I guess I would say that agents don't exist apart from one's subjective conscious experience. What you call "agency" is, simply, what I would understand as the experience of being conscious.
As for how emergence explains where this comes from, I am basically parroting arguments I've read in I am a Strange Loop.
Basically, brains evolve to assign categories to things. Organisms survive better if they have more precise categories for stimuli, yes? (Bad/good, food/not food, wet/dry, cold/hot, etc). Hungry/full would be an internal stimuli category. Hofstader argues that, at a certain point, brains start having categories for their own activity. Our experience of consciousness is simply our brain categorizing and organizing its own activity, the process of which creates a new phenomena at a level "above" its constituent parts.
What makes this "top-down" is this: plants behave basically through mechanical responses to stimuli. Instict is more complicated; the response gets filtered through a nervous system where sets of behavioral responses are basically encoded. Consciousness is even more removed, because the responses are filtered not even through the nervous system, but through the phenomenon that emerges from the nervous system's behavior.
Consider: regardless of whether we take the agent we are considering to be an entity that emerges from a brain, or just simply a brain, we are going to be left with the same questions. Whatever it is, that entity we're calling an agent is going to have sets of attitudes, goals, beliefs, and so on which will, in turn, determine how they respond to situations. Now either those attitudes, goals, beliefs, and so on are set by certain independent and prior facts about the world, such as the DNA the agent happened to have, that they were dropped on their head, etc. or those attitudes are set by nothing at all. If my attitudes are set by things like my DNA and the parents to which I was born, then they are set by factors out of my control, and hence the actions which follow from them are not things for which I can be responsible. But if they are set by nothing at all--if they are, in essence, random--then they are also out of my control, and again the actions which follow from them are not things for which I can be responsible.
I think, again, "control" is best seen as a subjective experience. As far as the implications re: morality and responsibility, I would say that morality itself is best seen as a high-level code for behavior that is only accessible by conscious beings, precisely because consciousness is an emergent phenomena that can exist alongside things like language and social cues.
You brought up DNA shaping our identities; but in humans, learned behaviors also hugely shape our identities and the "choices" we make (or think we make.) I mean, I was raised by liberal parents through no choice of my own, found friends randomly with their ideologies that rubbed off on me, and all of these factors shaped my identity much as a natural environment shapes the phenotypes of creatures that evolve in it.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I think, again, "control" is best seen as a subjective experience.
See, I think this is the only part of your response which is actually relevant; the emergentism stuff is just window dressing. Once you define control as a certain sort of subjective experience, the type commonly enjoyed by people making what appear to be choices, then it follows that we control all sorts of things. And hence, we can be responsible for them.
This is, coincidentally, not that different from the Compatibilist response I was giving.
I think, again, "control" is best seen as a subjective experience.
See, I think this is the only part of your response which is actually relevant; the emergentism stuff is just window dressing. Once you define control as a certain sort of subjective experience, the type commonly enjoyed by people making what appear to be choices, then it follows that we control all sorts of things. And hence, we can be responsible for them.
This is, coincidentally, not that different from the Compatibilist response I was giving.
Although this just feels the most "right" of the options, it feels like such a copout.
Reality is deterministic -> this class of things happening in reality is deterministic, but has magic voodoo "agency" -> this "agency" allows this class of things to have nontrivial "control" or "choice" over reality -> we've fudged our definitions enough such that reality is still deterministic!
MrMister is correct. Nagel also nearly nails it on some points. I am my desires, my beliefs, my choices, my body, etc. They are not forces that compel me, they are me. To say that they compel "me" is impossibly recursive, because what is "me" there at the end of that sentence? Who or what are my consituent parts acting upon when they compel?
Inasmuch as those constituent parts - desires, beliefs, memories, hormones - can be grouped together and called "Yar," so to can a culmination of causes and effects among them be grouped together and called "Yar making a choice" or "Yar, of his own free will." Break them all down into constituent parts and it appears that there is no free will in there anymore. But that's because you've broken it down to where there is no Yar anymore. So who or what is there remaining to have or not have free will? What meaning can free will have if you're denying the existence of the individual to whom we'd grant such a designation?
A properly formed argument that cites cause-and-effect to deny the existence of free will also necessarily denies the existence of the individual, and of pretty much anything else we can possibly conceive of existing.
Mr. Mister, I admit to skimming your post, but I'm surprised I didn't see anything about emergence?
It seems to me that the difference, if you could call it a difference, is that you are saying free will is an emergent phenomenon, whereas Mr^2 is saying that the individual is an emergent phenomenon, one who has free will and consciouness is responsible and so on. Mr didn't specifically say emergent, but I think that is precisely what he was getting at in his Identity stuff in #4.
It's a fictitious phenomenon the same way centrifugal force is a fictitious force. Except unlike centrifugal force, we cannot leave our reference frame. We can only imagine doing so.
The china brain doesn't have free will from our perspective because its complete state and inputs can be known. But there's no functional difference between having and not having free will, since it's only a matter of perspective.
I agree with this to some extent, except it raises some concern about what all you'd categorize under "fictitious." Pretty much anything our minds are capable of conceiving or observing could similarly be called "fictitious" and the designation becomes useless.
If we are discussing the way things appear to be, then we can maintain freedom INSOFAR AS we say "seems like I freely choose what I will eat", within a confined notion of "free" and "choose". We can disregard the issue of how things actually are, and instead focuse upon how things appear to be from a naive position.
And, just like that, we're back to the ontological debate where every philosophical discussion goes. Naturally, my response is, "what are some examples of these things/concepts which you claim are 'how things appear to be' but not 'how they are'?" Same old paradox. There is no possible manner in which you could talk or even think about how something "is" unless such is how it "appears to be" to you. To suggest otherwise is an immediate contradiction and absurdity. If it appears that we have free will, then we do. Else, it must necessarily not appear that we do.
Is anyone here able to provide a satisfactory, non-recursive definition of choice?
When reasoned consideration of possible and likely future events that may result from an action, and a preference or desire for some futures over others, were dominant causal forces in evoking said action. That isn't perfect or complete but it's the core of it as far as I can tell. The capacity to reason can act as a virtual sense that perceives possible futures. A flawed sense, like all the others, but a virtual sense nonetheless. And that sense can be a causal force driving towards some possible futures and away from others. That is making a choice. It is a practical understanding of it and also, on some level, defies the linear cause-and-effect chain that many perceive to be the reason free will can't be. Sure, on some level the entire process is still theoretically describable as deterministic, or as imaginary or as emergent, but nevertheless what I am describing is an observable or conceiveable reality that can be said to occur in some instances and entities and not in others, and is deserving of a word or phrase to describe it, such as "choice" or ultimately "free will." That's compatibilism. Free will and choice are things that do occur even in our deterministic universe, just like anything else. The attempt to define or conceive of these terms in such a way as to conflict with determinism is the fundamental flaw in this debate, and has no consistent justification despite its popularity.
Inasmuch as those constituent parts - desires, beliefs, memories, hormones - can be grouped together and called "Yar," so to can a culmination of causes and effects among them be grouped together and called "Yar making a choice" or "Yar, of his own free will." Break them all down into constituent parts and it appears that there is no free will in there anymore. But that's because you've broken it down to where there is no Yar anymore. So who or what is there remaining to have or not have free will? What meaning can free will have if you're denying the existence of the individual to whom we'd grant such a designation?
A properly formed argument that cites cause-and-effect to deny the existence of free will also necessarily denies the existence of the individual, and of pretty much anything else we can possibly conceive of existing.
Oh wow, this is beautiful. I'm using a version of this if ever I discuss free will again.
Also, _J_ I don't understand what you're saying at all, so I'm going to try and respond to a bunch of things you've written.
If we are discussing the way things are, then we need only discern whether or not there is a causal relation between actions or whether actions are uncaused. If there is causality, then determinism. If there is no causality, then freedom.
Why are we using freedom in this way - By this definition isn't an electron with indeterminate momentum 'free'? Isn't the radium man in the op thought experiment 'free'?
How is this a useful definition of free will and how does it in any way correspond to the folk conception of the meaning of 'free will'? It seems obvious to me that the radium man is less 'free' from the point of responsibility than Yar's determined individual which acts in response to its beliefs, desires, memories.
While one can conceive of one's self as free, this only answers the question of how things appear to be, how one conceives of one's self, and does not address the issue of whether or not one is, in fact, free.
Are you contending that assuming oneself as a free agent is a epistemological error?
Even if that's the case is there anything wrong with defining words like 'agent' and 'free will' within a more rigorously grounded epistemological framework (if we can do so consistently) in such a way as to maintain our intuitions related to these concepts?
Do you believe that there are any inconsistencies that occur as a result? Do you believe this should not be done for some other reason?
I don't understand how your solution actually solves the problem. If you want it to be the case that Player A is somehow different than the rock, then Player A has to be different than the rock. But if Player A and the rock are the same thing "events and forces in the objective order", then everything has efficacy.
And if we were using "self-efficacy" to preserve morality...then now rocks are moral agents.
Not if we define agency and self-efficacy in some meaningful (but still objective way). I.E. entities that internally represent their environment, represent themselves as an entity in their environment, have preferences for certain states of affairs, and attempt to interact with their environment to procure those states of affairs have agency and self-efficacy.
I'm not sure how successful that would be under thorough scrutiny, but it definitely excludes rocks. It does include things like people, some sorts of animals, and the china brain.
The china brain doesn't have free will from our perspective because its complete state and inputs can be known. But there's no functional difference between having and not having free will, since it's only a matter of perspective.
No. Does a mechanical clock have 'free will' or 'agency' if the person looking at it doesn't know what it will do next? Or is a difference of perspective a necessary rather than sufficient criterion?
