Why does determinism rule out free will?
I have been reading the arguments regarding free will and determinism but I confess I have got somewhat lost in the woods. I understand the arguments for determinism but the arguments against determinism seem to be based on additional assumptions.
For example, the Wikipedia entry for free will states the following:
"Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with the existence of free will thus conceived."
I cannot understand how the fact that only one course of events is possible rules out free will. It is conceivable that the one course of events is the result of innumerable decisions of free will. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic theologian, likens life to a novel where the end is known, but the story consists of agents acting freely.
Wikipedia also goes on to state:
"The puzzle of reconciling 'free will' with a deterministic universe is known as the problem of free will or sometimes referred to as the dilemma of determinism.[15] This dilemma leads to a moral dilemma as well: the question of how to assign responsibility for actions if they are caused entirely by past events"
I really do not understand the logic of this argument. Morality exists regardless of whether free will exists or not.
There are many such instances, I hope this forum will help me answer the questions for which I have not found sufficient answers.
For example, the Wikipedia entry for free will states the following:
"Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with the existence of free will thus conceived."
I cannot understand how the fact that only one course of events is possible rules out free will. It is conceivable that the one course of events is the result of innumerable decisions of free will. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic theologian, likens life to a novel where the end is known, but the story consists of agents acting freely.
Wikipedia also goes on to state:
"The puzzle of reconciling 'free will' with a deterministic universe is known as the problem of free will or sometimes referred to as the dilemma of determinism.[15] This dilemma leads to a moral dilemma as well: the question of how to assign responsibility for actions if they are caused entirely by past events"
I really do not understand the logic of this argument. Morality exists regardless of whether free will exists or not.
There are many such instances, I hope this forum will help me answer the questions for which I have not found sufficient answers.
Comments (406)
The claim is that one cannot be morally responsible for an action that one did not freely choose to do. As an example, if I am pushed over and as I fall I break a vase then I am not responsible for breaking the vase, but if I choose to break it then I am. If we don't have free will (according to the incompatibilist at least), what we think of as choosing to break the vase is actually akin to us being pushed over and breaking it as we fall; a consequence of external forces and not a consequence of our own agency.
If only one course of events is possible then there is some constraint on our decision-making. If there is a constraint on our decision-making then we don't actually have a choice, as a choice requires more than one possible outcome.
Regarding a single possibility- what Kreeft sounds like he is responding to is the problem of foreknowledge and free will, which is related to the free will debate, but does not comprise all of the debate. If there is only one possibility available to us to do, then we could not have done otherwise. If we could not have done otherwise, then in what sense is there free will?
Of course, there is compatibilism (free will, properly understood, is compatible with determinism), but that follows a different definition of free will than what is commonly referred to.
Do you have the actual power to do otherwise and believe this power to do otherwise is somehow necessary for moral responsibility? Then you are not a compatibilist, but believe in libertarian free will.
Yes, I also noticed that jkop began by mentioning and defining compatibilism and then seemed to be describing a form of incompatibilist libertarianism.
There is an issue, though, with contrasting compatibilism with the traditionally incompatibilist idea that free will requires the 'ability to do otherwise'. There now is a variety of compatibilism that incorporates this requirement but maintains that the 'ability to do otherwise' (or 'PAP', principle of alternative possibility, in the literature) is compatible with determinism. Endorsers of this new variety of compatibilism (e.g. Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Michael Fara) also endorse a view called "new dispositionalism" (by one of its detractors: Randolph Clarke) that adapts to abilities a (revised) conditional analysis of dispositions first proposed by David Lewis. The core idea is that when an agent performs an action in a deterministic world, that doesn't entail that this agent didn't have the ability to do something else but only that this ability was not actually exercised. This is much more to this new dispositionalist form of compatibilism, and the idea isn't without trouble, but it is worth mentioning that some sophisticated contemporary compatibilists now accept the requirement for alternative possibilities that was traditionally only insisted upon by incompatibilists.
Free will is classicaly represented through choice. A person has free will if s/he can choose, well, freely, as in, not under any influence s/he can't override.
Given the above, it follows that determinism precludes free will. This I think is what they call hard determinism.
The question then is, do we possess free will? The ramifications are important e.g. moral responsibility, fate, etc.
Here's where I'm puzzled. To me free will is demonstrable - just set up multiple choice question - and therefore provable through experimentation. Yet, no philosophy book mentions of such experiments! Why? Is it because it's impossible to count and reckon ALL the factors that may influence our choices? As you can see, this is a practical problem. Is it because we can never override some of these influences? This is, what I call, a theoretical problem. [B]I'd be grateful if someone would answer this question.[/b]
That said, there's another point I'd like to make. The laws of nature, as discovered in science, are inviolable and immutable over time and space. We're are put in a box, so to speak, whose walls are formed by these so-called laws of nature. We may see a choice that violates these laws, for instance one can imagine oneself levitating, BUT we can't make that choice. So, in a way, we are in a deterministic world. There's some degree of freedom (apparent) e.g. whether to drink coke or pepsi but these choices are restrained at some point along the way, for we can't drink through our ears. I wonder if such constraints extend to other domains of choice.
So, in some crude sense, we are living in a deterministic world; well, at least a semi-deterministic world.
Free will requires predictability to be meaningful, and predictability is dependent on [a degree of] determinism. But absolute determinism (the clockwork universe, down to and including individual decisions and fleeting thoughts) lacks truth-value, since truth is a property of propositions, and the link between the terms in a proposition must be free (else the proposition is not a proposition, but rather a term-disguised-as-proposition).
If we want our dialogues to be meaningful, we must accept both free will and determinism.
Because some understandings of free will, such as my own, have it that free will only makes sense if more than one course of events is possible, and we make a choice between those.
How though? At any given point, only one course of events is possible on the alternate view. Where is freedom entering the picture?
Quoting FreeEmotion
Again, how would they be acting freely?
Quoting FreeEmotion
The idea there is that if Joe murdered Paul, Joe had no choice in the matter. Only one course of events was possible, and that course of events was determined long before Joe even existed. Joe was merely a "pawn" in that course of events.
What I've never been able to make the slightest lick of sense of is compatibilism. It's always seemed incoherent to me.
If detereminism is the case, how do you have that opportunity? It would merely be a matter that you don't know which course of action you MUST take. (Otherwise determinism isn't the case.)
If they had the ability to do something else then the world in question isn't deterministic. You can't simply rename the ideas and say "There, compatibilism works."
The free will side was never saying that nothing is predictable, that causality never obtains, etc. The debate is between what you're calling "absolute determinism" and whether any ontic freedom obtains whatsoever. If you're not forwarding that "absolute determinism" is the case, then you're no determinist.
It's similar to say, the realist/idealist distinction in that realists aren't saying that nothing is mental or ideal in nature. Rather, the idealists are saying that we can't know or that nothing is NOT mental or ideal in nature.
Or say the nominalism/realism on universals distinction. Realists on universals aren't saying that nothing is simply conceptual or just a name or anything like that. Rather, nominalists are saying that things are ONLY conceptual or names, and there are no real types whatsoever.
According to a dispositional analysis of powers, the fact that an object doesn't exercise a power on some occasion doesn't show that the object didn't have this power on that occasion: only that is wasn't actually exercised. This is a common sense difference between the non-actualization of an existing power and a lack-of-power, which can be recognized irrespective of the truth of determinism.
For instance, a sugar cube has the (passive) power of dissolving in water. We call this power solubility. The general circumstance consisting in this sugar cube being immersed in water can be construed as a triggering condition (or triggering cause) for the actualization of this power. We don't say of the sugar cube, when is it kept dry, that it is not soluble at that time, only that it didn't actually dissolve. It's still soluble. A conditional analysis of solubility (in water) would look like this: "X is soluble in water if and only if X would dissolves if it were immersed in water" where the conditional is understood as a causal counterfactual. The counterfactual conditional is true even in circumstances where the antecedent isn't true.
In order to adapt this sort of analysis of powers (or dispositions) to the problem of free will, you may have to identify the 'triggering condition' of the agent's practical abilities with some feature of this agent's rational will. In that case, the agent who choses to steal a book didn't actualize her power from refraining to do so. This doesn't show that she didn't have the power from refraining to do so, anymore than a sugar cube remaining dry shows that it isn't soluble. An incompatibilist may object that the 'triggering' condition that was missing for the agent to refrain from stealing the book (having a honest character, say) isn't something that the agent had any control over at the time of acting if the world is deterministic. But it is far from obvious that rational agents relate to their own rational/moral characters in an extrinsic way such as to restrict their freedom. This is a much more difficult argument to make than it seems.
A determinist like Schopenhauer simply notes that apriori every event can only have one outcome. If the outcome of a die roll is that the 5 is face up, it is not possible that the 2 is also face up.
Talk of the "power of the die roll to produce a 2 face up" is an analysis of logical possiblity.
That's fine, but determinism, if we're indeed talking about determinism, DOES imply that the powers in question are not available. Otherwise we're not talking about determinism. We're talking about something else and calling it determinism.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
We don't say that because people don't actually think in determinist terms most of the time. What's the case in the world doesn't hinge on what we think or how we talk about it. If determinism were true, then it wasn't actually possible for a sugar cube that was kept dry to dissolve in water. We could think, "If things had been different, it could have dissolved in water," but if determinism is true, then things could not have been different, and that sugar cube never could have dissolved in water. If determinism were true, then counterfactuals are just complete nonsense. And conditionals would only have semantic relevance insofar as they're about epistemic gaps.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I can't quite figure out that sentence.
We can't talk about possibilities that aren't actualized if determinism is the case. There ARE NO possibilities that aren't actualized in that situation.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Again, a sugar cube that wasn't dissolved in water never had the possibility of being dissolved in water if determinism is the case.
If the world is deterministic, it's simply a matter of causality. Causality determined, long before the agent even existed, that the agent must steal the book.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I can't really parse that sentence, either, but it doesn't seem to be in a context of determinism being the case.
For sure, this is a common way to be a determinist. In his book The Refutation of Determinism, Michael Ayers (London: Methuen, 1968) calls this sort of determinism actualism. Actualism, as applied to human and natural powers (e.g. the powers of objects) yields the denial that objects (or humans) have unactualized powers. But the sort of conditional analysis of dispositions and abilities proposed by the new dispositionalists show that actualism isn't the only option. (And their view was anticipated by Michael Ayers although he isn't, himself, a compatibilist or a determinist)
In other words--"We could change the topic and thus be compatibilists."
Sure, they could do that, but then they're simply not determinists (too).
An alternate approach, which seems to be Dennett's, is to change the topic and claim to be a compatibilist without actually being a libertarian too.
So then we have to wonder why people are so eager to consider themselves compatibilists when they're simply changing the topic, changing the ideas that the terms represent, while they're still incompatibilists (as they must be if they're to be coherent) when it comes to what the terms traditionally represented.
Compatibilism only really requires believing that free will and determinism are compatible. It doesn't require that free will requires the ability to have done otherwise. For some, to have free will is just for one's self to be the cause of one's actions. Nothing about this requires that one's self could have caused a different action, or that one's self isn't in turn caused by some other event.
As an example, consider a deterministic universe in which a button is pressed and as a consequence of this a ball is dropped onto china plate, breaking it. What is responsible for the china plate breaking? The ball, even though the ball breaking it was determined by the button being pressed. So by the same token, one's self can be responsible for one's actions even if some external force is responsible for one's self.
Which is redefining the libertarian side, and thus one isn't a compatibilist on the traditional senses of the terms. One has merely changed the topic, apparently out of some normative desire to be considered a compatibilist. The person with the view you note is a determinist. They don't buy the libertarian side.
But yeah, I agree with you that determinists can still back moral responsibility in the sense you're talking about. I was explaining to the OP the traditional objection though (in my comment about Joe murdering Paul).
When you are saying that the powers in question "are not available" you are merely pointing out that they are not exercised in the actual circumstances, which is something that is accepted by dispositionalists. But to ascribe a power to an object, according to them, is not the same thing as saying that it was actualized. It is not either to say that it could have been actualized consistently with the past state of the universe and the laws of nature remaining the same. Maybe it was indeed necessary that the power would remain unmanifested. But according to the conditional analysis of powers, this is no ground for the denial of the object's possessing the power. Rather, the ascription of the power is akin to the attribution of some sort of intrinsic structural 'causal basis' to the object that explains why objects of that sort manifest this specific power when and only when the triggering conditions are realized. This is perfectly consistent with determinism, and with common sense, according to which attribution of dispositional attributes to objects (e.g. solubility in water, to sugar) is true irrespective of the possible truth of determinism. If theoretical physicist were to prove tomorrow that the fundamental laws of the universe were deterministic, it would not follow that they would have discovered that dry sugar cubes aren't soluble in water.
I grant that issues get more complicated when "new dispositionalism" gets adduced to defend the compatibility of determinism with the requirement for alternative possibilities for freedom and responsibility. One issue concerns the problem of "ultimate responsibility" when the antecedent features of the rational/moral character of agents are construed as antecedent conditions that determine their choices "externally", as it were. (That is, as determining conditions that aren't under those agent's control anymore). But such objections also rest of very problematic presuppositions about the nature of rational agency. For some recent statements of the objections to new dispositionalism, see Randolph Clarke, Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will-The New Dispositionalism, and Chistopher Evan Franklin, Masks Abilities and Opportunities Why the New Dispositionalism Cannot Succeed. I don't think, though, that Clarke's and Franklin's objections are definitive though they point to genuine problems with the current proposals.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that there's not the possibility in any sense. If you say that the possibility obtained, you're not a determinist. Hence not a compatibilist.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Just that compatibilists and libertarians have different conceptions of free will? Sure.
Or maybe the libertarian and the determinist have merely changed the topic, apparently out of some normative desire to be considered an incompatibilist?
You seem to be suggesting that the definition of free will that is incompatible with determinism is the correct one?
Compatibilism can only work by changing the topic.
Nope. What I'm talking about is what the terms referred to. That was the debate.
Quoting Michael
I'm saying that changing what we're talking about isn't actually saying that both sides of what we were talking about can work together.
But I'm not getting how the dispositionalist is offering an option. Determinists don't disagree that talk of logical possibility is valuable.
Again, I'm not sure what you mean by this. You seem to be suggesting that the definition of free will that is incompatible with determinism is the correct one?
And according to this, "As a theory-neutral point of departure, then, free will can be defined as the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility". Therefore, if one believes in causal determinism but also in moral responsibility then one is a compatibilist rather than a hard determinist.
But then someone comes along afterwards and says, (B) "Wait--it can be both blue and orange. We can make this part blue and that part orange"
Well, that's fine, but it's changing what was being talked about, namely that it could either be all blue or all orange but not both.
So the person who said (B) wasn't really saying something about (A). Maybe they'd use the same terms--the (B) person might say, "So, you see, the dress is both dreblue and dreorange." But it's not. They've changed what "dreblue" and "dreorange" are referring to.
They can obviously do that, but it has nothing to do with the conversation that the person who said (A) was broaching.
That depends on what it is that you want them to offer as "an option". Since they are compatibilists, they are not offering "an option" for agents to "chose otherwise" consistently with the past state of the universe (and the laws of nature) remaining the same, as most traditional incompatibilist libertarian required. Rather, they are offering an compatibilist analysis of "could have done otherwise", as opposed to traditional compatibilists who rather accept the lack of alternative possibilities and rather argue for the compatibility of free will and responsibility with this alleged lack of options.
So what did the first person who talked about free will mean by the term?
But this reasoning is problematic anyway. The first people to use the term "atoms" to refer to the atoms of the Standard Model meant by the term "indivisible". But atoms are nonetheless divisible.
It would be silly to frame the whole thing around the "could have done otherwise" phrase. You can just state it as "there is more than one possibility that has a >0 probability of obtaining."
Re freedom, the debate was originally about whether given some antecedent state, A, was there more than one immediately following, incompatible consequent state, at least B or C, that had a >0 probability of obtaining. (And then re free will, whether this was the case in conjunction with will phenomena, especially with respect to whether will could at all direct or influence the consequent state that did obtain.)
The determinist side, on the other hand, originally said that given some antecedent state, A, only one immediately following state, B, has a non-zero probability--namely a 100% probability--of obtaining.
The discussion of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for decades and it isn't silly at all. There is a genuine cost for accepting it (usually incurred by libertarians) and a genuine cost for rejecting it (usually incurred by compatibilists). The reason libertarian believe compatibilists to be silly, and vice versa, is because each side is acutely aware of the bullet being bitten by the other side. Compatibilists are resigned to accept that free agents only have the illusion of having several genuinely (as of yet unsettled) open options to them, and libertarians struggle with the problems of luck and control.
New dispositionalist analyses of the abilities of rational agents aim at providing an account of free will that avoids both of those costs. I am not a new dispositionalist myself, but I can credit them with seeing the blind spots of both libertarians and compatibilists, whereas those two traditional opponents usually only see each other's blind spots, not realizing that they themselves are paying too high a cost.
Do you have a source for this? The IEP offers this account of free will:
This seems to be the account I gave here. Free will is concerned with one's will being responsible for one's actions.
Because hard determinists and hard indeterminists have not noticed the problem with both sides of the debate for a long time.
I do not think the compatibilists is unaware of what they are accepting. In fact, it would appear, on the surface, they view themselves as critically analyzing what we consider "free" and "responsible" to mean beyond the naive notions we commonly hold.
I agree with you -- regarding traditional PAP-denying-compatibilism -- but I think traditional incompatibilist libertarianism also is on such an off-road. New dispositionalists also seem to have made a wrong turn, but their attempt is instructive for they seem to have traveled on the right track for a little longer than either of their two predecessors. And they are in the best position to see the shortcomings of both.
You didn't seem to understand my comment. I'm saying that hinging the whole thing on that particular linguistic characterization is silly.
Not without doing research for it (that would collate a lot of different materials, etc.). I'm not simply reporting something I just read off the Internet, on an online phil encyclopedia, etc.
Sure, there is a sense of possibility that applies to unactualized dispositions (or unexercised powers or abilities). This is the sense that is captured by a conditional analysis such as those of G. E. Moore, David Lewis or their 'new dispositionalist' sucessors, and it is perfectly consistent with determinism. For sure, you may not be satisfied with the way this clearly defined sense of 'possibility' can be adduced to secure the 'principle of alternate possibilities' in a way that makes it adequate for the ascription of freedom and responsibility to rational agents. But you'd have to actually look up the details of the proposals in order to assess them.
I disagree. It is not consistent with determinism. The only thing consistent with determinism in the original debate, where we're not changing the subject, is this, which I typed out above: given some antecedent state, A, only one immediately following state, B, has a non-zero probability--namely a 100% probability--of obtaining.
So any other state is not a possibility. It's rather an impossibility. It has a 0% probability of obtaining.
What are you referring to as "that particular linguistic characterization"? It would be a mistake to view those conditional analyses as mere arbitrary semantic conventions. The analysis of G. E. Moore was a first attempt. Lewis improved on it to account for 'finks'. Michael Fara improved again to account for 'masked abilities' and Kadri Vihvelin improved the analysis even further to account for asymmetries in PAP (the fact that we want agents who acted badly to have had the ability of have acted well, but not vice versa, as a requirement for them being deserving of praise or blame) in a manner that rather deeply illuminates the metaphysics of rational agency.
