The "subjects of morality": free will as effective moral judgement
"Philosophy of will" is, so far as I am aware (please correct me if I'm wrong), not generally considered a field of study unto itself, the way that philosophy of mind is, but I consider it a topic of equal importance in the overall structure of philosophical topics, so it gets its own thread in this series I'm doing.
Despite not being considered a field of study unto itself, there is a long history of philosophers addressing the topic of the will, especially its freedom or lack thereof. The history of that topic extends back at least as far as Aristotle, who contemplated something called the problem of future contingents, which concerns whether or not there are yet facts about future events, including about things that people will do in the future.
He and many subsequent philosophers reasoned that if there are already, in the present, facts about what will happen in the future, including the things that people will do, then that implies that those people have no choice but to do those things when those future times arrive, because it is already a fact that they will, which they held would imply that nobody ever has any freedom to choose about anything: no freedom of will. Much debate on the topic since then has hinged merely on the question of whether or not those future events are already determined, a metaphysical question, with both sides of that argument tacitly agreeing that if future events are determined, then nobody ever has any freedom of will.
But in the centuries since then many other philosophers have argued that that assumption shared between both sides of the metaphysical debate over determinism fundamentally mischaracterizes what we ordinarily mean by free will; and that not only does determinism, even if true, pose no threat to freedom of will, but indeterminism might pose an even greater threat. These philosophers have been called "compatibilists", because they hold free will to be compatible with determinism; and in contrast, those who hold them to be incompatible, whether they hold determinism to be true or not, are called "incompatibilists".
Different compatibilists have put forth different views on what is a better way to characterize free will in the sense that we ordinarily mean it, separated from this one metaphysical concern that has overshadowed the entire topic. I agree with all of them that freedom from determinism is not the important kind of freedom for freedom of will, and I consider several of the different things they put forth as better characterizations of free will to be philosophically important kinds of freedom.
But I think only one of them is the correct characterization of freedom of will in the way that we ordinarily mean it, and the importance of it is not metaphysical at all, but rather wholly ethical: what's important about freedom of will is its relationship to moral responsibility, and as I will elaborate, I hold free will to be essentially synonymous with the capacity for moral judgement, the capacity for weighing what is better or worse.
The earliest compatibilists, such as Thomas Hobbes, held that free will is simply the ability to do what one wants: regardless or whether what one will want in the future is already determined in the present, so long as one is free to do whatever that will be when the time comes, as in not physically restrained from doing so as by bars or chains, then one has free will, according to that view. Philosophers today generally consider that ability to be something separate from free will, mere freedom of action, which is not in itself of particular philosophical interest.
Other compatibilists have held that free will is instead the freedom to act without censure or punishment. But that is similarly held to be a topic not to do with the will, but rather to do with political or ethical liberty, which I will address in the next thread I have planned in this series.
Contemporary compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf, instead equate freedom of will with a psychological functionality, a kind of self-control or self-determination. I find that to be the most important and substantial topic regarding the will, and will address it at greater length at the end of this post.
But first I must address the metaphysical kind of freedom that is held to be of greatest concern by incompatibilists, which I will call "metaphysical will", as distinct from "psychological will". I will treat those as two separate subtopics, analogous to phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness in philosophy of mind.
As in my philosophy of mind, the philosophy of will that I am about to lay out is a hybrid of different positions, a different kind of position for each of three different senses of the word "will".
- About one sense of the word "will", the sense in which there is some special volitional causation distinct from physical causation, you could say that my position is that "nothing has free will", a position called "hard incompatibilism". To have "free will" in that sense would straightforwardly violate my physicalist ontology: whether it is deterministic or random, all causation is physical causation.
- About another sense, the sense in which there is unpredictability in the behavior of something, you could say that my position is that "everything has a free will", a position I call "pan-libertarianism".
- I think that those are both unhelpful senses of the word "will", however, and that in the ordinary sense that we normally mean the word "will", only some things have free will and others don't (just as we ordinarily think), in the manner of a position called "functionalism".
I'm going to do something I should have done in my post about philosophy of mind, where the OP was way too long, and maybe in some other threads that I split up into multiple threads, and instead split this super-long OP up into multiple posts in this one thread...
Despite not being considered a field of study unto itself, there is a long history of philosophers addressing the topic of the will, especially its freedom or lack thereof. The history of that topic extends back at least as far as Aristotle, who contemplated something called the problem of future contingents, which concerns whether or not there are yet facts about future events, including about things that people will do in the future.
He and many subsequent philosophers reasoned that if there are already, in the present, facts about what will happen in the future, including the things that people will do, then that implies that those people have no choice but to do those things when those future times arrive, because it is already a fact that they will, which they held would imply that nobody ever has any freedom to choose about anything: no freedom of will. Much debate on the topic since then has hinged merely on the question of whether or not those future events are already determined, a metaphysical question, with both sides of that argument tacitly agreeing that if future events are determined, then nobody ever has any freedom of will.
But in the centuries since then many other philosophers have argued that that assumption shared between both sides of the metaphysical debate over determinism fundamentally mischaracterizes what we ordinarily mean by free will; and that not only does determinism, even if true, pose no threat to freedom of will, but indeterminism might pose an even greater threat. These philosophers have been called "compatibilists", because they hold free will to be compatible with determinism; and in contrast, those who hold them to be incompatible, whether they hold determinism to be true or not, are called "incompatibilists".
Different compatibilists have put forth different views on what is a better way to characterize free will in the sense that we ordinarily mean it, separated from this one metaphysical concern that has overshadowed the entire topic. I agree with all of them that freedom from determinism is not the important kind of freedom for freedom of will, and I consider several of the different things they put forth as better characterizations of free will to be philosophically important kinds of freedom.
But I think only one of them is the correct characterization of freedom of will in the way that we ordinarily mean it, and the importance of it is not metaphysical at all, but rather wholly ethical: what's important about freedom of will is its relationship to moral responsibility, and as I will elaborate, I hold free will to be essentially synonymous with the capacity for moral judgement, the capacity for weighing what is better or worse.
The earliest compatibilists, such as Thomas Hobbes, held that free will is simply the ability to do what one wants: regardless or whether what one will want in the future is already determined in the present, so long as one is free to do whatever that will be when the time comes, as in not physically restrained from doing so as by bars or chains, then one has free will, according to that view. Philosophers today generally consider that ability to be something separate from free will, mere freedom of action, which is not in itself of particular philosophical interest.
Other compatibilists have held that free will is instead the freedom to act without censure or punishment. But that is similarly held to be a topic not to do with the will, but rather to do with political or ethical liberty, which I will address in the next thread I have planned in this series.
Contemporary compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf, instead equate freedom of will with a psychological functionality, a kind of self-control or self-determination. I find that to be the most important and substantial topic regarding the will, and will address it at greater length at the end of this post.
But first I must address the metaphysical kind of freedom that is held to be of greatest concern by incompatibilists, which I will call "metaphysical will", as distinct from "psychological will". I will treat those as two separate subtopics, analogous to phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness in philosophy of mind.
As in my philosophy of mind, the philosophy of will that I am about to lay out is a hybrid of different positions, a different kind of position for each of three different senses of the word "will".
- About one sense of the word "will", the sense in which there is some special volitional causation distinct from physical causation, you could say that my position is that "nothing has free will", a position called "hard incompatibilism". To have "free will" in that sense would straightforwardly violate my physicalist ontology: whether it is deterministic or random, all causation is physical causation.
- About another sense, the sense in which there is unpredictability in the behavior of something, you could say that my position is that "everything has a free will", a position I call "pan-libertarianism".
- I think that those are both unhelpful senses of the word "will", however, and that in the ordinary sense that we normally mean the word "will", only some things have free will and others don't (just as we ordinarily think), in the manner of a position called "functionalism".
I'm going to do something I should have done in my post about philosophy of mind, where the OP was way too long, and maybe in some other threads that I split up into multiple threads, and instead split this super-long OP up into multiple posts in this one thread...
Comments (96)
Metaphysical will is largely defined by its independence from the functional process of deliberation, in much the same way that phenomenal consciousness is defined by its independence from the functionality that defined access consciousness. If we stipulate the existence of some being, like a computer artificial intelligence, that performs a deliberative process of weighing evidence and priorities and determining a course of action that is exactly like the kind of deliberative process that a human being would do, there would still be an open question as to whether such a being has metaphysical will. That is because metaphysical will is not about that function, but about the metaphysics of the causation that underlies that function.
Incompatibilists generally argue that if such a deliberative function programmed into the being behaved deterministically, always giving the same output for the same inputs, in other words always making the same decision about what the best course of action is given the same knowledge of the same circumstances and the same priorities and so on, then it would not have freedom of its metaphysical will, if it could even be said to have such a will at all.
But a counterargument, often called "The Mind Argument" for its prominence in a philosophy of mind journal called Mind, argues that if the execution of that function did not happen deterministically but instead sometimes randomly produced outputs that did not follow from the inputs, that would hardly seem to add any kind of substantial freedom to the process, because blindly following a dice roll to make a decision seems, if anything, even less free than deterministically weighing evidence and so on to make that decision. Metaphysical will is the kind of thing that is at question in these kinds of debates about determinism and randomness, regardless of what exactly the deliberative function that (deterministically, randomly, or somehow otherwise) chooses some course of action may be.
Without an answer the question of whether the universe is entirely deterministic or not, there are generally three possibilities when it comes to what kinds of beings might possibly have metaphysical will: either nothing could possibly have it, not even human beings, because the concept is simply confused nonsense; some beings, like humans, could have it, if the universe is not entirely deterministic, but not all beings would thereby have it; or if anything at all could have it, then all beings, not just humans but everything down to trees and rocks and electrons, would have it.
The first of these position, the view that nothing can possibly have metaphysical free will because the concept is confused nonsense, is called hard incompatibilism; while the latter two positions are variations of the view called metaphysical libertarianism, which so far as I know do not have well-established names for themselves, but I will dub them emergent libertarianism and pan-libertarianism for my purposes here.
