial answer to your question would be cat:particle::choice:____, the problem is that I do not think there is anything which has the relation to a choice as a particle relates to a cat. Cats are amalgamations of particles because, well, i can take a cat and cut it up into really tiny pieces. Choices cannot really be cut up in the same way; I can cut a cat in half but I cannot cut a choice in half.
[...]
So, it's really not as if, in my arguments, i'm actually starting by granting "choice" and then reducing it. Really, I'm just flat-out denying choice but trying to be nice about it. So I'm trying to say "well, sure, we have the appearance of choices but REALLY it's just bla bla bla", except that very move of reduction fundamentally denies there ever being a choice in a way which is different from, say, physically reducing a cat.
Because, again, we can cut cats in half, and then cut each half in half, and keep cutting. But "choice" does not really divide as easily. So we can quite easily reduce it by saying "it's just reality", but articulating that division quantitatively is fucking difficult.
"Choice" is the name of a process like a punch or a bike ride is a process. Unless you want to argue that reductionism denies the existence of bike rides, I'm not sure this argument gets us anywhere.
It would be cool if we could articulate a set of premises with which we all agree and then suss out whether choice is in there, but I think that the problem is going to be that, ultimately, determinists do not grant the "choice" premise and compatibilists need the "choice" premise. And, sadly, there is no way to build "choice" up out of any of the premises determinists would grant.
How about this: particles are deterministically knocking around in the brain, and they form the thoughts "chicken" and "steak" in turn. Downstream of further knocking, the brain causes the mouth to say "steak please."
Isn't this what determinists think happens? This is what compatibilists think happens. They call the process "choice" and consider it part of the self.
In no way is choice argued for or spoken about as a process in the same manner you are in any of the compatabilist literature I've read so far. I've never seen anyone take such an approach and try to outlay a plausible causal mechanism for it.
I'd be very interested in any literature that tries to do this.
From what I've seen they stay way above this level and try to deny that it is reducible at all.
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"Choice" is the name of a process like a punch or a bike ride is a process. Unless you want to argue that reductionism denies the existence of bike rides, I'm not sure this argument gets us anywhere.
Well, good reductionism would deny the existence of bike rides. If only because there are no bikes, there are no riders, and there is no process of "riding"; there are only indivisible particles causally interracting with one another.
It would be cool if we could articulate a set of premises with which we all agree and then suss out whether choice is in there, but I think that the problem is going to be that, ultimately, determinists do not grant the "choice" premise and compatibilists need the "choice" premise. And, sadly, there is no way to build "choice" up out of any of the premises determinists would grant.
How about this: particles are deterministically knocking around in the brain, and they form the thoughts "chicken" and "steak" in turn. Downstream of further knocking, the brain causes the mouth to say "steak please."
Isn't this what determinists think happens? This is what compatibilists think happens. They call the process "choice" and consider it part of the self.
But it's not that the indivisible particles "form" the "thought" of "chicken" because, again, there is no "thought" and there is no "chicken", there are only the little particles bumping into one another.
To have the "thought" and "chicken" one has to be at the completely non-deterministic, non-reductionist point of view. One cannot get from "indivisible particles bouncing" to "chicken"; the process by which those particles could be amalgamated cannot occur from the point of view of there only being particles bouncing; there is nothing by which one would build when there is simply particles bouncing, there is no "buildingness", no amalgamating force to utilize. To get "thought" and "chicken" one has to have "I am a person looking at shit and thinking about shit", which is not part of the reductionist point of view.
The problem is that, in the reduction, there does not seem to be an ability to discretely divide a choice in the same way that one can discretely divide a cat. I can quantify and divide a cat fairly easily; I cannot quantify and divide a "choice" as easily.
are you serious?
What have you been doing this whole time, except taking what we call choice and then breaking it up into a process of perception triggering memory and desire, prompting action, and so forth?
In your analogy, cat:particle::choice:all those things you keep telling me choice is actually made up of, various deterministic causes and events.
So, it's really not as if, in my arguments, i'm actually starting by granting "choice" and then reducing it. Really, I'm just flat-out denying choice but trying to be nice about it. So I'm trying to say "well, sure, we have the appearance of choices but REALLY it's just bla bla bla", except that very move of reduction fundamentally denies there ever being a choice in a way which is different from, say, physically reducing a cat.
No, you have not in any whatsoever shown it is different. You haven't even tried.
But it's not that the indivisible particles "form" the "thought" of "chicken" because, again, there is no "thought" and there is no "chicken", there are only the little particles bumping into one another.
Right, this is also what we broke cat down into. So another form of your analogy, cat:particle::choice:particle.
To have the "thought" and "chicken" one has to be at the completely non-deterministic, non-reductionist point of view. One cannot get from "indivisible particles bouncing" to "chicken"; the process by which those particles could be amalgamated cannot occur from the point of view of there only being particles bouncing; there is nothing by which one would build when there is simply particles bouncing, there is no "buildingness", no amalgamating force to utilize. To get "thought" and "chicken" one has to have "I am a person looking at shit and thinking about shit", which is not part of the reductionist point of view.