Also some questions (to MrMister, Yar especially)
do you guys believe that the china brain has 'agency' in the colloquial sense? What about some sort of 'qualia' insofar as qualia would exist as a result of the sensory input of a china-nation?
What if a china brain was to interact directly, communicating with one of the people in china acting as a neuron? Would both parties be said to have agency or free will?
Can a modern nation be considered to have agency or free will? If not what specifically (in measurable, empirical terms) would have to change before it could be considered one?
Chake99 on
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Is anyone here able to provide a satisfactory, non-recursive definition of choice?
Because, you know, this argument repeats itself, but I've never heard anyone actually manage to define this idea.
Some people think that the language of choice is a primitive, i.e. that it cannot be defined in terms of some other set of vocabulary that does not itself reference choice. This is not necessarily a bad thing; for instance, for most of history this was true of temporal concepts (and it still is true of them for the average person), and it's also true of experiential color concepts. Choice might represent a primitive category like time or the experience of color. I think that Wallace is an example of a philosopher who takes this to be true (he thinks that volition is a basic and irreducible mental event).
I don't tend to think that's true myself, however. I am inclined to think that choice is analyzable in terms of the combination of some set of intentional states, like beliefs and desires, which as a result produces an intention. That is pretty hand-wavy, but to give a more precise formulation would be a lot of work.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Reality is deterministic -> this class of things happening in reality is deterministic, but has magic voodoo "agency" -> this "agency" allows this class of things to have nontrivial "control" or "choice" over reality -> we've fudged our definitions enough such that reality is still deterministic!
It feels like a hollow victory.
If the compatibilist were 'winning' just by definitional fiat then it would indeed be a hollow victory. For instance, I can define having free will as "wearing pants," and then I would certainly have free will. But no one would really care. Instead, the compatibilist is trying to show, as I quoted Frank Jackson as saying, that: "first, that the folk concept of free action involves a potentially unstable attempt to find a middle way between the random and the determined, second, that the folk conception is nowhere instantiated, and, third, that a compatibilist substitute does all we legitimately require of free action."
I think that I've already done a good enough job of those first two things, i.e. I've shown that whatever concept of free will we might have initially held, and which we thought to be ruled out by determinism, is hopelessly incoherent. More recently I've turned my attention to demonstrating the third thing, i.e. that there is a rival compatibilist notion of free will which is not incoherent or impossible. This is what my talk of agency is supposed to be in support of. Basically, the idea is this: sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, and that through said action you cause an event in the world, that, if all works out ideally, in some way furthers your goals and projects. That certainly looks like free will when you squint, especially given that the alternative notion, the one that we started with, is clearly incoherent.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The china brain doesn't have free will from our perspective because its complete state and inputs can be known. But there's no functional difference between having and not having free will, since it's only a matter of perspective.
No. Does a mechanical clock have 'free will' or 'agency' if the person looking at it doesn't know what it will do next? Or is a difference of perspective a necessary rather than sufficient criterion?
I agree with Chake99 here. Although the contrast between the objective and subjective points of view is what generates the problem of free will, it does not itself offer a solution. That is precisely because free will is not something which we take to be observer-relative: the very same action cannot be both free and unfree when viewed from different perspectives, any more than a rock could be both iron and gold when viewed from different perspectives.
do you guys believe that the china brain has 'agency' in the colloquial sense? What about some sort of 'qualia' insofar as qualia would exist as a result of the sensory input of a china-nation?
I don't think that this is really related to free will at all, but as a separate thesis in philosophy of mind I do tend to think that the china brain is just as full fledged an agent as any other. If it were to talk to one of its neurons then that might be trippy, but it wouldn't present any special philosophical difficulty.
I don't think that modern nations are agents, however, because both 1) they are not internally structured in such a way as to causally or functionally mimic the internal structure of an agent and 2) they don't act like agents in anything but the most extended of metaphorical senses.
In any case, though, these questions are questions about what sorts of things can have intentional states--beliefs, desires, etc.--rather than the relationship between intentional states and agency or free will.
Basically, the idea is this: sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, and that through said action you cause an event in the world, that, if all works out ideally, in some way furthers your goals and projects. That certainly looks like free will when you squint, especially given that the alternative notion, the one that we started with, is clearly incoherent.
To me, though, this just seems like equivocation.
If, sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, they only "moved" you to "action" because they could only have moved you to action.
It's like you have a bunch of dominoes lined up, and on top of each domino is a tiny card castle. You knock down the first domino in the chain, and then observe that the card castle on the final domino toppled. "Look, the card castle was moved to action, and as we all know, every card castle's goal in life is to be knocked over. It has free will because it is sufficiently far removed from the deterministic chain of events that gave rise to its occurrence!"
I'm not really arguing with compatibilism, I guess I'm just looking for a more precise statement of it.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I'm not really arguing with compatibilism, I guess I'm just looking for a more precise statement of it.
I think that first I need you to explain what you think the threat of determinism is.
That, literally, everything is determined. What is the definition of agency other than arbitrarily assigning certain events in the world-line to be "caused by an agent with 'free will' " or ~"cause by an agent with 'free will' ".
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
What is the definition of agency other than arbitrarily assigning certain events in the world-line to be "caused by an agent with 'free will' " or ~"cause by an agent with 'free will' ".
The concept of agency is indeed supposed to draw that distinction. But I don't see what licenses you to say that it does so in an arbitrary way. Certain events are caused by agents acting out their goals and projects, whereas others are caused by, say, meteorites; that certainly seems like an important categorical distinction to draw.
And also, I will reiterate that I don't think that the truth of physical determinism actually matters to this discussion, as I argued in section 3 of the original post. The problem is not about whether events are settled or not beforehand, the problem is about whether we can see any contribution to the eventual outcomes as coming from us ourselves. Determinism is only incidental to that.
As far as I can tell, compatabilism makes no actual statements about the nature of reality or individuals, but rather redefines (or perhaps more aptly, defines at all in any way, rather than relying on hazy assumptions and preconceptions) free will, or rather both "will" and "freedom."
The idea of the self, identity or subject as consisting of those "determinants," rather than being determined by them, is pretty much inarguable. I am my desires, my beliefs, my acculturation, my trauma, my memories, etc. There is no distinction between them and me. The argument could be made that any aspect of my subjective experience, including physical senses and seemingly trivial phenomena, are part of the self, however peripheral.
However, this concept could as easily be used to argue that "free will" is an empty idea as it could be used to argue that "free will" exists.
It is fairly obvious that my identity, those elements which compose me as described above, are not under my control. They are themselves determined by pre-existing forces, whether it's biology or culture or atoms bumping into each other. How could "I" control them, if they are "me," and thus must always-already exist if I exist?
So what is will? It is desire, interest, want - it is the impetus to action. These aspects of the personality are just as much a product of the forces that generate a personality as any other. Thus, will is determined.
But does this mean it is not "free"? What, exactly, would freedom mean for such a thing as the will? What would it be free of? It is clearly not free of pre-existing forces which have shaped it, and thus of the decisions and choices driven by the will.
To me, the equally reasonable conclusion is that the existence of selfhood or identity is incoherent without determinism. For a will to be "free" of the forces that shaped it is for it cease to exist.
"Free will" is something that really only makes sense when referring to someone's ability to do or not do something, in the manner of the word "freedom." As in "the defendant did not have free will during the time that he broke into the store because someone had a gun to his head and made him do it." If you're talking about whether or not people have control over their actions in general, you get into nightmarish recursive Twilight Zone arguments.
The only way to prove or disprove the notion of free will as true and complete control over your own behavior would be to have 2 creatures, identical in every way, experience the exact same stimuli in the exact same order. Then you would observe their behaviors to see whether they differ or match. This is basically impossible. I have a hunch, though, that if such an experiment were possible, their behaviors would match. I say this because every mental process has a physical component; it would be like feeding the same data into the same program on two identical computers. Human behavior just looks "freer" because of the incredible complexity of the brain. You can sort of see through the facade in less complex creatures though, like flies or worms or what have you, which operate largely on basic responses to stimuli. That doesn't mean you can predict their behavior exactly, because there is still an impressive complexity there.
You could argue that consciousness is the "free" part of free will, but consciousness is just where battle between opposing signals is fought. It's necessarily rooted in the physical realm because the processes that influence it are. If this wasn't true, then psychoactive drugs wouldn't do anything. Does that mean that your whole life is predetermined? No, it just means that you will always react to stimuli the way that you would react to it, as shaped by your previous experiences. Your actions will always be unique, however, because (as stated before) there is no one else out there completely identical to you who has received the exact same stimuli as you.
I don't think that this is really related to free will at all, but as a separate thesis in philosophy of mind
fair point
I don't think that modern nations are agents, however, because both 1) they are not internally structured in such a way as to causally or functionally mimic the internal structure of an agent and 2) they don't act like agents in anything but the most extended of metaphorical senses.
I'm not sure I see this at all. You said
In any case, though, these questions are questions about what sorts of things can have intentional states--beliefs, desires, etc.
If the tangent can be indulged, let us take for example the the government of the U.S. It very clearly has certain preferences and desires (i.e. Americans not dying, lowering unemployment, increasing GDP, lowering crime, people not doing drugs). It also very clearly has certain beliefs - institutional knowledge both collected in databases and belonging to those humans who are part of it which it 'believes' to represent the state of the world. The U.S. government also decides and acts - it reflects on its beliefs and desires and then tries to create a state of affairs it prefers. It's also aware of itself as a country acting within the world, and it's decisions incorporate this representation (i.e. it's self-conscious and would pass any sort of possible the mirror test*). To me, this seems to meet most of the requirements for compatibilist agency.