I am against hard incompatibilism, strictly speaking, though I am very sympathetic to the motivations for it. The incompatibilist quest for a useful notion of free will that depends on non-determinism, but is not simply randomness, does seem impossibly quixotic, because non-determinism simply is randomness. But I do not consider metaphysical will to be the useful notion of free will in the first place; that, I hold, is psychological will, which will be explored later in this post. But in answering the question of whether anything could possibly have metaphysical will or not, as useless a question as that may be to ask, I disagree with the hard incompatibilist that randomness undermines the possibility of it.
Instead, I hold, randomness is the entire essence of it: to have metaphysical will is just for the being in question to have a behavior, an output of its function, that is not entirely determined by its experience, the input of its function, and that simply is a definition of randomness. Too much randomness, or insufficient determinism, does indeed undermine the possibility of psychological will, which depends on an adequate degree of determinism to reliably maintain the functionality that constitutes it, but that is a separate question from whether anything has metaphysical will.
Against the hard incompatibilist, I hold that it is possible for things to have metaphysical will, because that would simply mean that determinism was false, which it very well could be (and according to contemporary theories of physics, it effectively is).
And if we instead slightly loosen the criterion for metaphysical free will from strict indeterminism to mere unpredictability, I hold that that is a necessary feature of any possible universe, regardless of whether determinism is strictly true or not, because predictability is self-defeating. An indeterministic universe would of course be unpredictable, but even a perfectly deterministic universe could not possibly be perfectly predictable, because the ability to perfectly predict the future is equivalent to information from the future coming to the past, and such backward transfer of information necessarily changes the future that proceeds from the moment of prediction.
In other words, predicting the future necessarily changes it, and thus renders the prediction, to some (if perhaps negligible) extent, inaccurate. These kinds of unstable feedback loops in dynamical systems, even perfectly deterministic systems, are called "chaotic", and all chaotic features render such systems inherently unpredictable, if for no other reason than the process of computing an accurate prediction in the face of such unstable complexity would necessarily take longer than the system being predicted would take to reach the future we're trying to predict.
Daniel Dennett calls this kind of unpredictability "elbow room", and holds it to provide for a kind of "compatibilist" free will that does not clash with determinism. But I hold that this sense of "free will" is still essentially the same sense as the one that incompatibilists concern themselves with – unpredictability is still not freedom of will in the ordinary, morally relevant sense, the sense that I call "psychological will" – and so is not really "compatibilist" in the same way that other forms of compatibilism are.
I am also against what I dubbed above emergent libertarianism, as a part of my general position against (strong) emergentism, as already elaborated in my previous thread on the mind. I am against such emergentism on the grounds that it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like metaphysical will and things that suddenly have it in full, and thus violates my previously established position against dogmatism.
Strong emergentism holds some wholes to be greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts. Specifically, as regards philosophy of will, it holds that when simpler objects, that do not themselves have metaphysical free will on this account, are arranged into the right relations with each other, wholly new volitional properties apply to the composite object they create: a being with metaphysical free will is created from parts none of which had metaphysical free will.
I do agree with what I think is the intended thrust of the emergentist position, that will as we ordinarily speak of it is something that just comes about when physical things are arranged in the right way. But I think that will as we ordinarily speak of it is psychological will, to be addressed later in these posts, and that psychological will is a purely functional, deterministic property that is built up out of the ordinary deterministic behavior of the things that compose a psychologically willful being, and nothing wholly new emerges out of nothing like magic when things are just arranged in the right way.
So when it comes to metaphysical will, either it is wholly absent from the most fundamental building blocks of physical things and so is still absent from anything built out of them, including humans, or else it is present at least in humans, and so something of it must be present in the stuff out of which humans are built, and the stuff out of which that stuff is built, and so on so that at least something prototypical of metaphysical will as humans exhibit it is already present in everything, to serve as the building blocks of more advanced kinds of metaphysical will like humans exhibit.
That latter position is what I have dubbed pan-libertarianism: the view that everything at least has something prototypical of metaphysical agency as we mean it regarding human will. That is the position that I hold: the kind of free will that incompatibilists are concerned about, that I've called "metaphysical will", is something that everything, even and especially the most fundamental particles in the universe, has. But in saying that everything has metaphysical will, I'm not really saying very much of substance.
It is merely the flip side of my panpsychist philosophy of mind, in light of the relationship between experience and behavior outlined in my earlier thread about ontology: every experience is in truth an interaction, seen equally well from a different perspective as a behavior instead of an experience.
Indeed, just as I compared that kind of panpsychist phenomenal experience to quantum-mechanical "observation" (distinguished from a more useful and robust access-conscious sense of "observation"), so too in quantum mechanics are those "observations" held to in fact be simply interactions, and it is those very interactions that introduce randomness, or at least the subjective appearance of randomness, to a quantum-mechanical model of the world (which otherwise models everything as deterministically evolving wave functions until the moment of "observation", or interaction with another system, at which point, at least from the perspective of the "observer", the wave function appears to randomly collapse into one of many possible classical states).
I hold that everything, even simple particles like electrons, has "free will", but only to the same extent that they have "consciousness": in an obscure technical sense they do, but only a pragmatically useless sense of the word that is only the topic of long-intractable philosophical quandaries.
Everything has control (and thus freedom) of some sort, in that its very existence changes the flow of events – otherwise they would not appear to exist at all, and so not be real at all on my empirical realist account of ontology – but only some things have self-control, and that is what the rest of these posts will discuss. Being able to predict what someone or something will do is not the same as them being forced to do it in any practical sense, and likewise, merely being unpredictable is not a pragmatically useful kind of freedom.
The pragmatically useful sense of "free will" is, I hold, a functional one, just like the pragmatically useful sense of "consciousness". Just producing behavior that is not determined by experience is not really anything of note; it is the function that produces that behavior that may or may not be worth considering "free willed" in the ordinary sense that we use that term.
And not only is randomness or non-determinism unnecessary for such a function to constitute free will in that ordinary sense, but too much randomness, or too little determinism, would actually undermine that function, because I hold freedom of will to be essentially the ability to evaluate reasons to do one thing over another, to weigh possible intentions against each other and decide which of them is the right one to intend, and then for that evaluation to be actually effective on your behavior (as opposed to either not doing such an evaluation to begin with, or to finding yourself behaving in ways you had already decided you shouldn't, as from a compulsion or phobia). Randomness would only add errors to the evaluative process, or impede it's effectiveness upon behavior, and so only serve to undermine free will, not to enhance it.
I call this combination of pan-libertarianism about metaphysical will and functionalism about psychological will "functionalist pan-libertarianism". And like with consciousness, defining exactly what the function of a free will is in full detail is more the work of psychology (mapping the functions of naturally evolved minds) and computer science (developing functions for artificially created minds) than it is the proper domain of philosophy, but for the rest of these posts I will outline a brief sketch of the kinds of functions that I think are important to qualify something as a free will, in the ordinary sense by which we would say that humans definitely sometimes have free will, and dogs occasionally might, but a tree probably never does, and a rock definitely does not.
As with consciousness, the first of these important functions, which I call "sentience", is to differentiate experiences toward the construction of two separate models, one of them a model of the world as it is, and the other a model of the world as it ought to be. These differentiate aspects of an experience, which as outlined in my thread about ontology is an interaction between oneself and the world, into those that inform about about the world, including what kind of things are most suited to it, which form the sensitive aspect of the experience; and those that inform about oneself, and what kind of world would be most suited to oneself, which form is the appetitive aspect of the experience.
From these two models we then derive the output behavior from a comparison of the two, so as to attempt to make the world that is into the world that ought to be. This is in distinction from the simpler function of most primitive objects, where experiences directly provoke behaviors in a much simpler stimulus-response mechanism, and no experience is merely indicative of the nature of the world, but all are directly imperative on the next behavior of the object.
Those experiences that are channeled into the model of the world as it is I call "sensations", and I have already discussed them, their interpretations into perceptions, and the reflection upon perceptions to arrive at beliefs, in my earlier thread on the mind.
Meanwhile, those experiences that are channelled into the model of the world as it ought to be I call "appetites". Appetites are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the feeling of pain or thirst or hunger. When those appetites are then interpreted, patterns in them detected, identified as abstractions, that can then be related to each other symbolically, analytically, that is part of the function that I call "intelligence" (the other part of intelligence handling the equivalent process with sensation), and those interpreted, abstracted appetites output by intelligence are what I call "desires", or "emotions".
None of this is yet sufficient to call something free will in our ordinary sense of the word. For that, we need all of the above plus also another function, a reflexive function that turns that sentient intelligence back upon the being in question itself, and forms perceptions and desires about its own process of interpreting experiences, and then acts upon itself to critique and judge itself and then filter the conclusions it has come to, accepting or rejecting them as either soundly concluded or not. That reflexive function in general I call "sapience", and the aspect of it concerned with critiquing and judging and filtering desires I call "will" proper.
(I see the concepts of "id", "ego", and "superego" as put forward by Sigmund Freud arising out of this reflexive judgement as well, with the third-person view of oneself that one is casting judgement upon being the "id", the third-person view of oneself casting judgement down on one being the "superego", and the first-person view of oneself, being judged by the superego while in turn judging the id, being the "ego"; an illusory tripartite self, as though in a mental hall of mirrors).
The output of that function – an experience taken as imperative, interpreted into a desire, and accepted by sapient reflection – is what I call an "intention".
As you may recall from my earlier thread on meta-ethics and the philosophy of language, I take such intentions to be equivalent to what are sometimes called "moral beliefs", or more accurately, the normative equivalent of beliefs, prescriptive thoughts or judgements (as distinguished both from descriptive thoughts, or beliefs, and from prescriptive feelings, or desires). The forming of intentions is what I take to constitute willing, so the will (and its intentions, and their predecessors like desires and appetites) is on this account the "subject of morality" in the same way that the mind is the "subject of reality": it is the aspect of subjective experience that is concerned with morality, with what ought to be.
The will, in this more important sense of psychological will rather than metaphysical will, is not at all about causation or lack thereof, but about purpose, a prescriptive issue, not a descriptive one. And the efficacy of willing upon actual behavior is what I take to constitute freedom of the will: you have free will if the process of deliberating about what is the best course of action is effective in making you do what you decided would be the best course of action; which is about causation, yes, but only in that it depends upon it, not in that it is threatened by it.
The proper conducting of this process of willing or intention-formation is the subject of the next thread I'll do once this one dies down, which, as promised earlier, will also tackle the last of the three philosophically interesting senses of "free will" laid out near the start of this thread, the sense equivalent to liberty, as well as its inverse, duty.