Yeah, this is correct. From a physical determinist's point of view, nothing can exist. Not even particles bumping around, actually. That's just a convenient euphemism. In fact, to a physical determinist, nothing at all can actually exist except for some theoretical quantity that we can't possibly ever even observe or know anything definite about. It's a scientific and philosophical impossibility for us to ever say, observe, know, or conceive of anything definite about that which you seem to think is the only that that "really exists." Note that this is identical to a belief in God, just without a consciousness associated with your belief about true reality. If this is your point, that nothing at all exists, no chickens, no thoughts, no selves, nothing, then I ask again, what's so special about choice and free will? They only don't exist because, as your argument requires, nothing exists. That isn't really useful, and logically does not make any meaningful point about free will, since you are simply describing some theoretical idea about its nature which is also true about all things and events.
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Would it be fair to say that the compatibilist position fixates upon the notion of "ownership" of a particular causal action to try and maintain a notion of self-causation?
Both MrMister and Yar seem to maintain that rocks and people are different kinds of things, that a people "chooses" and a rock does "something else". Yet they both claim to accept causal determinism in that in the sequence of events:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H
H was caused by G, which was caused by F, which was caused by E.
However, when articulating two causal series, they will both claim that there is a distinction to be made in the kind of causality occuring. In the causal series (billiard ball A hits billiard ball b, billiard ball b moves) there is a lack of specialness, selfness, which occurs in (biological need for food hits brain, brainstate "hunger" occurs).
The only difference I can discern, is that billiard ball A and billiard ball B can be interpreted to be independent entities encountering one another, whereas the biological need for food and "hunger" both occur within a particular wrapping of flesh. So, if we have two billiard balls hitting one another that is just causality. If those two billiard balls, however, occur within a particular wrapping of flesh, then free will is happening. Because, again, that's all brain-states and cognition are; particular amalgamations of chemicals in the brain. So "serotonin hits brain-transmitter" is the same as "billiard ball a hits billiard ball b".
Or not; I do not know.
I'm just trying to figure out how in a universe of discrete particulars causally interracting with one another MrMister and Yar and positing a "self" onto some particular amalgamations of particles while other amalgamations of particles are not selves. So when those two particles interract that's free will, but when those two particles interract that's just causality.
For Hume, yes. For Kant, No. Hume will say that there need be a desire to get the ball rolling, so to speak. But for Kant, simply understanding a means of attaining, say, X, will get one to start going for X if there is a rational requirement to do X.
Well, I think allowing it doesn't make any sense.
Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!
More information please.
I already headed you off here but you clipped off that portion of the post. If the simulation goes into flux until you look away, the real problem then becomes "when will you look away". And to answer that, you could run another simulation. And if you were watching the results of that one also and being contrarian, you'd have to look away to make a choice. And so on forever. Causality would not allow a choice until you broke your contrarian rule.
Man, it's not that difficult. The premise of Yar's argument was that the machine could discern what was causally, necessarily going to happen (Yar goes to post office at time X). But then something happens which the machine did not discern.
So the fucking machine didn't fucking do what Yar said the fucking machine would do; the example is flawed given that the machine did not do that which it was defined to have done.
"What if a machine could predict the future but then that which was predicted did not occur?"
Well then the machine didn't fucking predict the future, now did it?
I'm not on his side so much as temporarily allying.
So even having this discussion about "people" is very fallacious if we understand "people" as amalgamations of constitutive parts. Because, causally, it will be the constitutive, atomistic parts being causally determined by other atomistic entities and not the “person”, the amalgamation, being “caused” to do anything.
So, “person eats steak” is a gigantic amalgamation of a wealth of discrete particulars, all of which can be said to “combine” in the action “person eats steak”, despite the number of particular, atomistic causal forces occurring between the irreducible particles which make up the “person” amalgamation.
So, really, a better argument for there being no free will is that there is no will; there are just sub-atomic particles hitting other sub-atomic particles in a causally deterministic manner.
a) whether there is a fundamental material level of reality
b) what it would be composed of
c) whether it actually follows logical, causal rules
C is especially tricky since we already have "particles" that are actually not "things" so much as a cloud of probability and so don't even really "exist" in the way we are used to thinking.
when discussing free will, i don't think you have to go all the way to hard causal physical determinism.
Sure, it's just very difficult to define something like "hungry for steak" as a causal force, when you think about it. Especially when they're arguing that a person is the amalgamation of its constitutive states of desire. Because as one person makes the move of "what you REALLY are is ___" then the next move is to just reduce whatever they just reduced to another reduction. And whoever gets to the smallest particle first wins.
Determinism requires that there be things causally interracting, which means there have to be things, which means that there would have to be a discrete "desire for steak" interracting with a discrete "hunger" which them prompts a discrete action by a discrete will.
And that just seems fucking goofy.
In your massive wall of text, this is probably the most telling statement.
Your premise is that we are special, Yar. You are, in one had, declaring the universe to be deterministic, and in the other, declaring we have this special thing called "choice", and then in a third hand, arguing that the universe isn't deterministic, and in a fourth, final hand, claiming that you can contradict a machine that definitionally knows what you are going to do in the future.
I think you need to collect your arguments a little bit better.
I just want one of the compatibilists in the thread to give a coherent definition of choice which isn't fundamentally question begging.
So, choice is thinking and consideration. Ok, what are "thought" and "consideration"? I get that, most likely, "thought is something a rock can't do". But i do not know
1) What thought is.