*e.g. drop a bomb warning on capitol hill threatening the government and watch the government respond
So I'll just respond to Chake99's most recent post: we don't assign labels of agency and free will to a government because that isn't very useful to us. It might fit, but the underlying agency of individual politicians involved are both overly apparent to us and also presumably of more interest to us in the process of actually analyzing a situation and progressing forward, than would be a notion of agency and free will assigned to the government as a whole.
A simpler way to look at it is to say that if something seems to have agency and free will simply because it aggregates and averages the free will of agents that comprise it, then this is not in our defintion of agency and free will. When you break free will and choice down to where they don't exist anymore, then I have trouble accepting that as an argument that they don't still exist when they aren't broken down. But if you breaks free will and choice down to where they are just an aggregate of other free will and choice, then yes, that's a decent argument against the aggregate.
I mean, maybe it has value to philosophers because it ends some long-standing debate, but it doesn't change my life. If doesn't mean that someone is going to be able to anticipate what I'll do next while I walk down the street.
You won't be able to hook me up to the determinism machine in a court of law and prove that I had to have killed my wife. It's just not an important finding to me. It's like finding out that properly spaced dominoes do, in fact, all fall over when you topple the first one. I know that already.
I'm a compatibilist and at first I was awed by determinism but then i realized it sort of doesn't matter.
But this is separate from, and not sufficient for, explaining responsibility.
When engaging in a discussion of Free Will I think that a distinction needs to be made.
1) A conversation regarding the metaphysical conflict between determinism and free will.
2) A conversation regarding the ethical conflict between determinism and free will.
If we convolute these two completely different discussions, then the conversation gets muddled pretty quickly given how different the conversations are. We can have conversation 1 without ever using the term "responsibility", but 2 is going to rely heavily on notions of responsibility.
All that to say that I think when we talk about free will and determinism we need to be very clear regarding whether we are discussing metaphysics or ethics.
Intentional action occurs when intentional states, like beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions, etc. combine in the right way within an agent to produce a resulting action: for instance, when I believe that this cup is full of water, and I desire a drink, and so I drink what's in this cup.
What is the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity". I'm thinking about the distinction between the person and the rock. Because, again, in your account both a person and a rock are "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things", and you do not want to say that the person is somehow magically different than the rock despite your claiming, with regard to responsibility, that a person is different than a rock.
I want to know what the difference is between a person and a rock; the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity, inertia". Presumably you think these different classes of things to be quite different, but you have not explained how they are different.
And given that you want both rocks and persons to be the same kind of thing, "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things" I do not know from where you are pulling any notion that rocks and persons are different.
The conclusion of your argument is "persons are morally responsible in a way that rocks are not".
I want to know what premises can be used in this argument which are not simply restatements of that conclusion.
But intentional action is, at the least, the broad category from which we start, and the capacity for intentional action is, in broad strokes, what differentiates the things that we do from the goings on in physical systems like rivers and clouds, and, consequently, which it is also the capacity which renders us responsible for the things that we do.
Sure, but what is an "intention" other than a sort of magical pseudo-causal force in those magical person entities?
You cannot collapse everything into "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things" and then stipulate that particular amalgamations within this causal order are special in their having "intentions", whatever those are.
Usually when I have this conversation with people and "intention" comes up eventually they wind up defining "intention" as "choice", which begs the question of the whole fucking argument, given that we are attempting to discern whether or not there is such a thing as choice, since we're arguing about free will v. determinism.
Inasmuch as those constituent parts - desires, beliefs, memories, hormones - can be grouped together and called "Yar," so to can a culmination of causes and effects among them be grouped together and called "Yar making a choice" or "Yar, of his own free will." Break them all down into constituent parts and it appears that there is no free will in there anymore. But that's because you've broken it down to where there is no Yar anymore. So who or what is there remaining to have or not have free will? What meaning can free will have if you're denying the existence of the individual to whom we'd grant such a designation?
I will grant you that we can segment a particular set of causal relations within the universal causal nexus and label that set "Yar", in the same way that we dan segment a particular set of causal relations and label that "rock falling" or "BP oil well spilling oil".
What I will not grant, and have yet to discern an argument for, is how the Yar set has the magical "choice" and "free will" whereas the rock and BP oil well do not have "choice" or "free will".
I am entirely happy to say that the set of causal happenings Yar acts in accord with its own internally preserved determining forces which themselves came to be as a result of other interractions within the universal causal nexus; that is fantastic.
But I do not know how you got "freedom" or "choice" out of what you posted.
If we put a battery into a fan, it will do what a fan does.
If we put some food and oxygen into a Yar, it will do what a fan does.
How does Yar have free will and choice if the fan does not, given that Yar and the fan are the same thing?
If your contention is that Yars and fans are not the same thing, then how are they different? Yars have "desires" while fans have "programming"? What's the difference?
How is this a useful definition of free will and how does it in any way correspond to the folk conception of the meaning of 'free will'? It seems obvious to me that the radium man is less 'free' from the point of responsibility than Yar's determined individual which acts in response to its beliefs, desires, memories.
Free and Not-Free are opposites. What is the meaningful distinction to be made so explaining their opposition? Well, free is not caused, whereas not-free is caused. So, etc.
If we are talking about a different kind of freedom, then define it. But I see no reason to make a distinction between "free" and "not-free" unless there is a difference, and the only meaningful difference is with regard to causality.
Are you contending that assuming oneself as a free agent is a epistemological error?
I am contending that stating the conclusion of the argument as a premise is a logical error.
If an argument to discern whether or not Player A is free starts with "Premise 1: Player A is free", that is fine; but it is a very shitty argument.
My understanding is that in free will v. determinism conversations the point is to discern which is correct by allowing for the possibility that each be correct. If we start assuming free will...then we aren't really having a genuine debate / discussion on the matter.
Moreover, of one's argument for free will starts with "I am free", then it will be very difficult for that argument to withstand criticism.
Even if that's the case is there anything wrong with defining words like 'agent' and 'free will' within a more rigorously grounded epistemological framework (if we can do so consistently) in such a way as to maintain our intuitions related to these concepts?
Do you believe that there are any inconsistencies that occur as a result? Do you believe this should not be done for some other reason?
I think the inconsistencies or problems which result are the same as any argument within which one's premises are the conclusion for which one is arguing.
Not if we define agency and self-efficacy in some meaningful (but still objective way). I.E. entities that internally represent their environment, represent themselves as an entity in their environment, have preferences for certain states of affairs, and attempt to interact with their environment to procure those states of affairs have agency and self-efficacy.
I'm not sure how successful that would be under thorough scrutiny, but it definitely excludes rocks. It does include things like people, some sorts of animals, and the china brain.
But you've set up the definition of agency and self-efficacy to already contain that magical property for which one needs to argue in order to preserve freedom.
If you define a person to have "preferences" while rocks lack preferences, and you define "preferences" to be self-caused motivating states...then you've just snuck the magic of freedom into the argument.
If we are trying to argue that there is freedom, then we cannot start with a premise which basically states "there is freedom". Because that's not an argument; that's just stating what one believes.
The question is how we reconcile freedom will and determinism, uncaused actions and causality, without simply stating that some things, persons, have a magical freedom spot in their mind within which they are uncaused, or caused in a super-special different way than rocks are.
I think whenever free will debates come up, we forget that Free Will has been primarily a RELIGIOUS CONCEPT among the west for the past couple thousand years. It was created in order to explain a few theological problems in Christianity.
So, as an atheist I essentially take the fourth position, that the concept of Free Will is an outdated and irrelevant relic of the past. It really isn't that important.
Human beings do things. Animals do things. Rocks bouncing around in space do things. There are physical reasons that exist in the real world that caused all those things to do things. I look at his whole debate and think that it's unclear what free will is even trying to say outside of a religious context.
If it's trying to say that human beings are immune to the whole "things do things because of reasons" law that applies to almost everything in the universe, then it's stupid. We do things for reasons just like everything else in this world that's bigger than an electron.
If it's just trying to say that human beings consider different courses of action and then decide to something, and that decision is important and valuable, then cool, I'm okay with that.
But don't think that this is the same thing as the orthodox Christian definition of Free Will that folks like Thomas Aquinas considered. They conceive of free will as something explicitly and by definition supernatural - a totally free choice, free of causation, between God and not-God. But that definition is just kind of silly when you're an atheist. It loses all meaning.
So the concept of Free Will is really just meaningless to me.
Basically, the idea is this: sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, and that through said action you cause an event in the world, that, if all works out ideally, in some way furthers your goals and projects. That certainly looks like free will when you squint, especially given that the alternative notion, the one that we started with, is clearly incoherent.
Yey summary statements!
1) Beliefs and desires combine in such a way to move X to action. (person)
2) Gravity and friction combine in such a way as to move X to action. (rock)
What's the difference?
Well, 1 "furthers your goals and projects" while 2 occurs absent goals and projects.
Except that means that they did not simply "combine", as gravity and friction would combine, but rather were made to combine with regard to an intention maintained for the sake of goals and projects; that the goal or project has some causal impact (volition?) upon the coming to be of the combination of the beliefs and desires which then motivated the action.
the problem is about whether we can see any contribution to the eventual outcomes as coming from us ourselves. Determinism is only incidental to that.
No, determinism brings into question the very notion of a "coming from us ourselves", as all events are simply the results of the causal nexus of the universe. I am typing this post because (long causal chain) in the same way that a rock falls down a hill because (long causal chain).
I think whenever free will debates come up, we forget that Free Will has been primarily a RELIGIOUS CONCEPT among the west for the past couple thousand years. It was created in order to explain a few theological problems in Christianity.
Not really, no. Unless by "religious" you mean "ethical"; but I am pretty sure that atheists have ethics.
It only makes sense to discuss how one "ought to" or "should" act if one has control over one's actions; if I control my actions in the way that a rock does not control its actions.
Determinism brings this entire notion into question, as it is not "I" which controls my actions, but rather "my actions" are simply the necessary consequent of previously existing states which causally determine how I act.