Despite the fact that is free interpretation of what we should consider as better or worse I think there have to be a way to reinforce it. Thus, justice or judicial power. I truly believe this is the most important tool to use in ethics. You quoted previously Thomas Hobbes and as this philosopher said: Homo homini lupus. There always been there someone who wants hurt other because they do not understand basic ethics.
So, in this way we have to improve the most representative authority about responsibility and ethichs: courts..
I have to admit that somehow law is sometimes flawed. But this is not a cause of not believing in justice because if we do not do so, everything would be a chaos and ethics could disappear.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Interesting explanation. This is another thought I learned today :100:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Could be this a good argument to reinforce the judicial power/law then?
What I'm suggesting in this thread is that what it means to "freely will" something is to judge that something is the correct thing to do, and then have that judgement actually guide your actions; in contrast to doing something you didn't mean to do, or something that you didn't realize was a bad thing, or something you just didn't give any thought to, or anything like that, which are all paradigmatic cases of un-free will.
People exercising their will / moral judgement are still likely to make errors in that judgement, so it's still important that other people correct them, but that's a different topic to the one that I'm talking about here, which is simply "what does it even mean to will something?" I think it means to judge something as the correct course of action. And for that will to be free is for that judgement to actually direct your action.
Yes! I did understand your point but I was only suggesting that justice could be just another tool of reinforce the good ethics in free will.
My intention was not go against your topic and you are right that probably bringing here law and justice is a stupid tangent that is not connected with the main thread.
Sorry because I tried to participate here but I guess I need more knowledge in this topic. It will not happen again.
To freely will you need to not be restricted by anything.
That would be what I called 'metaphysical will' above, and gave arguments for why that is not a useful sense of the word "will"; but also, in practice everything is at least a little bit 'unrestricted', and so in that (useless) sense everything has at least a little bit of 'free will'.
Applause for the inclusion of at least the conception of a metaphysical will.
:up: A general tactic I like using in philosophy is recognizing positions that claim to be competing answers to the same question to instead be answers to completely different questions. I did a similar thing in my thread on philosophy of mind ("by 'mind' do you mean a mental substance, the having of first-person experiences, or a kind of functionality? I have different views on all three of those things"), the same tripartite split here, in my thread about dissolving normative ethics I take something like utilitarianism and something like Kantianism as good-ish answers to two different ethical questions... come to think of it even my core philosophical principles are all about differentiating between different senses of broad concepts like "objectivism", "subjectivism", "skepticism", and "fideism", and approving of one sense while disapproving of the other.
I don't have any objections to any of what you said, and it reminds me of a thought that I had a long time ago regarding determinism and free will: if determinism is true, it works backward just as much as it works forward: things that I do right now logically necessitate that things have happened in the past such that I end up doing the things I do right now. So, if determinism is true, then by typing this sentence I have determined that the dinosaurs went extinct -- because me typing this sentences necessitates me being here, which necessitates humans evolving, which necessitates the dinosaurs having gone extinct. But of course, in the way we usually talk about willing and choosing, it's ridiculous to say that by typing that sentence I chose for the dinosaurs to go extinct; the dinosaurs going extinct is just a necessary condition of me choosing to type that sentence. And because determinism is time-symmetric, it works the other way around too: (if determinism is true) the dinosaurs going extinct necessitates that I choose to type that sentence, but that has nothing to do with it being my free choice to type that sentence, because the usual way that we talk about "free choice" has nothing to do with the logical relations between disparate periods of time.
Or, an even simpler version of the above, relating back to the problem of future contingents: suppose metaphysical libertarianism were true. Presumably most people would still say that there are facts about things that happen in the past, right? I'm about to freely choose a word to type: freebird. Now the fact of my choosing that is in the past. There is a fact now about what I did choose in the past. Does that entail that my choice could not have been free? Ordinarily we would say no. So why does it matter if there's a fact about what I will do in the future, any more than it matters there's a fact about what I did in the past? It has no bearing on whether the thing I do is chosen freely or not.
It's not so black and white. Antecedent events may influence events, not necessarily exhaustively determine them.
The idea of freedom is logically incompatible with the idea of rigid determinsim; 'nuff said!
You can have a mix of determinism and randomness, sure, not just 100% of one or 100% of the other. But still the only thing you've changed about the fully deterministic picture is to add some randomness to it, which doesn't really seem like it makes anyone more free in the sense that matters to us, a morally relevant sense. "I only did it because prior events determined that I would" and "I only did it because as random chance would have it that's what I ended up doing" both sound just as bad, and "I only did it because it was the one out of several possibilities allowable by prior events that I randomly ended up doing" is no better.
That's a very nice multi-part OP! I just finished reading the whole thing. I had copy-pasted all parts in a unique documents and saved it as a pdf in order to be able to highlight and annotate.
It looks like I will have many quibbles on a background of broad agreement about some of the core issues. My positive characterisation of the power of the will is quite similar to yours although I stress social aspects of the constitutive role of the 'reactive attitudes' a little more. I also deal somewhat differently with the thesis of 'leeway incompatibilism', which relates imperfectly to what you call 'metaphysical will'. I had very much enjoyed Susan Wolf's Freedom Within Reason, and read it two or three times. You seem to also have gained much from it, or, at least, to find common ground with her.
I'll be back with more comments. I just wanted to congratulate you for the very well crafted OP!
Thanks a bunch! This is perhaps the most positive response I've ever received to any OP here -- it's exactly what I always want, "I like what you're trying to do and I have some ideas on how to do it better" -- so I'm looking forward to your further comments!
Quoting Pierre-Normand
To be honest, I haven't actually read Wolf herself, I've just read about her, when someone else compared the views I'd independently come up with to hers. The biggest actual influence on my views would probably be Frankfurt, but from what I understand Wolf's views are probably closer to mine than his.
From a general academic point of view, perhaps, yes, but then I think merely as a matter of interest. And this is technically philosophizing, the dissemination of various theory qualifications, historically given.
—————
Quoting Pfhorrest
This more like being used in philosophy proper. Still, given core principles, hasn’t one already approved one sense over all the others? I suppose one may exercise his core principles without the necessity of knowing what they actually are, but recognizing the validity of them from the feeling he gets in their manifestation in the world post hoc.
If hard determinism were the case, then all acts and events would be predetermined, in which case it seems obvious there would be no freedom. If indeterminism were the case then all acts and events would be only probablistically deterministic, and that leaves room for freedom.
We understand natural events in terms of causation, so we shouldn't expect to be able to understand freedom in those terms, because if a free act were (exhaustively) caused by anything other than the actor it would not be free at all. Also if the nature of the actor were fully determined by anything other than the actor then the actor would not be free on that account either, but could only act as their fully determined nature caused.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So, this is the problem with this kind of thinking, as I see it. If determinism were true then people would be either destined to achieve "self-control or self-determination", with those who do being able to control what they do and those who don't not being able to.
But the fact of whether control is achieved or not would be fully determined, meaning that those who lacked it cannot be blamed for doing what they do, and those who were able to exercise it could not rightly be praised. If humans are fully subject to the causation of nature then there is nothing to rationally justify the idea of moral responsibility, or praise and blame.
It would be like counting the corn as being morally responsible and praiseworthy for feeding us and sustaining life, and the lightning for being moral responsible and blameworthy for striking us dead.
NB, FYI, that the term "hard determinism" refers specifically to the combination of determinism with incompatibilism. It doesn't just mean "full determinism with no indeterminism".
Quoting Janus
And to the extent that determinism is not true, indeterminism is true, which then makes the argument for hard incompatibilism: one way or another free will is impossible.
The problem with that argument is that it conflates two different senses of the term "free will". Indeterminism is a threat to the usual, useful, psychological sense, because if you just do things at random, you're obviously not choosing what to do. But indeterminism is not a threat to the metaphysical sense, since that sense just is freedom from determinism, which just is indeterminism. And then we circle back around to indeterminism not being a useful kind of freedom... which just goes to show that the metaphysical sense of the term "free will" is not a useful sense of the term.
Quoting Janus
Something behaving in a way independent of causal effect on it just is what "randomness" means. A person who sprung into being with a character uninfluenced by anything about the world prior to their creation and who behaved in ways uninfluenced by anything about the world prior to that behavior would be a randomly-generated person doing random things. You could imagine instead a person whose character and behaviors are somewhat influenced by the prior states of the world, but now you're just adding a little determinism to that randomness.
You can keep adding more determinism until the person's character and behaviors are completely necessitated by prior events, or take more away until they're completely random again, but where in there does some mix of determinism and randomness amount to "freedom" in any useful sense? The random person is in a sense "free" from prior influences, sure, but doing things at random is not really what we usually mean when we say that someone did something of their own free will.
Quoting Janus
In the way we ordinarily talk about free will and moral responsibility, we do say that someone who lacks that self-control cannot be rightly blamed or praised for their actions, precisely because they lacked that self-control. The person who was able to exercise such self-control, conversely, can be praised or blamed for their actions. It's not that self-control is supposed to be praiseworthy and lack of it is supposed to be blameworthy. It's that self-control is what makes anything either praiseworthy or blameworthy, and lack of it absolves one of any praiseworthiness or blameworthiness.
Because the function of praise and blame is to reinforce or alter people's decision-making patterns: if someone makes the right choice, we give them positive feedback to let them know to make choices like that in the future, and if someone makes the wrong choice, we give them negative feedback to let them know to not make choices like that in the future. Whereas if someone did not make any choice at all, but just ended up doing something without really intending to do it, then there's no point praising or blaming them for it, because there was no choice to be made either correctly or incorrectly.
If someone's behavior was completely undetermined, they could not engage in any kind of reflective process of evaluating their own behavior, because that process would have to depend on information about the state of the universe. So completely undetermined behavior could not be freely-willed, in the sense of warranting praise or blame. That doesn't mean that their behavior has to be completely determined in order for them to have free will in that sense, but it needs to be determined enough at least that being praised or blamed will actually influence their future decisions, and it could be fully determined without undermining that requisite functionality at all.
And sure, then it wouldn't be "metaphysically free", but we already established above that that's a useless kind of freedom.