2) Why thought is special.
Same for "choice" and "consider".
I'd like to get to a common point at which we all agree and work forward from there. If the determinists and the compatibilists are all fine with causal determinism then, ok:
Particle A causes Particle B to move.
We all agree on that.
Now, get "thought" out of that.
Sure, that's essentially what I believe. But then the other thing to remember is that you can't really do anything useful with this: let's say you want to simulate the system so that you can predict what happens with the objects in the system in the future, well, you'd need a Turing machine that's at least as large as the system (i.e. the observable universe) or you'd need to make assumptions about which particles are important and which aren't, which won't necessarily (in fact, will certainly not be) correct.
Therefore, you can't tell the difference between free will and the illusion of free will, or at least you can't do anything useful with that knowledge (which, pardon my engineer's bias, evaluates to the same thing as there being no difference), so I'm going to go eat dinner and shove the entire topic to the back of my mind, as if I was playing The Game or something.
Hey, here's another twist to the determinism machine - take away any agent that can make choices, or any that can perceive possible futures, and the machine works fine. It can tell you about falling rocks all day with no problem. It's only the introduction of an agent who can conceive and act upon a consideration of possible futures that suddenly the machine is an impossible paradox and cannot produce an answer without relying on a variable of choice. I think that means that even wrt determinism, free will and choice are quite meaningful.
Actually the paradox exists even without this hypothetical agent, since the machine's presence in the universe will necessarily mean that the machine will interact with other objects in some way. So infinite recursion is inescapable for a determination machine.
Well, we can tell the difference between free will and the illusion of free will. What persons have is the illusion of free will, as a result of some bizzare chemical reaction or as a result of god or whatever, and what actually is the case is particles bumping into one another. The useful aspect of what was articulated is that it is the way things are, so it has a use in its being indicative of the way things are.
If you want a practical consequent of the physical reductionist understanding of determinism it is that adopting it as true renders particular understandings of morality / ethics / punishment nonsense. If, say, a person robs a bank we cannot punish that person on the basis of the person's having the ability to not have robbed the bank; that particular amalgamation of particles must necessarily have done that which that particular amalgamation of particles did.
So if at the macroscopic level persons are compelled to punish persons who rob banks, the justification for the action cannot be based upon, on the microscopic level, that amalgamation's ability to not have robbed a bank.
Wait.
So "choice" and "thought" are not fundamentally different from "gravity" and "inertia"?
Fundamentally, all four are merely definitions. This whole thread has been a massive No True Scottsman fallacy.
Edit: And fundamentally, that fallacy isn't a problem at all. It seems like you'd feel that it is, though.
This is called the Humean theory of motivation, and it is not an uncontroversial doctrine. Specifically, there is controversy both over whether certain beliefs can in and of themselves motivate--for instance, beliefs about the good--and also over what exactly it means to attribute a desire in explaining action. See McDowell, Platts, or Nagel, especially The Possibility of Altruism.
If the above was controversial, this transcends controversy into just plain falsehood. Teleological explanations are completely compatible with causal determinism. This could be because you think, ala Donald Davidson, that reasons are causes. It could also be because you think, ala Michael Smith, that desires are dispositions, and dispositions are causal. In any case, it's not that one thing is playing both the role of cause and effect. The desire for, say, a drink of water is the cause, and the reaching for the water is the effect. The distinction is here between the aim of the action and the action itself.
But, it's worth stressing, that these are complicated issues being given an extreme summary gloss.
There's that word "fundamentally." What does it mean? Choice and thought are physical processes and part of the causal order of the world, and so in that sense they bear a similarity to a rock falling or a comet hurtling through space. But they are also processes that are part and parcel of agency, and in that sense they are unlike a rock falling or a comet hurtling through space.
Sometimes people say things like "we're just a bunch of matter in motion!" And it's true, that is what we are, but the use of the word "just" betrays a misguided attitude. Water is "just" hydrogen and oxygen, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't also have important properties not had by either of its constitutive parts alone. The difference between water and its parts makes water drinkable even though its parts are not, just as the difference between a person and his organic matter makes him capable of choice and action even though his parts, were they to be separated, could do neither.
Experimentalists take subjects and monitor their brain patterns in some sort of apparatus, I'm guessing MRI, but I don't remember. The subjects are instructed to push a button whenever they feel like it, and remember when they decided to push it. There is a scrolling disk with numbers around the edge that they are intended to use to indicate when they made the decision. After enough data is collected, the experimentalists could predict 3 seconds in advance of when the subject would push the button. There were cries that the experiment was not conducted well enough. There's just one button, they can see the disc rotating, etc.
So they did it again. This time, subjects had two buttons, and the images did not scroll, they just changed, and they were not numbers anymore. This time the scientists could predict, not only when they would push the button, but which button they would push, 7 seconds in advance.
So what happens if you TELL the person their choice? Certainly, CERTAINLY that person's brain will change, and his/her decision will change too. Now. That doesn't make it wrong. Withing a reasonable margin of error, the individual was going to make that choice. Now that person won't. Machine changes its answer. So as a tangent, if the machine can change its answer, is it changing its mind? Making a decision?
