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Yet another Free Will Thread

I'm not sure it does either. In fact, van Inwagen feels the same way. He calls free will a mystery. No matter what your beliefs regarding free will, you are believing something that seems to be false.
 
AtaraX said:
We are designed by our genes to seek some outcomes and avoid others but our genes can't know exactly the situations we will find ourselves in. Our environment is too complex for our genes to perfectly predict the future and script out every motion we are to make through out our lives. If they could do this they would simply make us like clockwork automatons. Our genes cope with the complexity of the world by building flexibility into us: limited senses and limited speculative power so we have limited ability to determine how to reach goals we are designed to reach.

Ironically, our limited ability is the key to free will. If our genes could have designed us as super agents capable of perceiving and processing all causes then we would be no better off than the clockwork automatons, we would simply always take the optimal route (determined essentially by the interest of our genes) and our consciousness would be redundant.

It is in the middle ground of imperfect agency where free will emerges. We are complex multi-state avoiding and seeking machines with a high degree of flexibility. And thus we have the could-have-done-differently free will. Determinism states that everything has one ultimate outcome but within that deterministic universe we have build in flexibility so if it were possible to rewind the deterministic universal tape and whisper a piece of advice into ear of one of us imperfect agents the whole tape from that point on would change. If we could have known better (or just differently) we could have done differently. And in that is the free will we have and desire.

So in the only rational sense of the word we have free will. There are objections I can anticipate to my explanation but this is a forum so I will wait to others raise them to respond to them.
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I don't see how anything you wrote precludes us from being clockwork automatons. Just because elements of the clockwork automation may have been displaced from "genes" to synaptic networks doesn't make us less clockwork automatic, it seems to me. Defend your distinction, please.

But there is another thing that Tom Clark said that I thought was horrendous. He claimed that (since there was no free will) we can't hold criminals truly responsible for their actions! I know he couched it with provisions that did not follow from his argument to make it more palatable, like we still need a criminal justice system, but seriously this is a complete non sequitur.

First, I resent the intellectual elitism that is implicit in this kind of thinking: we educated, liberal-minded sorts are capable of understanding the big picture but we need to make allowances for those lesser unfortunates without the advantages and abilities we have.

Second, if criminals cannot be held responsible for their actions because they lack free will, how can we (also lacking free will) be held responsible for the way we treat them? Morality goes right out the window.

Third, I think Tom Clark is quick to embrace this faulty reasoning because he is blinded here by his agenda of taking retribution out of the criminal justice system. I sympathize with his cause but there are much better arguments for it, there are studies he could cite for example that I'm sure have been done. Cherry-picking bronze age metaphysical arguments that erode our agency to make your moral point is just as bad as cherry-picking bronze age myths from the bible to make your moral point.
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I don't see any intellectual elitism in Clark saying criminals aren't culpable in a free will agency sense of the word. He doesn't exempt elites. An argument can be made that only an elite subset of humanity has functional free will, but I don't see Clark making that argument as you relate his POV.

Also, you point out that neither criminals nor the enforcer of justice (nor the rest of us) have free will according to Clark's POV -does Clark deny that? Sure, it may make the concept of enforcement of justice all around absurd, but it doesn't mean it's an inaccurate description of what's going on.

I myself favor a more rational, empirically informed, and experimental and innovating approach to governance. It's a mystery to me why this isn't more universally embraced by my fellow humans. Perhaps it can be chalked up to wrinkles in the big bang's original matter, the limiting constants governing our universe, and the arbitrary random consequences of quantum fluctuation and chance?
 
KingMerv00 said:
Quantum weirdness probably adds some level of unpredictability on the micro scale but that doesn't give the mind control over itself.
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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we don't know that one way or another. Where dimensional perception exists is nontrivial to me. If one looks in a brain, one merely sees charged particles flowing around, not the rich perceptual universe we experience. Most people seem to casually dismiss this, but I think it's potentially a huge gap in our understanding of how apparent reality operates. It seems possible to me that apparent free will exists in this same, not completely explained space. And "quantum weirdness" seems as good a contributory force/gateway as any I've seen positted thus far.
 
chriswl said:
I think any supposed benefits here would depend on the legal system convincing us they had actually got the right person, even though they hadn't. If we knew that the police just arrested people at random then we would feel just as safe committing crimes as we would sticking to the law. I'm assuming a legal system based on deception would not survive very long.

Punishing the innocent has no deterrence value because it doesn't target criminal behaviour.
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It can theoretically have other net benefits to society though. For example, humiliating fat people, or people of below average intelligence, or short people could in theory result in more humor and relaxation than stress to the larger population, resulting in increased population health and economic productivity. I'm not saying this is necessarilly the case, but I think it's in the realm of the possible.
 
Freddy said:
If anyone is interested in the incompatibilist position, I recommend An Essay on Free Will by Peter van Inwagen. It is widely considered a modern classic, and it has been very influential in shaping the debate on the subject of free will (I think he wrote it in the 70's or 80's). Van Inwagen is a theist but not a dualist (but he doesn't invoke God in his arguments, so his being a theist is probably irrelevant), and having taken a class from him at Notre Dame, I can say that he may well be the smartest person I've ever met.