Maybe so in the academic sphere; I use it to denote rigid or exhaustive determinism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If there is a random element in nature, which allows for an open future, it doesn't follow that our actions are random; it merely allows for real self-determination, which would be impossible if all our acts were rigidly determined by antecedent causes.
NB, we have no way of determining what is actually the case. All this talk about determinism and indeterminism is just speculation about the possibilities we can imagine. But these distinctions have a logic and the logic of determinism is incompatible with the logic of freedom. That is all you need to know to put this to rest.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This is incorrect; people ordinarily do praise and blame people because they think people are responsible for their actions barring mental illness. The presumption behind ordinary talk about moral responsibility and praise and blame is based on the assumption of libertarian free will.
Compatibilism is incoherent, self-contradictory, as I see it; I have read a fair bit about compatibilism and I have yet to find a clear account of how it is possible that real freedom could be compatible with determinism. I've seen a lot of fancy verbal spin, but nothing cogent. The logic of being determined by natural forces contradicts the logic of moral freedom and responsibility, end of story. So, as I see it we are either fully determined by natural forces or we are not. and to the extent that we are not we are free. Unless you can provide a plausible argument showing why this is not so I will remain unconvinced.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This seems to be another example of a black and white mode of thinking. I haven't said that anyone's behavior could be "completely undetermined" by nature, all I am saying is that if it is completely determined by nature then logically it cannot be free.That is the problem you need to address. The other issue I see for your view is that you expect that if there is free self-determination then we should be able to give a causal account of how that's possible; but this very demand is self-contradictory.
It sounds like you are separating the human agent from nature, i.e. assuming a non-physicalist philosophy of mind. But even if that were the case, the logic of causation is still the same regardless of the ontological substrate in question: if there is a non-physical thing steering the motion of the physical body within the range allowed by an only-partially-determined physical world, we still have to ask if that non-physical thing behaves deterministically or not; and if the answer is "not", then the absence of determination is still exactly what "randomness" means, so to the extent that some non-physical agency drives our physical behavior, it's still some mix of determination and randomness, and it's still not clear what about mixing those two things produces meaningful freedom.
Quoting Janus
That's exactly what I just said. I just gave an elaboration of what it means to take responsibility for your actions: it's to reflect on the reasons to do one thing versus another thing, and based on that decide that one or the other thing is the right thing to do. If you decide correctly, you deserve praise, and if you decide incorrectly, you deserve blame. If you don't make any decision at all and something just ends up happening without any intent from you involved, then you're not responsible for what happened, and don't deserve any praise of blame.
Your actions happening in a way less dependent on the facts of the world, i.e. less deterministically, more randomly, makes you less responsible, because it reduces your ability to make any decision at all.
Quoting Janus
It's based on the assumption of free will, certainly; but "libertarian free will" is another of those technical terms like "hard determinism", that means the combination of free will with incompatibilism. Ordinary people don't always have opinions on compatibilism vs incompatibilism, and when they do have some intuition about it, they don't all side with incompatibilism. A lot of people's intuitive opinion is something like "of course determinism is true, but of course we have free will; incompatibilism is crazy because that would mean we have no free will since determinism is obviously true". (i.e. they view it as a choice between hard determinism and compatibilism, and see metaphysical libertarianism as such nonsense it's not even a consideration). I'm not saying that as an argument for compatibilism, but just contesting your claim that ordinary people are all metaphysical libertarians.
Quoting Janus
Sure, in the sense of "free" by which a uranium atom is "free" to decay at any time, i.e. a sense that means undetermined, or random. In that sense of "free" my view called pan-libertarianism above is that everything "has free will". That just illustrates what a useless sense of "free will" that is, though. Certainly you don't think a uranium atom is morally responsible for its decay, just because its decay was not determined? Assuming you agree it's not, that then leaves us with the question of what does make one morally responsible, that a uranium atom lacks? And I gave an account of that across several posts above.
Indeed. It seems like this is what tends to happen when libertarians hold that the 'circumstances' in which an agent acts must be taken to include the immediate 'past' of the agent herself, including the state of her own body and of her cognitive apparatus (brain, habits, character, etc.). In that case, libertarians who insist on an indeterminist requirement, treat this requirement as the provision of alternative physical possibilities when the universe has been 'rolled back', as it were, in the same exact state just before the agent deliberated or acted. While this libertarian requirement brings along troublesome consequences about luck and the intelligibility of actions that are now severed from their intelligible cognitive sources, it's not so much indeterminism that is at fault, on my view(*), but rather the disembodied conception of agency that is carried into the picture by a flawed conception of the 'circumstances' of human actions. Someone's character, just before she acts, isn't an external constraint on what she can do. It's rather part of what she is at that time, and what her intentional action will therefore reveal her to have been.
(*) ...although your point about too much indeterminism actually undermining free agency is well taken.
:up: :100:
I think you have it utterly arse about, but I have no further interest in discussing it with you, since all I get is the same misunderstandings of what I'm saying and the same unjustified assertions over and over, so I think I'll leave you to it..
What you seem to be missing is the realization that the idea that human decision making is determined by natural forces is a groundless assumption. How would you ever set about testing it?
I would dispute that with three counter examples.
1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them?
2. A steam engine is just an arrangement of steel, water and fire. And yet when it was invented, it was pretty revolutionary. And if there's nothing new in a steam engine, how come the pharaohs of antiquity didn't think of building a Memphis-Thebes railroad?
3. A living organism is just (supposedly) an arrangement of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen etc. And yet a living organism can reproduce, which an atom cannot do. To be precise, to reproduce an atom would mean very little, because what is reproduced in life is the (complex, biological) structure of the organism, the shapes the molecules make with atoms, not the atoms themselves. So the concept of reproduction has a clear meaning in biology but not in physics.
For the same reason that we collect a variety of goods and organize them on shelves in the same building called a "store": it's much nicer to go to one place and find all the things you need, than to have to wander far and wide trying to find each one who-knows-where out there. The same is true of discoveries (in any field, not just philosophy) as it is of goods: it's an improvement to have them all organized in one place for anyone to browse, than for everyone to have to go find them all over again.
Quoting Olivier5
Because they hadn't discovered that possibility yet. The possibility was always there, like all the discoveries we collect in books as above, they just didn't know about it yet.
Quoting Olivier5
This gets most to the point: reproducing a living thing is an aggregate of a whole (frickin') lot of ordinary mechanical processes that atoms already do. A multicellular organism like a human is assembled molecule-by-molecule by (?)illions of tiny nano-machines, which like all machines are just physical things that transform flows of energy through them. A human being is an absolutely insanely complicated thing, but when you analyze one sufficiently it turns out to be an aggregate of a (whole frickin') bunch of simple molecular reactions.
I don't think human decisions are determined by physical forces but neither are they determined by psychic forces outside of nature (as they seemingly would need to be for the sort of 'rollback' libertarianism under discussion to be cogent). I rather think that human decisions are determined by human beings. The sort of causation at issue is a sort of agent causation, which is an exemplification both of substance causation and of rational causation, on my view. Embodied and encultured rational human beings can determine things to happen on rational (and ethical) grounds.
You are talking of dictionaries. I am talking of philosophy books.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The possibility of a steam engine is something very different from a real steam engine, though.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The point is that this thing can reproduce, while an atom cannot. It can decide to fight or flee. It can sleep. It can eat and drink. It can observe, and it can think.
These behaviors emerged through life. They have no meaning outside if it.
All of which can in principle be broken down to complex arrangements of behaviors of atoms, without requiring that anything happen besides what those atoms could already do.
You’re talking about “weak emergence”, about which there’s really no debate; weak emergence is still reducible. I’m against strong emergence, as I already specified in the OP.
I repeat: atoms cannot reproduce.
OK, but where I have used "natural" you have substituted "physical". I'm not sure whether you draw a distinction between them, but as far as I understand, determinism is the thesis that all events are fully determined by antecedent physical events. This is often expressed in the thought experiment wherein it is claimed that if the evolution of the universe were to be played out again from the Big Bang everything would unfold again exactly as it has.
So, for me the kind of determinism which incorporates reductive physicalism is logically incompatible with the kind of freedom that could rationally be understood to justify the idea of moral responsibility.
So, I agree with what you've said above, but as I read it, what you've said does not support compatibilism, but rather rejects it.
Sure, but that's not relevant to the point at hand. One cannot meaningfully give the temperature of a single particle, only an ensemble of particles, yet nevertheless the temperature of that ensemble consists of nothing more than an aggregate of properties of the particles: it's not like there's the kinetic of energy of every single particles plus the temperature of the ensemble as a separate thing; the temperature of the ensemble just is an aggregate of the kinetic energies of the individual particles.
Likewise, a human being doesn't do some separate thing of "reproduction" that then somehow relates to a bunch of separate nanoscopic molecular actions that lead to the construction of a new human body atom by atom; the act of human reproduction just is all of those nanoscopic molecular actions in aggregate.
Like I said, you're talking about weak emergence, which is not anything I'm opposed to. I'm only against strong emergence. See for explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Strong_and_weak_emergence
Un fact it is more complicated than that, but I see what you mean.
The concept of emergence does not imply that magic things happen between elements when they arranged a certain way. This is a strawman. These concepts simply mean that certain things happen when elements are arranged a certain way, which would not happen to the elements taken in isolation. So for instance a sentence has meaning, in a way that the letters composing it lack. The meaning of the phrase Cogito ergo sum is not the meaning of C + the meaning of O + the meaning of G, etc. It is not even the meaning of "cogito" + the meaning of "ergo" + the meaning of "sum", although that'd be a bit closer to it.
Specifically strong emergence does, and as I've repeated at least three times now, including right in the OP, that is the specific kind of emergence I'm against. Weak emergence is fine, but also trivial; nobody is opposed to that, so there are no problems (caused by the lack of it) that it would solve.
E.g. if you modeled or simulated a bunch of particles and had no concept of "temperature" baked into your model, just the motion of particles, you would see temperature phenomena just show up in your model or simulation automatically (for large enough ensembles of particles), because it's just a direct product of the properties of the particles. That's weak emergence: you could just pay attention to the constituents and you would get the aggregate behavior out of it anyway whether you paid any attention to it or not.
In contrast, to model or simulate a strongly emergent phenomenon, you couldn't just model the behavior of the constituents and let it happen on its own; you would need to add some extra logic to the model or simulation that says that when a certain type of collection of constituents get together this certain way, start doing this new kind of thing.