You are not disagreeing with the analyses of dispositions that I have mentioned being consistent with determinism, are you? If anything, those analyses are tantamount to the recasting of power ascriptions to specific kinds of objects as statements of universal deterministic laws that link the actualization of those powers to triggering circumstances. Maybe that's not quite true of Vihvelin's analysis of practical rational abilities in terms of bundles of dispositions, but those constituent dispositions are deterministic and the overall account is completely insensitive to the underlying physical and/or neurophysiological levels of implementation being either deterministic or indeterministic (e.g. quantum-indeterministic).
You were characterizing new dispositionalism as hinging on an analysis of the "could have done otherwise" account of free will.
Yes. If you posit any possibility other than one, it's inconsistent with determinism.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Say what? Maybe if you added more prepositional phrases to that, haha.
The analysis is meant as a conspicuous definition that captures how we talk about dispositions of ordinary things. Those dispositions may be linked either deterministically, or merely probabilistically, in the analysis, to their normal conditions of actualization. Hence the possibility of such an analysis of dispositions makes no commitment whatsoever to the universe being deterministic or not. Again, where you seem to balk, is not over the specific analyses of abilities and dispositions that new dispositionalists are relying on. It is rather its relevance to free agency that you seem to be skeptical of. But you are dismissing the analysis on faulty grounds (implying falsely that it is inconsistent with determinism) before even considering how it my be used to support a compatibilist account of alternative possibilities that might be relevant to free will and agency.
What would an analysis of how we talk have to do with an ontological discussion?
Isn't the schism / confusion in most such debates about the metaphysical difference between empiricism and idealism / pragmatism?
Determinism could very well be true yet we don't have the capacity to empirically verify exactly what is causing someone's behaviour. Using determinism to conclude that morality / personal responsibility is some sort of illusion and even use it to inform (moral?) action is akin to taking an advance on future knowledge, which doesn't seem like the empirical thing to do.
For morality / personal responsibility we seem to be dependent on things like human communication, observing behaviour (our own as well as that of others), etc. This might not be preferred method of getting data / information for hard determinist / empiricists but we can't deny there's a decent amount of understanding between people at times. The unique part of it might not lie in man being an exception to how the universe might work but rather in the (complex) way we respond to our environment / process information.
It is relevant to the 'free will and determinism' debate because the way 'possible' is tacitly understood in discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities often loses touch with the 'possibilities' that figure as open options from the perspective of the rational practical deliberation of agent (conceived by them as powers and opportunities that they have). Paying attention to how 'possibilities' likewise are involved in our conceptions of the powers of ordinary objects can alert us to the manner in which they are often misconstrued within a Humean metaphysics of event-causation. Talking about objects having powers and events being historically possible, in a deterministic universe, are two different things. Philosophers who aren't attentive to the problematic connection between those two sorts of (im)possibilities (i.e. historical impossibilities of specific events versus merely unactualized powers of agents) are led to mischaracterize agents as bundles of events, or deterministic processes that somehow supervene on underlying causal-chains of physical events. And those philosophers thereby lose track of the actual causal structure of rational agency.
I haven't the faintest idea what this is saying.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
But that "misconstrual" is what the debate is tradtionally about.
Anyway, a lot of what you're typing I'd have to work out one phrase at a time, but you don't seem to care for some reason (because you're offering no attempt at clarification . . . at least none that doesn't read as additional word salads of prepositional phrase after prepositional phrase)
The actual causal structure of anything (at least under determinism) is a deterministic processes that is causal-chains of physical events, by the way. (There's no need for invoking supervenience or "underlying" there.)
It is actually ignored by a majority of participants in the debate. The relevance of the metaphysics of substances and powers (which contrasts with the metaphysics of Humean event-event causation) to rational-causation is often ignored because libertarian agent-causation is taken to conflict with our understanding of physics and neurosciences. (But traditional libertarian agent-causation hardly is the only alternative to traditional determinism.) Hence, a recent discussion between proponents of four different main orientations in the philosophy of free-will: John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Manuel Vargas, (Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell, 2007), who are semi-compatibilist, libertarian, hard determinist and revisionist-compatibilist, respectively, never mention the possibility of agent-causation (as opposed to event-event causation) except as a topic of joke.
This is a category error. A causal structure isn't a process of any kind. And yes, there most definitely is a need to invoke supervenience in order to bridge the categorical gap in the argument that you are attempting to make. Jaegwon Kim has developed such sophisticated supervenience based arguments to get from the determinism (assumed) of the laws of physics to the causal exclusion of high-level causal/explanatory powers of agents (or of mental states of agent). The supervenience of the events that involve the high-level entities (psychological processes, bodily motions, etc) over the microphysical events must be assumed in order that the deterministic causal efficacy of the low-level initial state of the "system" exclude the possibility of of their being independent causes of the agent's actions at the higher level.
It it really that hard? Apologies if it is badly formulated. I am simply referring to the fact that rational agents such as us, when we deliberate about what we are going to do, are contemplating a range of options that we have both the power and the opportunity to do. All of those options are 'possible', or so do we believe, just in virtue of our having both the power and the opportunity of realizing any one of them. The traditional compatibilist philosopher, on the other hand, claims that only one of those 'possibilities' is really possible, and, indeed, necessary; and that, consequently, the other options that seem open to us only appear to be open due to our unavoidable epistemic limitations regarding the past state of the universe and the implications from the laws of physics. I am further claiming that this claim by the compatibilist stems in part from a confusion over two different sorts of possibilities, or lack of attention to the way in which they relate to one another (allegedly, through supervenience, on Kim's influential albeit misguided account).
Couldn't disagree with you more here. There's nothing extant that's not a process.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What two different sorts of possibilities are you positing?
It's not something extant that I meant to refer to. I was suggesting that two different sorts of occurrences -- agent-causation and event-event Humean causation, specifically -- exemplify different forms of causation. Forms of causation, or "causal structures" as I meant the phrase, are abstracta. They are exemplified by causal processes that are similarly structured in some respect, and it is this respect of similarity that I called "causal structure". Thus, what I was objecting to is the common belief that explanations of human actions in terms of rational-causation, or agent-causation, can be reduced, somehow, or identified with, or eliminated in favor of, explanations in terms of Humean event-event causation (rendered popular by Donald Davidson in the philosophy of action) relating either mental states to one another (and to bodily motions) or their underlying realizations into deterministically evolving neurophysiological states and events.
Are you saying that in your view they obtain somehow (or whatever word you'd use) but they don't exist?
In my ontology there are no real abstracts. Abstracts only exist as dynamic states in individuals' brains. In other words, they're particular mental content.
Mental states, including rationality, etc. are particular physical events.
The two sorts of possibilities that I was discussing were (1) an event being possible consistently with the system it is involved in being in some initial state and the laws governing the evolution of that system. And (2) some choice or action being possible as an action that an agent has both the power and the opportunity to perform at some time in the future, from the prior perspective of her practical deliberation. That an event is impossible from the standpoint of an external observer (e.g. a Laplacean demon) who observes the agent from some external non-intervening standing point doesn't entail that this event can't constitute an open option, and hence be possibly realizable in the second sense. Furthermore, and this is where I am parting company with most compatibilists, the possiblitity of this event being realized by the agent isn't merely a matter of the epistemic limitations of the agent. Finally, since I am not denying that this event, which is possible form the agent's practical perspective, may also be 'impossible' (in the first sense) from the external Laplacean perspective, I am also parting company with most libertarians. As I suggested, the apparent incoherence in holding the same event to be both possible and impossible, in the future, at the same time, from two different sorts of perspectives, only seems contradictory owing to the failure to distinguish two radically different forms of causation.
There are different forms of explanations of events, and likewise there are different forms of causal processes that that are the topics of those different forms of explanation. For instance, biologists who make use of functional/teleological explanations of adaptative behaviors, or physiological processes, focus on different "causal structures" than do engineers who explain why a bridge collapsed. It really doesn't matter for the purpose of my argument if you are a realist or an anti-realist about universals or abstract objects. My only claim is that two specific forms of causal explanations don't reduce to one another and failure to properly distinguish them (or properly relate them) has produced mischief in the free will literature.
I don't at all agree with that claim though.
Re your two different types of possibilities, I'd say that (2) is simply a subset of (1) . . . Unless I'm not understanding something there, and I'd say that whether something is possible in way way rests on an observer.
Actually, (2) sounds like you might be saying that x is possible just in case S believes that x is possible, but surely that's not right.
It's the opposite since there is only one possibility from the external non-interventionist Laplacean perspective (1) whereas that are typically several mutually incompatible options (powers conjoined with opportunities) from the perspective of an agent (2). So. (1) is a subset of (2).
I agree that the fact that most options are impossible from the Laplacean perspective (and that the only one that is possible is thereby necessary) while several options are typically possible from the perspective of the agent boils down to... a difference in perspective. But only the Laplacean perspective is the perspective of an observer. The perspective of the agent is radically different, since the way she knows what will happen has nothing to do with her knowledge (or lack thereof) of the antecedent causes of her action (including her own character or states of mind -- those are enablers of her rational capacities, not premises of her practical deliberation). She merely decides what is best to do, by her own lights (rational and/or moral considerations) and forms the intention to do it. She thereby knows what she will do or is doing. Knowledge acquired through practical deliberation, and the formation of an intention, is what Elizabeth Anscombe called practical knowledge. You know what will happen through deciding what will happen, and you thereby know the reason why it happens: which is that it ought to happen by your own lights (and that it is hopefully in your power to accomplish it).
In a way, the Laplacean observer is more knowledgeable than you yourself are, as an agent, since he knows in advance what it is that you are going to do (or, at least, how it is that your body will move, although those motions may be unintelligible to him if he hasn't figured out what they mean in high-level intentional terms). But in another sense, you are more knowledgeable than the Laplacean observer is for, except in cases of self-delusion, you always know what meaningful and purposeful action your bodily motions are realizing, since the controlling intention is the outcome of your own rational deliberation. Thus, you know something that the Laplacean observer may be badly situated to know, which is that the bodily motions that he predicted would necessarily occur happen to be realizing some specific intention not by accident, but for a reason. This reason, which is the 'rational-cause' of your bodily motions coming to realize non-accidentally some intentional action that you may have an objective reason to do, by your own lights, explains why it occurred as the intentional action that it is. (The way in which the intelligible cause of your action -- i.e. the reason why you are doing it by your own lights -- explains why the underlying low-level neurophysiological processes and bodily motions that realize it precisely realize this specific sort of high-level intentional action is a typical instance of 'downward-causation', by the way. There is also a form of causation that runs in the opposite direction, but it is non-determinative; your neurophysiology enables your learned agential powers and rational abilities to operate. In that sense, the causal power of the low-level processes are enabling causes of your agency. They make things 'possible' for you, in the second sense previously discussed.)
Why must you type such long responses regardless of how short my replies are? Is it some sort of psychological inability to keep things short as if you're having a conversation? If there's anything I hate about this board it's that. It's like a friggin disease that disables folks from keeping things concise/focused and conversational.
I'm not about to read all of that (and if you haven't noticed, I haven't read the majority of the content in the posts of yours I'm responding to).. I'm responding to one thing at a time.
Okay, and these obtain by virtue of what? The agent simply thinking that they're possibilities?
Because those are complex issues and there is no point is repeating almost verbatim the same seductive albeit simplistic (and flawed) arguments that have already been expounded uncritically 10,000 times previously in very similar threads.
If you don't want to think deeply about the issue, and prefer twitter-like superficial exchanges, you are of course free to ignore my long responses. I produce them for my own benefit as well.
If you can't communicate like you're having a conversation rather than someone with some sort of logorrheic disorder there is something wrong with you. It's not indicative of "deep thought" that you type a lot, especially when a lot of it has been unfocused, gobbledy-gooky word salad.
So how about a straightforward, conversational answer to "Okay, and these obtain by virtue of what? The agent simply thinking that they're possibilities? "
No. The agent may mistakenly think that he has the power to do something and not have it. He may not be strong enough to lift the suitcase, say. He may also believe wrongly that he has an opportunity. The bus left the station earlier than expected, say. But when the agent has both the power, and a corresponding opportunity to exercise this power, and know that he has both, then that makes up an open option for him. And there typically are several such open options in each particular deliberative context. What then determine which one of those possibilities will become actual is the agent herself, through deciding what she has a good reason to do.
In the post that you elected not to read, I explained why there being thus several options that all are open (and hence possible) for the agent is compatible with the fact of there being only one of them that is possible from the perspective of an external observer.
The best I can do is keep explaining as best as I know how what it is that you think is unclear and ignore the gratuitous insults. I can't do any better. I've already explained why twitter-style discussion isn't an option for me.
Your exeternal observer is an external ideal observer, right?--Hence Laplacean. So how can it be the case that both there is only one possibility to the Laplacean observer but really and not just mistakenly from a phenomenal/belief perspective, more than one possibility open to the agent? How is that not contradictory? Are you arguing something like consciousness being a "separate realm" somehow?
This appears to be one of the many beliefs upon which determinism is founded. There is no reason to believe this actually is so, especially since everything is constantly changing. In any case, current understanding of quantum physics (probably the closest we can come to a fundamental understanding of nature and this time) pretty much undermines determinism.
What you are asking for is a totally new description of the problem, which it's reasonable. But to say that a person had the ability to choose and at the same time everything is determined (even the choice) sorry if leaves the problem in midair and doesn't advance understanding. There must be some concrete understanding of the problem so that it can be practically applied to life. Knowing that I have the ability to choose actually provides meaning to life, hence it's a practical philosophy.
It would be contradictory if both senses of "possible" were the same. But I've already taken care of distinguishing them.
The agent who deliberates among several open options ('possible-2') knows that only one of them will eventually become actual. What it is that determines which one will become actual is the reason this agent will disclose, through practical deliberation (which may include a process of rational assessment of her own conflicting desires, values and prior commitments), for making this intelligible choice. It is true that the 'ideal' Laplacean observer is able to foresee the necessity of just one among those outcomes being realized (and hence the only one being 'possible-1'. But what it is that the Laplacean observer thereby sees to be necessary is not the intelligible action itself but rather the fine-grained physical realization of this action through bodily motions that are caused by antecedent physical/neurophysiological events. The explanation why those particular motions happen to be realizing a specific sort of intentional action (characterized in high-level purposive terms) isn't supplied by any sort of understanding of physical laws since physics can say nothing about the way practical reason and intentions relate to intelligible action types. It is the deliberation of the agent that makes this determination; which is another way to say that the agent is the cause of her own actions. This is what agent-causation amounts to. What makes it the case that only one among several 'possible-2' actions is executed is that the agent herself determines what sort of purposive action her own bodily motions (whatever their deterministic causes may be) will come to realize.
You have the option of not participating in discussions not in your preferred style. It may be reasonable to ask participants to adopt a different style, but the site itself does not endorse one style or another, so other participants are under no obligation to conform to your expectations. Please attempt to respect the preferences of others who are also behaving within the site's guidelines.
That's obvious. That's not going to stop me from commenting on it. In my opinion it's a problem that people are so logorrheic and unfocused. Other people can have other opinions (and obviously do).
This is simply a conflation of epistemological and ontological issues.
What you're missing is the fact that different people have varied, disparate, and sometimes mutually exclusive notions of what constitutes "morality".
Imagine a person who believes that god created humans with free will and then rewards and punishes them based on the standards of their behavior. A determinist would deem this to be unfair because they are destined to behave in a certain way, and hold that the free will given to them by god is not the kind that actually enables them to choose to be a moral person...
The main implication of this issue is the destruction of "intrinsic moral guilt/blame" (such as an evil soul deserving of punishment). So what are we left with?
Something I call "pragmatic moral guilt/blame"...
Whether or not a person has true free will, we still need to behave as if they do (in some ways) because we're unable to perfectly predict their future actions. If someone commits the crime of rape, then we still need to take precautions to protect ourselves and prevent them from doing future harm (regardless of whether determinism is true or not). We might therefore incarcerate them, and while it's not a nice thing to do to people, since it's the less unfortunate of two unfortunate realities it makes pragmatic sense for us to do it. Torturing them while incarcerated per determinism is usually described as immoral because we don't hold them intrinsically responsible for their actions, and torture isn't in any way necessary for our protection or rehabilitative (which is a secondary moral strategy for dealing with a criminal population under a determinist moral framework).
Morality then becomes strategies and standards of behavior designed to maximize our socially shared values. People hate this description because it goes against their own versions of what "moral truth" is and where it comes from.
The problem is that so many people are concerned with the "truth" components of moral positions, and so they argue on endlessly, while the minimalist assertions of determinists that morality is just a cooperative strategy proves uninteresting to the lay-determinist ;) , (albeit uncontroversial given that this form of moral reasoning is slowly taking over our legal systems).
Essentially what I've described underlies a part of the reasoning behind the "compatibilist" definition of free will...
As opposed to being total slaves to many causal chains? A slave with many masters is no less a slave than a slave with one master, no?
Are you suggesting that we have no reason to believe that the laws of physics are consistent?
(There's ton's of strong evidence for this actually, namely the fact that science keeps working).
What about quantum mechanics actually undermines determinism or supports free will?
You can replace determined will with random will, but "random" does not equate to "free".
In the face of quantum randomness, we might just propose a non-local hidden variable theory and blame that for our actions anyway...
Judge: "Why did you do it?".
Defendant: "The uncertainty in the the "spin" of a quantum particle made me do it."...
This sounds like obfuscation. The point is not that the ability was not actually exercised, but that, in a deterministic world, if it was not exercised then it was never actually (as opposed to merely logically) possible that it could have been exercised.
I think a better term is 'influence'. "Determinism" carries the baggage of the notion of absolute constraint. Otherwise, I agree with you, there must be some constraint given by external influences or the idea of freedom becomes meaningless. ('External' here meaning 'outside the ambit of the agent's control').
I have no idea what a so-called Law of Physics is (a term that is bandied about with absolutely no definition) and since science is changing all the time and our understanding is changing all the time, there is zero evidence for such godlike claims of such a never changing, omnipresent, spiritual-like presence. But it doesn't stop people from using such concepts hoping no one will notice the lack of concreteness.
It might difficult for anyone to take a Newtonian position of determinism in the face of quantum probabilistic equations (probabilistic is very akin to potential choices) but again, those who wish to robotize humans will insist that somewhere, somehow humans should continue to deny their obvious everyday capacity to choose. If someone wishes to be a robot, be my guest, but there is zero evidence for such a notion.
F=MA
The force required to accelerate an object (by a specific amount) is proportional to it's mass, as described by the above equation. (Newton's second law of motion).
We're as certain this will never change as we're certain about anything; It's basically 1+1=2. If you want to suggest that either of these things will stop being true you've got to literally tear up the most fundamental assumptions we've made about the nature of reality.
So that's an example of "a law of physics".
Regarding the "robot" like qualities of humans, the whole of neuroscience will happily disagree with your assertion that "there's no evidence".
If certain parts of your brain are removed or damaged, then you might exhibit somewhat predictable behavioral changes as a result.
We know that something in the going's on of the brain provides the decision making power of human consciousness, and there's mountains of evidence for this.
Determinists don't deny the illusion of choice or the pragmatism of actually making them, they're just not willing to call them "inherently and 100% free".