His conclusions are very interesting. He thinks that free will is definitely incompatible with determinism, but that it also seems to be incompatible with indeterminism. Nevertheless, we are powerless not to believe that we have free will. That is, I can believe that free will is an illusion, but I still cannot stop believing that I have free will. If I were really able to stop believing that I have free will, it would be impossible to ever try to decide what to do, and I would be incapable of functioning. It is impossible for me to try to decide whether to do A or B unless I believe that it is possible for me to do either.

If I believe that free will is an illusion then I simply hold incompatible beliefs, because in that case I would believe both that I do not have free will and that I do have free will, since it is impossible for me not to believe that I have free will.

(A subtle point: it is impossible for me not to believe that I have free will, but it is not impossible for me to believe that I do not have free will. This is because it is not impossible for someone to have inconsistent beliefs. People do it all the time. I can believe that I do not have free will, but that doesn't mean that I don't also at some level believe that I do have free will.)

Now, this doesn't mean that free will is real, because it is obvious that believing in one's free will is beneficial for survival (because belief in one's free will is necessary for decision making), and it may just be a trick of evolution. But we might as well believe that free will is real because we literally can't help it. The only alternative to believing that I have free will is for me to simultaneously believe two propositions that I know to be inconsistent.

I just think that it's a very creative way of approaching the problem, and as I said it has generated a lot of response and influenced the opinions of many analytic philosophers.
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Interesting. I'm not convinced that one must at some level believe they have free will in order to survive. For example, one could sincerely believe that all options presented to one are an illusion or the equivalent of a grand kabuki, and that whatever option they end up "choosing" is in reality the only one they could have chosen. How does he address this argument, if in fact he does?

I think neuroscientists are probably going to be the most informative on these topics over the next few years.
 
Freddy said:
Nevertheless, we are powerless not to believe that we have free will. That is, I can believe that free will is an illusion, but I still cannot stop believing that I have free will. If I were really able to stop believing that I have free will, it would be impossible to ever try to decide what to do, and I would be incapable of functioning. It is impossible for me to try to decide whether to do A or B unless I believe that it is possible for me to do either.
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I don't understand this. How does believing that the understanding I come to of a system and the choice I make based on this system is deterministic stop me making a decision?

My perspective is I still make choices much as a believer in free will would despite not believing in it, and that the process is much the same as a computer trying to guess an optimal solution to a badly defined and largely intractable problem.

Would your professor say I'm deluding myself?
 
AtaraX said:
The free will we want is the could-have-done-differently free will and we have that.
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Coulda, shoulda, woulda ... but didn't. Doesn't get us far, does it?

Consciousness is a deeply weird phaenomenon but it does seem to be mostly about observing what we do and coming up with reasons post facto. Even when we weigh-up options weights are assigned by our animal side, our emotions. Not much room for free will there.
 
It might not need "much". What I take as free will seems more a millisec here & there to switch gears.
 
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We lose free will once we do an act ovber and over again, then we have created the synapic routes so welll worn, new pathways are almost impossible to take without great mental effort or great external stimuluses, like judgment or failures when doing the same thing over and over again. As one definition of insanity is defined as expecting different results from doing the same thing.
 
Jekyll said:
I don't understand this. How does believing that the understanding I come to of a system and the choice I make based on this system is deterministic stop me making a decision?

My perspective is I still make choices much as a believer in free will would despite not believing in it, and that the process is much the same as a computer trying to guess an optimal solution to a badly defined and largely intractable problem.

Would your professor say I'm deluding myself?
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I think he would say that while you consciously deny that you have free will, your actions presuppose the belief that you have free will. The fact that you described what you do as "making choices" seems to tell in favor of that suggestion. If there is no free will, then you aren't making any choices, even though it may seem to you that you are. To the extent that you believe that you are making choices, you believe that you have free will. To the extent that you can't help believing that you make choices, you can't help believing in free will.
 
My opinion on the subject: Libertarian Free Will, whilst liked by many people, is a nonsensical concept in a couple of ways.

Firstly: it can't exist in the first place. Let's call the entity that houses the free will (be it a human mind, or a soul or whatever) the Agent. Now, if the agent came into existance at any time it must either be created according to some intention, pattern or laws of nature (that is deterministically) or have been created randomly (indeterministically). Everyone agrees that the first of these types is not free will, since the initial state of the agent was determined by forces outside its control, and therefore subsequent states will also (ultimately) be outside its control. However, the second type is not free will either, since the initial state is also outside the control of the agent. The agent is, in no case free to pick its initial state and assuming that the only things that determine the subsequent states of the agent are the initial state, deterministic forces and random occurrences, the agent can never be said to be truly free. If however, the agent did not come into existance at any time, there was no initial state and so we can take any point in the infinite existance of the agent and see that the state it is in at that point was determined by its state at some arbitrary point in the past and by the sum total of deterministic and random occurences that have affected it since then. Since there are no points in the infinite past of the agent where it is able to make decisions that are not determined by these factors, there is no way for it to have free will.