So in that way, "nothing new" happens in the weakly emergent model, you don't have to specify anything other than the behavior of the constituents to automatically get the "new" behavior of the aggregate; while on a strongly emergent model, something "wholly new" happens in aggregate, in that if you just model the behavior the constituents, you miss out on modelling the "new" behavior of the aggregate entirely; your model wouldn't behave like the supposedly strongly-emergent reality would, if your model only modeled a bunch of constituents.
Rejecting strong emergence means rejecting that there's anything in the universe that can't in principle be fully modeled just by modeling the behavior of the constituents, because you'd always automatically get the same behavior of an aggregate of them in the model as you would in reality; nothing ever strictly needs to be added to the model to handle the behavior of aggregates.
(Of course, for practical purposes, we often only care about the aggregate, and can ignore the constituents, and use simpler models of the aggregate behavior while ignoring the behavior of the constituents. That we can and often want to do that is different from a case where we have to because modelling the constituents just wouldn't do it).
It all boils down to what kind of aggregation one is talking about then.
[I]Aggregation[/i]: the formation of a number of things into a cluster.
"a single dose of aspirin irreversibly inhibits the normal aggregation of platelets"
This word therefore calls to mind a naturally collected, loosely structured mass of elements.
Would one call a house "an aggregate of bricks"? The bricks do not merely aggregate into a house like platelets aggregate into a clot. A house has a very definitive structure, which may be made of certain types of bricks or other material but the material does not naturally aggregate into a house.
Likewise, a word is composed of certain sound types (phonemes). When written, the word is composed of certain letters, arranged in a specific way, otherwise it's another word. It is a structure, not a mere clot of letters.
Likewise, a sentence is composed of words, but it is not a passive aggregate of words. A sentence binds its elements into a precise structure to mean something specific.
The structure is not comprised in the elements, and it brings something new. This structure is what you hide to yourself when you use the word "aggregate". It's what you cannot account for in your system. You have no sense of structure.
Yes, I had purposefully replaced "natural" with "physical" because I meant to deny that human actions having natural causes must imply that they also have (fully determinative) physical causes. Endorsing naturalism without physicalism is enough to ward off implausible forms of super-naturalism, I would hope.
It seems to be assumed by many philosophers that (1) the thesis of micro-physical determinism conjoined with both (2) the thesis of the causal closure of the physical and (3) some doctrine of supervenience, imply (4) the thesis of universal determinism, such that human actions, in addition to everything else that takes place in the natural world, are fully determined by the past physical state of the universe (at some arbitrary moment in time). This would appear to follow from Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument (according to which, roughly, anything that happens has a sufficient physical causes and higher level 'causes' therefore are epiphenomenal). But I think Kim's argument fails to apply to human actions (and to scores of other natural and social phenomena) because he gets the metaphysics of those higher-level phenomena (and of higher-level material agents) wrong.
As I had suggested earlier, human actions can't sensibly be construed as causal impacts that some agent exerts on the material world, at a moment in time, from outside of the world, as it were. Human beings are material beings in the world. As such, they are not divorced from their own pasts, and the material (bodily) and cognitive powers that they possess at some moment in time aren't features that merely determine them to act but rather constitute them acting in the world.
Hence, when a human being reflects on the physical determinations of her own embodied actions, some of those determinations indeed constitute external constraints on what she can do. (Someone, for instance, may be unable to deadlift 300 pounds, or mentally calculate 10 decimals of Pi). But some other among those physical determinations realize instances of that person's own abilities. They are enabling causes, rather than constraints, with respect to an agent's physical abilities and her powers of rational practical deliberation.
So, let us suppose that we grant the possibility of micro-physical determinism being true, and of the thesis of the physical-closure of the physical being true as well, but nothing more. It remains true, then, that given 'the past', as it was, there was no possibility that some agent, who actually did A, would (counterfactually) have done anything else consistently with the past having been as it was. So, indeed, if the state of the universe was 'rolled back' to some earlier state, the agent would still necessarily do A and nothing else. But that doesn't imply that this agent was constrained by the past physical state of the universe to do A. That's because the agent herself figures in that past (at least recently). And so she is (and was) an active participant in the process of determination of the future. And when we say that she could have done something differently (or refrained from doing it), we don't mean that she could have done it consistently with there being nothing about herself that would have been different (including the states of her character, her motivations, her reasons, habits and inclinations, etc.) but rather that nothing outside of herself fully determined her to act in the way she did.
Some worries that remain may stem from regress arguments against ultimate responsibility (such as Strawson's 'Basic Argument' for hard incompatibilism) or consequence arguments that set up regress of antecedent determinative physical causes reaching back to a past time before the agent existed. But I think I should address those worries in a separate post.
Your language examples are a bit beside the point, because we make up the rules of language and so can make up strong emergence in them if we want. We could also make a simulated universe where when constituent come together the right way new rules start applying, in addition to the aggregate of all the rules applying to the constituents. We can make up whatever we want for abstract things we invent. The question is whether the real world behaves in that way.
Show up = emerge.
Note that one can make several different houses with the same material, so the structure of the house is additional to the material. It is not 'contained' in the material.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Okay, so strong emergence happens, I suppose...
Weakly, yes, but that’s not in question.
Quoting Olivier5
If we make up something with rules where it happens, sure.
The question is whether the universe follows such rules or not.
We can make up anything we want for things that exist only in our minds. Letters, words, and sentences don't intrinsically mean anything that you could discover by studying just scribbles or sounds etc; they only mean things to people, and we find out what they mean by studying the people.
It's like any social construct: something "is money" not because of any properties of the thing, but because of how people treat it; to find out what is or isn't money, you don't investigate the things themselves, you investigate what people think about the things.
People can choose to assign meaning to a word that is not a composite of the meanings of the letters, as we obviously do, but that doesn't mean that there's any actual strong emergence in the real world, only in the stories and games we make up and tell each other.
To come back to money for analogy: we could decide that 100 cents together as a unit count as more (or less) than 100 times the value of a cent, if we wanted to do things that way. That doesn't tell us anything about the properties of pennies or dollars or whatever; that only tells us about the stories and games we've made up about pennies and dollars etc.
By 'weak emergence' I understand properties reducible to some 'configuration of simples' (e.g. rainfall from convection of water vapor).
By 'strong emergence' I understand properties reducible to complexes of interrelated 'configurations of simples' and, therefore, irreducible to discrete 'configurations of simples' themselves (e.g. climate systems from chaotic interractions between local geography, ground temperature, prevailing winds, barometric pressure-gradients, average humidity, etc).
Oversimplifications notwithstanding, tell me what I'm misunderstanding here.
I don't know that rainfall would count as any kind of emergence, but maybe you can explain further why it would.
Basically, the distinction as I understand it is that weakly emergent behavior is still reducible in principle to the behavior of the 'simples' as you say, while strongly emergent behavior is not reducible.
No. It's like saying: if consciousness happens in humans, it must have a precursor in the animal kingdom. It cannot stem from nothing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But language is real. If strong emergence is a fundamental characteristic of all human language, where does it come from? How did strong emergence emerge?
That is, ironically, a very anti-emergentist line of argument; it's basically the line of argument that underlies my panpsychist position on phenomenal consciousness. Whatever besides ordinary physical behavior (if anything) is involved in human consciousness, some precursor of it must exist in everything, because otherwise there would be some point in the construction of a human from more fundamental things where suddenly a property that wasn't built out of (and so reducible to) more fundamental properties just appeared from nowhere. That can't happen -- that's strong emergence -- so whatever property we're talking about either doesn't exist at all even in humans or else some precursor of it exists in everything.
Quoting Olivier5
Stories are real, as in, people really to tell stories. Things happen in stories that can't happen in real life. If they can't happen in real life, how can they happen in stories? zomg big philosophical mystery? No.
We make up things all the time that doesn't mirror reality. Language is a thing we made up. It's real inasmuch as we really do make up and use languages, like stories are real. But like I said, you can't learn about a language just from studying sounds and scribbles -- you have to study how people use (and so implicitly think about) those scribbles and sounds. The facts of the language are actually facts about human thoughts (with regards to those scribbles and sounds), and those thoughts can be about things with structures that don't actually exist in reality.
Quoting Olivier5
Then what you're calling "strong emergence" is not the same thing I'm talking about. You're still just talking about weak emergence. It's fine if you think strong emergence is a useless idea -- I do to, that's why I'm against it. But don't take me saying I'm against that useless idea to mean I'm against something normal and mundane that so far as I know nobody is against.
The whole point of bringing up strong vs weak emergence is that you take me to be arguing against something I'm not arguing against. I'm trying to say what the thing I am arguing against actually is. If you just deny that there's any difference between them, then you're taking my words to mean other than I mean them, and counter-arguing against a straw opponent whose position is not mine.
But the argument is NOT about what language SAYS but about how it WORKS.
Human language uses elements such as phonemes or letters to forge words. The meaning of words is not contained in their elements (letters).
In turn, language uses these words as elements of structured sentences, and sentences are elements of paragraphs and book. A word can have many meanings, and the meaning of a word has to be interpreted within its context (sentence or group of), and thus the relationship between elemental word meaning and sentence meaning is a complex one, a two-way relationship. It is NOT additive:
Meaning of word <> meaning of letter 1 + meaning of letter 2 + meaning of letter 3 + ...
Meaning of sentence <> meaning of words 1 + meaning of word 2 + meaning of word 3 + ...
It is in this sense that one can say: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There is something in the whole that is not present in the parts taken in isolation: the connexions, the interrelations, the synergies.
If language is not additive, if complex structures play a central role in it, why can't the same type of non-additive structures exist elsewhere?
If such non-additive, emergent structures exist in our mind, if they are fundamental to the way we think, doesn't it stand to reason that they can exist outside of our mind? Ontologically, that is.
Even if one contends that structures are views of the mind but do not exist in and by themselves in the outside world, we still think in terms of structures, so where does this seemingly new human ability come from? Did it emerge from nothing? That would contradict your stance that emergence does not emerge...
And the way that it works is something that we made up. We decided to make languages where words mean more than the sum of meanings of their phonemes etc. That structure cannot be found in the sounds or scribbles themselves; it exists only in the stories we tell ourselves about what those sounds and scribbles mean, in the rules of the games we play with them.