One thing about uncertainty and particles that is ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL! {edit} : (Fundamental is used here to mean an inherent property; something that is necessary in our expression or understanding of the term.)
These things ARE particles. They act like waves. Particle-wave duality is sort of a misnomer. What it is, is that the particle itself has a probability of being somewhere at XYZ time, at ABC speed. It really is a particle. It doesn't move like a wave. It's more like a field:
A proton has its proton field. At some time, the field has some excitation that specifies its location, energy, etc. This is based on other particle fields everywhere. That's your intro to Fock space. Have fun with that name, by the way.
Umm...So randomness is a fundamental facet of what we understand the universe to be. But with SOOO MANY particles, we can assume that a large system on the order of a fraction of a mol will act out its probabilities exactly. You can technically walk through a wall. A can of beer can technically fall over for no reason. But the beer would take 10^120 years to do so, and you'd be banging your head for a lot longer.
So for systems on the order that we are thinking, just assume that heisenberg doesn't play in to it.
Of course we can; a system that does not punish bank robbers would lead to a system that produces more of them, just as surely as entropy increases in a closed system. It just means that your motives aren't punitive, but instead preventative and rehabilitative. And since your motives exist only in your head, that brings us right back to my original point.
edit: also I'm not entirely sure that "events aren't deterministic because quantum interactions are fundamentally random" necessarily implies free will rather than just, y'know, randomness.
Re Davidson: Reasons are an amalgamation of motive and cognition. When you give your reasons, you are trying to describe to someone that you wanted something and what beliefs guided you to acheive what you wanted. You don't escape the problem I outlined by trying to smash two things into one and claiming that thing is now something different. You end up with more problems, for example, explaining why it is suddenly different. I don't agree with davidson because he's taken a misstep right at the start.
It's a redescription of the problem that doesn't answer any questions.
Similarly, I disagree with Michael Smith's stance that dispositions can be causes. When you say something has a disposition, you are trying to say that what something will do given a certain circumstance is an intrinsic property of that thing. That what something will do is part of what it is.
Take brittleness as a dispositional quality of glass. When we say something is brittle, we mean that if we drop the glass it will break. So we describe the glass as brittle and believe the question ends there.
However, brittleness doesn't help in explaining what it is about the glass that makes it likely to break.
Brittleness is the potential outcome and is conceptually distinct from the intrinsic state of the glass (the atomic structure).
Because dispositions are potential future outcomes, they cannot be antecedent causes.
Let's take a look at desire, which you take to be a causal concept.
Desire is a teleological concept. You have to desire some thing. There is no such thing as a desire without a focus. Desire is inherently towards something and hence towards a goal. To say that desires allow teleological explanations to be an antecedent cause is to say the same thing as teleological concepts can allow teleological explanations to be an antecedent cause. In either case, you are again claiming a future consequence is an antecedent cause. It's not just circular, it's recursively circular.
If that is not enough to throw out desire as causal, desire is also dispositional. As I outlined above, dispositions cannot be causal because they are descriptions of potential future outcomes.
Note that rejecting beliefs as causes is different from claiming that beliefs can direct someones behavior once they have already been motivated.
There's no problem in saying P did A because they believed that doing A will achieve X. It is only a problem if you try to claim that the belief is why P wanted to get to X.
P having a belief can direct P's actions, sure. It' just doesn't explain why P wanted to achieve X.
And nor does desire or any other teleological or dispositional concept.
I'm quite aware of the controversial nature of these arguments. I find fault with the arguments against them.
You need to keep your emotional head on your shoulders though, because you seem to believe, honestly believe, that just because a bunch of well known people don't like something this means arguing for it is automatically false. Something being controversial means precisely jack shit and I take issue with you pulling a giant argument to authority. Please stick to the arguments involved, I honestly do not care at all how much a bunch of people don't like something. I care what their argument is and only what their argument is. Try to keep this in mind before you spout off about falsehoods, alright? True and false kind of loses its meaning if you start talking about wether or not it's popular.
edit: Oh yeah I guess I should cite that my ideas and arguments were influenced by Maze, JR and Joel Mitchell. Dunno if you've heard of them though.
But let's put that aside. Now I have a little more to say on conceptual analysis as it applies to the case of free will. I think this will do something to allay these sorts of worries, which have periodically cropped up:
Here is one way the situation could appear: _J_ and I mean different things by a "free will," and so, in each of our own lexicons, we are both correct. So our apparent disagreement is not even a real disagreement at all, it is just a linguistic divergence. Sometimes this is indeed the correct way to dissolve arguments, but I do not think that it is appropriate here. The principle reason why not is that we take our different theories to have different practical consequence. Namely, _J_ takes himself to have shown that the notion of moral responsibility, and hence also retributive justice, to be vacuous and incoherent. I, however, take no one to have demonstrated any such thing. So it is not just a use of language over which we differ, but rather an attitude toward the right action.