Teaching the ethical rule "Killing is bad" only makes sense if particular beings can learn that rule and so modify their behavior. If everything which happens is only a necessary causal consequent of the causal nexus of the universe, all of which was determined when the first cosmic domino fell, then teaching someone ethics is complete nonsense, as everything which will ever happen, ever, has already been determined for millions of years.
What is the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity". I'm thinking about the distinction between the person and the rock. Because, again, in your account both a person and a rock are "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things", and you do not want to say that the person is somehow magically different than the rock despite your claiming, with regard to responsibility, that a person is different than a rock.
I want to know what the difference is between a person and a rock; the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity, inertia". Presumably you think these different classes of things to be quite different, but you have not explained how they are different.
You must not mean exactly what you write here, because obviously beliefs, desires, hopes and cognitions are different from gravity, velocity, and inertia. For instance, beliefs, desires, and hopes are all intentional states, states of an agent, whereas gravity is a force. States are not forces, a fortiori gravity is different from a belief or desire. What you must mean is that there is some relevant similarity which you take to hold, but, unfortunately, you have not spelled out what that similarity is supposed to be.
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.
You cannot collapse everything into "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things" and then stipulate that particular amalgamations within this causal order are special in their having "intentions", whatever those are.
Why I most certainly can: just because two different things both belong to the causal order of the world does not mean that they must have all their properties in common. My mug and my jacket are both things that exist in the causal order of the world, but I can neither drink from my jacket nor can I wear my mug.
One of the properties that things can have is being the bearer of intentional states. Some things, in addition to being soft or hard, tall or short, can hope to be the president or think that oatmeal is delicious. I am one such thing, and I strongly suspect that my cat is another, and hopefully you are too.
Except that means that [beliefs and desires] did not simply "combine", as gravity and friction would combine, but rather were made to combine with regard to an intention maintained for the sake of goals and projects
No, that is absolutely not what I am saying. If I were to say that the combining of beliefs and desires to form intentions was something an agent did then I would enter an immediate vicious regress; for how could the agent take the action to combine his beliefs and desires, except by first combining other beliefs and desires, and how could he take that action without first combining other beliefs and desire, and so on.
It is not that I act to combine my belief that there is water in my cup and my desire to drink to form the intention that I reach out for my cup. Combining them is not something that I do at all, it rather something that happens inside me. And it is something that is happening inside me whenever I act intentionally.
You must not mean exactly what you write here, because obviously beliefs, desires, hopes and cognitions are different from gravity, velocity, and inertia. For instance, beliefs, desires, and hopes are all intentional states, states of an agent, whereas gravity is a force. States are not forces, a fortiori gravity is different from a belief or desire. What you must mean is that there is some relevant similarity which you take to hold, but, unfortunately, you have not spelled out what that similarity is supposed to be.
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.
I think we may be having something of a burder of proof argument, as you state that I have to define the similarity, whereas I think you need to define the difference.
The only difference between, say, (beliefs, desires, hopes) and (gravity, velocity) that I can discern is location: beliefs, desires, and hopes are internal to a person whereas gravity and velocity are external forces acting on rocks. So a belief is my own as it is internal to me, whereas gravity cannot be a rock's own as gravity is an external force.
But why does that matter? Why is location a significant factor? Or, take, for example, the idea of inertia. We could specify that inertia is internal to a rock in the same way that a desire is internal to a person. So, then, are inertia and desire the same sort of thing given that they have the same location? The rock's tendancy to stay in one location could be said to be internal to the rock in the way that my desire for ice cream tends to be a continual feature to me.
Unless you think there is a difference other than location. But, then, what is the difference? Other than belief, desire, hope being super-special freedom things.
One of the properties that things can have is being the bearer of intentional states. Some things, in addition to being soft or hard, tall or short, can hope to be the president or think that oatmeal is delicious. I am one such thing, and I strongly suspect that my cat is another, and hopefully you are too.
Have you provided an argument for there being intentional states? If so, I missed it.
Additionally, how are intentional states not deterministic? If I program a robot to always sit down in spot B, and a person intends to sit in spot B, is there a difference between the robot's programming and the person's intending? What is the difference?
Except that means that [beliefs and desires] did not simply "combine", as gravity and friction would combine, but rather were made to combine with regard to an intention maintained for the sake of goals and projects
No, that is absolutely not what I am saying. If I were to say that the combining of beliefs and desires to form intentions was something an agent did then I would enter an immediate vicious regress; for how could the agent take the action to combine his beliefs and desires, except by first combining other beliefs and desires, and how could he take that action without first combining other beliefs and desire, and so on.
It is not that I act to combine my belief that there is water in my cup and my desire to drink to form the intention that I reach out for my cup. Combining them is not something that I do at all, it rather something that happens inside me. And it is something that is happening inside me whenever I act intentionally.
1) Combining belief and desire is not something that I do at all.
2) it rather something that happens inside me
3) it is something that is happening inside me whenever I act intentionally
So, the person does not combine the belief and desire (1) but rather the combination happens inside the person (2) when the person intends(3).
What is intending?
1 and 2, I think, are fine with regard to your collapsing everything into a universal causal nexus; things are combined and that combining happens "within" a particular nexus of causality. Ok, cool.
But 3 posits some kind of agency onto the person which is not the result of a causal nexus and rather is "I intend", the source of the intention is the "I" which is estranged and independent of any other causal forces.
If the intention, if the act of intending, is causally determined, then we're still stuck in determinism. If the intention is independent of causal forces, then you've invoked magic.
i am curious as to how MrMister would define the nature of "freedom" re: free will, as opposed to the nature of constraint for a will that is not free.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Have you provided an argument for there being intentional states? If so, I missed it.
Additionally, how are intentional states not deterministic?
I have not provided an argument that intentional states are possible, because I did not (and still do not) feel the need to argue that people are capable of believing things, desiring things, hoping for things to come about, fearing things, respecting things, etc. If you have some reason to doubt this rather uncontroversial premise then voice it, but I can't read your mind.
You deeply misunderstand my argument if you think that I rely on the purported fact that intentional states are not deterministic to account for free will. I do not rely on that purported fact at all, because it is not actually true. Intentional states do interact in largely deterministic ways. To see why, just suppose for a moment they didn't: suppose, for instance, that the desire to drink water was just as likely to lead to the forming of an intention to paint pictures as it was to lead to the forming of an intention to drink water. But then by virtue of what fact does it count as the desire to drink water in the first place? Why is it not, instead, the desire to paint pictures? The content of an intentional state necessitates that it play a certain functional role, which, in turn necessitates a large degree of determinism in its interactions.
So, intentional states are largely, if not totally, deterministic. But does that lead to a problem? You say:
If the intention, if the act of intending, is causally determined, then we're still stuck in determinism. If the intention is independent of causal forces, then you've invoked magic.
But in order to say that you must not be paying attention: my entire point is that we can be, as you so colorfully say, "still stuck in determinism" while nonetheless possessing free will. It is baldly question-begging for you to assert that determinism and "invoking magic" are the only two alternatives. There is another alternative, compatibilism, and it is correct.
But what is it that is so special about intentional states, you ask?
The only difference between, say, (beliefs, desires, hopes) and (gravity, velocity) that I can discern is location: beliefs, desires, and hopes are internal to a person whereas gravity and velocity are external forces acting on rocks. So a belief is my own as it is internal to me, whereas gravity cannot be a rock's own as gravity is an external force.
But why does that matter? Why is location a significant factor?
Spatial location is certainly not a significant factor. For instance, I can have a bomb planted in my chest, but when it explodes (or fails to) that is not a product of my agency. Or, in other words, what matters is not that beliefs and desires are internal to the body, but rather that they are internal to the agent.
In fact, intentional states are not only internal to the agent, but they provide the very criteria for action. To elaborate: how is it that we can differentiate actions which occur within my body--such as spasms, cancerous growths, etc.--from actions that I myself undertake--such as picking up a glass, throwing a ball, etc? Well, actions that I undertake issue from the proper combination of my intentional states: it is by virtue of the fact that I kicked my leg because I desired to score a goal and believed that kicking the ball would score a goal the movement of my leg counts as an action rather than a spasm. The difference between that case and the case where the doctor hits my knee is that in the former my bodily movement is triggered by the proper combination of intentional states whereas in the latter my bodily movement is triggered by a hammer.
On this account, action just is the proper interaction of intentional states. An agent is made up of a variety of sub-agential parts, and what is happening on the sub-agential level when an agent acts is that intentional states are combining. Just as what it is for a vacuum cleaner to clean is for its bristles to spin, it's valves to open, and etc., what it is for an agent to act is for her intentional states to properly combine. The crucial difference between the human and the vacuum cleaner does not lie in whether they are made up of parts, or whether those parts interact deterministically--it lies in the fact that the human's sub-agential parts include intentional states.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
i am curious as to how MrMister would define the nature of "freedom" re: free will, as opposed to the nature of constraint for a will that is not free.
In the sense of "freedom" at play in free will arguments, all human action is necessarily the product of a free will; there is no unfree will against which to contrast. We can, nonetheless, draw important distinctions among human actions regarding coercion, ignorance, and so on. They just aren't going to be drawn in terms of freedom of the will.
There are two people in the audience. MrMr and _J_. After watching the movie MrMr turns to _J_ and says, "I thought the motivations for the characters in this movie were really well fleshed out; you can really see how Don Jean-Pierre had to struggle to choose between losing his daughter, or ruining his country forever."
_J_ turns back and says, "That's a ridiculous statement, we just observed a series of pictures. They could only ever happen in the order they were presented. The struggle was nonexistent."
And both of you keep arguing past each other about who is right. You're rejecting each others premises.