No, free will is concerned with one's free will being responsible for one's actions. If determinism is the case, then one's will is not free, and responsibility is reduced to causal responsibility. Moral responsibility, as it has traditionally and as it is coherently, understood in distinction to mere causal responsibility, is incoherent under the assumption of determinism, no matter how much wriggling those who do not wish to accept this are wont to do.
Of course, if you change something things change. No one is suggesting it otherwise. However, exactly what will happen it's totally unpredictable, demonstrating once again that determinism is fluffy myth. I wonder why people hold on so tightly to such an idea with zero evidence supporting it. What we are all doing all the time is choosing yet determinists are so desperate they become Buddhists and start declaring the world as we experience it is all an illusion. And what is creating this illusion (there is no who in the world of robots)? Molecules??
This kind of analysis cannot be anything but playing with words if it is not consistent with, and coherent in terms of, easily understandable common sense notions of free will and determinism.
F=MA was never designed to describe the quantum scale though. Your objection to F=MA would be like an architect telling an astronomer that the standard candle principle doesn't apply to bridge design.
We have very good descriptions of quantum mechanics which we don't expect to suddenly change; even in the quantum world your supposition that there is no consistency is mistakenly founded.
We cannot be certain whether or not a given electron will emit a photon if we prepare it's "spin" in a particular state and then suddenly change it's orientation using a magnetic field. But what we do instead is describe a range of probabilities for given prepared states and given deviations from that prepared state. F=MA doesn't need to apply to the quantum world just as Hiesenberg didn't need his descriptions and calculations of quantum mechanics to apply to the Newtonian world... You're just comparing scientific apples to scientific oranges.
Quoting Rich
Forgive me but it seems like you're very desperate to reject the idea of determinism by whatever means...
As a determinist I hold that the future is not predictable with absolute certainty (for various reasons), and nobody is arguing that we should act like the concept of "choice" is incoherent. What are you so afraid of?
No, it's a metaphysical issue. It's a consequence of multiple realizability and of the falsity of nomological reducibility (of psychology to physics). That a given fine-grainedly characterized physical history of the set of material particle temporarily making up a human body happen to realize some specific form of intentional action of a person isn't determined by any level of physical details of this motion anymore than the value of a dollar bill is determined by the physical motion and structure of the atoms making it up. That you cannot know the value of the dollar bill on the basis of the knowledge of its material constitution isn't a matter of epistemic limitation regarding your precise knowledge of the latter, but rather a matter of the latter being insufficient to determining the former, in a metaphysical sense of "determination". This may be true even if the economic facts of the world supervene on the physical facts; and so might it be in the case of the psychological facts in relations to the physical facts that they supervene upon, or so even many non-reductive physicalists such as Jerry Fodor and Donald Davidson have convincingly argued.
What you call "the point" is actually a substantive philosophical thesis that is in need of a rational defense however obvious its truth may seem from the standpoint of traditional compatibilist reasoning.
The traditional distinctions between logical, epistemic and nomological necessity/possibility are actually too crude to settle this question. That's because possibilities for action aren't equivalent to any of those three kinds of possibility. If an option still is open to you as a possibility for action, then it is both logically possible and epistemically possible that you will do it, but those possibilities for a range of different actions isn't simply a matter of your being ignorant of all the relavant facts regarding the (alleged) nomological possibility of only one of them. (It is 'nomologically possible' in the intended sense if its occurrence is consistent with already settled physical facts that you don't have any power over anymore at the time of practical deliberation in conjunction with the laws of physics).
If it were the case that the nomological necessity of just one determinate action implied a lack of alternative possibilities for other actions then, when faced with several choices for action and asked what it is that you will chose to do, it would make sense for you to reply: "I don't know yet, let's wait and see". (This would be a rationally justified answer if you were to accept the validity of van Inwagen's 'consequence argument'). But the sensible answer rather is: "I don't know, I haven't decided yet; what ought I to do?" And when you are deliberating what it is that you ought to do, you aren't inquiring about already settled facts that unbeknownst to you will cause you to act in a determinate manner, but rather about what it is that makes it reasonable for you to select one possible option in preference to the alternatives in your current situation.
All this seems to say, without acknowledging that it is saying it, is that free will is really an illusion caused by our lack of knowledge and understanding of all the ("fine-grained") forces determining our behavior. In other words free will and moral responsibility are inevitably "real for us" even if the world is really inexorably deterministic. Spinoza made that claim, and acknowledged it, some 350 years ago.
I think the philosophical accounts regarding free will and determinism propounded by Michael Ayers, Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Erasmus Mayr are especially sensitive to the causal relevance of irreducible features of the first-person perspective of rational agents (and their characters, values and motivations). I am especially partial to the accounts of Ayers and Mayr, myself, but all four are illuminating. Consider Alfred Mele, also, though the specifics of his account are less congenial to me.
When I am arguing explicitly that a thesis is false, and propose arguments that purport to show the thesis to be false, that hardly is a way of saying that the thesis is true! I am arguing that the fine-grained description of the physical particles making up your body, which may or may not amount to deterministic processes, aren't relevant to the determination of the intentional action type that, together with the bodily motions that they cause, they happen to realize, then the issue of the real "cause" of them coming to realize a specific (multiply realizable and irreducible) action type remains unsettled from the microphysical perspective.
The question is though, whether those who claim compatibility between free will and determinism really mean to say both that the world is causally closed and causality is not probablistic at all but rigidly deterministic, and that free will of the kind that could justify attributions of praise and blame must be sui generis in a way that would deny either that the causal order of nature is closed or that our decisions and actions are completely determined by it.
If clear, unequivocal, easily comprehensible answers cannot be given to these questions by compatibilists, of whatever stripe, then I would say they are practicing some form of obfuscation or sophistry. They don't want to face the logical consequences of their own beliefs, and they are wriggling like crazy, but making no sense at all.
More than that: our free choice is a determining part of causality. It is born of causality, we are caused to exist with the ability to make free choices, and partakes in causality, our choices are deterministic events that result in certain states occurring rather than others, such that we have the ability to control determined outcomes in our future.
Then you are saying that human actions are somehow not determined by the causal order of nature, as all other physical processes are. You are thus not a determinist at all, so no need for compatibilism.
The point is human choice is part of the usual order of nature itself. Compatibilists point out the traditional dichotomy between free choice and causality (determinism) is incoherent. It lacks awareness of our own nature as choosing beings within causality.
Free will is does not fight causality/determinism but that partakes in it, allowing us to determine our future one way or another.
One problem is that the thesis of nomological determinism seldom is precisely defined. It is often equivalent to the claim that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic laws, and that physics is somehow "complete" in the sense that all the other sorts of "high-level" weakly emergent features of the world somehow supervene over the totality of the underlying physical facts. This thesis of the completeness of physics can be denied consistently with the acceptance of the fact that everything is materially constituted by physical stuff (e.g. particles and fields and whatnot). When the possibility of strong emergence is acknowledged (as it increasingly tends to be in contemporary philosophy of physics!) then one can be both a compatibilist and an incompatibilist in two different senses: that is, one can hold that freedom of the will is compatible with microphysical determinism and the causal closure of the physical domain and also is incompatible with nomological determinism at the strongly emergent levels of psychology and intentional action.
There is also the possibility what you don't fully understand the structure of the arguments that seem sophistic to you, or that your own strongly held metaphysical beliefs generate blind spots.
This is the fundamental problem work science. Speculative ideas are just bandied about and people are suppose to unquestioningly accept them because "science"is attached to it. Just a new form of religion. You said that F=ma is applicable every where in the universe and had been and will forever be a force of law. It clearly isn't and never was and never will be, yet you still insist. Why? Because you used it as an example?
Instead of trying to explain to me quantum physics, because you or no one can't (it is basically Schrodinger's equation + the Heisenberg principle), go back and look at your claims and observe how outright absurd they are, just like any religious belief. The problem with scientists is they v demands c proof from everyone else but themselves, because as all evangelists, they are on a mission.
Choice doesn't determine anything. It gives impetus in a direction. The outcome is always indeterminate and resolves itself as time flows. Everyone is making choices and something will happen. The universe is composed of probabilistic (choice) waves.
You say there is compatibility, but you provide no account of how it could be so. I'll believe it when I see a clear, convincing explanation of how microphysical processes which are completely deterministic could give rise to macro events that are really somehow free from that microphysical determination not merely in the epistemic sense (for us), but in the ontological sense (absolutely). I would want to know what that "somehow free" consists in, and how it could emerge from the "definitely not free".
If there is such an account then you should be able to outline it here in a way that is coherent and understandable to the intelligent lay person.
I am yet to see any arguments; all I've seen are vague assertions.
From a compatibilist perspective, Anthony Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility, is a favorite of mine, and it is written in an engaging style. From an incompatibilist perspective, Michael Ayers, The Refutation of Determinism is hard to beat but it is both difficult and hard to find (though there might be cheap second hand copies available). You will easily find papers by Michael Smith or Kadri Vihvelin online. (See for instance Vihvelin, Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account). Erasmus Mayr's Understanding Human Agency is excellent but not cheap. Also quite relevant, and excellent, are two papers by Don Levi: Determinism as a Thesis about the State of the World from Moment to Moment and The Trouble with Harry (this last one is available online and is especially relevant to the principle of alternative possibilities).
But so far as we know it DOES apply everywhere in the universe, it's just not suitable for describing individual quantum particles.
It clearly still applies to the same massive bodies to which it has always applied, and clearly will continue to do so...
Quoting Rich
I went back and looked at my claims, but I still find them to be reasonable...
Perhaps you could explain to me why you think F=MA will stop being a valid description of the relationship between acceleration, mass, and force at Newtonian scales?
Just because something is not an accurate description of X doesn't mean it's therefore not an accurate description of Y. (because X and Y might be different).
If you want evidence for F=MA, here's some :D
As much as possible, I try to stay with the concrete because I actually apply my philosophy to my life and it's not simply a game to pass the time of day. I am always on the lookout for a new idea that can advance understanding of the human condition.
Well, it's true that I haven't presented a full blown and fully argue defense of my thesis, but I have also been lambasted for my posts being too long. I have explained what appears to me to be the weak links in the arguments for the traditional forms of (anti-PAP) compatibilism and agent-causal incompatibilism, and provided links to the relevant literature where those positions are criticized. I've also provided several pointers to the theses that underlie my own position, with more references to the relevant literature. You may think it's too sketchy, but I've mainly been laying my cards on the table and answered all the requests for clarification.
Did you not watch the third grade Indian child? His experiment may illuminate you.
Quantum particles are not a place (a "where"), they're are things. "The quantum realm" isn't some separate place, it refers to certain (small) distances and scales of measurement of space where fundamental particles (these interesting and distinct things) exhibit observable behaviors. That fundamental particles exhibit different behavior from massive objects should not be taken as some clever rebuke of science.
Anyhooo, I'm not sure how what I've said is religious, but it would be nice if you could redress your point while taking into account my own.
I did provide such an account in this post.
Isn't quantum physics about randomness? If it is then it sabotages determinism but that still isn't enough to infer free will. After all, we still can't be sure that the quantum randomness is within our control.
So, if you're trying to say free will exists (are you?) based on the above I don't think the argument works.
Quantum physics it's basically the probabilistic Schrodinger equation which leaves plenty of room for choice but pretty much crushes determinism. But hope springs eternal for scientists who desire to play God and control everything as they insist somewhere, sometime in the distant future, far, far away, the Law of Quantum Physics will change and no longer be probabilistic and absolute predictably will once again become possible. And who am I to dash such dreams. After all, Scientific Laws are indeed always changing.
OK, I read that, but it just seems to me to be saying that the Laplacean 'perspective' ( which is really the God's eye 'view from everywhere') is different from the subjective (limited human epistemic) view. If subjective intentions, purposes, plans and understandings are limited perspectives on our decisions and actions, that ( necessarily) do not include the complex microphysical events that determine them, then what reason do we have to think that they are not merely epiphenomenal rationalizations?
Also "1)" could not be a subset of "2)" because if subjective intentions are exhaustively emergent form microphysical processes which are rigidly deterministic then they are not causal of any of those objective microphysical processes, but only of decisions, actions etc understood from the subjective perspective. The two are correlated; and as Spinoza points out it would not be proper to say that one is causal of the other at all. BUT, the microphysical is understood by determinists to be the prior determining matrix, and we are back to the position that our decisions only seem to be free from our necessarily limited subjective perspectives. Laplace's Demon should be able to see all our reasons as well as the physical causes that they are rigidly correlated with.
Also, your account does not seem to explain how it is possible for something utterly deterministic to give rise to something really free (undetermined). Waving towards complexity only explains why our actions would nonetheless seem free to us in a deterministic world; it cannot explain how freedom could be an actual reality.
I am not a determinist, by the way. I believe in freedom but I also believe it is irreducible; which means it cannot be explained in terms more basic than itself. All our objectivist explanations are produced in terms of causality; but to explain freedom in terms of causality would be to contradict it; to deny its reality.
If freedom is impossible to explain without contradicting it, then explaining how freedom could be compatible with determinism is obviously impossible. I think the fact is that the human intellect can understand its own logics of determinism and freedom; which apply properly to the space of causes and the space of reasons respectively, but the two cannot be made compatible, because those logics contradict one another; they are mutually exclusive.
For the compatibilist, there is no Laplace's Demon. Sure, one can suggest someone who knows all causes (including dress choices) ever to be, and so know which events will occur, but this does not eliminate possibility.
Prior and without those causes, including choices, the known future cannot occur. Consider the future of my creating this post. I had a choice whether to make this post or not. Faced with your post, I had a choice to make: I possibly could have ignored it or possibly could have responded. Without this choice, the one future which occurs (me making the post) cannot be defined.
Determinism is not predeterminism. Laplace's Demon, which knows what will happen by what happened in the past, is incoherent. Only by knowing each event in terms of itself can someone know what will happen. So called "perfect knowledge" is not achievable by looking at some other state and deriving from it what must necessarily happen. One can only know by each event itself-- God knows the free choices everyone makes and so knows what will happen, without the elimination of either freedom or possibility.
Under compatibilism choice is not a "reason" someone acts. It is an event of the world itself-- I exist making a free choice and so determine myself to respond to you post rather than not.
The mistake of the libertarian will/(pre)determinism dichotomy is to envision choice as a "reason" for action, as if we were "influenced" to act either by free will or mindless matter, rather than recognise our choices are states/actions in themselves.
Our intentions, and the practical reasons on the basis of which we act are causally efficacious, as are, in a different sense, our episodes of practical deliberation. (Those are instances of rational-causation and mental-causation, respectively. They are complementary forms of explanation. The first one cites the reasons of the agent as causal antecedents whereas the latter cites psychological 'states' such as beliefs or desires). But the sorts of causal explanation that they provide have different forms from the causal explanations (nomological causation) that subsume isolated physical events under universally quantified laws. The belief that all causation is nomological causation is what led Davidson to assert his principle of the "nomological character of causality", which is a principle that has no basis in science and merely seems to be a wild inductive generalization from familiar modes of explanation that focus on classical Newtonian physics (and classical electrodynamics) and ignore the actual scientific explanatory practice that have currency in almost every other fields, including chemistry, biology and modern physics.
When you explain the occurrence of an event with reference to the normal function, or natural power, of an object, or living organism, then the form of causality at issue is substance-causation (of which rational agent-causation is a special case) and those explanations aren't reducible to processes of event-causation neither do they disclose causal antecedent that belong to the same category as the objects and events which obey the laws of physics belong to. A philosophy that argues on the ground of some inchoate reductionism (or flawed supervenience arguments) that the causal efficacy of our intentions are preempted by the causal efficacy of our material constituents is no more prima facie plausible than a philosophy that argues that our perceptions of the external world constitute a veil between us and the way the world is in itself.
What you are gesturing at is an argument for causal exclusion. Such arguments are based on supervenience relations between high-level descriptions of agents described in intentional terms and low-level realizations of those actions in terms of non-intentional bodily motions and their neural causal antecedents. Such arguments (such as Jaegwon Kim's) typically fail due to their overlooking issues of multiple realizability, among other things.
Spinoza also was arguing for the epiphenomenalism of mental phenomena on the basis of causal exclusion at the level of material embodiment. Kim attempted to make such arguments more rigorous but failed, on my view.
Yes, that seems to be the dogma, but it is poorly argued for and it goes beyond the thesis of microphysical determinism. There is more to what many macroscopic objects (such as artifacts and living organism, and even some inanimate natural entities such as stars, candle flames and hurricanes, than their material constituents and the laws that govern those constituents. There are emergent principles of organisation and individuation that are only weakly constrained by the laws that regulate the constituents.
We only get back to this position if we accept the arguments for bottom-up causal exclusion that purport to establish it. It's not a default position in contemporary philosophy of science anymore. Even theoretical physicists like Michel Bitbol and George Ellis now are arguing against this position and in favor of strong emergence instead. And there is nothing magical or unnatural about it. Modern cognitive science, evolutionary biology, chemistry and even physics all have superseded the old metaphysics underlying the Cartesian/Newtonian/Galilean/Laplacian world view.
I think it's a common misreading of the thesis of strong emergentism that deterministic processes "give rise" to non-deterministic processes. Maybe this is encouraged by a narrow focus on diachronic emergence where new forms of organisation of matter arise that didn't previously exist, as a result of evolution or change in boundary conditions. But focus on cases of inter-level synchronic emergence, where both the deterministic and non-deterministic processes characterize simultaneously two separate levels of organization, and thereby two different domains of entities, provide a more conspicuous picture of what is going on and why causal exclusion arguments are problematic.
I agree. But I don't think microphysical determinism constitutes a threat to freedom. It doesn't even entail determinism simpliciter.
John McDowell has proposed that the space of reasons and the space of laws are disjoint, but the space of causes intersect both. Human intentional actions (and their beliefs) are disclosed within the space of reasons. Human neurophysiology is disclosed, at lest partially, within the space of laws. But it is only excessively narrow conceptions of causality that make problematic the top-down and bottom-up causal relations between the two levels.
Yes, this paper by Fodor has had a significant impact on my thinking also, as well as Putnam's 'square peg through the round hole' argument (in his Philosophy and our Mental Life paper). Both papers are anti-reductionist classics. I also have been helped a lot in overcoming my old physicalist prejudices by John Haugeland's Truth and Rule Following and Wiggins' Sameness and Substance Renewed. Those two works elucidate in two different ways how different levels of material organization relate to one another in a way that accounts both for their ontological independence and their undeniable mutual dependencies.
So do you think you could manage an executive summary of the argument? I spotted bits of it here & there in your posts, but I couldn't possibly reconstruct it.
I think it might help make your position clearer. A change of scenery. Anti-reductionism is more or less a lemma for you, so maybe if you just presented the lemma separately, that would be tidier. (I was going to say something about people not having entrenched views about meteorology, but ...)
I think anti-reductionism may be more of a default position for me rather than a lemma. It is actually a position that is shared by many of the philosophers that I am arguing against. When it was the main topic of the thread, I was happy to straddled myself with the burden of defending anti-reductionism. I did it in this thread, starting on the third page, in a protracted discussion with Frederick KOH. (I may have made some comments, along the way, about the irreducibility of rational-causation and/or mental-causation, and how they operate quite naturally and non-mysteriously).
