jan said:
3/10 Manners of Speech
If I remember correctly, I never claimed determinism to be compatible with libertarian free will. I think that libertarian free will is incompatible with everything, including dualism...
1 : voluntary choice or decision (I do this of my own free will)
2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
Consider the following two sentences:
- I made a decision of my own free will.
- I made a decision by exercizing my free will.
These two sentences mean the same thing, although the first uses definition #1 and the second uses definition #2. Definition #1 simply means "voluntary choice" while #2 means "the ability to make voluntary choices."
The American Heritage Dictionary defines it like this:
1. The ability or discretion to choose; free choice:
chose to remain behind of my own free will.
2. The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.
Again, the first is "free choice" and the second is "the power to make free choices."
The only reason there are two definitions is because they can be used in two different ways (both happen to be nouns) but they both state related ideas, and both refer to libertarian free will (what other kind of "free will" is there?).
In fact, there can be no voluntary choice (definition #1) without the ability to make a voluntary choices (definition #2).
It is true that the phrase "of my own free will" (definition #1) is often used to mean "without coercion" (i.e. without a gun pointed at my head), but so is the second as in the sentence "I had no free will because a gun was pointed at my head." Also, both uses refer to
any circumstance which provides a person with no opportunity for voluntary choice, including determinism, in which no voluntary choice exists at all. Other possible things that might prevent or affect one's ability to make voluntary choices would be mental defect, lack of ability to comprehend the consequences of one's action due to immaturity, and other mitigating circumstances.
In the Webster's definition, the phrase "that are not determined by divine intervention" simply means that a diety isn't
forcing us to do its will (we're not puppets to a diety, but it might be possible that a diety somehow "enables" us to have free will). I don't see this version of free will (if it exists) to be incompatible with dualism, rather I think that it may only exist if dualism is true (i.e. we are more than the sum or our parts, that there is a part of us that we don't know about that allows us to make these choices ourselves, rather than our behavior being caused externally).
That is not to say that our choices are always unlimited. For example, we might be able to choose between only two possible things, or perhaps we are limited by the laws of physics (we cannot choose to fly, but we can choose whether to walk or run). Even if our choices are limited, we are still free to choose between them.
Ethically speaking, we are not held responsible for our actions if we're not choosing those actions voluntarily, whether that be because someone is holding a gun to our head or because we don't possess the ability to make our own choices. It would follow that if we don't possess the ability to make choices under determinism, then we cannot possibly voluntarily choose
anything, and therefore cannot be held responsible for anything we do.
It is possible to expand this and develop a concept of "being forced by the firing of my neurons". But how often do people worry about this kind of force?
Modern ethics is concerned with many reasons for which we might not have the power to voluntary choose, including mitigating circumstances, mental defect, or someone holding a gun to one's head. Most people don't tend to worry about determinism forcing their neurons to fire because most people presume libertarian free will to be a fact (and probably don't even consider the possibility of determinism), which would leave only other influences which might affect our ability to voluntarily choose to do or not do something.
If you suggest to the average person on the street that every choice they make was actually predetermined before they were born, they'd think you were crazy. Once explained, they are likely to ask something like "How can anything I do be voluntary if all my actions are being controlled by circumstances beyond my control that existed before I was born?" which is exactly the concept of "being forced by the firing of my neurons." If people don't associate "I didn't do this of my own free will" with determinism and neurons it is simply an indication that they presume free will to be a fact or that they don't know anything about determinism or neurons.
"I do this of my own free will" means something like "it wasn't a shotgun-wedding", it doesn't allude to philosophical determinism or neuroscience.
It asbosultely would allude to determinism or neuroscience if people didn't presume free will (assuming they even know what determinism or neuroscience is). But it is also used quite often to refer to mental defect or any number of other things that might take away one's ability to make voluntary decisions.
The very fact that compatibilists have been attempting to mesh the ideas of determinism with free will for thousands of years proves that libertarian free will is indeed related to philosophical determinism and neuroscience. We cannot make any voluntary choices if we don't have libertarian free will.
So, it seems to me that your only hope at compatibilism is to do what Dennett attempted, which is to redefine "free will" (and "voluntary" and "intentional" and other related terms) in order to provide some means in a deterministic world by which we can distinguish between those things that we typically consider involuntary or unintentional and those things we typically consider voluntary or intentional.
If, for you, this is just some verbal trick and nothing besides libertarian free will is genuine free will, then I believe that free will doesn't exist, at least unless someone could show me a kind of free will that doesn't violate physicalism.