There are two people in the audience. MrMr and _J_. After watching the movie MrMr turns to _J_ and says, "I thought the motivations for the characters in this movie were really well fleshed out; you can really see how Don Jean-Pierre had to struggle to choose between losing his daughter, or ruining his country forever."
_J_ turns back and says, "That's a ridiculous statement, we just observed a series of pictures. They could only ever happen in the order they were presented. The struggle was nonexistent."
And both of you keep arguing past each other about who is right. You're rejecting each others premises.
haha, I like this analogy. Although I have to say, I tend towards the determinist view. I don't see how anything can really be called a "choice" when it's completely determined by extermal stimuli, internal body/brain states, and maybe some randomness too. To really make a choice, it seems like people would have to do things which have no specific reason, and yet, are not completely random. Maybe such actions would appear random, though.
my entire point is that we can be, as you so colorfully say, "still stuck in determinism" while nonetheless possessing free will
Intentional states do interact in largely deterministic ways. ... So, intentional states are largely, if not totally, deterministic.
what matters is not that beliefs and desires are internal to the body, but rather that they are internal to the agent.
The crucial difference between the human and the vacuum cleaner does not lie in whether they are made up of parts, or whether those parts interact deterministically--it lies in the fact that the human's sub-agential parts include intentional states.
So, you do not seem to be arguing for Free Will, but rather are arguing for the Kantian bastardization of Free Will that we get out of the 2nd Critique and the Metaphysics of Morals; a will is free when it acts in accord with, is determined by, its own laws. So, if I have the desire for X, and act in accord with that desire, I am acting freely.
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.
Because, again, that is what "free" means. And that is precisely why "Free Will" is impossible; persons have reasons, limits, influences. An actually Free Will is actually impossible; no one would argue that it is possible.
So, that's the "you are not arguing for a Free Will, you are arguing for Kantian nonsense" response.
The other response is slightly better, i think.
Say that I have a desire for X. Whence that desire? Well, given the causal nexus of the universe, I came to have that desire for X as a result of a causal process; it did not randomly, uncausedly pop into my mind; it came to be in my mind via a causal chain of actions. Say I desire a Coke as a result of culture impacting me, marketing impacting me, biological needs impacting me, etc.
So, how can it be said that (I desire X), freely, if my coming to have desire X results from a deterministic causal chain? Given the causal nexus of the universe, I came to have desire X.
So, I did not freely come to have the desire, but rather the desire was posited onto me via a causal chain.
This is the problem of the example you give at the end of your post:
Well, actions that I undertake issue from the proper combination of my intentional states: it is by virtue of the fact that I kicked my leg because I desired to score a goal and believed that kicking the ball would score a goal the movement of my leg counts as an action rather than a spasm. The difference between that case and the case where the doctor hits my knee is that in the former my bodily movement is triggered by the proper combination of intentional states whereas in the latter my bodily movement is triggered by a hammer.
But how is (desire to score a goal) different from (hit by a hammer) given that the desire to score a goal came to be in the person as a result of a casual chain of events; your parents told you to score the goal, your coach told you, you have a biological need to reproduce and understand the goal scoring to possibly increase your chance of getting laid.
Knee hit with hammer causally results in leg jerking.
Understanding that X can result in getting laid causally results in X being pursued when one has a desire for getting laid, the desire for which results from biology, which results from etc.
How are those actually different? How is the pursuit of X not simply a slightly more elaborate version of the leg jerking? I will agree that it is more complicated, more steps are involved, but there is no magic of freedom simply by virtue of there being many steps.
It seems like you would have to sneak some magic in there; kneejerk is involuntary while goal scoring is voluntary. But goal scoring is not voluntary; it is the necessary causal outcome of a particular amalgamation of causal forces. It cannot be the case that I freely chose to do it, as it happened as a result of a wealth of external stimuli.
Which is the problem with the Kantian notion of Free Will: A will is free that acts in accord with its own laws.
"Its own" has a very hollow meaning if a particular being is simply the result of a causal chain of events. I never *really* created my "own" laws; I came to have those laws which I was deterministically caused to have. So, if I am a being which acts in accord with the categorical imperative I never freely came to choose that, but rather I have been causally determined to be the kind of thing which acts in accord with the categorical imperative; it was impossible for me to have not been this kind of thing.
Which is why there is no freedom. If everything I am is that which I must deterministically, causally, necessarily be, then I could never have done otherwise.
So, it cannot be my responsibility for acting in accord with the desire to strangle a kitten which I was causally determined to have; I was necessarily determined to strangle the kitten given my having been infected with the desire by external forces and my having come to encounter the kitten via a causal chain of events. You can't blame me for something I was necessarily determined to do.
There are two people in the audience. MrMr and _J_. After watching the movie MrMr turns to _J_ and says, "I thought the motivations for the characters in this movie were really well fleshed out; you can really see how Don Jean-Pierre had to struggle to choose between losing his daughter, or ruining his country forever."
_J_ turns back and says, "That's a ridiculous statement, we just observed a series of pictures. They could only ever happen in the order they were presented. The struggle was nonexistent."
And both of you keep arguing past each other about who is right. You're rejecting each others premises.
It's not that we are rejecting one another's premises. We reject the other's vocabulary. The problem is that MrMr wants to call "free" that which is not "free" and I want to only call "free" that which is "free".
If a machine comes to be programmed to act towards end X, MrMr / Kant are going to say that machine is free when it acts towards end X.
I am going to say that is not freedom, because not only was the acquisition of the end X not free, but also the pursuit of end X is not free, as the pursuit of end X is caused by having end X as an end.
Freedom is a very, very, very silly and absurd thing that more likely than not never existed, never will exist, and never can exist. So I really do not know why intelligent people still argue for it.
I don't see how anything can really be called a "choice" when it's completely determined by extermal stimuli, internal body/brain states, and maybe some randomness too. To really make a choice, it seems like people would have to do things which have no specific reason, and yet, are not completely random. Maybe such actions would appear random, though.
Not exacly. Actual, real, free choice would not even be random. Randomness occurs within the confine of possibility. To be free, there must be no confines.
Think of that one scene from the episode of Community within which the teacher is trying to actualize Dead Poets Society. He walks up to the coffee bar and sees coffee, espresso, and lattes. The waitress asks what he wants. He exclaims, "A birthday cake!"
That's closer to freedom.
But, really, in that situation of being at a coffee bar, the actual free choice would be a choice which is unrestricted, uncaused, unknown (as knowing is structural), unlinguistic (language is structure). And, really, to have a free choice one would have to be completely free from context, so no coffee bar either..and bodies are limiting...so no body...and there could not be a limit to the process of thought...so....
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I guess I would say that agents don't exist apart from one's subjective conscious experience. What you call "agency" is, simply, what I would understand as the experience of being conscious.
As for how emergence explains where this comes from, I am basically parroting arguments I've read in I am a Strange Loop.
Basically, brains evolve to assign categories to things. Organisms survive better if they have more precise categories for stimuli, yes? (Bad/good, food/not food, wet/dry, cold/hot, etc). Hungry/full would be an internal stimuli category. Hofstader argues that, at a certain point, brains start having categories for their own activity. Our experience of consciousness is simply our brain categorizing and organizing its own activity, the process of which creates a new phenomena at a level "above" its constituent parts.
What makes this "top-down" is this: plants behave basically through mechanical responses to stimuli. Instict is more complicated; the response gets filtered through a nervous system where sets of behavioral responses are basically encoded. Consciousness is even more removed, because the responses are filtered not even through the nervous system, but through the phenomenon that emerges from the nervous system's behavior.
I think, again, "control" is best seen as a subjective experience. As far as the implications re: morality and responsibility, I would say that morality itself is best seen as a high-level code for behavior that is only accessible by conscious beings, precisely because consciousness is an emergent phenomena that can exist alongside things like language and social cues.
You brought up DNA shaping our identities; but in humans, learned behaviors also hugely shape our identities and the "choices" we make (or think we make.) I mean, I was raised by liberal parents through no choice of my own, found friends randomly with their ideologies that rubbed off on me, and all of these factors shaped my identity much as a natural environment shapes the phenotypes of creatures that evolve in it.
See, I think this is the only part of your response which is actually relevant; the emergentism stuff is just window dressing. Once you define control as a certain sort of subjective experience, the type commonly enjoyed by people making what appear to be choices, then it follows that we control all sorts of things. And hence, we can be responsible for them.
This is, coincidentally, not that different from the Compatibilist response I was giving.
Although this just feels the most "right" of the options, it feels like such a copout.
Reality is deterministic -> this class of things happening in reality is deterministic, but has magic voodoo "agency" -> this "agency" allows this class of things to have nontrivial "control" or "choice" over reality -> we've fudged our definitions enough such that reality is still deterministic!
It feels like a hollow victory.
Because, you know, this argument repeats itself, but I've never heard anyone actually manage to define this idea.
The point at which a dynamical system achieves a certain threshold?
Inasmuch as those constituent parts - desires, beliefs, memories, hormones - can be grouped together and called "Yar," so to can a culmination of causes and effects among them be grouped together and called "Yar making a choice" or "Yar, of his own free will." Break them all down into constituent parts and it appears that there is no free will in there anymore. But that's because you've broken it down to where there is no Yar anymore. So who or what is there remaining to have or not have free will? What meaning can free will have if you're denying the existence of the individual to whom we'd grant such a designation?
A properly formed argument that cites cause-and-effect to deny the existence of free will also necessarily denies the existence of the individual, and of pretty much anything else we can possibly conceive of existing.
It seems to me that the difference, if you could call it a difference, is that you are saying free will is an emergent phenomenon, whereas Mr^2 is saying that the individual is an emergent phenomenon, one who has free will and consciouness is responsible and so on. Mr didn't specifically say emergent, but I think that is precisely what he was getting at in his Identity stuff in #4.