So, what exactly are we doing when we argue over what freedom means? Well, in this case we are trying to repair a hopelessly defective commonsense concept. Here, I think, is a great explanation from Allen Wood in some unpublished notes:
In commonsense we find this concept, free will, which is intimately related to our concepts of responsibility and action. But the problem is that this commonsense concept is hopelessly incoherent--so no matter what we do with it, if we ourselves want to be coherent, then that will entail abandoning or modifying parts of it. This is, really, one of the great things that philosophy does, and one of it's practical applications--it takes a commonsense concept, shows its incoherence, and then offers ways of repairing it. Not only does this give us a warm glow of rightness, but it also often, as I've already mentioned, has important consequences. For instance, another hopelessly incoherent commonsense concept that philosophy has had a go at is the commonsense concept of race, and repairing that leaky boat has all the best consequences. There's also the concept of the triune god, but hey, let's not get too controversial.
Now, there are multiple ways to repair an internally incoherent concept, but usually it involves jettisoning one part in order to keep another. In this case, one way to repair the idea of free will is by insisting on a certain sort of freedom at the expense of the idea that we actually have it. This is what J does, and we see it here:
Another way, however, is to insist that we actually have free will, but at the expense of the idea that it requires a certain sort of freedom. That is what I do.
Given this dilemma, the first thing to point our here is that it's absolutely inappropriate for _J_ to insist that he simply knows what "free" means in this context. No one knows what free means in this context because it's embedded in an incoherent mess. That's the reason we have to investigate: to figure out something for free to mean that best honors our overall commitments and ideas, and which best fits the evidence we have.
But why do I think that my way of repairing the concept is better than his? Well, for starters, because his idea of freedom is absolutely nonsensical. If freedom entails freedom from reasons, then freedom is not even a quality that any rational being could possess. If it also means freedom from limits or compulsion, then it's doubtful that it could even be a property of something we consider to have a mind. In order to recognize something as having a mind we require that it display a certain sort of coherence in its behavior, and that coherence is mutually exclusive with having a J-free-will. So, on that notion of freedom it is simply logically impossible for a creature to have a free will, be it in this world or in any hypothetical other.
But, if that is true, then it follows that free will is logically impossible, in this world or any other. Which is just to say that it is also impossible in indeterministic worlds. So, it turns out, determinism is not a relevant issue; its truth has no bearing on whether we have free will. But determinism is one of the main arguments that J, and other fatalists, use to try to motivate their position. So their argument, if it succeeds, undercuts its own support. That is a sort of internal incoherency to which we do not want to commit ourselves.
One of the main motivations for compatibilism, I think, is the absolute confusion surrounding this sort of notion of a free will. The compatibilst often says, basically--free will, J style, makes no sense whatsoever. So clearly, if we thought it was important we were wrong. The way to fix our concept is not to hold on to it at the expense of our other commitments, but rather, to hold on to our other commitments at the expense of it. It is weird and gross; we would like to remove it from our thought.
i don't see the motivation for your project. you have already stated that the previous conceptions of free will were incoherent, nonsensical, etc. why do you feel the need to redefine free will such that it means something entirely different from the quasi-mystical nonsense that it usually refers to? what is the purpose of taking the term and applying it to a determined, caused mind?
Desires are not explanations of why an agent wants to achieve a goal; they are just statements of the fact that an agent wants to achieve a goal. Their point is not to explain why he has that goal, but rather to explain why he took a particular action. And they explain that action by showing it as directed towards a goal he is understood to have antecedently had.
Why people have the desires (goals) that they do is another question entirely, and one not intended to be answered by belief-desire explanations. That, indeed, would be circular.
I don't list philosophers who disagree with you in order to prove that you are wrong. I list them in order to show that you are not being very careful; there is a significant literature which you are at best engaging with superficially. It is also a way of pointing out issues, and a depth of complexity, that might otherwise go unremarked on--not to mention giving people a starting point to research if they so desire.
So don't be a dick.
In order to show how we can retain our concepts of control; of agency; of the voluntary versus the involuntary; of actions versus spasms, or mere bodily movements; and of moral responsibility. There are all sorts of concepts tied up with free will around the edges, and compatibilism shows how they can be made sense of without relying on something that is deeply incoherent.
Not to mention that it provides a good template for understanding how to reconcile the objective and the subjective generally. The View from Nowhere and all that.
why do we need to retain those ideas?
why does responsibility require free will or agency? responsibility can easily be the attribution of an effect to a cause.
Why do we need to retain any idea? Well, because I think that they represent real distinctions and categories. And so I go through the trouble to show how they can fit into an overall coherent and integrated worldview.
Because we are not responsible for everything that we cause, as I've elaborated in previous examples, and so we need to explain how to draw that distinction. Agency, I have claimed, is a good starting point.
for a second there i thought you were denying responsibility entirely.
i don't think the distinction can really be drawn in good faith. to do so you'll need to make an internal/external division that cannot be upheld.
i think that you can completely eliminate the concept of responsibility and establish a system by which to reach utilitarian objectives more consistently and more effectively.
Here's my reply: Let's say that Yar wants to be "wealthy", but "wealthy" means "has $75,000". Yar does not have $75,000, but wants to be wealthy. Either Yar can accept that his lack of $75,000 renders him not wealthy, OR Yar can redefine "wealthy" to mean "has $X", where X is the amount of $ Yar has.
I think that when persons use the word "free" what they mean is what I have articulated: Some uninfluenced, irrational, uncaused, metaphysical, magical freedom of self-actualization completely estranged from any restrictions. Once we start to think, we realize that "free" is impossible. But we still want free just as Yar, in the example, wants to be wealthy despite his lack of weath.