However, the relationship between reductionism and the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) is extremely complex. My main beef with the manner in which most compatibilists, libertarians and hard determinists alike seem to dismiss the compatibility between PAP and micro-physical determinism is their main motivation for dismissing the possibility of this compatibility, and this seems to be their inchoate acceptance of actualism. (The 'new dispositionalists' who I mentioned mostly are compatibilists, but they explicitly argue against actualism: the thesis that only what is actual is possible, even in a deterministic universe). The rejection of actualism requires a radical shift from a Humean metaphysics of event-causation to a metaphysics of substances and powers. Since substances have causal powers that are irreducible to the causal powers of their material constituents, that is one step in the argument where reductionism is at issue.
What complicates matters is that, as already mentioned, most contemporary compatibilists reject PAP -- i.e. maintain that free will and responsibility don't require genuine alternative possibilities for the agent to chose from -- and yet they do so (rejecting PAP) on the basis of their uncritical acceptance of actualism in spite of the fact that they aren't committed to nomological reductionism at all.
Indeed, Jaegwon Kim's argument for causal exclusion only explicitly relies on the thesis of the supervenience of the domain of mental events over the domain of physical events. Yet, Kim is an self-avowed non-reductive physicalist who even endorses a weak form of emergence. The reason why, though, he is led to a belief in the causal exclusion of the mental, on the basis of the alleged causal sufficiency of the the causal efficacy of the (broadly deterministic) physical supervenience base, is the lack of attention that he pays to the irreducible principles of individuation of mental phenomena (something multiple-realizability is relevant to) and also to the fact that the causal efficacy of the mental isn't at all a matter of event-event causation. I've also already commented on Davidson's endorsement of the principle of the nomological character of causation. Davidson't also believes mental events to by anomalous (qua belonging to mental types) in spite of them being token identical with physical events. I don't think this is perspicuous at all, but it's not mainly reductionism that is the source of the mischief, since Davidson, just like Kim, isn't a reductionist. Rather, the problem again is the reliance on a narrow Humean conception of event-event nomological causation.
So, the core of my argument consists in showing how an overly narrow conception of event-event nomological causation leads to actualism and why the replacement of this metaphysics with a more Aristotelian metaphysics of substances and their natural powers (and of peoples' 'second-natural' powers of rational deliberation) enables the principle of alternative possibilities to be endorsed consistently with determinism and causal closure both having complete reign at the level of their atomic material constituents. Much of this argument, though, consists in reminders about commonly known facts of ordinary life (and of ordinary scientific practice) and the debunking of commonly endorsed metaphysical prejudices mistakenly believed to be obligatory components of the modern scientific picture of the world. One of the most important reminders is that we don't truthfully withhold ascriptions of powers to ordinary objects, even just temporarily, on the mere ground that the conditions of exercise of those powers aren't currently realized. But I'll have to say more about that because the temptation for believing so in the case of human agency (especially in the context of the free will and determinism debate) seems irresistible to many.
OK, so it seems to me you are saying that microphysical processes, including I would assume, cellular processes, do not exhaustively determine (at least some) macro phenomena, including human decision and thought. If this is correct then we have no argument and there is also no need for you to hold a compatibilist position it would seem, because you are rejecting determinism, at least as I understand it. I still doubt that it is possible to offer any coherent explication of the 'relationship' between so-called "bottom up' and 'top-down' causalities, though.
Sure, I am saying that but this is something traditional incompatibilists proponents of agent-causation have been saying for a long time. But what they have been saying also always had seemed incredulous to the vast majority of philosophers because traditional agent-causalists (such as Roderick Chisholm and Randolph Clarke) thought that since free agents control their own bodies, then the only way for agent-causation to be irreducible to neural-causation is for agent to be able to control their own neural processes, and thus, in some mysterious way, initiate new causal chains in their own bodies at the neurophysiological level that are not themselves initiated by earlier neurophysiological events. Hence, those intentional "acts of volition" are "contra-causal" in the sense that they are "uncaused causes" of neurophysiological events.
This is indeed incredible and it is not at all what I am saying.
Indeed, I am rejecting determinism. But unlike traditional libertarians, and unlike traditional agnent-causalists, I am not denying causal determinism and causal closure at the level of neurophysiology and "raw" (physicalistically described) bodily motions. Rather, I am adducing results in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of emergence to explain how the specific internal causal structure of 'higher-level' intentional actions, and their integration with our mental lives, make them dependent on their neurophysiological underpinnings in a way such that those underlying processes are merely enabling of our rational powers of agency and not determinative of our responsible decisions.
I've explained how I construe top-down causation (which is somewhat different from the standard interpretations in the literature on emergence) in a previous post. Bottom-up causation, on the other hand, mainly is a manner of the functional organization of our brains being such as to enable our rational powers of theoretical and practical reasoning. How and what those powers are actualized, is another matter entirely, and it isn't determined from the bottom-up. Processes of top-down and bottom-up causation, though, both are irreducible to deterministic causal explanations that only look down at the causally closed level of neurophysiology and 'raw' bodily motions.
One apparent difficulty with my approach concerns the reconciliation of the possibility of top-down causation with the causal closure of the lower level. But this only seems impossible when we assume the token-identity, and hence a one-to-one mappings, of mental-events with neurophysiological events. But I am denying the existence of any such psycho-physical parallelism. Brain events aren't mental events at all. Brain structures and processes enable basic cognitive functions, but our mental lives are a matter of the dynamical actualization of those functions in a rich context of social embedding and scaffolding of our behaviors. This social context consists in a formative preexisting linguistic community and a meaningful environment rich in rational-behavioral affordances.
What you're addressing in this passage is an epistemic issue. That's why you're conflating an epistemic and an ontological issue. Whether possibilities and free will obtain has nothing to do with our ability to explain anything, our understanding of physical laws, what physical laws can say about anything, etc.
"Top down" and "bottom up" are nonsensical ontologically. They might make sense re how some people think about causal relations, but they'd have no correlate in the external world.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
You write a lot of stuff that sounds like it's saying something but that on analysis turns out to just be garbage. It's like con artist or used car salesman hand-waving talk designed to obfuscate and dismantle critical examination. And then your technique if challenged about anything is to write hundreds of words of only obliquely related additional hand-waving, where you make sure some sentences have fifteen or so prepositional phrases in a row. The hope is that that will discourage further critical examination. Most of your posts would be believable as unpublished Sokal texts that were intended to expose the folly of pomo journals.
Which means that you're not a compatibilist.
Causal explanations for sure address our explanatory needs, but to single then out for that reason doesn't turn them into merely epistemological issues. There is a tight conceptual connection between causation and explanation (as there is, also, between causation and natural laws and/or natural powers, and between causation and counterfactual dependence). So, when I'm suggesting that, the fact that some bodily motions happen to realize, in some specific practical contexts, some specific sorts on intentional actions, is explained by the intelligible source of the intention of the agent (i.e. her reasons for acting in that way precisely in contexts of that sort), I am not merely pointing to the fact that she may believe, truly or wrongly, that this fact is causally relevant to the production of her action. I am suggesting that it is explanatory by virtue of its being causally relevant.
The alternatives to the reality of those real instances of rational-causation are either causal-overdetermination or something like pre-stablished harmony (Ă la Mallebranche or Leibniz). But the only alternative explanation of the fact that those bodily motions come to constitute the specific form of intentional action that they do constitute, the allegedly determinative neurophysiological (or microphysical) causal entecedent of the bodily motions, doesn't actually explain the fact at all. It is a very poor candidate cause. On the other hand, the rational-causal explanation makes perfect sense in light of the fact that human brains have have evolved over phylogenetic time frames, and then continue to adapt through learning over ontogenetic time frames, precisely to sustain the practical rational powers of mature human beings. But it is enough to account for the dependence of rational abilities on underlying neurophysiological structure to cast the latter as enabling-causes of cognitive function, and not as determinative causes of our specific exercises of practical and theoretical rational powers.
Indeed, I am not. But I do share with compatibilists the commitment to the idea that free will and responsibility are compatible with the causal closure of the physical domain. As for the question of the determinism of fundamental physical laws, I also share with compatibilists the belief that it is irrelevant to the question of free will. So, my position is intermediate between traditional compatibilism and traditional incompatibilist libertarianism.
I have briefly run through the answers. It's difficult to deal directly with the question, so let me give an example.
In an universe without any human beings or any living things, all events can be said to be strictly deterministic, is this not correct? It appears that the principle objection to determinism is that it affects human responsibility and morality. But in an inanimate universe or part of the universe which has no humans or life in it, would be totally deterministic.
Can robots be programmed to develop morality and laws? Of course they can. This does not mean that we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility, on the contrary, if a robot steps out of line all the other deterministically programmed robots will take corrective action, and the offending robot will have to take into consideration the cost of doing 'wrong'. As an academic concept, there should be no fear in discussing the issue. So it is with us.
So the arrival of human beings in the universe suddenly changed the universe from a deterministic to a non-deterministic one? I am not sure that makes sense. That is my problem.
If there were a switch to turn the universe from deterministic mode to non-deterministic mode in an instant, would turning the switch make any difference? Would we feel any different?
What makes it an epistemological issue is that you're talking about explanations, understanding, what our physical laws can do, etc.
Aren't you the user Streetlight under a different name by the way?
They are multitudes of correlates in the real world. You should keep up with recent literature on the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of chemistry and the philosophy of physics. (Search "top-down causation on PhilPapers). Nobody seems to deny that externally triggered changes in high-level features of organized systems seem to reliably produce systematic effect on low-level features (and this matches up with traditional interventionist accounts of causation: if manipulation of A produces systematic change is B, then there is a causal relationship between A and B). So, the only issue that separate strong emergentists from skeptics on that issue is the question of the potential reducibility (or 'eliminative' analysis) of those prima facie real cases of inter-level causal efficacy into low-level constituent causal processes. The chances for that seem bleak and only to be motivated by die hard reductionist or physicalist tendencies.
It's not the case that it's not nonsense ontologically just because a lot of people are talking about it.
It's not that I'm stumping for "low level causality" as you seem to believe. The whole "level" idea is nonsense. It's simply an artifact of how people are choosing to think about this stuff.
However, I am a physicalist. The idea of nonphysical existents is incoherent.
That's because in the case of rational agency, our understanding of what we are intentionally doing is normally part of the cause of our doing it. Just because epistemically relevant concepts are mentioned in the context of the discussion of human cognitive powers hardly means that no real causation can be involved. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are two radically different manners to know that something will happen. The first one is to learn about a sufficient causal antecedent. The second one is to choose to make it happen (when it is within our powers to do make it happen). The second one is a reliable means for us to know many things that will happen that doesn't depends on us our knowing, or ignoring, any other causal antecedents of those happenings.
Certainly not. I only have one single account and my handle is my real name.
Our understanding is irrelevant to whether possibilities or free will obtain.
And our understanding of what we are intentionally doing can be part of the cause of what we are doing where either (a) only one possibility exists in any given situation and there is no free will, or (b) at least two possibilities exist in at least some situations and there is free will.
So again, it would be a conflation of epistemological issues with ontological issues. The epistemological issues here have no bearing on what's the case ontologically.
Whether there is more than one possibility and whether free will obtains have zilch to do with what we know.
(Sorry for all the typos . . . Which I've been trying to correct as quickly as I can. I'm on a mobile and I'm always fighting with the keyboard, with spell check, etc.)
No, of course not. But you were suggesting that the idea of top-down causation doesn't have any "correlate" in the real world. So, I thought you rather seemed unfamiliar with the very idea of top-down causation, which refers to an abundance of phenomena in both the natural and the social sciences. But, in any case, I offered an argument why the idea isn't nonsensical at all, can be defined with a scientifically sound criterion for the existence of causal relations. You've ignored my explanations.
This is like saying that the very idea of "rabbits" is nonsense. "Rabbits" just is an artifact of how biologists are choosing to think about lumps of biological stuff.
Which I'd agree with in the sense that I'm a universal/natural kind antirealist. I'm a nominalist.
Your "support" of "top down" (or "high-level")/"bottom up" (or "low-level") causation being something that actually obtains ontologically included statements like "Nobody seems to deny that externally triggered changes in high-level features" . . . which simply assumes what it's supposed to be a support of and which is also an argumentum ad populum.
Since everything is quanta, the above statement it's incorrect.
In any case, any speculation about a universe without humans is strictly outside the realm of science. It is not even philosophy. I guess it is pure imagination and pretty much inapplicable to humans.
However, your question about what switch was pulled and who pulled the switch to go from the non-living to the living is a reasonable one. Religion claims god did it. Biologists claim... It magically emerges?
Pierre-Normand may not be a compatibilist, but this doesn't necessarily follow from the fact that he's not a determinist.
Compatibilism is simply the view that free will is compatible with determinism. It does not entail the view that determinism is true (although some compatibilists may take the position that determinism is necessary for free will).
I wouldn't say that someone is a compatibilist unless they actually assert that both determinism and free will are the case.
What is the importance of the free will debate, in your eyes? In mine it is one of responsibility- the metaphysics only interest me insofar as they inform the notion of responsibility. If responsibility is the main focal point, then one can be a compatibilist even if determinism is false because the free will the compatibilist is concerned with is one of responsibility, not metaphysics.
My primary interest in the issue is ontological--whether we can actually make choices, and I prefer to focus on the simplest choices for that--whether we can really choose to turn left or right on a street on a whim while we're walking or taking a bike ride say.
Then I'm afraid you've misunderstood compatibilism.
The claim that X is compatible with Y does not entail that Y must be true.
And I'm afraid that you've misunderstood my comment.
Thanks dude!
OK, thanks for your excellent explanation. I find nothing to disagree with here; and I begin to get a glimpse of where you are coming from. I haven't done anything like enough reading in that area to properly appreciate it, though.
I understand the idea of quantum mechanics "God playing dice with the universe". The statement by Einstein has had many interpretations, I am sure, but mine is that God (let's assume one exists, or let's assume an universe in which God exists) .. God cannot be ignorant of the outcome of any event. It's not like playing dice where we have to play the dice and then read the dots. Somehow I would think that the existence of a God would imply determinism since there is only one fore-known (by God) sequence of events that takes place, will have taken place in that universe.
Also, there is no need to imagine a universe without humans - take a location far away from the earth, even beyond the distance light could travel from the times humans appeared - isn't this area purely mechanical in its operation? Yes, but I then rule out quantum mechanics. Fair enough.
Let me rephrase the switch question:
How will a purely deterministic universe be different from a non-deterministic one? Surely this is a simple enough question? My answer is that it would not look any different.
Is the past determined?
You say that there is no need to imagine a universe without humans but then you try to imagine one. It is compatible to discuss anything without the concept of conscious observation. What ever is outside of observation is simply unknown an inaccessible. Consider the observer as an active participant (totally entangled in any discussion) and not parenthetical.
I am not sure that that is this is one of the assumptions this discussion is based on. However, assuming that the observer is an active participant, and considering the world humans inhabit, I am still puzzled as to what the difference would be if we were in a world where events are determined by some giant clockwork machine.
Lets take a clockwork machine - Big Ben for example. Suppose I am a cogwheel in the clock. Suppose I want to turn at so many revolutions per hour, and I feel I am doing this of my own free will. Suppose then I decide to stop turning, and I do. At the same time, however, the clock has jammed and my intention to stop turning coincides exactly with events.
I believe this is something akin to what happens - our feeling of free will accompanies our actions. For example I may believe I have the free will to walk on water. What happens after the first step is not relevant.
Has anyone suggested this line of reasoning? I get the feeling that free will means different things to different people - could possibly free will be confused with omnipotence? If not why?
You could try to imagine such a situation but it is your consciousness that is doing so. One cannot disentangle consciousness from any discussion or exploration-either philosophically or scientifically. A thought experiment is an experiment of the mind (consciousness).
For me, there is no such thing as free will. What is possible (and this is reflected in everyday life) is to make a directed (willful) choice in a particular direction. Outcome is never certain (though probabilistic) and is completely unknown until it unfolds in psychological time (the time of life). We try and we then observe what happened in memory.
I understand your point perfectly. I can work within such a view, though I it's a tricky area to explore, does anything happen outside my consciousness, it does, but imagining it brings it in.
I broadly agree, except for the fact that I do think I have a free will, as a passenger to this roller coaster ride.
But I think I need to get to the definition of free will itself:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/free+will
I personally find the definitions here problematic and even disturbing. I think that is what brought me to the forum in the first place.
a. the apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined
It's 'apparent' - illusory? Externally determined? External to what? The mind? real slippery slope here.
b. the doctrine that such human freedom of choice is not illusory. Compare determinism1
Not illusory? What would it look like if it was real? Free will is known to us by our senses - our mind, emotion, feelings. But this goes outside the human mind as it were. It relates to the nature of the universe.
If I pick up a glass of water - there I just physically did that, I am sure we all agree that there are thoughts and feelings and mental processes accompanying that event, even preceding it.
That is what I call free will.
But that is not what we are talking about here, it is like the question - do parallel universes exist at the point of each possible action?
Different things are meant by free will and even by determinism, so it remains to me to pick which meanings of free will are incompatible with which versions of determinism,
Many times the debate is chaotic and circular due to the lack of hard definitions of free will, I think.
http://www.hawking.org.uk/does-god-play-dice.html
On your view, in a world where microphysical determinism obtains in such a way at to enable an ideal Laplacean predictor to foresee all future events (on the basis of his knowledge of all the present physical conditions and of the deterministic laws of physics), there are two senses in which a future occurrence can meaningfully be said to be 'possible' -- epistemic possibility or ontological possibility -- where the latter doesn't depend on an agent's perspective at all.
I think this leads you to paper over an important metaphysical distinction regarding possibilities for the future (though you hardly are alone in doing this). Imagine the following two cases.
Case 1: Suppose an agent is placed in a room with only two doors leading out. The agent is informed that the room will be flooded in ten minutes. At that time, both doors will lock down automatically. The agent must thus exist the room within ten minutes in order not to drown. Furthermore, the agent is informed that there is a wild tiger behind the first door and that there are a dozen venomous snakes laying on the ground behind the second door. The agent is, as of yet, indecisive about what to do, except that she is quite certain that she must exit soon. Until such a time when she will have made up her mind what kind of beast(s) might be more manageable or least dangerous, she doesn't know what door it is that she will open. (But the Laplacean predictor knows what her eventual choice will be already).
Case 2: Consider now a variation on the previous scenario where one (and only one) of the two doors is locked from the very beginning, and the agent is informed of this also, though she isn't told which one it is. However, if the agent would first try to open the door that happens to already be locked, there will be no penalty. She would then be allowed to walk to the other door and open it (provided the ten minutes time limit hasn't elapsed already). Now, the agent still doesn't initially know what door it is that she will eventually manage to open and what sort of beast(s) it is that she will confront. But there is no point in her losing time pondering over the issue since in any case only one of the two doors is unlocked. She might as well try out one door (chosen at random) and thereby find out as fast as possible which one is unlocked, and then confront the tiger, or snakes, on the other side, whatever the case may be.
On my view, in the first case, before the ten minutes have elapsed, and before the agent has made up her mind which door it is that she will try to open first, *both* options are open to her (and hence represent possible future outcomes) from her own practical perspective, and this not merely a matter of epistemic limitation, or so I would argue.