Speaking of circling back......hope you don’t mind.
Does your statement “indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense” meant to indicate a metaphysical sense of free will? In which case, the statement then becomes.....indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will. If so, does it follow that indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will because (or, iff) the will is taken to be free to make determinations of its own kind, by its own right, in a metaphysical sense? But it doesn’t follow from that, that your “that sense just is freedom from determinism”, which if indeterminism is no threat because determinism is the case, contradicts itself. Indeterminism is freedom from determinism, but the metaphysical sense of free will makes determinism necessary, so indeterminism IS a threat to the metaphysical sense of free will.
Ok, so.....indeterminism is no threat because....or, iff....the will is free as a determining functionality. How, then, does it follow that the metaphysical sense of free will is not a useful sense of the term? How is it that the metaphysical sense is not the only possible sense of free will there can be, without getting involved in that damnable “....wretched subterfuge of petty word-jugglery...” (CpR, B1,C3, Para 45, 1788)?
I submit, and that rhetorically, the term “free will” is useless because the concept of “free” does not belong to the will as much as does the concept of autonomy belong to it necessarily. But this goes further afield than your thesis admits, as far as I can tell. You know.....because you never mention the word.
————-
Quoting Pfhorrest
Isn’t there a need to distinguish kinds of determinism? If physical determinism is not true with respect to the metaphysical sense of free will, I don’t agree indeterminism is therefore true, under the same conditions. Given the metaphysical sense of free will, it is logically consistent that the sense of determinism should itself be metaphysical, in which case, determinism must be true if it be the case that the metaphysical sense of free will abides exclusively in its law-giving functionality. I don’t think it is reasonable to suppose that because a metaphysical sense of determinism is not susceptible to inductive support in the same way as physical determinism, that the conception is therefore inherently flawed.
Clarification, not counter-argument.
Correct, like all philosophy, like all art and all science... Like cars or computers, or zillions of other things.
Nope, glad to be talking about things other than just emergence!
Quoting Mww
Yes.
Quoting Mww
It's not clear to me what "make determinations of its own kind, by its own right" means, other than that the being in question causes or necessitates things to happen, but is not itself caused or necessitated to do so; i.e. it has an output that does not depend on its input.
If that's all you mean, then yes, but NB that that is just the same thing as indeterminism, which is the same thing as randomness. So indeterminism (or randomness) is not a threat to "free will" in the metaphysical sense of the term, because the metaphysical sense of the term just means "indeterminism (or randomness)".
Quoting Mww
I'm having trouble understanding this bit here, so I'll just try to clarify what I was saying before, in case that answers anything:
The metaphysical sense of free will doesn't make determinism necessary. (The psychological sense requires "determinism enough", but that's a completely different thing).
The metaphysical sense of free will just is being undetermined.
Therefore indeterminism is not a threat to free will in the metaphysical sense. (It would be a threat to it in the psychological sense, but that's a completely different thing).
Quoting Mww
Having trouble understanding that first sentence there still, so I'll just try to clarify my position with regards to the rest of it again.
There are several different things that we might want to talk about regarding a person's decisions and behavior:
- Did they do the behavior that they wanted to do under their own motor power, and not because something physically pushed them to do something or physically restrained them from doing otherwise?
- Did they do the behavior they wanted to do without being threatened or otherwise coerced into doing it?
- Did they do it because they thought about what the best thing to do was and decided that that was it, rather than doing something they they thought was the wrong thing to do but they just felt like they couldn't help themselves? (Like an addiction, compulsion, phobia, etc).
- Did they do something that was not necessitated by prior states of the universe?
A "yes" answer to any of these questions is something that someone has called "free will" at some point or another.
The first one is today generally called "freedom of action" instead, but some people like Hobbes said that that's all it takes to have "free will".
The second one is today generally called "political liberty" instead, but is also sometimes called "free will", at least in a casual sense.
The third one is what I'm calling the "psychological sense" of free will, and is what contemporary compatibilists like Frankfurt and Wolf mean.
The fourth one is what I'm calling the "metaphysical sense" of free will.
I say that the fourth one is not useful because all kinds of things "have free will" in that sense, but we wouldn't normally care to talk about whether or not those things have free will; I gave the example of radioactive decay, which is not determined, and therefore is "freely willed" in this sense, but nobody cares whether or not a uranium atom "has free will".
The third one is useful, because that's the kind of thing that determines whether it makes any practical sense to praise or blame, reward or punish, someone for their actions, i.e. it's the kind of thing that makes them morally responsible. If someone already agrees that what they did was bad, and regrets doing it, but felt like they just couldn't help themselves, telling them that they're bad for doing it or making them suffer to drive home that point is useless; they already agree! They intended to do otherwise but that intent was not effective in making them do otherwise; therefore, their will was not free.
The second and first ones are also useful things to care about, but they're different kinds of freedom with their own names, and so don't have to be addressed until the topic of "free will" specifically.
Quoting Mww
I'm not clear what you mean here, but it sounds like you're talking about determinism in the physical world versus determinism in some kind of non-physical world that interacts with the physical world. I deny that any such non-physical world could possibly exist in the first place, but even if it did, that wouldn't solve any problems with regard to free will.
The non-physical agent would still either make the decisions it makes on the basis of prior facts (about some combination of the physical and non-physical world), in which case its decisions are determined by those facts; or else it makes its decisions without regard to the facts, at random, in which case its decisions are undetermined. There's no clear reason why we would want our decisions to be random, or any way that that makes us "free" in any useful sense, even though it's freedom from determinism.
On the other hand, the kind of process by which the facts of the world are considered and factored into the decisions that get made and the actions that get performed can be a useful kind of freedom, a freedom to do what you think you should do (and an ability to correctly assess what you should do), instead of doing things regardless of whether or not you think you should.
Quoting Olivier5
Cars and computers and other physical objects that we make are made out of the stuff of the universe, and so follow whatever rules the stuff of the universe follows. They can only be strongly emergent if the universe already has such strong emergence in it: we can't just decide that e.g. if we arrange some bits of metal in a certain way it creates new energy that wasn't present in the bits of metal. We'd have to discover that the universe already had that strongly emergent feature to it, and then take advantage of that.
But we can write stories, come up with rules of games, etc, for imaginary things that exist only inasmuch as we pretend that they do, and stipulate that there's strongly emergent things in those imaginary worlds. We can stipulate that in some game, if you get five separate points all at once that batch of points gets doubled to ten points, whereas five separate points gained one at a time don't double like that. That would be a strongly emergent feature of the game world, but that wouldn't prove anything about reality, any more than writing a story about a unicorn proves that unicorns exist in reality.
Okay so for you, all possibilities must have emerged at once, at time zero in the history of the universe, like in the mind of God. In my version, things and possibilities emerge more progressively. Emergence is spread over time and not finished or predetermined at time zero.
Because it sounds like you mean e.g. if a bunch of atoms were to have been arranged together into the shape of a human so-and-so many billion years ago, they would not have had supposedly "emergent" features of humans like consciousness, willpower, and (to use your own example) reproduction, because the possibility of those features emerging didn't exist yet.
Or, in the case of cars and computers as you mentioned, that cars or computers at one point in the past weren't a possibility -- that arranging the same parts in the same way would not have resulted in machines that function as our cars and computers do -- but nowadays it does, because that is a possibility of emergence that has since emerged.
Or that, although right now it's not the case that if you arrange seven palladium hexagons of exactly the right proportions in the right way it will create a perpetual motion machine that outputs more energy than any of its components have, in the future that might become the case!
And of course that's all nonsense, so you must mean something else, which once again makes me think that you're taking word to mean something different than I am, and think that I mean something I don't too.
It was always possible to arrange bits of metal etc together into a steam engine, even if nobody did it until relatively recently. Someone starting to do something that was always possible to do isn't "emergence" in any philosophical sense, but of course I don't deny that that happens.
If you arrange the right bits of metal together in the right way, they can do something that none of the bits of metal etc alone did (like make a train move), but that thing they do all together is a combination of a bunch of things they could all already do. Compare: one person alone can't spin a car around from the outside, but a dozen people positioned in the right way each pushing in the right directions can; yet all you've done there is combine the abilities of the individual people in the right way. That's "weak emergence", and I have no objection to it, and never have, and have been explicit about that this whole time.
But some people say that if a bunch of atoms form into molecules that form into cells that form into a human being, that human being starts doing something that's not something any combination of things that cells / molecules / atoms / etc could already do, but something else entirely on top of that physical functionality. That's "strong emergence", and that's the only thing I've been arguing against with you.
So if that last thing is not the thing that you mean, then we have no fight! And I've been saying that all along, and I don't know why you keep acting like I'm arguing against against the second thing, or now the first thing.
In short: Moral egoism; moral narcissism.
Physically, maybe, assuming that the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed since the bronze age. But historically, no, because you need a certain grade or quality of steel to build a steam engine, which ancient Egyptians did not have the technology for.
I’ve not read where you deny the metaphysical domain of human reason, so I wonder how you can categorically deny the possibility of some kind of non-physical world here. If it is impossible to deny the appearance.....the seemingness......of human rationality, isn’t it permissible to grant the validity of its sufficiently critiqued cognitive machinations? Why can’t the metaphysical domain be a valid placeholder for a non-physical world?
I submit that a metaphysical domain does solve the problems of free will, if one is satisfied by mere acceptance of possible logical consistency, rather than necessary empirical proofs.
—————-
Quoting Pfhorrest
What of the possibility that determinations can be made without regard to facts, but with regard for law? In such case, those determinations cannot be in any way random.
I think we must account for A.)....circumstances in which the facts are not known, yet in which some determination is nonetheless required, and B.)....circumstances in which the facts are known but the agent makes his determinations in direct opposition to them. In other words, it doesn’t hold that the predicates of a purely physical world can be the sole arbiter of the human decision-making procedure. Which you apparently condone, given your “.....an ability to correctly assess what you should do...”, which presupposes some ability to relate a subjective judgement to its objective manifestation.
As I said.....applause for the conception of a metaphysical will, but I regret to see you spoil it by denying its usefulness.
I hear you saying: only the things that can happen do in fact happen. Which I agree with, obviously. If they happen, they can happen.