So, instead of abandoning the pursuit of "freedom", we instead change the definition but keep the word. And the reason we keep the word is that we still think the word to be related to that thing we initially desired. Just as Yar maintains the word "wealth" despite his lack of the $75,000 which would constitute wealth.
Moreover, I think that to engage in this conversation requires something of an opposition: There is "free" and there is "not-free". When we start to think about it, we realize that "not-free" means caused, determined, influenced, restricted. So, necessarily, "free" is the opposite of those things; the only sensible way to even begin the conversation regarding freedom and determinism is to set up a X & ~X relation, and when we do that, when we honestly do that, the only sensible definition of free which can serve as an opposite to the determined is the "free" I defined.
So, for my part, I am entirely confortable with "free" as an impossibility, because I think that the impossible definition of freedom I maintain is the only sensible definition to maintain in order to make the free / determinism opposition sensible. And not only to maintain the opposition, but to genuinely articulate that which is being discussed. If we want to say "slaves are not free", then free must be that which a slave is not. It makes no sense to say "slaves are influenced" and "free agents are influenced", and then quibble over the differences in "influence" pertaining to slaves and free agents. Just set up a binary opposition where slaves are influenced, and frees are not-influenced.
It's just clearer and simpler.
"Free", as I defined it, would not be impossible in an indeterministic world; it would be the fundamental state of being for all entities in an indeterministic world. Problem being, of course, there could be no beings, as beingness itself would be a limitation, and so not free. So, in an indeterministic world, within which there was freedom, there could be freedom...there would simply be no beings instantiating that freedom.
Which is fine by me.
It is not that my notion of freedom makes no sense; it is that my notion of freedom is impossible. It is entirely sensible, intelligible; it's just impossible. And I have no problem with there being things which are impossible to actualize in our reality. I have no problem defining and X which cannot be actualized in this reality.
I understand what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it, and I applaud your ability to articulate your project in a sensible way. I just think the project fundamentally flawed, in that it redefines a term to pertain to that which the term does not actually pertain.
Basically, i think you are doing what Yar does in my example. You really want to be wealthy, and wealthy means "Has $75,000", but you do not have $75,000. So instead of saying "Well, guess I can't be wealthy" you redefine "wealth" to be whatever you can has.
The only difference would be that, with regard to freedom, it's not that just Yar cannot be free, or just MrMister cannot be free, or just _J_ cannot be free; no one and no thing can be free.
Which is entirely fine. We have created a concept for a thing which cannot be actualized in this reality, kudos to us. If we want to talk about things which can be actualized in this reality? That's fine...but why in god's name are we taking the term for an impossible thing and redefining it to be something which is possible?
Just pick a different fucking word for christ's sake.
Alright. So they're descriptions?
You just said that they are not explanations but descriptions. This contradicts your previous statement.
According to your first statement, desire is a description, not an explanation.
If you want to claim that it is an explanation, this is not a coherent position because:
1). In order for a goal to be antecedent, it must be in the form of a belief/cognition. Beliefs and cognitions are policy neutral for the reasons already outlined.
2). If you are saying that it is not a belief or cognition but that a person can have a goal antecedentally, how it is that this person is thinking about the goal or acting towards a goal that is not part of their beliefs or cognitions. The stance that people just have "goals" that are automagically non cognitive is not an acceptable stance to take when you are dealing with causal determinism because the entire point of determinism is that everything has a cause and can be explained in this manner. Nor is it an acceptable stance to take for appealing to choice: if you just "have" goals, how on earth are they enabling choice? You end up with determinism.
Goals are not coherent causal motives.
In that case, desires and goals are descriptions not explanations. If you want to use them as causal explanations, a plausible causal mechanism for where they come from and how they can be antecedent is required, as the concepts desire and goal are not justified alone. They require further support.
It is not "besides the point" it is the entire point. If you can't justify them you have an empty concept.
What? I know you were doing this.
This is not what annoyed me.
This annoyed me.
It was quite inflammatory and gave the distinct impression that you were conflating popularity with wether something is true or false. If you were not, then fine, I accept that you were not.
I would have more to say except that Evil Multifarious and _J_ have already outlined the same objections.
Beyond that, I've never asked or required anything like "magic" or "selfness" or anything else you keep insisting. But I still wonder, and you've never answered, who is it really that requires "selfness" here? If you are, as I interpret now, denying the existence of self, then who are you attempting to claim doesn't have free will? There is no self which can have or not have it.
Because that's what we do, we take groups of discrete particulars and give them names. That is all of ontology. Without that, nothing exists, nothing you are even capable of conceiving can possibly be said to exist. As long as you are not employing solipsism, as long as you are willing to accept that we group various discrete particles together and allow that group to be called a "cat" because of certain vague properties that non-cats don't have, instead of insisting on just referring to it as those particles, and denying the existence of the cat... well then that's all we need to deny your entire argument here. We can group together certain events, certain sets of causes and effects, and call them "choices" or even "free will" because of certain vague properties that grouping has that other groupings don't have (the properties I've given you repeatedly already). That's all there is to it. That's all there is to anything your mind is capable of. Determinism cannot possibly affect anything. It cannot be used to support or refute any argument or any claim we are capable of making. When you achieve a non-sloppy, coherent understanding of determinism, you will realize this and understand why saying "determinism" doesn't disprove any concept our minds can create, not even free will or choice.