In the second case, only one option is open, and it is indeed merely a matter of epistemic ignorance which one is open from the practical perspective of the agent. The agent only has one exit option but doesn't yet know which one it is.
On your view, though, there is only one 'ontological possibility' in the Case 1 scenario. And the fact that the agent doesn't yet know (prior to making up her mind) which door it is that she will open is a case of epistemic possibility, just as it is in the Case 2 scenario.
My question to you, then, is this: Why is it that the agent, in the first scenario, wouldn't be justified to just try one door at random and forego any prior deliberation regarding the potential threats (tiger versus snakes), just as it would make sense to forego such pointless deliberations in the the first scenario when she knows that only one door is unlocked anyway. Why is there any practical point in her prior deliberating what choice to make when, on your view, there actually just in one real (ontological) possibility that already has been set by the past state of the universe and the laws of physics; and her 'feeling' that there are two options really (ontologically) open to her reflects nothing more than mere 'epistemic possibilities'?
I agree with you that the topic of responsibility is centrally important to the 'free will and determinism' debate.
Some philosophers, such as Helen Steward, defend the thesis of agency incompatibilism, according to which determinism isn't compatible with animal agency in general, and not just incompatible with free rational agency. (See her A Metaphysics for Freedom). This may be true, and if it is true it would entail that free will isn't compatible with determinism since free will characterizes just one particular sort of animal agency.
But while we recognize non-rational animals such as cows, dogs and finches to be agents, we don't ascribe then free will. They are, in a sense, irresponsible, since they aren't able to take ownership of their own natural and/or conditioned tendencies. So, even if it is the case that the bare metaphysical inquiry into possibilities for the future, as it applies to the natural powers of substances and of non-rational animals, is undoubtedly relevant to the free will issue, it remains the case than an inquiry into the topic of specifically rational agency (which includes questions about the philosophy of 'moral psychology') remains centrally relevant.
Thanks for that. It would be interesting to compare this exegesis/reconstruction of Epicurus's account to Chisholm's, Clarke's or Kane's more recent libertarian accounts of free will and see if it suffers from the same limitations (such as the problems from luck and intelligibility).
??? That's not my view. There is no "epistemic possibility" where there is no ontic possibility. An "epistemic possibility" with no ontic possibility is otherwise known as a false belief.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I just want to clarify that on my view, if determinism is true then there is only one ontic possibility, and the agent is simply mistaken that there is more than one.
However, on my view, determinism isn't true. I'm an incompatibilist and a libertarian.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Note by the way that I'm not at all saying anything about justification.
On my view, if determinism is true, whatever the agent does in both scenarios, whether they deliberate or just go right ahead and try opening one door or the other, it had to happen exactly the way it did, and the agent didn't really have any choice in it. The agent is either going to deliberate or not. It's not the agent's choice to deliberate or not if determinism is true, and that's the case contra appearances, contra anything the agent thinks.If determinism is true, and the agent believes they have a choice, the agent us simply mistaken. They're the victim of an illusion. If the agent realizes this and thus stops deliberation in scenario 1, that can only be because that's the only thing that could happen, if determinism is true. It's not that the agent chose to not deliberate in that case.
I am not sure what is meant by "choice" here - does the act of choosing mean the mental act of thinking and weighting options? If that is what it means, then then occurs in either case.
Merriam- Webster:
1 :Â the act of choosing :Â selection finding it hard to make a choice
2 :Â power of choosing :Â option you have no choice
So the question is in a non-box universe, and a non- mechanical universe, where the future is non existent, does a person act as a result of a result of several interacting mechanical processes ie atoms and electrical currents in the brain, or do they act out of a result of something else, the mind, the soul, something supernatural that cannot be caused or analyzed? Is that the question? (2) seems to imply that.
Choice doesn't obtain when we're only talking about an illusion. There has to really be more than one option.
On my view, mind is identical to particular (dynamic) brain structure/functioning. I'm a physicalist.
It's just that I don't buy that the physical world is (wholly) deterministic.
So what would these options be and what would this look like?
I was using the term "epistemic possibility" in the way it is commonly used in philosophy. From Wikipedia: "In philosophy and modal logic, epistemic possibility relates a statement under consideration to the current state of our knowledge about the actual world: a statement is said to be:
epistemically possible if it may be true, for all we know..." (my emphasis)
So, a claim of epistemic possibility regarding a proposition that is (unbeknownst to one) metaphysically, historically or nomologically impossible isn't the expression of a false belief. It is more akin to an avowal of ignorance.
My own account of free will doesn't rely at all on epistemic modalities. They are rather irrelevant to it. The reason why the issue came up is because you (and also John) were charging me with conflating epistemic and ontological issues when I was attempting to distinguish two different sorts of possibilities for the future, neither one of which is epistemic on my view.
However, it seems to me, the tendency to conflate those two sorts of 'necessities' (the duals of the corresponding 'possibilities') often leads philosophers into a dilemma. Compatibilists who deny the principle of alternative possibilities are embracing one horn of this dilemma (and face problems in dealing with van Inwagen's consequence argument), whereas many libertarians (including traditional agent-causal theorists) are embracing the other horn (and face difficulties in dealing with the luck and intelligibility objections). My suggestion is that when the proper distinction is made between the two sorts of modalities that are relevant to the metaphysics of agency (neither one of which is merely epistemic) then there appears a third path between the two horns of the traditional compatibilist/libertarian dilemma.
Thanks for expressing your view regarding my 'room-escape' thought experiment. I'll comment further on your response later on.
I don't know how to answer "what would this look like," because I'm not sure what you're asking. What the options would be are real possibilities, where from antecedent state A, either B or C (where B or C are incompatible) can obtain as an immediate consequent state, because they're not causally determined by A.
Yes it is on my view. The definition of epistemic possibility that you give describes an illusion--something that one is mistaken about re how the world really is (or a false belief). Namely that it's possible that C can obtain consequent to A, in the scenario where there is only one possibility that can obtain consequent to A, B.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
For at least the third time, the reason that you were conflating the two is that you were talking about understandings etc. That's epistemological. But this is an ontological issue.
Re your "two types of possibilities," I'd have to go digging through previous posts to even recall what the two types of possibilities were supposed to be and whether your supposed distinction made any sense in my opinion.
Re the other comments, I'm not that familiar with Van Inwagen's argument (and not that fond of the fact that it seems to be made strictly as a formal logical argument, due to my belief about what logic is, etc.). I'd have to go more into detail just what the issue would be there. Re the "luck" and "intelligibility" issues, for one, will seems to bias probabilities. There's no reason to believe that different possibilities are equiprobable. And the bias can be near 100% in some cases.
Sure. In my view the real possibilities there including choosing door 1, door 2, not making a choice and looking for another way out (I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily exhausting the possibilities . . . maybe I am, but those would at least be a few).
If determinism were the case, though, then there would only be one real possibility.
You are misunderstanding the definition. It's not an illusion, it's a claim of ignorance. Saying that P is an epistemic possibility (always relative to the consistent body of beliefs of an individual or some community consensus) just means that it isn't inconsistent with this prior body of beliefs. If I am coming back home and I don't know if my girlfriend is home already, that means that either (1) her being home already or (2) her not being home already are propositions that both are consistent with everything that I already know or believe (truly or falsely). This is what it means that both propositions are epistemic possibilities from my perspective.
If you believe that I'm saying that the definition has it as an illusion you're misunderstanding my comment. I'm saying that what the definition is describing would be an illusion, if determinism is true.
Getting acquainted at least with an informal statement of van Inwagnen's consequence argument (also credited to Carl Ginet) is useful because it has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for many decades now, and it brings into focus many of the incompatible commitments that ground the accounts of the libertarians, the compatibilists and the hard determinists.
The "intelligibility problem" for for libertarian free will is a very old objection that has been raised for it and that has been much discussed by one of the most prominent contemporary libertarian: Robert Kane. See page 23 in Four Views on Free Will, which you can preview for free on Google Books.
The "luck objection" is closely related to the intelligibility problem but it is most often raised in the context of the libertarian accounts of the "possibility to do otherwise", i.e. the libertarian way to simultaneously satisfy the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) and secure "agent control" over the choice actually being made. Maybe you can just Google "agent", "control", "luck" and "PAP". It is also mentioned in the SEP article mentioned above (search the word "luck" in the page).
Choice (I hesitate to use the concept of Free Will) is an attempt to move in a particular direction that is constrained. Constrained by what? Memories (habits) that are within us and the forces that we perceive applied too us, e.g the choices of others. All of this yields a probabilistic outcome that manifests as what we perceive as quantum waves. Consciousness is not outside attempting to direct (control) the waves but rather are imbued within the waves. There is no duality. It is all done. That is why it is impossible to separate consciousness from perception or imagination.
This comment suggests that you didn't really read or understand the comment you're responding to.
You still seem to be missing the point of the concept of epistemic possibility. If when I am claiming that for all I know my girlfriend may (epistemic 'possibly') still be at home, I am saying nothing more than that I dont know. I don't know because both the proposition and its negation are consistent with everything that I do know or believe falsely. In what sense would this seemingly justified claim of ignorance be illusory, and what is the relevance of determinism to it? Maybe I know that she is home and have temporarily forgotten due to some distraction? So I can be brought to remember that knew it already? That would by one way to interpret your claim that a statement of epistemic possibility can be mistaken. But determinism has nothing to do with it.
If we're ONLY saying "I don't know if she's home or not" how are we talking about possibility?
Because it an extremely common and everyday use of the words "possible" and "impossible" (Did you know that P? I don't know, that's possible, for all I know.) And also because those uses of the words possible and impossible (and necessarily) in an epistemic context obey the very same rules of modal logic as alethic or metaphysical modalities. Which is why, of course, it is natural to use those words in epistemic contexts, since they obey the same logic and hence licence the same forms of inference.
Is it possible that I have a brother?
What??? You didn't seem to understand if we're only. If we're only saying that "I don't know," then we're not saying "that's possible," right? Because "that's possible" is not ONLY "I don't know."
If I'm only saying I don't know, it doesn't follow that I believe it's possible. (I can explain why, but I shouldn't have to.)
I was just trying to be helpful in providing links to the commonly discussed issues (in the free will literature) that I had mentioned and that you claimed not to be familiar with. There is no obligation for anyone to make use of them. They're just there for the taking in case anyone is interested.
Which is not what I said, and that should have been clear from what I typed as well. Hence, you either didn't read or understand what I typed very well.
Are you simply asking my personal view, outside of the context of what I was talking about? If so, then yes, certainly. Keep in mind that I'm not a determinist.
If it means that both the proposition and its negation are consistent with everything that you know (or believe to be true), then that's 'possible' in the epistemic sense. Nobody ever suggested that epistemic possibility implies other sorts of possibility. But when people make use of the word "possible" in ordinary contexts, what they mean satisfies the definition of epistemic possibility, and what they say is often true.
An epistemic sense has to do with individuals' beliefs, right?
If the person isn't badly confused, and she genuinely doesn't know, this tends to imply that she doesn't know or believe something on the basis of which the proposition or its negation can be deduced. (Although this raises issues regarding the logical closure of knowledge, not very relevant here). That means that for all practical purposes, claims of ignorance are equivalent with claims of epistemic possibility. They have logical implications governed by the logic of epistemic modalities.
If I believe that I don't know if A or B is the case, does it follow that I believe that it's possible that either A or B are the case?
Of course! I said that from the very beginning. It is relative to the body of beliefs of a person at some point in time.
Yes, if you are using 'possible' in the epistemic sense; no, if you are using it differently. If I don't know whether or no my girlfriend is home, that doesn't entail that I believe that she is some sort of a Schroedinger Cat living in an unsettled state of both possibly being or not being at home. Mere epistemic possibilities don't logically entail other sorts of possibilities.
Well, the epistemic sense is about what I believe. So if I believe that it's not in fact possible for A or B to have obtained--I believe that it's only possible for one of them to have obtained and the other was always impossible (even before one obtained), then how does my saying "I don't know" imply a belief that both are possible? I rather explcitly believe that one was never possible; I simply don't know which one was possible.
Really? You can't wait ten minutes? Should I take an appointment with your personal secretary, next time? I am allowed more than one bathroom breaks in a day?
Don't you ever have time available where one wouldn't have to wait ten minutes for a response in a conversation?
You can't possibly be serous. Just listen to yourself. I am patiently replying to your rapid fire quibbles over a simple notion (epistemic possibility) that you could have gotten acquainted with easily on your own with a Google search. We didn't come to a prior agreement that this exchange, which has spanned a few days, ought suddenly to become be a no-break-allowed conversation.
Getting to the won't answer a simple question point. Nice.
How would you describe this in modal logic?
"It is not possible for A or B to have obtained".
¬?(A ? B)
Now, I'm not particularly knowledgable of modal logic, but does De Morgan's theorem apply here, and like this?
¬?(A ? B) ? ¬?A ? ¬?B
Quoting Terrapin Station
So it's possible that I have a brother.
I don't have a brother.
What does this say about your claim that it's possible that I have a brother? Does it make sense to say that your claim/belief was illusory? I don't think so.
But I did answer it, didn't I? You're just complaining that it took more than 10 minutes, due to my being busy answering other posts of yours!
That looks okay to me, but I can't guarantee I'm not missing something.
How about getting back to the more substantive comment? I need to leave in less than half an hour, and I'll be in and out prior to that.
The comments about epistemic possibility being illusory were in a different context--supposing that determinism were true, etc. That's why I qualified that response when I made it.
You are freely mixing up metaphysical and epistemic possibility operators in this paragraph, so the question seems ill posed. I already mentioned that epistemic possibilities don't entail other sorts of possibilities. If you believe that only one among two 'possibilities' can be actual, due to the conjunction of them being nomologically impossible, then this could be formalized thus: EP(?A xor ?B), where EP is the epistemic possibility operator, '?' is a different sort of possibility operator.
You must be missing something. Let's say that A is "I will pick up the cup" and B is "I will not pick up the cup". So ¬?A ? ¬?B means "it is not possible that I will pick up the cup and it's not possible that I will not pick up the cup". I don't think you meant this.
But epistemic possibility necessarily has to do with the individual's beliefs re possibility, no?
Right--for one I misread the "and" as an "or"
So unless De Morgan's theorem doesn't apply this way to modal logic, to avoid this consequence you have to abandon your claim "It is not possible for A or B to have obtained".
In other words, it's either not possible for A or it's not possible for B to have obtained.
What epistemic possibility "has to do with" is rational people's consistent sets of beliefs, and what they are about is specific propositions in relation to those prior sets of beliefs. The content of those propositions can concern ordinary empirical claims, claims of temporal modalities, alethic modalities, mataphysical modalities, or even other epistemic modalities (or anything else that one can intelligibly believe or disbelieve).
For instance, I may claim that, for all I know, for all Donald Trump knows, he will be remembered at the greatest president ever. This could be formalized thus: EPPN(EPDT(P)), where EPPN is the epistemic possibility operator relativized to my own present epistemic perspective, EPDT is the same operator relativized to Trump's epistemic perspective, and P is the proposition that he will be remembered at the greatest president ever.
So ¬?A ? ¬?B. Which, again using De Morgan's theorem, just entails ¬?(A ? B), but then nobody's arguing that.
But presumably what you would accept is ?A ? ?B (either A is possible or B is possible). Doesn't that then entail ?(A ? B)? And so, again, you must abandon your earlier claim that "It is not possible for [either] A or B to have obtained"
It rather seems to me that applying De Morgan's law to ¬?A ? ¬?B yields ¬(?A ? ?B).
If either A or B are impossible, then it's not the case that they're both possible.
Might be clearer if I change ¬? to IMPOSSIBLE. That gives us:
IMPOSSIBLE(A) ? IMPOSSIBLE(B) which entails IMPOSSIBLE(A ? B).
Although ¬(?A ? ?B) also follows.
And also that it's not possible that they're both the case.
But which of these is a proper application of De Morgan's law, I'm not sure. Maybe you're right on that. Or maybe "the negation of a conjunction is the disjunction of the negations; and
the negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations" is broad enough to cover both?
I was paraphrasing you formula and interpreting '¬?' as "impossible". I meant "both impossible" also as a paraphrase for "¬?A ? ¬?B".
No trouble. I must however retract what I just said. I hadn't actually said "both impossible" originally, but rather "not the case that they're both possible". It is the latter that is the correct paraphrase from the right hand side of my revision of your formula, and it is the proposition that I take to follow from the left hand side thought the correct application of De Morgan's law.
Your own "IMPOSSIBLE(A ? B)" also follows indirectly, but it follows from modal logic rather than propositional logic.
From ¬(?A ? ?B) you can indeed infer ¬?(A ? B) since if
(1) it is not the case that ((there is a possible world where A) and (there is a possible world where B)),
then
(2) there is no possible world where both A and B.
So when you don't want to deal with some particular individual's beliefs, you just claim that that is not a rational person.
Who gets to decide who is rational?
It's being argued if epistemic possibility is supposed to amount to both A and B being epistemically possible at some point in time.
Quoting Michael
A determinist would not accept that. I noted this explicitly already.
Everyone has inconsistent beliefs but there ought to be a consistent core. Who said I wan't prepared to deal with it on a personal level? We were discussing rules of inference that are valid for epistemic logic, presently. For those rules to apply to the belief systems, or epistemic perspectives, of real persons, there must be a minimal presumption of rationality. When a person believes that P, and also that Q isn't logically consistent with P, she isn't normally prepared to accept that, for all she knows, Q. If she is nevertheless prepared to accept Q as an epistemic possibility, then she must thereby either acknowledge that she doesn't really believe that P for sure, or be prepared to revise her belief that P and Q are inconsistent.
If a person shows no tendency to revise some of her beliefs when they are shown to be mutually inconsistent, then there is no saying what it is that, for all she knows, might be true, and epistemic modal logic breaks down as a means for interpreting her. (Look up Donald Davidson on 'radical interpretation', the 'constitutive ideal or rationality' and also the 'principle of charity'.)
We were? That's not what I was discussing. I had said simply said this, which you never addressed:
"So if I believe that it's not in fact possible for A or B to have obtained--I believe that it's only possible for one of them to have obtained and the other was always impossible (even before one obtained), then how does my saying 'I don't know' imply a belief that both are possible? I rather explcitly believe that one was never possible; I simply don't know which one was possible. "
"Then how does my saying 'I don't know' imply a belief that both are possible" wasn't a rhetorical question.
What's the answer to that? That the person isn't rational?
Yes, I did address it. You didn't reply to my comment about it. Maybe you missed it.
Sorry, you did. So you're saying that epistemic possibility in that scenario has nothing to do with what the individual in question believes about possibility (versus what they do not believe)?
Otherwise, how exactly does that amount to mixing anything up, because all I did was talk about what they do and do not believe?
(What this might amount to is simply that I don't at all buy the distinction you're attempting to make. There's ontological (or "metaphysical") possibility and there are beliefs about (ontological) possibility.)
That's because in the case you are describing, as I've displayed through formalizing it, there are two different sorts of modalities involved. It is a case where you avow ignorance regarding which one among two propositions is nomologically (or temporally, maybe) impossible, while the other one is nomologically possible, although you don't (yet) know which one. Since epistemic possibility doesn't entail nomological possibility, there is no validity in inferring the conclusion that you believe both to be nomologically possible. It's just your conflating the those two sorts of 'possibility' that generated the invalid inference and the false conclusion that you thereby believe both to be possible conjointly.