What I am saying is: sometimes things happen for the first time, or for the first time somewhere. Say, abiogenesis happens on earth circa 4 billion years ago. Or a community of primates invents articulated language circa 50,000 years ago. Or a new book is written by a guy called Galileo. Or the steam engine is invented in Europe during the 18/19th century. And sometimes, as in these examples, this new thing works; in ways that old things did not. Truly new developments, behaviors and laws regarding them can emerge. Of course, these new behaviors and the laws regarding them are not impossible, they can emerge, after all they DO emerge. And thus they do not contradict previous laws. They just ADD something new to them.
Something like life. Or language. Or modern science. Or the industrial revolution.
That is emergence, properly conceived. It looks magic but it's not. It just happens when wholes are more than the algebraic sum of their parts. When structures matter more than their replaceable elements.
Great reading comprehension there. :smirk:
(Hint: X as Y isn’t Y as X).
Quoting Mww
I don't at all deny human reason, only that it depends at all on some kind of non-physical stuff.
Quoting Mww
In the OP I linked to an earlier thread on my physicalist ontology. Short version is: physicalism is just empirical realism, and non-empiricism leaves no recourse except to dogmatism, while non-realism leaves no recourse except to relativism, and both dogmatism and relativism are just alternate ways of giving up on even trying to figure out what is real, so pragmatically must be rejected, which in turn (following the chain of inferences back up) necessitates empirical realism, i.e. physicalism.
Quoting Mww
Sure, but then they would still be deterministic, and in an even less free way if what you mean by "law" is something that completely disregards the facts, i.e. if an agent will always do X regardless of circumstances, even if the circumstances would suggest he ought to do otherwise.
Quoting Olivier5
None of the examples you gave add new laws; they are just inevitable consequences of the laws that already existed. Like I said already, if you model a whole lot of molecules just as molecules, without programming any concept of thermodynamics into your model, your model will automatically exhibit thermodynamic properties; you don't have to add anything to it. Thermodynamic properties are just shorthand for aggregates of more fundamental properties, and while it can be handy to use that shorthand when those aggregates are what you care about, you don't strictly have to; the more fundamental properties are enough, and you get the aggregate properties for free from them, without adding anything more.
When it makes sense to use such shorthand, that is emergent behavior in the "weak" sense of the term, and not anything I've ever argued against. (NB that the examples you gave above aren't even emergent in this sense; there's nothing emergent about them at all, in the way that word is usually used). It's only when you have to explicitly add new laws to account for the higher-level behavior -- like if a bunch of molecules modeled as such would not exhibit temperature unless you added a temperature parameter to the model -- that it's emergence in the "strong" sense, that I'm against.
Quoting Olivier5
That's how you conceive it, but it's not how anyone in the philosophical literature conceives of it.
That is simply not true. Life created new laws, like the laws of genetics.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's how it is conceived by biologists.
So you're saying that you think genetics is not just an inevitable consequence of molecules doing what molecules do, when the right molecules come together the right way, but in addition to the laws that govern those molecules, the universe has entirely separate "laws of genetics" that it invokes when molecules get together like that?
I.e. that if you build a simulation of a simple living organism, it would not be enough to simulate the laws that govern the molecules that organism is built of, but you would also have to simulate a completely separate genetic function to make the organism behave like a real organism does?
Quoting Olivier5
Citation needed.
Whether natural laws exist or not by themselves is a matter of dispute. But it cannot be disputed that human beings have identified regularities in the working of nature, which they call laws. Some of these laws pertain to how genetics work. Get used to it.
These, by the way, are most probably NOT inevitable. Other rules could work just as well. You could replace the bases serving as letters in DNA by other bases for instance. The genetic code is arbitrary, just like any code.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The concepts of systems and the possibility of their emergence are all over biology. They are the dominant paradigm since the mid-20th century. You cannot learn biology today without dabbing into system theory. One example among millions:
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00942.2007
If you want to get more familiar with these ideas, I recommend François Jacob (The Logic of Life; The possible and the actual). Gregory Bateson is also very good.
That doesn't answer the question at all.
Of course we've identified laws of genetics. The question is: if we perfectly modeled the molecules that, when put together the right way in real life, obey those laws of genetics, and didn't explicitly program our model with those laws of genetics, just the laws of chemistry (etc), would we just see the complex systems of molecules obeying the laws of genetics in our model automatically, even though we didn't tell the model anything about genetics?
If yes, that's only weak emergence and I've never argued against it.
If no -- if we'd have to program the model with those laws of genetics in addition to the laws of chemistry (etc) in order to see the same behavior in the complex system of molecules that we see in real life -- then that's strong emergence and that's the only thing I'm against.
Quoting Olivier5
You're understanding "inevitable" backward. I don't mean "is it inevitable that life would evolve to use DNA as we know it as its genetic code", but "if you simulated just the molecules of life as we know them, like DNA, in the right arrangement, would that automatically simulate life as we know it, whether we were trying to simulate life or not, because the laws governing those molecules entail the laws governing life without any additional input about the laws of life specifically?"
Quoting Olivier5
That's not the question. The question is whether the sense of emergence that you insist is the "proper" one, a sense that just means "new things happen that didn't happen before" and not any of the philosophically specific things I'm talking about above, is what biologists all mean when they say that word.
Okay then.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That is I suppose the crux of your argument. Factually speaking, it is NOT TRUE that we can model, derive or compute the laws of genetics from the laws of chemistry. It hasn't been done yet. Likewise, we cannot really derive the laws of chemistry from those of QM.
Agreed....reason cannot depend on non-physical stuff, in the strictest sense. So you.....and everybody else that “...rises to the level of speculation....” grants the necessity of physical ground for reason, but nobody knows how one follows from the other. So we don’t deny the reality of that which we know nothing real about. An insurmountable paradox best left alone.
I don’t see why we can’t say reason depends on non-physical stuff, if only because reason is itself non-physical, FAPP, and it is reason that tells us about itself. It’s how humans operate, so to reject that operational character is to reject our own intrinsic humanity.
You do decent philosophy, but at what cost?
"We have not done it" is not the same as "it cannot be done".
Of course in that case we're still not certain as empirical facts can be that it can be done, which is why this is a philosophical issue rather than a scientific one. The question at hand is whether (it is reasonable) to expect that it can eventually be done, or instead that it is just in principle not possible.
That's the repeated theme throughout a bunch of my philosophy: "we haven't done it yet, but should we conclude on that basis that it therefore can't, or instead assume that it can and just keep trying to?" My answer is always the latter.
This is actually a much clearer way of formulating my objection to strong emergentism, so this has turned out to be a productive conversation after all; I'll make a note to myself to phrase it this way in the future.
In any case, I would be interested to hear a synopsis of where exactly the difficulties in reducing biology to chemistry or chemistry to physics are, because in the biology I've studied macroscopic organisms were easily reducible to microscopic organisms, and we've gotten really good at modelling the nanoscopic molecular machinery that those microscopic organisms are made of, which seems like that's already a reduction to chemistry. Likewise, in the chemistry I've studied, all the aggregate chemical reactions were explained in terms of molecule-by-molecule interactions, which appealed ultimately to the physics of electron orbitals for how the atoms of those molecules do their things to each other. At no point in my (admittedly non-specialist) education in these fields were any specific problems where something could not be clearly reduced to something simpler ever detailed, so I'd be curious to hear about some.
Quoting Mww
That's begging the question there.
You might as well, because all this talk about weak and strong emergence is cheap.
The main problem I see with reductionism (the actual name for this idea of yours; an idea from the 19th century) is the elusive bottom: there's no reason to assume that there is some rock bottom somewhere on the path to the infinitely small.
Another problem is that our present understanding of biology contradicts reductionism, in that in a living being, the structure is more important than the elements, and in fact manages its own elements. This is evidence of top-down causation, an anathema for reductionists.
Finally, reductionism is tragically penny-wise dollar-stupid. It makes the quest of truth about some sort of sad bean counting. By that I mean that instead of taking the human condition seriously, it makes gestures in the direction of muons and quarks, assuring us that one day, we will know who we are by looking at our smallest pieces... This is alienating, and may explain the tragedies of the 20th century. After all, if human beings are nothing more than clusters of atoms, one might as well kill them en masse.
Reductionism is a death cult.
The fundamental problem to "jump" from QM to chemistry is that we can't solve the Schrödinger equation for molecules. So we cannot predict, say, the V-shape form of the molecule of water from our QM models of oxygen and hydrogen. The shape of molecules being a big factor in their chemical reactivity (stericity), this means we can't predict chemistry from QM.
The fundamental issue to "jump" from chemistry to life is the problem of abiogenesis. We don't have a good model of how life emerged from non-life. In life, chemistry is instrumentalized to transmit messages, so there is an epistemic jump here, not just an organizational one like exists between QM and chemistry. How chemicals did learn to communicate and coordinate with one another is therefore a major issue.
Then there is the "jump" from biology to consciousness, which is where we happen to live. This is the mind-body problem, and it's not near being solved. I also think of it as an epistemic jump, not just as a more complex form of organisation. The mind is life trying to understand itself.
.....says the guy that doesn’t deny human reason, insists it must in no way depend on non-physical stuff, yet can’t measure it. Can’t show how signals from a sense organ enable some quanta of neurotransmitters such that Lima beans are translated into that which the brain registers as gawd-awful. Then, even enables itself to inform some other brain it has registered Lima beans as gawd-awful, with which that other brain may not agree. Maybe because it has no “gawd-awful” pathways enabled....dunno.
I’d rather just beg the question.
I'm still talking about weak and strong emergence. Your refusal to acknowledge that we're talking about different things is the root of this entire disagreement. Philosophical progress is made almost entirely by differentiating concepts that would otherwise cause intractable confusion when conflated together.
Quoting Olivier5
Reductionism is much older than the 19th century, and that's not a fault with it; lots of old ideas are still the right ideas. Literally the first ever philosophical theory in recorded history was "maybe everything is made of the same stuff" (water, according to Thales), and that notion that everything is connected in one continuous unified whole has been the driving force behind most of science. It's not about finding a "rock bottom", it's about not having discontinuities in our understanding: having every account or everything transition seamlessly into each other with no sudden new fundamental laws of nature added anywhere, just building up from simpler laws of simpler things, and analyzing those simple laws of simple things down in to even simpler laws of even simpler things. We start in the middle and connect both up and down.