This doesn't change anything I've said at all. You're still on my side here. However you want to imagine the infinite recursion and inability to form an answer, the result is the same. Just like travelling back in time, physical determinism, at least the unrefined beginner's concept of determinism, presents an immediate paradox. That doesn't necessarily mean it isn't possible, but it does mean we have to get pretty damn tricky with how we think it would actually work in our universe of cause and effect. Otherwise, this rough concept of determinism fails utterly when faced with a being that can understand and imagine possible futures and make decisions.
No, the machine discerned it. It knew I would look at the printout and do the opposite of what it said. Stop being dense. This is pretty simple. If you want me to give you the version you are able to wrap your mind around, it goes like this: "what if I traveled back in time and killed my younger self?" Your answer seems to be, "well, then you wouldn't have traveled back in time, the end. You hypothetical says it's about time travel but really it's not because you died instead and didn't travel back in time" And you're ignoring the obvious next response, which is, "well if I didn't travel back in time, then I would not have been killed, and therefore would have travelled back in time."
This is no different. The machine runs a simulation, and then I read the result and I do the opposite of whatever it predicts. It predicting that I will do this does not in any way enable the machine to give a more accurate answer. Your challenge that "you say it predicted what you would do but then it didn't" is quite a weak and thoughtless challenge. Think harder. As others here have tried to suggest, the machine will be incapable of making an answer until I make certain choices (and yet these people dumbfoundingly think they are arguing against choice). I rather think that the very idea of the machine is a paradox. Your rough concept of determinism is a paradox, and it actually can't be used to make the arguments you think it can be used to make.
I think you need to try harder to understand them. You guys keep wanting to use the word "special." I am not requiring anything be special anymore than anythign else we give a name to. Is the collection of a particles that make up a cat "special" because we gave it the name "cat?" If "special" is the word you have to use there, fine. A cat is "special" because its group of constiuent particles creates some recognizable features and we gave it a name "cat." When a thinking being considers future possibilities and acts towards one based on desires, I guess that is also "special" and we call it "choice." Trust me, you guys are the ones who think the latter one there is "special," not me. You guys are the one who suddenly think that free will and choice actually don't exist simply because they can be reduced to more basic elements, despite the fact that everything our minds are capable of observing or conceiving can be reduced to more basic elements. Why does choice not exist simply because we can explain and reduce it, whereas a cat still exists even though we can explain and reduce it, too? Who here is the one who thinks something is "special"?
I'm not going to respond to anymore attempts for you to put words into my mouth that blatanty and dishonestly leave out parts I've repeatedly identified as significant. You've had enough chances. Learn to discuss things like a mature academic or leave the thread.
First, you get "rock" out of it, then I'll get thought out of it. As long as you're playing reductionism, then my thoughts and your rocks are only the same because neither exist.
I need you or someone else to define "special" for me. That is in almost every post now and I don't think anyone using it understands why they are using it or what it is supposed to mean.
Sure, if you use a definition of "fundamental" that renders all existence and language meaningless.
That's the crux of this debate and the essential failure of your argument. You think that because you can break down a choice or free will into its constituent parts, or because you can say that we only think it exists, or because you can say that it is "fundamentally" the same as something else, then that means it doesn't exist. But those same things can be done to any concept. Any word or thing you can possibly utter or visualize, I can break it down into constituent parts, or prove that you merely think it exists, or show how on some fundamental level it is no different from other things. What about that makes choice special? And unlike you guys, I actually have a meaningful explanation of what I mean by "special" when I ask that question: how does deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism particularly disprove choice and free will, other than in the exact same manner in which deconstruction or solipsism or physical determinism disproves absolutely everything?
My guess is that you understand the (appearance / reality) distinction, or the Kantian (Practical Point of View / Scientific Point of View) distinction, or the Sellarsian (Manifest Image / Scientific Image) distinction. One of the problems in this thread may be that we keep jumping back and forth between two contrasting points of view, so confusing the situation. So, let's clear things up a bit.
Appearance: Cat
Reality: Particles
I think a good starter definition is that appearances are those things which have yet to be reduced, and the most real, most existent thing is that thing which is the more irreducible; particles are more real than cats given that cats are simply amalgamations, constructs, of particles. If you take a cat and cut it up into the most discrete, atomistic, irreducible particles, then the particles are the most real as they were there both in the "cat" situation and the reduction, whereas the cat only existed prior to the reduction.
I think this works fairly well with physical entities, with entities the constituent parts of which can be perceived and conceived. But it gets really weird when we do:
Appearance: Choice
Reality: [causal determinism]
I guess my initial answer to your question would be cat:particle::choice:____, the problem is that I do not think there is anything which has the relation to a choice as a particle relates to a cat. Cats are amalgamations of particles because, well, i can take a cat and cut it up into really tiny pieces. Choices cannot really be cut up in the same way; I can cut a cat in half but I cannot cut a choice in half.