Actually this is a better question: why wouldn't epistemic possibility be beliefs about nomological possibility? I'm not at all convinced that it's coherent to say that it's anything other than that.
There isn't any proposition that she is claiming to be nomologically possible, if I understand you. Rather, she is claiming that one and only one among two propositions, A and B, is nomologically possible but she doesn't know which one it is. (If she would care to draw logical inferences from her own beliefs, though, she could conclude to the nomological possibility of the disjunctive proposition 'A xor B', as I've suggested to Michael, since this is a valid inference from (nomological) modal logic.)
I changed my post to this:
Actually this is a better question: why wouldn't epistemic possibility be beliefs about nomological possibility? I'm not at all convinced that it's coherent to say that it's anything other than that.
I'm unsure why anyone would think that the only sort of propositions which, for all one knows, might be true, are complex propositions regarding the nomological possibilities of basic propositions. There are more things under the Sun than just nomological possibilities. Maybe a determinist would believe something like that (that everything that is true is nomologically necessary) since, on her view, everything that will ever become temporally necessary in the future always has been in the past also. But then, that would only be true if we assume the nomological necessity of the 'initial state' of the universe.
What in the world does that have to do with what I asked?
I didn't say anything about the only sorts of propositions that might be true. In fact, I didn't say anything about propositions or truth whatsoever.
I didn't say anything about "complex" versus "basic" propositions.
It seems like you're making an incomprehensible jump from "possibility" to "truth."
What you asked me was this: "Actually this is a better question: why wouldn't epistemic possibility be beliefs about nomological possibility? I'm not at all convinced that it's coherent to say that it's anything other than that."
Are you not familiar with the idea that the contents of beliefs are propositions?
It really sounds like you were doubting that epistemic possibilities can coherently be said to be about anything other than propositions of nomological possibility. That would make those contents complex propositions of form (NP(A), where A is a simple proposition in subject/predicate form, and the belief itself (the epistemic possibility) has the form EP(NP(A). I have no idea why you would believe that, or believe that beliefs of the form EP(A) that aren't themselves "about" nomological possibilities, are necessarily incoherent.
To put it quite simply, when I say that, for all I know, my girlfriend may still be at home, this statement of epistemic possibility is about my girlfriend being at home. It's not about any sort of nomological possibility. I may not even believe that there are laws of nature. (Maybe I am a Humean regularist about laws, and I don't believe in natural necessities at all, say).
Yes, but I don't agree with it. Some beliefs are definitely propositions, but in my view belief is a lot broader and fuzzier than that.
But what would that have to do with the only sorts of propositions that might be true?
It's not as if all beliefs are about possibility.
What would be the grounds for a claim that a proposition like "There is a possibility that x" has a structure like "(NP(A)" (or EP(A) or EP(NP)A) or whatever)? How does the structure obtain? Propositions only exist insofar as someone thinks them, and they only have the structure that someone thinks.
Of course not. But you were the one expressing doubt that epistemic possibilities could coherently be thought to be "about" anything else than nomological possibilities, not me. I had construed that as the claim that epistemic possibilities have the form: 'for all I know, A might be nomologically possible', or, in shorter form, 'EP(NP(A)'. If you meant something else with your suggestion that all epistemic possibilities are "about" nomological possibilities, I don't know what that is. You would need to explain what you mean by "about" if it's not propositional contents.
What happened to this part?
What would be the grounds for a claim that a proposition like "There is a possibility that x" has a structure like "(NP(A)" (or EP(A) or EP(NP)A) or whatever)? How does the structure obtain? Propositions only exist insofar as someone thinks them, and they only have the structure that someone thinks
I am simply trying to understand *your* suggestion that it may be incoherent to interpret epistemic possibilities to be "about" anything else than nomological possibilities. I provided a simple counterexample regarding my girlfriend possibly being at home (for all I know). It would help if you would explain what you meant with your "about" claim if it's not related to content.
I'll be away from my computer over the next several hours.
Again, it's not at all plausible to me that beliefs about possibility are beliefs about something other than whether an event can metaphysically obtain.
At least where one is using the term "possibility" in anything like its conventional sense.
I think I see what you are getting at. Let's compare life to a maze. To me, I am walking through the maze, constrained by the walls, at the same time making limited choices whether to stop or go on. The exit point is pre-determined, lets' say I have some control over how long I take to get there.
This, to me is determinism + free choice. Compatibilist. This may be an imperfect example, but let's use it for now.
Now, for the determinist, I make no choices, its all pre-programmed as if I am a robot.
For those who say there is free will, I am not sure which of the following apply ( broadly, there are different definitions of free will).
1. The maze exists only in my field of view. What is beyond is non-existent
2. The maze exists within my field of view and outside. The maze changes its shape and its exit point depending on my choices
3. There is no God or other being who can view the maze journey from all or any point in time, and therefore know which path I would take, or finally took, or am going to take, assuming He is viewing something real.
Have I missed anything?
Indeed, this it's how religious people think of responsibility, God, and life. Heaven is their destination picked for them by God and it matters naught how many people they lie, steal, cheat, and even kill along the way (maybe kill is not allowed).
This is insulting to the religious person, even to the more Calvinistic Christians I know. Some religious folk are compatibilists; they think responsibility holds even if determinism is true. There are those who are free will libertarian as well, so they think that determinism is not true and they effectively choose their fate. Neither believes one can break the laws of their religion and get away with it. They are not fatalists about salvation. A person who murders, cheats, and steals will not go into heaven, even from a Calvinist perspective.
It gets complicated since God has already decided and has the final say.
But not too worry, it's better than determinism that has us all killing each other because some gene is obsessed with surviving.
It is not. Free will libertarians do not believe in pure freedom. I am not free to gain magic powers if I will them, for example. Just because I am in a maze with only one eventual outcome a the end of the maze does not mean I make decisions inside the maze. The libertarian believes that, at some points in my life, I have the ability to actualize one of many possibilities in a given scenario. When faced with a forked path, I can choose to go right or left. If I go right, I did not need to go right- I could have gone left if I so chosen. In other words, even if everything had been the same (same chain of events leading up to the forked path), I could have gone left. This ability is what the libertarian calls free will and what they view as needed for moral responsibility.
The determinist thinks that prior causal events dictate what will occur, so there is only one course of action that will result. If I go right, in a sense, then I must go right. Given a particular chain of events, only one outcome results. Determinists reject free will and the moral responsibility along with it.
Compatibilists think that free will exists, but they do not define it like the libertarian does. They think the relevant use of words like "choose", "could have done otherwise", and "free will," does not require the ability to actually be able to do something different given a specific chain of prior causal events. They think that their definition of free will allows determinism to be true. In short, being free for the compatibilist does not mean determinism is false. They can think there is only one possible outcome for a given situation and that free will and responsibility still holds.
The words "possible", "possibly" and "possibility" have a multiplicity of senses and not just one single conventional sense. Just look up the two or three main definitions in any common English dictionary, as well as the various examples of common usage that they give.
It is not at all plausible that epistemic possibilities really are beliefs about the metaphysical (or alethic, or temporal) possibility of events. One good way to get at the difference is to pay attention to the fact that most modalities can be construed as statements regarding some set of possible worlds (semantic models). But epistemic possibilities always are statements about the *actual* world. (See the examples in the Wikipedia article on epistemic possibility and the mention of the actual world at the very beginning.)
If we are waiting for the bus, and we are unsure if we may *possibly* have missed it, and ought to walk rather than wait any longer, we are not pondering over whether there might be possible worlds other than the actual world where the bus has passed ahead of schedule. We rather are pondering over whether it is at all likely (where "likely" expresses subjective probabilities) that it has passed ahead of schedule, and we thereby missed it, in the actual world. This "possibility" is entirely premised on our state of ignorance regarding some features of the actual world.
Another telling example might be this. If I endeavor and seem to have succeeded in proving a mathematical conjecture then I may still wonder if the conclusion might not be false because I have made a logical mistake while constructing the proof. So, I think it is still possible that the conclusion may be false. But the conclusion being a mathematical proposition, if it is true in this world then it is true in all possible worlds. (In other words, the truth of mathematical proposition isn't a contingent truth). Therefore my belief that, for all I know, the conclusion might still be false (because I am still unsure about the validity of my proof) doesn't entail the claim that there might be possible worlds other than the actual world where the statement is false. The possibility of its being false is purely epistemic.
God, in their minds, does not decide what they will do, at least in the sense that precludes moral responsibility. God could determine actions, but refrains from doing so to preserve creaturely freedom. Again, the compatibilist thinks that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible with each other.
Unrepentant murderers do not go to heaven.
Quoting Rich
Not all determinists are materialists. And I do not see what this has to do with anything I said. It seems like you are just saying things to try to get a rise out of people.
In my view that explanation is just compounding problems (note that my comments below are in the context of what's functionally going on, with respect to what's coherent or not, re conventional uses if terms):
* "Possible worlds" talk doesn't make sense except as talk about what is metaphysically possible in the actual world (which for a determinist is only one thing for each "branching point" so to speak . . . also, I see logical possibility as a subset of what's metaphysically possible, although determinists would have to say that it's the subset of things that are possible to non-contradictorily imagine; that, however, is still a subset of metaphysical possibility.)
* I don't know if you intended them to, but alethic or temporal possibility wouldn't refer to anything other than metaphysical possibility (they'd just be limiting the consideration to metaphysical possibility re truth-value judgments or changes that obtain relative to something)
* "Possible worlds as semantic models" -- we can note that the semantic models that individuals happen to possess (meaning is subjective and only obtains insofar as individuals actually think it) are actualized possibilities, but this is still metaphysical possibility (and to a determinist actualized (or to-be-actualized) possibilities are the only possibilities there are)
* The idea of "subjective probabilities" is just nonsense--if there are probabilities and that's not just an illusion, that's going to be a name that picks out some objective relational feature(s) of the world
* It's fine to note that we can be ignorant about which possibility obtains, where we believe that prior to something obtaining, there is more than one possibility, but if we're determinists we do not believe this; we believe that there is only one thing that's a possibility prior to each "branching point,' and our ignorance is about which thing was possible. Thus (a) ignorance isn't the same thing as some sense of possibility, and (b) this is not a different sense of possibility than metaphysical possibility; we're merely talking about our ignorance and beliefs re metaphysical possibility.
* Mathematics (and logic) are simply languages that report our subjective understanding of contingent relations, as they are thought about on the most abstract level, and
* Truth-value is a judgement about the relation of a proposition to something else (the exact something else being whatever the individual believes to be the pertinent relational consideration (for the context at hand). That could be their perception of the external world, or consistency with their stock of previously adjudged propositions, or usefulness per their judgment, etc.)
Right, which is why the idea where you make some choices have some "free" control over the maze isn't actually determinism. What you described at the start is libertarianism (not in the political sense obviously) where the ultimate outcome is predetermined somehow.
Re free will (aka libertarianism (with respect to will)), your (2) is closest.
Re your (3), one can believe that God exists (I personally do not--I'm an atheist, but one can believe God exists). And many people see free will as compatible with God's omniscience because they see knowledge as only being about what actually obtains, including natural laws, if one believes they obtain, and this gives God some predictive powers. But free will isn't part of natural law in this view, and God can't know what you'll decide prior to you deciding it. That's not the only approach to this issue in the context of religious belief, obviously, but it is one popular approach.
Just for reference, let me paste here my maze scenarios:
You said
What's logically possible is whatever isn't ruled out by the laws of formal logic alone. Whatever isn't self-contradictory is thus logically possible. Metaphysical possibilities, however you construe them, seem also to exclude propositions that are false because they are ruled out by a priori conceptual truths or by the laws of nature. (But see also Kripke on the metaphysical necessity of identity or of origin). It is very strange to say that logical possibility "is a subset of what's metaphysically possible", rather than the other way around.
Something is an alethic possibility ('a-possibility') if there is a true subjunctive conditional (e.g. a causal conditional) in which it figures as the consequent.
e.g. I arrived at work late because I forgot to set my alarm clock but it is a-possible that I would have arrived to work in time since if I had (counterfactually) not forgotten to set it then I would have arrived to work in time.
What is the allowed range of counterfactual antecedents that make alethic possibility statements either true or false is of course a pragmatic contextual matter that a semantic model must be sensitive to. (There seems to me to be a flaw with David Lewis's 'counterpart' models and their seemingly context insensitive similarity relations between possible worlds. Saul Kripke seems to me to provide a better informal account in Naming and Necessity.)
A temporal possibility is a possibility for the future that may become actual after the time has come. When the time has come, and the proposition now represents the past, it becomes (temporally) necessarily true or necessarily false. The range of possible worlds under consideration, in this case, is the set of possible worlds that share the same past with the actual world, at a time, and are branching out in the future consistently with the laws of nature. Just in case determinism is true, of course, then there is no branching out. There only is one actual future.
My point only was that epistemic possibilities depend on neither of those two modalities since they are premised on my ignorance regarding the actual world and don't always depend either on whatever is as of yet unsettled (for the future) or on what would have happened in counterfactual circumstances.
No. Semantic models aren't "actualized possibilities". This is nonsense. They are sets of characterizations of possible worlds with only one among them being labelled as the actual world. When something is actual, then it is possible but only one possible world is actual.
If you throw a die that you know to be fair and balanced, then, regardless on the laws of nature being deterministic or indeterministic, after the die has been thrown, but before you are informed of the result, the subjective probability for each one of the six conceivable results, from your own epistemic perspective, is p = 1/6. I am unsure why you would think this is nonsense. It is just part of the normal course of practical deliberation for people to make use of their own subjective probability estimates of the consequences of various possible actions, even when the consequences already are settled conditionally to their choices.
Those are just dogmatic assertions that you are making. Determinists and indeterminists alike usually agree about the fixity of the past. Yet, it makes sense to speak about epistemic possibilities regarding past events.
Well, yes, sure. That's exactly what epistemic modalities are about.
I'm not going to keep doing a series of posts of ever-increasing length, on an ever-increasing number of topics, where you state some status quo view, I give a view that disagrees with it, and then you either restate or state additional status quo views in response, where your responses don't seem to really even acknowledge what I had said very well.
So back to one thing at a time.
I wouldn't say that there are any laws of formal logic.
There are basically language games that are set up as conventions re different species of logics, where logic, as I had said, is a subjective linguistic reporting of how individuals think about relations on the most abstract level.
You are the one who brought up the topic of logical possibility and claimed, contrary to traditional wisdom, that logical possibilities are a subset of metaphysical possibilities. I am usure how this further characterization of logic explains the claim that you made. Maybe it would help if you would give an example of something that, in your view, is a metaphysical possibility even though it is not a logical possibility. That would possibly help me make sense of your strange suggestion.
It doesn't. It shows why your explanation doesn't work in my view. Logical possibilites have nothing to do with "laws of logic" because there are no such things.
I'm using logic to refer to a language about relations on an abstract level, and more specifically, it has to do with implications/inferences of relations. (Because that's what logic is, functionally, contra some beliefs about it.)
Not everything in the world is a language about relations, is it?
So, for example, imagine there are no persons. Well, there is no logic in that case. But there are metaphysical possibilites.
OK, fine. I would call De Morgan's law, modus ponens, modus tollens, or the axioms of first order propositional logic "laws", but if you would rather view them as "relations... (that have) to do with implication/inference relations", that is perfectly fine with me.
I am no less puzzled by your claim that logical possibilities are a subset of metaphysical possibilities.
Again, can you think of just one metaphysical possibility that isn't a logical possibility?
I just explained this to you. Imagine that there are no people. There would still be metaphysical possibilities. There would be no logical possibilities. There would be no logic period.
I don't think you really understand what I'm saying, which makes it frustrating to try to communicate.
This is not an example of something that is a metaphysical possibility and not a logical possibility. It's rather an imagined scenario (for instance, an alternative history where human beings didn't evolve) where nobody invented logic. But it is logically possible that no intelligent beings had evolved: for instance if a huge meteorite had hit the earth 100 million years ago and killed all the higher life forms. So the imagined scenario is logically possible. Else, you'd have to say that it's logically impossible for mankind to become extinct (unless other sorts of beings somewhere, on another planet maybe, still go on thinking logical thoughts). But logic alone doesn't rule out the possibility of mankind's extinction at some point in the future.
It's not just imagined. Persons didn't exist at one point in the past. There was no logic. No logical possibilities. But there were metaphysical possibilities.
It's not logically possible for no intelligent beings to evolve.* If no intelligent beings evolve, there is no logic. You're assuming that logic is something other than a thing that intelligent beings do.
(*Prior to intelligent beings evolving, it's also not logically possible for them to evolve. Again, if there are no intelligent beings, there is no logic.)
http://www.ditext.com/runes/f.html
The claim that it's not logically possible for no intelligent beings to evolve conflates two things. It conflates the idea of this scenario not being logically conceivable by us, and the idea of this scenario describing a state of affairs where our logic (or anyone's logic) has not been invented and/or made use of within the imagined situation.
Your claim doesn't make anymore sense than the claim that is it logically impossible for there to be distant planets where not life evolved, since in that case the is no logic on those planets.
Say it's 10 billion years ago or so.
Is it logically possible at that point in time for intelligent beings to evolve or not evolve?
You must resolve the ambiguity between the idea of (1) its being logically possible (according our conception of logic, now) that something could have been the case at time t, and the different idea of (2) its being logically possible at time t that something is possible at that time.
The second construal presupposes that there is something about the claim that must be indexed to the principles of logic that are being used by whoever happens to be alive, and sapient, at that time. But this is no part the the usual idea of logical possibility, where the criteria of logical consistency are our own criteria, and not the criteria of the creatures that may populate the contemplated scenario (if there are any).
I'm asking you a yes or no question about time t=10 billion years ago, or say at the moment of the big bang.
At that time (so a la (2)), not now where you're thinking about that time, is it logically possible for intelligent beings to evolve or not evolve? Yes or no. I'm not going to move on until you answer yes or no, despite how much you try to avoid doing so.
I've explained to you that your question conflates two different ideas. I've explicitly disambiguated those two ways to read the question. The answer, according to the first construal, is "yes". The second construal, which seems to be your intended construal, doesn't really make sense. In any case, it's not related to our ordinary understanding of logical possibility according to which it is logically possible that an atomic war could have wiped out humankind ten years ago and that the earth would have continued orbiting the sun.
Do you think it makes sense that there was a time billions of years ago, just after the big bang, say?
I am not sure exactly how to evaluate the proposition "there was a time billions of years ago". What would it mean for its being the case that there isn't "a time" at some point in the past?
So you don't know if there was a "point" in time billions of years ago? Do you know if there was a point in time yesterday?
What does a "point" in time look like? This sounds like the propositional reification of an unsaturated predicate. I can tell you if there was a point in time when the sun was shining. Temporal point are rather like spatial locations. You can tell if there is something or other at this or that place or if there is (was, or will be) something occurring at this or that time. But mentioning a time and asking if there is a point in time at that time seems strangely confused. It's like asking "is there a 'point in space' in the corner of this room?".
Didn't I say "at the moment of the big bang" a couple times?