I agree with this to some extent, except it raises some concern about what all you'd categorize under "fictitious." Pretty much anything our minds are capable of conceiving or observing could similarly be called "fictitious" and the designation becomes useless.
And, just like that, we're back to the ontological debate where every philosophical discussion goes. Naturally, my response is, "what are some examples of these things/concepts which you claim are 'how things appear to be' but not 'how they are'?" Same old paradox. There is no possible manner in which you could talk or even think about how something "is" unless such is how it "appears to be" to you. To suggest otherwise is an immediate contradiction and absurdity. If it appears that we have free will, then we do. Else, it must necessarily not appear that we do.
When reasoned consideration of possible and likely future events that may result from an action, and a preference or desire for some futures over others, were dominant causal forces in evoking said action. That isn't perfect or complete but it's the core of it as far as I can tell. The capacity to reason can act as a virtual sense that perceives possible futures. A flawed sense, like all the others, but a virtual sense nonetheless. And that sense can be a causal force driving towards some possible futures and away from others. That is making a choice. It is a practical understanding of it and also, on some level, defies the linear cause-and-effect chain that many perceive to be the reason free will can't be. Sure, on some level the entire process is still theoretically describable as deterministic, or as imaginary or as emergent, but nevertheless what I am describing is an observable or conceiveable reality that can be said to occur in some instances and entities and not in others, and is deserving of a word or phrase to describe it, such as "choice" or ultimately "free will." That's compatibilism. Free will and choice are things that do occur even in our deterministic universe, just like anything else. The attempt to define or conceive of these terms in such a way as to conflict with determinism is the fundamental flaw in this debate, and has no consistent justification despite its popularity.
Oh wow, this is beautiful. I'm using a version of this if ever I discuss free will again.
Also, _J_ I don't understand what you're saying at all, so I'm going to try and respond to a bunch of things you've written.
Why are we using freedom in this way - By this definition isn't an electron with indeterminate momentum 'free'? Isn't the radium man in the op thought experiment 'free'?
How is this a useful definition of free will and how does it in any way correspond to the folk conception of the meaning of 'free will'? It seems obvious to me that the radium man is less 'free' from the point of responsibility than Yar's determined individual which acts in response to its beliefs, desires, memories.
Are you contending that assuming oneself as a free agent is a epistemological error?
Even if that's the case is there anything wrong with defining words like 'agent' and 'free will' within a more rigorously grounded epistemological framework (if we can do so consistently) in such a way as to maintain our intuitions related to these concepts?
Do you believe that there are any inconsistencies that occur as a result? Do you believe this should not be done for some other reason?
Not if we define agency and self-efficacy in some meaningful (but still objective way). I.E. entities that internally represent their environment, represent themselves as an entity in their environment, have preferences for certain states of affairs, and attempt to interact with their environment to procure those states of affairs have agency and self-efficacy.
I'm not sure how successful that would be under thorough scrutiny, but it definitely excludes rocks. It does include things like people, some sorts of animals, and the china brain.
No. Does a mechanical clock have 'free will' or 'agency' if the person looking at it doesn't know what it will do next? Or is a difference of perspective a necessary rather than sufficient criterion?
Also some questions (to MrMister, Yar especially)
do you guys believe that the china brain has 'agency' in the colloquial sense? What about some sort of 'qualia' insofar as qualia would exist as a result of the sensory input of a china-nation?
What if a china brain was to interact directly, communicating with one of the people in china acting as a neuron? Would both parties be said to have agency or free will?
Can a modern nation be considered to have agency or free will? If not what specifically (in measurable, empirical terms) would have to change before it could be considered one?
Some people think that the language of choice is a primitive, i.e. that it cannot be defined in terms of some other set of vocabulary that does not itself reference choice. This is not necessarily a bad thing; for instance, for most of history this was true of temporal concepts (and it still is true of them for the average person), and it's also true of experiential color concepts. Choice might represent a primitive category like time or the experience of color. I think that Wallace is an example of a philosopher who takes this to be true (he thinks that volition is a basic and irreducible mental event).
I don't tend to think that's true myself, however. I am inclined to think that choice is analyzable in terms of the combination of some set of intentional states, like beliefs and desires, which as a result produces an intention. That is pretty hand-wavy, but to give a more precise formulation would be a lot of work.
If the compatibilist were 'winning' just by definitional fiat then it would indeed be a hollow victory. For instance, I can define having free will as "wearing pants," and then I would certainly have free will. But no one would really care. Instead, the compatibilist is trying to show, as I quoted Frank Jackson as saying, that: "first, that the folk concept of free action involves a potentially unstable attempt to find a middle way between the random and the determined, second, that the folk conception is nowhere instantiated, and, third, that a compatibilist substitute does all we legitimately require of free action."
I think that I've already done a good enough job of those first two things, i.e. I've shown that whatever concept of free will we might have initially held, and which we thought to be ruled out by determinism, is hopelessly incoherent. More recently I've turned my attention to demonstrating the third thing, i.e. that there is a rival compatibilist notion of free will which is not incoherent or impossible. This is what my talk of agency is supposed to be in support of. Basically, the idea is this: sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, and that through said action you cause an event in the world, that, if all works out ideally, in some way furthers your goals and projects. That certainly looks like free will when you squint, especially given that the alternative notion, the one that we started with, is clearly incoherent.
I agree with Chake99 here. Although the contrast between the objective and subjective points of view is what generates the problem of free will, it does not itself offer a solution. That is precisely because free will is not something which we take to be observer-relative: the very same action cannot be both free and unfree when viewed from different perspectives, any more than a rock could be both iron and gold when viewed from different perspectives.
I don't think that this is really related to free will at all, but as a separate thesis in philosophy of mind I do tend to think that the china brain is just as full fledged an agent as any other. If it were to talk to one of its neurons then that might be trippy, but it wouldn't present any special philosophical difficulty.
I don't think that modern nations are agents, however, because both 1) they are not internally structured in such a way as to causally or functionally mimic the internal structure of an agent and 2) they don't act like agents in anything but the most extended of metaphorical senses.
In any case, though, these questions are questions about what sorts of things can have intentional states--beliefs, desires, etc.--rather than the relationship between intentional states and agency or free will.
To me, though, this just seems like equivocation.
If, sometimes your beliefs and desires combine in such a way as to move you to action, they only "moved" you to "action" because they could only have moved you to action.
It's like you have a bunch of dominoes lined up, and on top of each domino is a tiny card castle. You knock down the first domino in the chain, and then observe that the card castle on the final domino toppled. "Look, the card castle was moved to action, and as we all know, every card castle's goal in life is to be knocked over. It has free will because it is sufficiently far removed from the deterministic chain of events that gave rise to its occurrence!"
I'm not really arguing with compatibilism, I guess I'm just looking for a more precise statement of it.
I think that first I need you to explain what you think the threat of determinism is.
That, literally, everything is determined. What is the definition of agency other than arbitrarily assigning certain events in the world-line to be "caused by an agent with 'free will' " or ~"cause by an agent with 'free will' ".
The concept of agency is indeed supposed to draw that distinction. But I don't see what licenses you to say that it does so in an arbitrary way. Certain events are caused by agents acting out their goals and projects, whereas others are caused by, say, meteorites; that certainly seems like an important categorical distinction to draw.
And also, I will reiterate that I don't think that the truth of physical determinism actually matters to this discussion, as I argued in section 3 of the original post. The problem is not about whether events are settled or not beforehand, the problem is about whether we can see any contribution to the eventual outcomes as coming from us ourselves. Determinism is only incidental to that.
The idea of the self, identity or subject as consisting of those "determinants," rather than being determined by them, is pretty much inarguable. I am my desires, my beliefs, my acculturation, my trauma, my memories, etc. There is no distinction between them and me. The argument could be made that any aspect of my subjective experience, including physical senses and seemingly trivial phenomena, are part of the self, however peripheral.
However, this concept could as easily be used to argue that "free will" is an empty idea as it could be used to argue that "free will" exists.
It is fairly obvious that my identity, those elements which compose me as described above, are not under my control. They are themselves determined by pre-existing forces, whether it's biology or culture or atoms bumping into each other. How could "I" control them, if they are "me," and thus must always-already exist if I exist?
So what is will? It is desire, interest, want - it is the impetus to action. These aspects of the personality are just as much a product of the forces that generate a personality as any other. Thus, will is determined.
But does this mean it is not "free"? What, exactly, would freedom mean for such a thing as the will? What would it be free of? It is clearly not free of pre-existing forces which have shaped it, and thus of the decisions and choices driven by the will.
To me, the equally reasonable conclusion is that the existence of selfhood or identity is incoherent without determinism. For a will to be "free" of the forces that shaped it is for it cease to exist.
The only way to prove or disprove the notion of free will as true and complete control over your own behavior would be to have 2 creatures, identical in every way, experience the exact same stimuli in the exact same order. Then you would observe their behaviors to see whether they differ or match. This is basically impossible. I have a hunch, though, that if such an experiment were possible, their behaviors would match. I say this because every mental process has a physical component; it would be like feeding the same data into the same program on two identical computers. Human behavior just looks "freer" because of the incredible complexity of the brain. You can sort of see through the facade in less complex creatures though, like flies or worms or what have you, which operate largely on basic responses to stimuli. That doesn't mean you can predict their behavior exactly, because there is still an impressive complexity there.
You could argue that consciousness is the "free" part of free will, but consciousness is just where battle between opposing signals is fought. It's necessarily rooted in the physical realm because the processes that influence it are. If this wasn't true, then psychoactive drugs wouldn't do anything. Does that mean that your whole life is predetermined? No, it just means that you will always react to stimuli the way that you would react to it, as shaped by your previous experiences. Your actions will always be unique, however, because (as stated before) there is no one else out there completely identical to you who has received the exact same stimuli as you.