(This is not to say that I cannot reduce a choice, but rather that the reduction is not quantitative in the same way that the cat / half a cat reduction is quantitative. I can reduce a choice in the sense that I can say "a cat is really X + X + X". Choices can be articulated as very confused pseudo-amalgamations of discrete, causal particulars. But, ultimately, the whole notion of choice eventually gets dissolved by this process. More on that in a bit.)
So, I can say that what is "really going on" in "choice" is a wealth of particular, discrete, causal events; there is no such thing as choice but, rather, there is simply causal determinism. The problem is that, in the reduction, there does not seem to be an ability to discretely divide a choice in the same way that one can discretely divide a cat. I can quantify and divide a cat fairly easily; I cannot quantify and divide a "choice" as easily.
So, it's really not as if, in my arguments, i'm actually starting by granting "choice" and then reducing it. Really, I'm just flat-out denying choice but trying to be nice about it. So I'm trying to say "well, sure, we have the appearance of choices but REALLY it's just bla bla bla", except that very move of reduction fundamentally denies there ever being a choice in a way which is different from, say, physically reducing a cat.
Because, again, we can cut cats in half, and then cut each half in half, and keep cutting. But "choice" does not really divide as easily. So we can quite easily reduce it by saying "it's just reality", but articulating that division quantitatively is fucking difficult.
Which is why when we start to do it we really just need to say "I'm just denying your premise that there ever was choice, because causality."
Reduction does not "disprove everything", reduction reduces all things which can be reduced. Eventually there is something irreducible, because Western Philosophy.
It may be that I, and others, were simply being too nice; we were trying to grant the premise of "choice" and then argumentatively divide it and re-articulate it as an amalgamation of smaller components. But, really, we just needed to flatly deny choice because "determinism" and flatly deny compatibilism because, well, compatibilism maintains premises which are contrary to the premises of determinism.
It would be cool if we could articulate a set of premises with which we all agree and then suss out whether choice is in there, but I think that the problem is going to be that, ultimately, determinists do not grant the "choice" premise and compatibilists need the "choice" premise. And, sadly, there is no way to build "choice" up out of any of the premises determinists would grant.
So, here's my starting assumption for this argument: The basic, fundamental "stuff" of existence is atomistic, indivisible, particles which causally, deterministically, interact with one another.
I don't understand how anyone could get "choice" out of that, given that it presents reality as simply very, very, very tiny billiard balls bouncing into one another completely without agency, intention, thought, or anything else compatibilists need to make their argument.
I'll take it further: even if there are nondeterministic random interactions between particles at a quantum level I don't see how that necessarily implies free will. A Turing Machine with a true random number generator attached to it is not fundamentally more powerful than a Turing Machine by itself.
Of course, I'm not entirely certain of what the practical consequences of free will vs. the illusion of free will are (if any).
How about this: particles are deterministically knocking around in the brain, and they form the thoughts "chicken" and "steak" in turn. Downstream of further knocking, the brain causes the mouth to say "steak please."
Isn't this what determinists think happens? This is what compatibilists think happens. They call the process "choice" and consider it part of the self.
In no way is choice argued for or spoken about as a process in the same manner you are in any of the compatabilist literature I've read so far. I've never seen anyone take such an approach and try to outlay a plausible causal mechanism for it.
I'd be very interested in any literature that tries to do this.
From what I've seen they stay way above this level and try to deny that it is reducible at all.
Well, good reductionism would deny the existence of bike rides. If only because there are no bikes, there are no riders, and there is no process of "riding"; there are only indivisible particles causally interracting with one another.
But it's not that the indivisible particles "form" the "thought" of "chicken" because, again, there is no "thought" and there is no "chicken", there are only the little particles bumping into one another.
To have the "thought" and "chicken" one has to be at the completely non-deterministic, non-reductionist point of view. One cannot get from "indivisible particles bouncing" to "chicken"; the process by which those particles could be amalgamated cannot occur from the point of view of there only being particles bouncing; there is nothing by which one would build when there is simply particles bouncing, there is no "buildingness", no amalgamating force to utilize. To get "thought" and "chicken" one has to have "I am a person looking at shit and thinking about shit", which is not part of the reductionist point of view.
What have you been doing this whole time, except taking what we call choice and then breaking it up into a process of perception triggering memory and desire, prompting action, and so forth?
In your analogy, cat:particle::choice:all those things you keep telling me choice is actually made up of, various deterministic causes and events.
No, you have not in any whatsoever shown it is different. You haven't even tried.
Right, this is also what we broke cat down into. So another form of your analogy, cat:particle::choice:particle.
Yeah, this is correct. From a physical determinist's point of view, nothing can exist. Not even particles bumping around, actually. That's just a convenient euphemism. In fact, to a physical determinist, nothing at all can actually exist except for some theoretical quantity that we can't possibly ever even observe or know anything definite about. It's a scientific and philosophical impossibility for us to ever say, observe, know, or conceive of anything definite about that which you seem to think is the only that that "really exists." Note that this is identical to a belief in God, just without a consciousness associated with your belief about true reality. If this is your point, that nothing at all exists, no chickens, no thoughts, no selves, nothing, then I ask again, what's so special about choice and free will? They only don't exist because, as your argument requires, nothing exists. That isn't really useful, and logically does not make any meaningful point about free will, since you are simply describing some theoretical idea about its nature which is also true about all things and events.
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