A determinist wouldn't accept ?A ? ?B. But they must accept ?A ? ?B (or accept that both are impossible – but for the sake of argument we're accepting that one of them is determined to happen).
Only one is possible to them, however you want to formalize it. (I'm not of the opinion that there are no semantic ambiguities just because we've formalized something.)
ONLY one. Again, however that makes sense to you to formalize it. I'm not of the opinion that formalizations have no semantic ambiguities.
Not quite. You mentioned a moment shortly after the big bang. But then you are asking me if there was a "point in time" at that time. This is just like asking if there is a point in space in the corner of the room. But you've just mentioned such a point. How could there not be a specific temporal location "at the time" you just specified as a specific temporal location?
I didn't write "or say at the moment of the big bang"?
That's why I used ?A ? ?B, not ?A ? ?B.
Although, to be more proper, it's ?A ? ?B (exclusive or).
Yes, OK, you said that also. That's not very helpful. Should we now be talking about space-time point singularities in the context of general relativity and quantum cosmology? You haven't explained how your question about there being, or there not being, a "point in time" at some specified moment in time, whichever it is, makes any sense.
Right, so do you think that there was a time when the big bang occurred?
This question can't be answered meaningfully unless it is being interpreted within the conceptual framework of some fundamental physical theory. It's likely that in relation of such a framework, the question is formulated badly. The idea of a continuous linear ordering of moments in time, or of an initial moment, may break down.
Right, so you'd also say that you can't answer meaningfully whether there was a time/a "point" in time (in quotation marks for a reason) that you had lunch or whatever meal(s) you might have eaten yesterday?
That's correct. Because moments in time when specific sorts of events are truly said to have occurred are coarse-grained in a way that must be consistent with the typical duration of those events. For this reason, I happen to think that the idea of 'the present' as an unextended temporal location that separates the past from the future is unintelligible. For any meaningful use of the concept of the present, it has some sort of temporal 'thickness'.
Would you say that there was a yesterday, and that it was before today, but after last week?
For sure. But that is just to say that it is meaningful to say that things occurred yesterday, and that they thereby occurred earlier than today and later than last week.
Why would that be meaningful but it's not meaningful to say that things occurred 15 (or 18 or whatever age you accept) billion years ago?
(At this point, by the way, I'm starting to think that you're either basically insane or just an educated moron. Just thought I should let you know that.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
What's the difference between saying "it was logically possible" and "it was 10 billion years ago"? If you want to say that the former requires there to have been a formal system of logic at the time then to be consistent shouldn't you also say that the latter requires there to have been a calendar at the time?
In my view time is objective. Logic is not.
But I quite agree that it's perfectly meaningful to say that things occurred billions of years in the past (I am just agnostic regarding the exact moment of the big-bang). But it is one thing to say that there were things happening over some specified time frame in the distant past, and it is another thing to say that there was a "point in time" at some specified moment in the past. It's the latter that I can't make sense of.
In fact, I had been insisting that it is meaningful to say that there are distant past events that possibly occurred, as a matter of logical possibility, while *you* were denying it on the ground that there were no human being back then and hence that there was "no logic".
Again, "point" was in quotation marks for a reason. "Some specified time frame" is the same thing (per what I had in mind).
Right, so do you think it's meaningful to say that the first stars were forming at "some specified time frame" in the past?
Yes. That's meaningful. But episodes of star formation are events. They are not points in time, and neither are they "specified time frames" existing on their own some time shortly after the big-bang.
So during those events--the first star formation, say, was there logic?
There was no logic, no music and no literature. But this has no bearing at all on the question, for instance, whether or not it is logically possible that there were roughly as many spiral galaxies as there were elliptical gallaxies. That's indeed logically possible, arguably. It is not, however, logically possible that there were more binary star systems than there were stars. In those statements, "there were" is past tense, but "it is" is intemporal. It is not pegged to a specific time but rather to our own interpretation of logical possibility.
Right. So during those events, was it logically possible for life to evolve?
Why is your statement of logical possibility tensed? It makes sense to tense the proposition that the modal operator is operating on since this specifies the time frame of the events you are talking about. But why tense the modal operator also? If you mean to peg the interpretation of the concept of logical possibility to the understanding of whatever people might have been alive at that time (if any), then your question would be more conspicuously phrased something like:
"During those events, was it logically possible for life to evolve from the standpoint of the people who were living at the time, if any?"
The answer would be 'no' since there weren't any living people. But this is not what we mean when we say, for instance, that it is logically possible that, at that time, conditions weren't such as to prevent the future evolution of life. (And if conditions were such as to prevent the evolution of life, anyway, then the impossibility would likely be nomological rather then logical, or so it seems to me.)
Because I'm asking you a question re during the first star formation.
You had no problem answering that during the first star formation, there was no logic.
Why are you having a problem answering whether during the first star formation, there was logical possibility?
If there's no logic, is there logical possibility?
If there is no logic then there is no logical possibility. But it is irrelevant to our claims of logical possibility regarding the past state of the world whether of not there "was logic" in the past. Our claims of logical possibility are our own. They are pegged to our interpretation.
Likewise, our claims about the logical possibility about distant places in space aren't pegged to "the logic" at those places.
If we ponder over whether it is logically possible that there are non-rational Martians on Mars and that the tallest Martian is taller than the shortest Martian, then it doesn't make sense to say: it's not logically possible on mars, because martians don't use logic. The reason why it's not logically possible is our logic, not anyone else's.
Great. So an example of there being a metaphysical possibility that's not a logical possibility is that during the first star formation, it was a metaphysical possibility that life would evolve, but it wasn't a logical possibility.
No. The contemplated scenario about the eventuality of life evolving from those initial conditions is both a nomological possibility and a logical possibility. The fact that there was nobody using logic doesn't make the scenario logically impossible from our perspective. Likewise for the scenario about there being an unknown uninhabited planet permanently hidden on the other side of the Sun. There being such a planet over there doesn't fail to be a logical possibility just because, according to you "there is no logic over there".
When I acknowledge that if there is no logic then there is no logical possibility, I of course meant, not logic anywhere at anytime. But it's not true that there is no logic. There still is our logic, and it's the only logic that counts for the evaluation of our claims of logical possibility.
I'm not talking about our perspective.
I'm talking about during the first star formation. It was a metaphysical possibility that life would evolve. It wasn't a logical possibility. So that's an example of there being a metaphysical possibility and that's not a logical possibility. It might not be an example that you care about, that's at all interesting to you, etc. Nevertheless, it is an example.
The task wasn't to give a "context-independent" example, or an example that only involves us. If a context-independent example had been the task, I'd say that there is no such thing. If an example that only involves us had been the task, I'd say that it's a loaded question. And that would also have nothing to do with the comment I'd made earlier about logical possibility being a subset of metaphysical possibility.
Free will libertarians usually believe a combination of (a) and (b). They think agents can, in some situations, choose between different options. If faced with the option to divorce someone, a person could divorce or not divorce. Both options are actually open to them; it does not just appear from their perspective that they have this power. They think (c) is important, but is more of necessary condition that is needed to make (a) and (b). Also, (a) and (b) are required for moral responsibility.
Determinist reject (a) and (b). They think that our ability to choose is an illusion and that there is only one actual option that results. The decision we reach when we decide whether to divorce or not is the result of prior causes that will dictate the outcome. Determinists, obviously, believe there is a sense in which (c) is true- there is a difference between a person caused by drugs that behaves out of character and a person who is not under the influence of drugs that behaves in character- but find it irrelevant to moral responsibility.
Compatibilists focus on (c). They think that the libertarian position is incorrect in that they think moral repsonisibility does not depend on (a) and (b) because, on a more critical reflection, phrases like "freely choose" and "possibility" do not mean what the libertarian does in terms of moral responsibility. They think the truth of determinism is irrelevant to moral responsibility and what we should use the term "free will" is compatible with determinism beibg true.
No but you are talking from our perspective. When we make claims of logical possibility regarding contemplated scenarios unfolding here or elsewhere, now or in the past or in the future, we are envisioning those logical possibilities from our own perspective.
You are again conflating two different claims. First, there is the claim that at the time of the first star formations there wasn't yet a practice of logical evaluation of consistency of propositions, validity of inferences, etc. (just as there was no musical or scientific practice, say). And then there is the claim that it was not a logical possibility that something occurred at that time. The first claim doesn't entail the second because logical possibilities don't have temporal boundaries anymore than they have spatial boundaries. If it's logically possible that there are more than two rocks on Earth, then it's also possible that there are more than two rocks on the surface of Mars regardless of the fact that there is "no logic on Mars" in the sense of there not being such a socially instituted practice over there.
So, the implied interpretative context, in all claims of logical possibility, is our own practice of logical evaluation of propositions and inferences. There doesn't exist this context-free 'view from nowhere' perspective relative to which a determinate scenario is nomologically possible but is neither logically possible nor logically impossible.
But do you understand that I don't agree with this? I'm an antirealist on logic. I don't believe that logic is something objective. Logic is ONLY a language that individual persons use. It does not exist beyond that, which means that logical possibility does not exist beyond that.
I'm not saying that we have a language of logic that's about objective stuff that's more or less "the same thing." I'm saying that ALL that logic is is our language. That definitely has a temporal and spatial location. (And if you remember, I noted a while back that I do not buy that there are ANY real abstracts. That includes logic/logical objects/etc. and mathematics/mathematical objects, etc.) In my view there is nothing that does not have a temporal and spatial location.
If there is no logic, there is no logical possibility, but there is logic: our logic. And the truth of modal logical claims is not temporally limited anymore than it is spatially bounded.
Imagine that a team of paleontologists comes up with the following discovery about the past: At some point during the Cretaceous, over a period stretching more than one million years, the average population of triceratops was exceeding the average population of pterosaurs, which themselves were more populous than the velociraptors, which themselves were more populous than the pterosaurs.
They thus submit their putative discovery to a scientific journal and one reviewer sends an e-mail to the main author of the study pointing out that their main result has the form of a conjunction of propositions making up an inconsistent triad. That's just not logically possible. The main author replies that it may very well be that this would be logically impossible now, but none of the three reported disjuncts are nomologically impossible, and it is irrelevant that their logical conjunction isn't logically possible now since it happened over 100 million years in the past, at a time when there was no logic.
Upon receiving this reply, the reviewer scratches her head and ponders over what to respond to Professor Station.
Again, I do not agree with this. Do you understand that I do not agree with it?
And re your example, that my view is something unusual isn't of any consequence. I'm explaining it to you now. You need to be able to understand something other than the status quo, something other than a consensus view, etc.
Of course, this is precisely why I present arguments as to why this claim that you are disagreeing with is reasonable and why your disagreeing with it leads to absurd results. If you are not agreeing with the idea that the truth of logical propositions isn't temporally bounded, then you must be agreeing with the defense provided by the author of the paleontological study. You must also be agreeing with the claim that scenarios that are logically impossible on Earth, those very same scenarios, are not logically impossible on Mars. If fact, they are not even logically impossible on the coffee table between us (assuming we would have had a conversation over coffee) since there is no logic literally 'on' the coffee table.
Right, logical anything, including possibility and impossibility, is always to someone, and not only that, but it's also going to be only relevant to the particular logic that person is using at that time. Logical possibility and impossibility do not obtain outside of that. Not on a coffee table, or to amoeba in the ocean, or 3 billion years ago, etc.
This is no different than saying that "Joe's usage of the word 'plook'" doesn't occur when we limit our domain to the coffee table, or to amoeba or 5 billion years ago, etc.
You rather have an objectivist view of logic. I do not.
So, this means that on your view, Professor Station was correct and the logical criticism of the conclusion of the study by the reviewer was misguided. The editor of the journal should publish the study without any revision since the result hasn't been shown to be logically invalid. It was not logically impossible that there were more triceratops than pterosaurs, more pterosaurs than velociraptors, and also, more velociraptors than pterosaurs. Our contemporary logic just doesn't extend to the distant past.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
It would be that it's not logically possible to the reviewer, per the system of logic that they're employing.
Which would have to be to the author, per whatever system of logic they're employing (which could be "the same" system of logic the reviewer was employing)
The reviewer should ask why whether they weren't logically impossible or possible at the time matters to the author in the context of the article. Did the article have something to do with whether there was logic 100 million years ago?
In our case, you asked for an example of a metaphysical possibility that's not a logical possibility, so I gave you an example. I think you rather just didn't care for the fact that I was able to give you an example.
He was correct that the statements wouldn't have been either logically possible or impossible 100 million years ago. (They also wouldn't be true or false, they wouldn't have meaning, they wouldn't refer to anything, etc. 100 million years ago, by the way.)
"The criticism was misguided" is a value judgment that doesn't follow from anything. You have no idea what I feel makes criticism of something in various contexts misguided or not. In this case, I would say that the criticism isn't misguided.
Similarly, this is a normative claim that doesn't follow from anything either one of us said. Whether anyone should publish anything is going to be based on their subjective criteria.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
100 million years ago, indeed it was not logically impossible, and it was not logically possible either. It wasn't logically anything.
There are relevant historical social, political, and moral contexts for all of these strange descriptions of human existence. They don't spin out of the blue. All that is necessary is to have each person make choices with uncertain outcomes, but for those in positions of power, throughout history, this often does not fit the playbook. Hence the concoction if determinism and compatibilism.
Well, this is pretty much what I have been asking you in several recent posts. I have been consistent in my insistence that claims about the logical possibility of scenarios or propositions depicting the past have absolutely nothing to do with whether there was logic in the past.
The metaphysical possibility that you offered was about the past state of our universe at the time when the first stars formed. It was about the "metaphysical" possibility that this state could give rise to the evolution of life. This is also a logical possibility since the possibility of live evolving from that initial state "(has nothing) to do with whether there was logic (billions of) years ago" (as you now seem to be acknowledging). The fact that there was no logic back then is no more relevant to the evaluation of the logical possibility of the claim, regarding the evolution of life, than it is relevant to the relative populations of different species of dinosaurs.
Yes, the illusion of free will is often used to explain the experience humanity by both Buddhism (some branches that is) and science. Once we go down this path, anything and everything can be an illusion and there is nothing left to say other than welcome to the world of magical illusions.
And this is precisely what is happening in life. We have habits and skills and senses. We continually observe and make judgements of possible modes of action and then, depending upon our skills, we make a choice in a particular direction. We then observe results, learn, and continue the cycle. The human experience is about exploring, creating, and learning and this is the mode by which we do it.
At the time in question, it's only a metaphysical possibility.
This is because logic only exists once there are people. That's not the case with the world in general.
This is relevant to there being an example of a metaphysical possibility that's not also a logical possibility. I'm not saying that it's relevant to anything else.
When you say that "something" is a logical possibility at time t, this can be interpreted in a specific way that is perfectly intelligible but that is clearly not how you mean it. This "something" must have the form of a predicate such that it may be true at some time and not at other times. For instance, some specific apple's being ripe would be such a predicate. This could be written R(...), where the argument place is a time variable. Then, saying that the apple's being ripe is a logical possibility at time t means that R(t) is logically possible.
But what you mean is something different. You rather mean that the saturated expression R(t), (or rather the proposition that is expresses), not the unsaturated predicate R(...), itself may be logically possible or logically impossible depending on whether or not there happens to be human beings (or other sorts of logic users) in the temporal and/or spatial vicinity of the apple. I think this is nonsensical, and it is absolutely not required by the thesis that logic is human dependent, in a pragmatic or Kantian sense. The relevant sense of human dependence does't require that the objects thought about be in the spatial or temporal vicinity of the human beings evaluating the logical possibilities of propositions about them since our cognitive reach isn't limited to the present or to the surface of the Earth, say.
But I am not going to belabor the point. We will have to agree to disagree. This excursus was rather off topic anyway.
I'm just repeating myself over and over basically here.
Again, that P is logically possible is only the case to some S at some specific time, because of what logic is--namely, a way of thinking about the world. That doesn't imply that S can't think about the world when he does so that he thinks that P(t). But that doesn't imply that at t P(t) is true. It's not. It's only true to S, at the time that S thinks it.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What it is to be logically possible or logically impossible is for some individual to think about things a particular way. There's nothing else to it.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I don't know or remember exactly what the "pragmatic" or "Kantian sense" of logic being dependent on humans would be, but I can almost guarantee that it's not the same as my view.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Right, so if that's the "pragmatic" or "Kantian sense" it definitely is NOT my view. It's a fact that logic depends on individual humans thinking as they do. Thus there are specific spatio-temporal locations.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Which ignores that under my view, logic is ONLY a way of thinking about the world. It's not what we're thinking about, in the sense that we might be thinking about a particular rock, say, because there's no external-to-minds correlate.
This is indeed exactly how I understood your position.
But you are claiming something else. You are claiming that for something to be logically possible or logically impossible at time t there must not only be some individual who thinks about it, or be able to think about it (at some time or other), but, in addition to that, this individual must be thinking about it at time t.
This is strange, but, coming to think more about it, it doesn't appear to be inconsistent. I still prefer the view that operators of logical possibility, just like operators of alethic, metaphysical or nomological possibility (but unlike operators of temporal or epistemic possibility) are tenseless. The view that they have truth values only at the time when they are thought about strikes me as somewhat idealistic or solipsistic rather than pragmatic. It also introduces a strange disconnect between logic and natural laws, as if natural laws weren't also pragmatic abstractions. But, again, nothing much hinges on this. At least I have come to see that your view may be consistent. So, let us agree to disagree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGtkDzELAI
I understand the concepts much better now - much clearer. The next video on Compatibilism was also very helpful.
I just watched both videos and they are quite good. Of course, they're introductory and very condensed, so many more subtle distinctions are glossed over, and there are a few inaccuracies. (Some of the inaccurate statements are very widespread, though, even within the recently published literature.)
The doctrine of determinism is glossed as the idea that every event has a cause. But many philosophers will rightfully separate this idea (the principle of universal causation) from the different idea, more properly called determinism (or nomological determinism), that the state of the universe at one time, together with the laws of physics, jointly determine uniquely the state of the universe at any other times. Also, the Oedipus cases, as narrated in the video, seems to illustrate the idea of fatalism, or of the possibility of foreknowledge. Fatalism doesn't necessarily imply determinism, and neither does fatalism imply determinism. And finally, many philosophers have argued that the possibility of the foreknowledge of an agent's future actions (divine omniscient foreknowledge, for instance) doesn't imply fatalism or determinism either.
Another simplification was the equation between libertarianism and the belief in the possibility of agent causation. Many contemporary philosopher now endorse varieties of 'agent causation' and also are compatibilists (and determinists). And there are also proponents of agent causation who take agent causation to be incompatible with universal determinism but who nevertheless accept the idea that every event has a cause. They reject the idea that agents have the "contra-causal" power to initiate new causal chains of physical events -- as explained in the first video -- (though actions may be construed as initiations of causal chains of other sorts, which supervene on the physical but aren't identical with physical events).
Also, the discussion of 'Frankfurt cases' and of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) makes it sound like compatibilists all believe this principle to be incompatible with determinism, and hence believe free will not to require it. But quite a few contemporary philosophers, dubbed 'new dispositionalists' by their critics, endorse both compatibilism and PAP. They have, in other words, an account of what it means to say that an agent could have done otherwise than what she actually did, and their account is specifically designed so as to make possession of this ability (and therefore also PAP) consistent with determinism.