I believe that libertarian free will ("could have done otherwise" and "ultimate source") is FREE WILL, but I can perhaps concede that another definition of "free will" which can exist alongside determinism might be used to define ethics concerning involuntary acts.
I don't think that the forking paths or the ultimate source model are useful at all. More on that below.
That may very well be, but you have yet to prove it.
If free will is something we share with thermostats, and if we agree that thermostats are pretty deterministic, that doesn't seem like an impossible task.
Well, perhaps ~free will is something we share with thermostats, but you have to prove that ~free will is a meaningful substitute for FREE WILL. So far, you have only used it to indicate a spectrum of ~intention, which is defined as how "much" we are able to understand the object using
only an intentional stance (black box) to being able to understand the object by using an intentional stance and perhaps other stances as well (a whiter box). Your claim is that things that are commonly thought of as having INTENTION (people) are black boxes, while things that are sometimes thought of as not having INTENTION (thermostats) are grey boxes, while things that are almost never thought of as having INTENTION (a rock) are close to white.
Although, humans are very good at anthropomorphizing all sorts of thing ("that rock really likes to lie there and do nothing" or "the rock wants to get to the center of the earth when you drop it"), so I'm not sure there is anything that is truly white.
I can buy this view of things, but you would have to show it to be useful in distinguishing between the responsibility that could be held by a rock for destroying a house in a landslide, the responsibility of a thermostat for destroying the house by causing the pipes to freeze, and the responsibility that can be held by a human for bulldozing the house. Only one of these is considered a "crime" and even then only under specific circumstances.
And I still think that both the forked path and the ultimate source model are useless, despite of thousands of years of tradition.
And still they have yet to be shown useless after thousands of years, nor has anyone even provided a reasonable alternative for the application of ethics. The very notion of "intent" and "responsibility" in most modern ethics system are tied up in the ideas of "could have done otherwise" and "ultimate source."
The thermostat as an example was, I think, provided by another poster, not by Dennett, and I just adopted it.
That's possible, but the Stanford article also uses it:
According to Dennett, even a thermostat can be interpreted as a very limited intentional system since its behavior can usefully be predicted by attributing to it adequate beliefs and desires to display it as acting rationally within some limited domain. For example, the thermostat desires that the room's temperature (or the engine's internal temperature) not go above or below a certain range. If it believes that it is out of the requisite range, the thermostat will respond appropriately to achieve its desired results.
From the Jargon File 4.4.7
Oh, now that seems silly to me. I'm a programmer by trade and could be referred to as a "hacker" so I can tell you for a fact that programmers/hackers/designers do sometimes anthropomorphize computer hardware and software, but they don't believe that they possess any real intent.
Sure, it might be "useful" in some cases to anthromorphize a rock, but that doesn't make the rock alive. Likewise, it might be "useful" to say that a dripping faucet is "sad" but does that mean it's really sad? I suppose you can argue that it's "useful" to think of a thermostat as having intentions, but I doubt if a repairman could possibly repair one unless he had a deeper knowledge of it. In fact, it would be very difficult indeed if we related to a thermostat using only an intentional stance. Therefore, we can think of the intentional stance as being "useful" but "incomplete." It might also be useful to consider the world as flat (such as with a map) but that doesn't make it so, and as a result the usefulness of the metaphor will always be limited.
It could just as easily be argued that the boxes have no shades of grey, but are completely black or white. Anything for which it would be impossible for us to understand using anything other than an intentional stance has real INTENTIONS, otherwise we simply haven't found a better way of understanding or relating to it (yet). If we
did know how to understand it another way, we would be able to understand it
better than we currently can using an intentional stance. One might claim that humans are the only thing for which we will always have to use an intentional stance because because only humans actually have true INTENTIONS. Alternately, one could claim that there are only white boxes, and that we can only understand the behavior of very complex objects (including humans) using an intentional stance because we haven't yet learned to understand it using a physical stance.
If this is true, why do we try to repair them?
Do you honestly feel that by repairing them, we are somehow holding thermostats ethically responsible for keeping the room a comfortable temperature? We only repair them when it is cheaper than replacing them. I feel no guilt in discarding a broken thermostat in the trash rather than repairing it.
-Bri
edited for poor grammar
What if the Creator were in fact endowed with free will? Wouldn't that provide for the best of both worlds? Wherein that which is most highly evolved, becomes the cause, of which the rest becomes the effect? And, while it may not appear this way, I believe in compatiblism myself.