I'm not sure I see this at all. You said
If the tangent can be indulged, let us take for example the the government of the U.S. It very clearly has certain preferences and desires (i.e. Americans not dying, lowering unemployment, increasing GDP, lowering crime, people not doing drugs). It also very clearly has certain beliefs - institutional knowledge both collected in databases and belonging to those humans who are part of it which it 'believes' to represent the state of the world. The U.S. government also decides and acts - it reflects on its beliefs and desires and then tries to create a state of affairs it prefers. It's also aware of itself as a country acting within the world, and it's decisions incorporate this representation (i.e. it's self-conscious and would pass any sort of possible the mirror test*). To me, this seems to meet most of the requirements for compatibilist agency.
*e.g. drop a bomb warning on capitol hill threatening the government and watch the government respond
So I'll just respond to Chake99's most recent post: we don't assign labels of agency and free will to a government because that isn't very useful to us. It might fit, but the underlying agency of individual politicians involved are both overly apparent to us and also presumably of more interest to us in the process of actually analyzing a situation and progressing forward, than would be a notion of agency and free will assigned to the government as a whole.
A simpler way to look at it is to say that if something seems to have agency and free will simply because it aggregates and averages the free will of agents that comprise it, then this is not in our defintion of agency and free will. When you break free will and choice down to where they don't exist anymore, then I have trouble accepting that as an argument that they don't still exist when they aren't broken down. But if you breaks free will and choice down to where they are just an aggregate of other free will and choice, then yes, that's a decent argument against the aggregate.
I'm a compatibilist and at first I was awed by determinism but then i realized it sort of doesn't matter.
When engaging in a discussion of Free Will I think that a distinction needs to be made.
1) A conversation regarding the metaphysical conflict between determinism and free will.
2) A conversation regarding the ethical conflict between determinism and free will.
If we convolute these two completely different discussions, then the conversation gets muddled pretty quickly given how different the conversations are. We can have conversation 1 without ever using the term "responsibility", but 2 is going to rely heavily on notions of responsibility.
All that to say that I think when we talk about free will and determinism we need to be very clear regarding whether we are discussing metaphysics or ethics.
What is the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity". I'm thinking about the distinction between the person and the rock. Because, again, in your account both a person and a rock are "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things", and you do not want to say that the person is somehow magically different than the rock despite your claiming, with regard to responsibility, that a person is different than a rock.
I want to know what the difference is between a person and a rock; the difference between "beliefs, desires, hopes, cognitions" and "gravity, velocity, inertia". Presumably you think these different classes of things to be quite different, but you have not explained how they are different.
And given that you want both rocks and persons to be the same kind of thing, "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things" I do not know from where you are pulling any notion that rocks and persons are different.
The conclusion of your argument is "persons are morally responsible in a way that rocks are not".
I want to know what premises can be used in this argument which are not simply restatements of that conclusion.
Sure, but what is an "intention" other than a sort of magical pseudo-causal force in those magical person entities?
You cannot collapse everything into "lumps of happenings in the objective causal order of things" and then stipulate that particular amalgamations within this causal order are special in their having "intentions", whatever those are.
Usually when I have this conversation with people and "intention" comes up eventually they wind up defining "intention" as "choice", which begs the question of the whole fucking argument, given that we are attempting to discern whether or not there is such a thing as choice, since we're arguing about free will v. determinism.
I will grant you that we can segment a particular set of causal relations within the universal causal nexus and label that set "Yar", in the same way that we dan segment a particular set of causal relations and label that "rock falling" or "BP oil well spilling oil".
What I will not grant, and have yet to discern an argument for, is how the Yar set has the magical "choice" and "free will" whereas the rock and BP oil well do not have "choice" or "free will".
I am entirely happy to say that the set of causal happenings Yar acts in accord with its own internally preserved determining forces which themselves came to be as a result of other interractions within the universal causal nexus; that is fantastic.
But I do not know how you got "freedom" or "choice" out of what you posted.
If we put a battery into a fan, it will do what a fan does.
If we put some food and oxygen into a Yar, it will do what a fan does.
How does Yar have free will and choice if the fan does not, given that Yar and the fan are the same thing?
If your contention is that Yars and fans are not the same thing, then how are they different? Yars have "desires" while fans have "programming"? What's the difference?
Free and Not-Free are opposites. What is the meaningful distinction to be made so explaining their opposition? Well, free is not caused, whereas not-free is caused. So, etc.
If we are talking about a different kind of freedom, then define it. But I see no reason to make a distinction between "free" and "not-free" unless there is a difference, and the only meaningful difference is with regard to causality.
I am contending that stating the conclusion of the argument as a premise is a logical error.
If an argument to discern whether or not Player A is free starts with "Premise 1: Player A is free", that is fine; but it is a very shitty argument.
My understanding is that in free will v. determinism conversations the point is to discern which is correct by allowing for the possibility that each be correct. If we start assuming free will...then we aren't really having a genuine debate / discussion on the matter.
Moreover, of one's argument for free will starts with "I am free", then it will be very difficult for that argument to withstand criticism.
I think the inconsistencies or problems which result are the same as any argument within which one's premises are the conclusion for which one is arguing.
But you've set up the definition of agency and self-efficacy to already contain that magical property for which one needs to argue in order to preserve freedom.
If you define a person to have "preferences" while rocks lack preferences, and you define "preferences" to be self-caused motivating states...then you've just snuck the magic of freedom into the argument.
If we are trying to argue that there is freedom, then we cannot start with a premise which basically states "there is freedom". Because that's not an argument; that's just stating what one believes.
The question is how we reconcile freedom will and determinism, uncaused actions and causality, without simply stating that some things, persons, have a magical freedom spot in their mind within which they are uncaused, or caused in a super-special different way than rocks are.
So, as an atheist I essentially take the fourth position, that the concept of Free Will is an outdated and irrelevant relic of the past. It really isn't that important.
Human beings do things. Animals do things. Rocks bouncing around in space do things. There are physical reasons that exist in the real world that caused all those things to do things. I look at his whole debate and think that it's unclear what free will is even trying to say outside of a religious context.
If it's trying to say that human beings are immune to the whole "things do things because of reasons" law that applies to almost everything in the universe, then it's stupid. We do things for reasons just like everything else in this world that's bigger than an electron.
If it's just trying to say that human beings consider different courses of action and then decide to something, and that decision is important and valuable, then cool, I'm okay with that.
But don't think that this is the same thing as the orthodox Christian definition of Free Will that folks like Thomas Aquinas considered. They conceive of free will as something explicitly and by definition supernatural - a totally free choice, free of causation, between God and not-God. But that definition is just kind of silly when you're an atheist. It loses all meaning.
So the concept of Free Will is really just meaningless to me.
Yey summary statements!
1) Beliefs and desires combine in such a way to move X to action. (person)
2) Gravity and friction combine in such a way as to move X to action. (rock)
What's the difference?
Well, 1 "furthers your goals and projects" while 2 occurs absent goals and projects.
Except that means that they did not simply "combine", as gravity and friction would combine, but rather were made to combine with regard to an intention maintained for the sake of goals and projects; that the goal or project has some causal impact (volition?) upon the coming to be of the combination of the beliefs and desires which then motivated the action.
Which begs the damn question.
No, determinism brings into question the very notion of a "coming from us ourselves", as all events are simply the results of the causal nexus of the universe. I am typing this post because (long causal chain) in the same way that a rock falls down a hill because (long causal chain).
Actors? What actors?
Not really, no. Unless by "religious" you mean "ethical"; but I am pretty sure that atheists have ethics.
It only makes sense to discuss how one "ought to" or "should" act if one has control over one's actions; if I control my actions in the way that a rock does not control its actions.
Determinism brings this entire notion into question, as it is not "I" which controls my actions, but rather "my actions" are simply the necessary consequent of previously existing states which causally determine how I act.
Teaching the ethical rule "Killing is bad" only makes sense if particular beings can learn that rule and so modify their behavior. If everything which happens is only a necessary causal consequent of the causal nexus of the universe, all of which was determined when the first cosmic domino fell, then teaching someone ethics is complete nonsense, as everything which will ever happen, ever, has already been determined for millions of years.
So you have a philosophy without stuff / nouns?
What does the verbing in your philosophy?
You must not mean exactly what you write here, because obviously beliefs, desires, hopes and cognitions are different from gravity, velocity, and inertia. For instance, beliefs, desires, and hopes are all intentional states, states of an agent, whereas gravity is a force. States are not forces, a fortiori gravity is different from a belief or desire. What you must mean is that there is some relevant similarity which you take to hold, but, unfortunately, you have not spelled out what that similarity is supposed to be.
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.
Why I most certainly can: just because two different things both belong to the causal order of the world does not mean that they must have all their properties in common. My mug and my jacket are both things that exist in the causal order of the world, but I can neither drink from my jacket nor can I wear my mug.
One of the properties that things can have is being the bearer of intentional states. Some things, in addition to being soft or hard, tall or short, can hope to be the president or think that oatmeal is delicious. I am one such thing, and I strongly suspect that my cat is another, and hopefully you are too.
No, that is absolutely not what I am saying. If I were to say that the combining of beliefs and desires to form intentions was something an agent did then I would enter an immediate vicious regress; for how could the agent take the action to combine his beliefs and desires, except by first combining other beliefs and desires, and how could he take that action without first combining other beliefs and desire, and so on.
It is not that I act to combine my belief that there is water in my cup and my desire to drink to form the intention that I reach out for my cup. Combining them is not something that I do at all, it rather something that happens inside me. And it is something that is happening inside me whenever I act intentionally.
I think we may be having something of a burder of proof argument, as you state that I have to define the similarity, whereas I think you need to define the difference.