Man, the more I talk about this with you the more I realize my overarching philosophical principles apply to this situation more directly than I thought. Your recourse to strong emergence to avoid the bottomless pit of reductionism is exactly analogous to the transcendental dogmatist who thinks the only alternative to that worldview is cynical relativism (a la "you have to believe in magic or else you believe in nothing"). You're taking a side on a dichotomy that I consider false. I'm not on the opposite side of that dichotomy from you, I reject the dichotomy entirely.
Quoting Olivier5
This is still misunderstanding what's even at issue here. What you're talking about is multiple realizability: you can have a high-level structure realized in many different kinds of low-level structures. That doesn't change that all you need to get the high-level structure it to put some such low-level structure or another in place; you don't have to arrange the parts and then wave your magic wand to bring them to life, just arranging any appropriate parts the appropriate way is enough. That different parts can be used to the same effect is beside that point.
Quoting Olivier5
I've suspected that some kind of attitude like this was behind your recalcitrance. You think that a deeper understanding of something somehow makes it less special, takes away some kind of magic. Never mind that this is completely mixing up is and ought. You can understand that human beings are fundamentally just really complex patterns of excitations in quantum fields, and still also understand that their lives have moral value; because one has nothing to do with the other.
This is how it feels from my side:
[I]Olivier5: there exist donkeys.
Pfhorrest: only weak donkeys exist. Strong donkeys are impossible.
O5: ???
Pfh: strong donkeys are those traveling faster than the speed of light. They cannot possibly exist.
O5: mmmmokay... So weak donkeys exist.
Pfh: yes but weak donkeys are trivial. The important point is that strong donkeys do not exist.[/i]
.......
I suspect you use this distinction between strong and weak donkeys to muddy the water and avoid facing the existence of real donkeys. Because you and I happen to agree on the impossibility of transluminous donkeys. Where we disagree is where you say "weak emergence is trivial". I believe it is massively important and non trivial, as it created you and me.
Quoting Pfhorrest
They have been precursors, but I think you are confusing reductionism with the idea that nature is one, an idea at least as old as monotheism, and to which I subscribe. But just because nature is one, does not mean there's no emergence in it. A theory of everything would include some description of life, societies, language, literature, science, philosophy, and the likes, and therefore would need to account for their emergence. The TOE won't be just about muons. There is no reason to prioritize one scale of reality over another, which is what reductionists do.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quantum fields have moral values? Since when?
I only mean trivial in the sense that it's not something in dispute. Nobody denies the existence of subluminal donkeys, so there's no point arguing about them. And you and I may exist that there are no superluminal donkeys, but there are other people who claim that they do exist. I suspect that you think it's pointless arguing about whether superluminal donkeys because they obviously don't, but if you agree that that's obvious you're not the target of the argument, the people who think they do exist are. If the only donkey's you're talking about are subluminal ones, I don't know why we're even arguing, and in that sense (the "where's the disagreement?" sense) it's trivial.
However, as the conversation has gone on, it's begun to sound like you really do believe in superluminal donkeys, think all donkeys are superluminal, and take disputing the existence of superluminal donkeys to be equivalent to disputing the existence of donkeys entirely. Or at other times, in the other direction, like you think a "donkey" is just any ungulate. Or possibly both at once, that all ungulates are donkeys and all of them are superluminal, and take my denial of anything superluminal as a denial that even cows exist.
Quoting Olivier5
Sure, but the TOE should be able to relate phenomena on any level to phenomena on any other level, in principle, even if it's impractically difficult and not something we'd want to do in the ordinary routine of things. It should be able to describe psychological phenomena in terms of biological phenomena, and biological phenomena in terms of chemical phenomena, and chemical phenomena in terms of physical phenomena. Just like in mathematics, we can in principle describe things as complicated as Special Unity groups (a kind of locally-flat geometric space, obeying certain rules, where every point in that space is a square matrix of complex numbers, also obeying certain rules) entirely in terms of empty sets nested inside of each other.
There's no practical reason why we would want to do that ordinarily, but being able in principle to zoom into the details of someone on one level of abstraction and see a complex arrangements of things on another lower level means we never have any discontinuities in our understanding of things: we can understand how all of these different kinds of objects at different scales relate to each other. Weak emergence is just the converse of that: if you zoom out and ignore the details on the smaller scale you'll begin to see new structures on a larger scale, just as a natural consequence of those smaller-scale things doing what they do. Strong emergence OTOH is the claim that those higher-level structures are not such a natural consequence: that there are special higher-level rules that explicitly cause those higher-level structures to exist, and as a consequence if you zoom in too far ("reductionism") you lose information.
It would perhaps be handle to speak also of "weak reductionism" and "strong reductionism", where weak reductionism is compatible with weak emergentism and vice versa, while strong reductionism is incompatible with strong emergentism and vice versa. Which once again fits the kind of pattern that comes up over and over again in my general philosophy:
etc
Quoting Olivier5
Patterns of information encoded in quantum fields have moral value (singular, i.e. are of moral value) since they developed into forms that differentiate the experiences they are subjected to into types with different directions of fit, thereby becoming susceptible to suffering upon mismatch of those experiences.
No disagreement there, as long as the specificity of each level is adequately and equally reflected, rather than abolished. There is no level having some greater existence or causality than another. They are all just one reality. The different scales are a view of the mind and therefore no particular scale takes precedence over the others in reality.
We might think of our level as the "ground level" or reference level for instance. We often do, in fact, but that is just because it is literally our point of view, our locus of experience. It's how the world looks from where we are. If the universe could think, it would probably see itself, the whole universe, as the "ground level" and everything else as mere details.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Rather, I see a new structure as one of the many possible manners in which certain elements could be arranged to do things these elements cannot do in isolation. Structures are not pre-determined, they just happen a certain way but could have happened another way. And structures do things that don't "show up" at elemental level. For instance, you cannot observe or describe phenomena like reproduction or predation at elementary particle level. Of course, when you eat a carrot (or use it to simulate or stimulate reproduction) certain things happen to the electrons of that carrot, but if you'd zoom on them, you won't see your electrons eating up the carrot's electrons or shaging them. You wouldn't see anything in fact, because that's not the level at which predation or reproduction happens. It is in this sense that reductionism is absurd.
:up:
Emergence came up in this thread in the course of making the point that the higher and lower level structures are metaphysically continuous, such that the higher level can be broken down to the lower level and the lower level built up into the higher level and at no point do all new metaphysics have to be invoked: it’s all the same kind of stuff, examined at different levels of detail or abstraction. Strong emergentism definitionally runs counter to that. If you’re not counter to that, then I’m not arguing against you. As I’ve been saying all along.
When I asked you since when wavefunctions have moral values, you answered in essence: since they can suffer. Can't electrons suffer? Is suffering an emerging phenomenon then?
My whole problem with reductionism is that it is alienating. It places truth and causality artificially and needlessly outside of the human realm. It makes a mockery of human beings. Hence the people adopting it become sad, depressed and often aggressive. I believe it is important to recognize a certain sanctity to the human person. The idea comes from religion: man was supposedly made in the image of God. Even an atheist such as myself can see in the 20th century the horrors that the trivialization of human beings as mere objects can bring. God was dead alright, and man was expandable.
There is something radically new in life, and in human consciousness. Something precious and rare that does not exist in electrons.
Philosophies have consequences. A philosophy that does not see life as precious and does not recognize human beings as specially precious, is a dangerous philosophy. If your form of reductionism is not like that, if it can find ways to calculate moral values based on the Schrödinger equation, maybe indeed it is a weak form of reductionism, one that allows quite a lot of emergence to happen in it.
It isn't like that, but not because it can "calculate moral values based on the Schrödinger equation", but because questions about what is real and questions about what is moral are completely separate kinds of questions, on my account. Analyzing what a human being (or anything) is, down into quantum fields or whatever, tells us nothing one way or the other about what ought to be; the answers to the latter question are independent of answers to the former question.
And that's not strongly emergent, because it's not that new "ethical properties" arise when amoral matter is arranged the right way, but that ethical questions are completely separate from what kinds of properties what kinds of things have and how they relate to each other.
And yes, the capacity to suffer is a (weakly) emergent phenomenon, like life, consciousness, and back to the subject we're wildly diverging from now, will. It's a kind of functionality, which like all functionality shapes both behavior and experience.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The capacity to suffer arises when matter without capacity to suffer is arranged the right way. Therefore, suffering is strongly emergent as per your definition.
No, because the capacity to suffer is, on my account, a product of the way that the brain functions (though like all mental phenomena it's multiply-realizable: it doesn't have to be exactly a human brain to be capable of suffering, just execute the same general kind of function), which is an ordinary physical process built up out of simpler ordinary physical processes in a way that is only weakly emergent.
I.e. there's not some extra fundamental law of nature about suffering, on top of the ordinary physical laws, that only applies to matter arranged the right way into something like a human brain. But when you arrange matter the right way, a possible product of the complex interactions of the ordinary laws already governing that matter is a state of suffering.
If you put a bunch of simple things together and some higher-level structure or behavior appears out of the complex of them, that's emergence, simpliciter, of some sort or another.
If you could (in principle) model just the simple things, put together like that, and your model would automatically show the higher-level structure or behavior in the complex of them, that's weak emergence.
If, instead, even a perfect model of just the simple things, even put together like that, could not (even in principle) automatically show the higher-level structure or behavior in the complex of them, unless you added a special rule to the model to make complexes like that do things like that, that's strong emergence.
On my account, if you were to perfectly model just the low-level behavior of a bunch of matter arranged exactly like it is in a human being, you would automatically model a being capable of suffering, and all other mental phenomena, without having to add any special rules to the model specifically to handle modeling mental phenomena. So that is weakly emergent, not strongly emergent.
That such emergence needs to be physically possible (without magic) in order to happen is a point that you have made at some length, and I agreed that impossible or magical things do not usually happen, so if emergence happens it must be within the boundaries of what is physically possible, but the point seems rather trite to me.
We also agreed that strong emergence is fundamental to how language works, and therefore that it happens, if only in the mechanisms of symbolic language. I guess such strong emergence weakly emerged at some point... :-)