So before we even examine the reality of the world, Libertarian Free Will is out, whatever kind of universe we happen to find. But there is another problem (mentioned by others in this thread already, so I'll attempt brevity): Libertarian Free will is not free - it's just capricious. It is the freedom to do what you do not will, to act against the decision that you have made, the freedom to have your decsions be beyond your control. This is because, if your decisions are not based on your initial state and the events that have happened to you since then, then what are they based on? Because it is certainly not your personality, your desires, your motives or your will. It is a bizarre concept.

Compatibilist free will is a much more sensible idea. It is the freedom to act according to your decisions, to apply the being that you are to the the problems that you face, to will what you will. It is the kind of free will that I actually want, and it seems possible, at least in theory. I think of it as Pseudo-Free Will since (much like the relationship between the Pseudo Random Numbers used by computers and actually random numbers) it fulfills all requirements that we would want of free will, without actually being, in a strictly technical sense, free. It allows us to make the decisions we want to make, it allows us to hold people resonsible for their actions and it allows us to praise them for their decisions, too. That it is ultimately determined in theory is completely irrelevant, since it is almost certainly a chaotic system and thus unpredictable without infinitely accurate data.
 
Dave1001 said:
Perhaps it can be chalked up to wrinkles in the big bang's original matter, the limiting constants governing our universe, and the arbitrary random consequences of quantum fluctuation and chance?
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There's an idea I've been toying with in my head having to do with free will and the "arbitrary random consequences" of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is weird. Really weird. It's especially weird when you consider that the behavior of particles is not only random, but it only becomes non-random, i.e. it gets decided, when there is an observer. (The cat becomes fully dead or fully alive when you open the box, at least in some interpretations.)


So, maybe those charged particles in our brain really could go randomly this way or that way. Or, maybe they go this way or that way depending on an observer?

Is it conceivable that the observer does not just force the wave function to collapse in a random manner, but that there is an observer that picks from among the possibilities? Could the apparent randomness actually be a loophole that would allow free will? Could there be a "soul" that is an observer of the activity in our brains, and picks from the available possibilities?

It's a bit far fetched, and it's not fully thought out, but it's a thought I find intriguing. And if it is found, after some consideration, that the thought is preposterous, I take comfort in the fact that I had no choice but to think it.
 
Meadmaker, do a google search for Robert Kane and you will find a more worked-out scenario involving quantum fluctuations. Kane is one of the last "libertarian" free will thinkers out there. Personally, I don't buy it, but he does have some interesting ideas. Like Freddy and van Inwagen I spent a year in Kane's classroom. He is also a theist and a pretty darn good guy.
 
Freddy said:
His conclusions are very interesting. He thinks that free will is definitely incompatible with determinism, but that it also seems to be incompatible with indeterminism.
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Yes, because libertarian free will postulates a decision-making mechanism that is neither determined nor random. If only someone could explain what such a mechanism is like!

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Yes, because libertarian free will postulates a decision-making mechanism that is neither determined nor random. If only someone could explain what such a mechanism is like!

~~ Paul
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It would appear that we must deny one of the options and possibly redefine the way that we think. The Kantian Copernican Revolution supplies one option -- that causality itself may be a lie, a construction created by the way that our minds work.

It is interesting that the way we speak of this -- "what could such a mechanism be like" -- seems to belie causal thinking (to which, of course, we are predisposed). If our questions are based on causality then is it even possible to arrive at a non-causal answer? If our questions are not based on causality, may we make sense of anything? I think that is why Kant gave up on the project and listed free will as one of the antinomies.
 
I think the single biggest confusion factor in reconciling materialism with free will is that we are confused about the relationship between agents and the material world.

A person is not logically a particular arrangement of physical matter - if that were the case, then we couldn't talk about the same person when they were older, because the arrangement of matter would be different. A person is actually many different possible arrangements of matter, all of which could constitute the same person.

To say that a person can do either X or Y is to say that some of these arrangements would do X and some would do Y, and any of them would still be the same person. There's nothing non-materialist or even necessarily non-deterministic about that.
 
DogBoy said:
I think the single biggest confusion factor in reconciling materialism with free will is that we are confused about the relationship between agents and the material world.

A person is not logically a particular arrangement of physical matter - if that were the case, then we couldn't talk about the same person when they were older, because the arrangement of matter would be different. A person is actually many different possible arrangements of matter, all of which could constitute the same person.

To say that a person can do either X or Y is to say that some of these arrangements would do X and some would do Y, and any of them would still be the same person. There's nothing non-materialist or even necessarily non-deterministic about that.
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To repeat myself from an earlier thread...

I am not the same person I was when I started writing this sentence.
 
A person is actually many different possible arrangements of matter, all of which could constitute the same person.
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One could rather say that a person is a "mental" construction, a fantasy, a dream. Seems to me Hume said something along those lines........
 
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