The only difference between, say, (beliefs, desires, hopes) and (gravity, velocity) that I can discern is location: beliefs, desires, and hopes are internal to a person whereas gravity and velocity are external forces acting on rocks. So a belief is my own as it is internal to me, whereas gravity cannot be a rock's own as gravity is an external force.
But why does that matter? Why is location a significant factor? Or, take, for example, the idea of inertia. We could specify that inertia is internal to a rock in the same way that a desire is internal to a person. So, then, are inertia and desire the same sort of thing given that they have the same location? The rock's tendancy to stay in one location could be said to be internal to the rock in the way that my desire for ice cream tends to be a continual feature to me.
Unless you think there is a difference other than location. But, then, what is the difference? Other than belief, desire, hope being super-special freedom things.
Have you provided an argument for there being intentional states? If so, I missed it.
Additionally, how are intentional states not deterministic? If I program a robot to always sit down in spot B, and a person intends to sit in spot B, is there a difference between the robot's programming and the person's intending? What is the difference?
1) Combining belief and desire is not something that I do at all.
2) it rather something that happens inside me
3) it is something that is happening inside me whenever I act intentionally
So, the person does not combine the belief and desire (1) but rather the combination happens inside the person (2) when the person intends(3).
What is intending?
1 and 2, I think, are fine with regard to your collapsing everything into a universal causal nexus; things are combined and that combining happens "within" a particular nexus of causality. Ok, cool.
But 3 posits some kind of agency onto the person which is not the result of a causal nexus and rather is "I intend", the source of the intention is the "I" which is estranged and independent of any other causal forces.
If the intention, if the act of intending, is causally determined, then we're still stuck in determinism. If the intention is independent of causal forces, then you've invoked magic.
I have not provided an argument that intentional states are possible, because I did not (and still do not) feel the need to argue that people are capable of believing things, desiring things, hoping for things to come about, fearing things, respecting things, etc. If you have some reason to doubt this rather uncontroversial premise then voice it, but I can't read your mind.
You deeply misunderstand my argument if you think that I rely on the purported fact that intentional states are not deterministic to account for free will. I do not rely on that purported fact at all, because it is not actually true. Intentional states do interact in largely deterministic ways. To see why, just suppose for a moment they didn't: suppose, for instance, that the desire to drink water was just as likely to lead to the forming of an intention to paint pictures as it was to lead to the forming of an intention to drink water. But then by virtue of what fact does it count as the desire to drink water in the first place? Why is it not, instead, the desire to paint pictures? The content of an intentional state necessitates that it play a certain functional role, which, in turn necessitates a large degree of determinism in its interactions.
So, intentional states are largely, if not totally, deterministic. But does that lead to a problem? You say:
But in order to say that you must not be paying attention: my entire point is that we can be, as you so colorfully say, "still stuck in determinism" while nonetheless possessing free will. It is baldly question-begging for you to assert that determinism and "invoking magic" are the only two alternatives. There is another alternative, compatibilism, and it is correct.
But what is it that is so special about intentional states, you ask?
Spatial location is certainly not a significant factor. For instance, I can have a bomb planted in my chest, but when it explodes (or fails to) that is not a product of my agency. Or, in other words, what matters is not that beliefs and desires are internal to the body, but rather that they are internal to the agent.
In fact, intentional states are not only internal to the agent, but they provide the very criteria for action. To elaborate: how is it that we can differentiate actions which occur within my body--such as spasms, cancerous growths, etc.--from actions that I myself undertake--such as picking up a glass, throwing a ball, etc? Well, actions that I undertake issue from the proper combination of my intentional states: it is by virtue of the fact that I kicked my leg because I desired to score a goal and believed that kicking the ball would score a goal the movement of my leg counts as an action rather than a spasm. The difference between that case and the case where the doctor hits my knee is that in the former my bodily movement is triggered by the proper combination of intentional states whereas in the latter my bodily movement is triggered by a hammer.
On this account, action just is the proper interaction of intentional states. An agent is made up of a variety of sub-agential parts, and what is happening on the sub-agential level when an agent acts is that intentional states are combining. Just as what it is for a vacuum cleaner to clean is for its bristles to spin, it's valves to open, and etc., what it is for an agent to act is for her intentional states to properly combine. The crucial difference between the human and the vacuum cleaner does not lie in whether they are made up of parts, or whether those parts interact deterministically--it lies in the fact that the human's sub-agential parts include intentional states.
In the sense of "freedom" at play in free will arguments, all human action is necessarily the product of a free will; there is no unfree will against which to contrast. We can, nonetheless, draw important distinctions among human actions regarding coercion, ignorance, and so on. They just aren't going to be drawn in terms of freedom of the will.
Say you're watching a movie called The Universe.
There are two people in the audience. MrMr and _J_. After watching the movie MrMr turns to _J_ and says, "I thought the motivations for the characters in this movie were really well fleshed out; you can really see how Don Jean-Pierre had to struggle to choose between losing his daughter, or ruining his country forever."
_J_ turns back and says, "That's a ridiculous statement, we just observed a series of pictures. They could only ever happen in the order they were presented. The struggle was nonexistent."
And both of you keep arguing past each other about who is right. You're rejecting each others premises.
haha, I like this analogy. Although I have to say, I tend towards the determinist view. I don't see how anything can really be called a "choice" when it's completely determined by extermal stimuli, internal body/brain states, and maybe some randomness too. To really make a choice, it seems like people would have to do things which have no specific reason, and yet, are not completely random. Maybe such actions would appear random, though.
So, you do not seem to be arguing for Free Will, but rather are arguing for the Kantian bastardization of Free Will that we get out of the 2nd Critique and the Metaphysics of Morals; a will is free when it acts in accord with, is determined by, its own laws. So, if I have the desire for X, and act in accord with that desire, I am acting freely.
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.
Because, again, that is what "free" means. And that is precisely why "Free Will" is impossible; persons have reasons, limits, influences. An actually Free Will is actually impossible; no one would argue that it is possible.
So, that's the "you are not arguing for a Free Will, you are arguing for Kantian nonsense" response.
The other response is slightly better, i think.
Say that I have a desire for X. Whence that desire? Well, given the causal nexus of the universe, I came to have that desire for X as a result of a causal process; it did not randomly, uncausedly pop into my mind; it came to be in my mind via a causal chain of actions. Say I desire a Coke as a result of culture impacting me, marketing impacting me, biological needs impacting me, etc.
So, how can it be said that (I desire X), freely, if my coming to have desire X results from a deterministic causal chain? Given the causal nexus of the universe, I came to have desire X.
So, I did not freely come to have the desire, but rather the desire was posited onto me via a causal chain.
This is the problem of the example you give at the end of your post:
But how is (desire to score a goal) different from (hit by a hammer) given that the desire to score a goal came to be in the person as a result of a casual chain of events; your parents told you to score the goal, your coach told you, you have a biological need to reproduce and understand the goal scoring to possibly increase your chance of getting laid.
Knee hit with hammer causally results in leg jerking.
Understanding that X can result in getting laid causally results in X being pursued when one has a desire for getting laid, the desire for which results from biology, which results from etc.
How are those actually different? How is the pursuit of X not simply a slightly more elaborate version of the leg jerking? I will agree that it is more complicated, more steps are involved, but there is no magic of freedom simply by virtue of there being many steps.
It seems like you would have to sneak some magic in there; kneejerk is involuntary while goal scoring is voluntary. But goal scoring is not voluntary; it is the necessary causal outcome of a particular amalgamation of causal forces. It cannot be the case that I freely chose to do it, as it happened as a result of a wealth of external stimuli.
Which is the problem with the Kantian notion of Free Will: A will is free that acts in accord with its own laws.
"Its own" has a very hollow meaning if a particular being is simply the result of a causal chain of events. I never *really* created my "own" laws; I came to have those laws which I was deterministically caused to have. So, if I am a being which acts in accord with the categorical imperative I never freely came to choose that, but rather I have been causally determined to be the kind of thing which acts in accord with the categorical imperative; it was impossible for me to have not been this kind of thing.
Which is why there is no freedom. If everything I am is that which I must deterministically, causally, necessarily be, then I could never have done otherwise.
So, it cannot be my responsibility for acting in accord with the desire to strangle a kitten which I was causally determined to have; I was necessarily determined to strangle the kitten given my having been infected with the desire by external forces and my having come to encounter the kitten via a causal chain of events. You can't blame me for something I was necessarily determined to do.
Unless you're John Calvin.
It's not that we are rejecting one another's premises. We reject the other's vocabulary. The problem is that MrMr wants to call "free" that which is not "free" and I want to only call "free" that which is "free".
If a machine comes to be programmed to act towards end X, MrMr / Kant are going to say that machine is free when it acts towards end X.
I am going to say that is not freedom, because not only was the acquisition of the end X not free, but also the pursuit of end X is not free, as the pursuit of end X is caused by having end X as an end.
Freedom is a very, very, very silly and absurd thing that more likely than not never existed, never will exist, and never can exist. So I really do not know why intelligent people still argue for it.
Not exacly. Actual, real, free choice would not even be random. Randomness occurs within the confine of possibility. To be free, there must be no confines.
Think of that one scene from the episode of Community within which the teacher is trying to actualize Dead Poets Society. He walks up to the coffee bar and sees coffee, espresso, and lattes. The waitress asks what he wants. He exclaims, "A birthday cake!"
That's closer to freedom.
But, really, in that situation of being at a coffee bar, the actual free choice would be a choice which is unrestricted, uncaused, unknown (as knowing is structural), unlinguistic (language is structure). And, really, to have a free choice one would have to be completely free from context, so no coffee bar either..and bodies are limiting...so no body...and there could not be a limit to the process of thought...so....
You get the point: freedom is absurd.