There'd be more to say about what appears to me to be a misconception pertaining to the way agent-control relates to responsibility and free will in Patricia Churchland's account. But her views are very widespread and they are accurately reported in the video.
I'm glad we agree on this. Of course there are the simplifications and errors that you pointed out, however for my purposes it served me quite well.
The initial question was why does determinism rule out free will. From what I understand from the videos, determinism holds the view that we live in a clockwork universe where events follow a set course. The idea of free will is that we are not machines, and we are 'something else' agents or whatever, not reducible to mechanical or biological machines. This other thing, the mind or the soul or whatever it may be cannot be defined in physical terms, it is assumed, so is not part of the deterministic process.
The video also emphasizes the fact the we feel we have free will, which plays an important part in this debate. I am a little puzzled by the fear that a belief in determinism will lead people to stop taking responsibility for their actions.
It's important to not see the debate as being between (1) materialism or physicalism and (2) an ontology that posits nonphysical things. One can be both a physicalist and a free will advocate, as I am. How? Simply by not buying the view that physical things are wholly deterministic, not buying the view that physical things operate in that "clockwork" way through and through. On this view, we are machines, so to speak, but machines are not completely deterministic.
Is free will compatible with random causation, e.g. A could cause either B or C to happen, or with spontaneity, e.g. B (or C) happened without a cause?
I'd say it's compatible with both, although the latter is a different idea than folks usually talk about.
Keep in mind that "random causation" need not be B or C happening with a 50/50 chance.
So prior physical events randomly causing me to behave in this way counts as free will but prior physical events determinately causing me to behave in this way doesn't?
Yes. That's a difference between freedom and determinism. Free will is ontological freedom in conjunction with will phenomena.
Hmm. I thought randomness involved equiprobability. Could you explain?
Nozick would disagree:
[quote=Philosophical Explanations, 1981]The task is to formulate a conception of human action that leaves agents valuable; but what is the problem? First, that determinism seems incompatible with such a conception; if our actions stem from causes before our birth, then we are not the originators of our acts and so are less valuable. (We shall look later at what assumptions about value underlie this reasoning.) There is an incompatibility or at least a tension between free will and determinism, raising the question: given that our actions are causally determined, how is free will possible?
Some would deny what this question accepts as given, and save free will by denying determinism of (some) actions. Yet if an uncaused action is a random happening, then this no more comports with human value than does determinism. Random acts and caused acts alike seem to leave us not as the valuable originators of action but as an arena, a place where things happen, whether through earlier causes or spontaneously.
Clearly, if our actions were random, like the time of radioactive decay of uranium 238 emitting an alpha particle, their being thus undetermined would be insufficient to ground human value or provide a basis for responsibility and punishment. Even the denier of determinism therefore needs to produce a positive account of free action. On his view, a free action is an undetermined one with something more. The problem is to produce a coherent account of that something more. Once that account is formulated, we might find it does all the work, and that it is compatible with determinism and sufficient for our value purposes; in that case, the something more would become the whole of the account of free will.
How is free will possible? Given the tension between causal determination and randomness on the one hand, and valuable agent-hood on the other, how is valuable agenthood possible?[/quote]
If you use the term to denote things that are equiprobable, then it would be a false dichotomy to say that events are either determined/deterministic or random. Events could be non-randomly probabilistic, too. That's why I put "random causation" in quotation marks by the way.
From A as an antecedent state, it can be the case that:
(1) B has a 100% probability of immediately following and C has a 0% probability - this would be determinism
(2) B has a 50% probability of immediate following and C also has a 50% probability - this would be random on a narrow usage of that term
(3) B has somewhere between a 0.00000...1% probability and a 99.999999...% probability, as does C, though where we're excluding a 50% probability - this would be non-(narrow-usage)-randomly/non-deterministically probabilistic.
Value is subjective, of course. Different people value different things, and they can't be wrong (or right) about what they value.
I see. Thanks for explaining.
Yes, the problem for libertarian free will that Nozick raises is this passage is the luck objection. I had mentioned this objection as well as the closely related 'intelligibility problem' and the issue of 'agent control' in this post.
It is somewhat unusual to cast this problem as a threat to the value of human life in the way Nozick does. Terrapin Station's dismissal of it on the ground that values are subjective isn't really to the point.
Also, allowing agents to somehow gain indeterministic control over their actions through there existing a bias in the probabilities of the different courses of action that they can possibly follow doesn't seem to ensure that they have the ability to do otherwise that underscores personal responsibility. For, in that case, while the agent who *might* have achieved an unintended result (when she actually intended to achieve the most probable result) doesn't thereby possess an ability to do so. It's just something that could happen, just as the ability to hit bullseye may fail to be realized when a shooter misses. But if she had missed in circumstances where she was aiming at the center of the target, she wouldn't thereby have freely exercised an ability to miss.
One way out of the problem of luck for the libertarian is to posit that the indeterministic branching occurs immediately before the time of the mental "volition", or the formation of the intention. But such accounts then run into the intelligibility problem, and the problem of agent control.
Precisely what would be taking responsibility for anything in a deterministic world? The inanimate quanta? In other words, how does the concept of responsibility arise? If we play the deterministic game, we play it to the hillt. Nothing means anything anymore and every concept magically arises out of quanta.
Not at all. The universe is filled with habits or repetitive memory that is constantly being refashioned by choices. I may get up around 8 o'clock every day, but not precisely. My mind decides (or an alarm clock that my mind sets) on a slightly different time or maybe very much different time (all within a probabilistic range) which changes the habits.
The thing about determinism is that without a scintilla of evidence of any sort that such a thing exists, there are humans who prefer this description of their life. I find this the most interesting of all. It would be an interesting discussion as to why people choose (for they are surely choosing) this view of their life.
You don't have to accept that any stance on free will versus determinism has any particular implication re moral responsibility.
Of course, one big reason for this is that there are no facts re moral responsibiilty.
The relevance comes from the Kantian 'ought implies can' formula according to which you can't hold responsible someone for having done something that she could not possibly not have done (i.e. didn't have the power to refrain from doing, or didn't have an opportunity to so refrain). But it is true that this requirement can be satisfied by both (some) compatibilist or incompatibilist accounts of free will. Some philosophers (e.g. Alfred Mele or John Martin Fischer) are semi-compatibilists; they hold moral responsibility to be compatible with determinism although it isn't precluded by the lack of abilities to do otherwise. They would thus deny the validity of the 'ought implies can' formula. (So called 'Frankfurt cases', popularized by Harry Frankfurt, constitute alleged counter-examples to the formula.)
Myself, I think the mere self-conscious ability to reflect on one's own rational responsibility for the authorship of one's own past, present and foreseen actions, choices and intentions is the source of the 'ought implies can' formula (and the PAP principle); and the application of this formula to specifically moral considerations just is a dramatic but special application of this rather profound metaphysical fact about rational agency. (I also hold morality to be an integral part of rationality rather than its being extraneous as a mere source of extra-rational conative attitudes, but that is a separate matter).
It's possible that you are an agency incompatibilist, like Helen Steward. You would thus hold the core issue regarding the problem of free will and determinism to be an issue for animal agency in general. But even agency incompatibilists usually recognize that free will is best construed as a special form of agency that only rational creatures enjoy and that makes then responsible for their actions in a way animals who can't help but behave in accordance with their own natures (however non-deterministically) aren't.
One can be a physicalist and a free will advocate? OK. Not subscribing to the view that physical things operate as "clockwork". Well you may not subscribe to that view, but isn't' science based totally on that view? Quantum mechanics may be the exception, is this your "way out"?
What is the theory behind machines that are not totally deterministic? Is the decay of an radioactive substance random?
"Free will is ontological freedom in conjunction with will phenomena."
I am not sure I understand this concept.
Indeed. These are importance questions. I sense however, a great deal of intellectual nervousness about discussing the topic of determinism without any reference to moral responsibility. The 20th century has its share of intellectual disasters, I would imagine or "Frankensteins Monsters" of thought, where a particular school of thought led to wars and worse. For example Darwin's book was entitled "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." It could be argued that this idea fostered imperialism.
I don't see why each of the theories of morality is incompatible with determinism, except the maybe (4) and (5)
http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/MoralTheories.html
I find this line of reasoning somewhat puzzling. I sometimes use the device of thought experiment in the form of 'if there were an universe where.." to sufficiently remove me from any uncomfortable conclusions relating to the world we live in, and to make it easier to conceptualize.
If there were an universe which was inhabited by completely deterministic beings, either biologically or mechanically, ie robots, would they not have a word for responsibility? Could such a society survive without the same sort of communal ethics or groupthink morality that some earthly societies had? Responsibility can be seen as one assuming oneself to be the first cause of something. Why cannot this be assumed?
Exactly, precisely what is a "deterministic being"?
I view humans as intelligence. This intelligence makes choices. It is responsible for its choices despite the issue that outcomes are always unknown until they manifest. But there is an intelligence making choices (this is more or less the Bergson model).
Now, compare this to the deterministic model. There is no choice, it is an illusion. There is no responsibility, it is an illusion. There is not even a being, since that must also be an illusion. (Let us put aside for the moment the Miracle that out of nowhere created all these illusions, a Miracle that puts all of Genesis to shame).
So all we have is a universe of entangled quanta spontaneously, by some magic, manifesting all of these illusions (I guess quanta is some sort of god). Exactly what (not who) is responsible for anything? The Big Bang?
Science is all about approximations that are practical for all purposes (an idea proposed by John Bell). It is not exact. Never was. Never will bless. Everything, it's quanta and to be absolutely precise in any prediction one must be able To precisely predict the quanta. Physics says this is impossible. This science must live with imprecise measurements that are still usable, which is why Newton's equations are still used even though they yield imprecise results. The results are good enough.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not a scintilla of a scintilla piece of evidence that supports determinism. It is a religion but the adherents of this idea are so enchanted by it, they don't care that there is zero evidence. They might as well swap determinism forces for God. The two are equivalent.
OK, say I agree to this:
Quoting Rich
I see what you mean. It is not out of the question for robots to assign responsibilities to themselves. However, assuming the situation where I exist as a being, and acknowledge I have responsibilities as a free agent, as a soul or something that cannot be determined in material terms alone, then it will be difficult to say that clockwork robots can have the same properties. There are some unstated assumptions involved I think. But no matter, I get the model.
Are these the possible chains of causation we are discussing? Just to clarify.
a) (Beginning?) Unknowable quantum event > Unknowable quantum event > (End?)
b) (Beginning?) First Cause > Resultant Causes > Resultant Causes > Resultant Causes > End
Note: all events are not knowable.
c) God as first cause > > Resultant Causes > Resultant Causes > Resultant Causes > End
All events, causes known by God 'in advance' and in retrospect therefore God knows in advance everything that will happen, and this has to be limited to one set of events, which in turn means it is deterministic.(Theistic Determinism?)
Now the question what happens after? Those who believe in all powerful forces, whether God or the Big Bang (again the two are absolutely equivalent) are forced into a position of predetermination or predestination, with some "illusion of choice" thrown in by the all powerful force for some unknown reason. One had to buy into this piece of trickery to buy into determinism or compatibilism. The cause and effect chain had been entirely laid out by an immutable non-evolving force.
With the non-deterministic view, everything is real. Intelligence is real. It was there at the beginning (the Daoist view), we are really making choices, and we are really learning and creating. This is the actual experience of every day life.
So why even bother with determinism or compatibilism? The answer is that those who adhere to these ideas start off with the idea that there must be all powerful forces (God or the Laws of nature) so it is necessary to come up with a philosophy that fits into their desired goal. One can just accept things as they are (an evolving intelligence that makes choices) and eliminate the need to resort to all of these miracles and illusions that are required by the "all powerful force" philosophies all of which have relevant historical, social and political contexts. The cart was put in front of the horse for a reason.
This is a peculiar consideration, really, because if we don't have free will then whether or not I hold you responsible/punish you is also determined and not something I freely choose to do.
It's true that if determinism is true, and agents have no alternative possibilities (abilities) for doing otherwise than what they actually do (or judge), then Kant's formula appears to lead to a contradiction (or rather, to an imperative that can't be consistently obeyed in conjunction with the knowledge that determinism is true) when applied to the act of holding people responsible. So, there are three solutions to this. (1) Deny Kant's formula (and thus also PAP). (2) Deny determinism. And (3) provide a sensible conception of rational abilities (and thus of "can") such that PAP is consistent with determinism. (Kant seems to have endorsed (2) in the Critique of Practical Reason, saying that freedom is a postulate of practical reason; although the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason might be read as a proposal for (3) accomplished through distinguishing the empirical character of causality from the intelligible character of causality.)
On my view there's nothing particularly interesting about moral responsibility with respect to the free will issue, because there are no facts about moral responsibility. I find the free will issue interesting simply because of the ontological question--whether freedom is even possible, and then it's interesting with respect to just how will phenomena would be connected to ontological freedom.
I am not sure if there is a distinction between the future being 'laid out' and unknowable to us human beings, and a future that is not already pre-determined. Is it an academic (or is this what is meant by ontological) difference?
I am also puzzled by the statement that 'free will is an illusion' - if it is, it is an illusion which can never be found to be an illusion or not, and something we will never know. Also our world would not look any different. It is different from a magician's illusion where we can say that the magician makes it look like
he is levitating, for example, but we find that in reality he is being supported by an invisible support.
I have lately come to believe that there is some relationship between the Western and Eastern religions, for example Christianity and Taoism in that the Christian doctrine teaches of a more personal, 'human - like ' deity although I would think Christian theologians would be the first to admit that God's actual nature transcends all understanding and imagination, perhaps like the concept of Dao?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Daoism
It seems to me that even if one is an eliminativist, anti-realist or error-theorist regarding personal responsibility for one's own actions, it still figures as an inherent part, not just of our self-conception as rational agents, but also, quite prominently, in the phenomenology of practical deliberation, conscious choice and voluntary action. We feel like there is a difference between the actions that we performed because we voluntarily chose to do them, and the events happening to us (and to our bodies) which we aren't responsible, on a personal level, for having brought them about (e.g. so called involuntary 'actions' such as sneezing, say). One issue for the libertarian is to explain how this phenomenal distinction between deliberate choices or intentional actions, on the one hand, and things that merely happen to us, on the other hand, is to be explained such that intentional actions aren't merely occurring non-deterministically but rather constitute exercises of the agent's own abilities to chose to do them and thereafter remain in control of them. Such an account still has to contend with the problems of control, luck and intelligibility regardless of one's metaphysical stance regarding specifically moral responsibility, or so it seems to me.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z
Thanks for that again! You always find interesting stuff. A discussion involving Helen Beebee, Simon Blackburn and Galen Strawson ought to be interesting. The three of them are very smart and articulate even though Strawson's hard deterministic view seems rather deeply misguided to me.
Beebee wrote an engaging introduction to the topic: Free Will: An Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan (2013). The very short conclusion of her book might be worth quoting in full:
"If you’ve managed to get this far, you now really know quite a lot about the contemporary debate about free will. More importantly, I hope you are now armed with the resources to decide – provisionally, of course! – what you think. Is free will compatible with determinism, and, if not, which kind of incompatibilist view is right? More importantly – or so I think – is it plausible to think that we actual human beings routinely act freely? And, if not, what consequences does that have for our responses to, and relationships with, other people, and for our conception of ourselves? My own (again, provisional) general view is, I think, clear enough; but, of course, you most certainly should not take my word for anything. One of the great joys of philosophy is that you don’t have to take anybody’s word for anything . Of course, that also poses a major challenge: When so much is up for dispute, it’s hard to know where to start. Overall, however, I think it’s more of a blessing than a curse. I hope you agree." -- Helen Beebee
Daoism does embrace creative evolution (the evolving intelligence that permeates the universe). In this c respect, it is similar to the philosophy of Heraclitus (the evolving Lagos), and most recently the Creative Evolution of Henri Bergson.
The Daoists were simply observers, and did not start out with preconceived objectives, e.g., create a metaphysics that makes room for super-forces such as God or the Laws of Nature which govern and determine everything. Their observations were quite straightforward without the gymnastics of most Western philosophers, i.e.:
1) The universe is permeated with intelligence (the Dao)
2) The universe is characterized by Yin/Yang opposites (positives and negatives) that are waves (quantum waves)
3) Opposites (+, -) create energetic motion (Qi) which creates everything else.
The above is the One (Dao/Intelligence) that creates Waves (Yin/Yang) that create Energy Qi) which describes the nature of the universe. It it's very simple, very real, and pretty much explains everything. The universal intelligence (including humans) is an creating, learning, evolving force that learns with memory and creates with intelligence. That's it.
The reason Western philosophy gets so messy and far-fetched is that historical forces insisted on metaphysical philosophers that either had to include God (or else you get burned at the stake) or had to include all powerful and all determining Laws of Nature (science has its own axe to grind). Ideas like "determined free will", "the illusion of free choice", or "selfish genes" are the result of the torturous problem of trying to get a square peg in a round hole.
I don't see how that's not projection on your part. I feel as responsible for my sneezing, say, as I do for choosing to respond to you again in this thread.
Maybe if you would put a little more thought in your replies, and a little less anger, it wouldn't feel like you were sneezing. But if you would rather elect not to sneeze in my direction anymore, I have no objection to that either.
I hadn't anticipated that you would object to my observation that people hold themselves (and each other) responsible for their voluntary actions in a way that they don't for their involuntary behaviors. You suggest that I am unjustifiably projecting my own personal sentiments since you yourself feel responsible for your own sneezes. It may make sense for you to say this if you are conflating responsibility for intended actions with strict liabilities for their unintended consequences. Strict liabilities are a thing, for sure, but they don't normally figure in the phenomenology of action (let alone in the phenomenology of involuntary behaviors) until after their unintended consequences (if any) have occurred.
And do you care if your observation is wrong?
I would care if you would supply an argument rather than just a bold claim that seems to rest on a conflation. If you won't care to explain in what sense you are holding yourself responsible for your own sneezes, then it is difficult for me to evaluate the philosophical import of this alleged counterexample to a prima facie quite uncontroversial observation.
You made the claim that people do not feel responsible, on a personal level, for events such as sneezing.
I said that that's not the case for everyone. I said that I feel responsible, on a personal level, for events such as sneezing.
That doesn't require an argument. It's simply a fact that I feel responsible for sneezing when I sneeze, and many other people I know would say the same thing.
So then you wanted to change it to whether responsibility for voluntary actions is the same as responsibility for involuntary events. Obviously it's not in a very trivial way: namely that voluntary actions are not the same thing as involuntary events. Of course, this has nothing to do with the claim you'd initially made, which was simply that people do not feel responsible, on a personal level, for events such as sneezing.
If you'd like to modify your claim, maybe I'd agree with it.
There you go again, by the way, with simply reporting norms--and unfortuantely demonstrating that you seem not to be able to think very well outside of them. Philosophy shouldn't be simply learning what other people typically say and parroting it. I'd rather you didn't even bother with what other people say and learn to think for yourself instead. That would be more valuable.
No. I didn't "want to change" my initial claim with another claim. You have not been paying attention. From the very start my point was to contrast the phenomenology of actions with the phenomenology of involuntary behaviors or of unintended bodily motions: things that merely happen to us. Here is what I had said again:
"We feel like there is a difference between the actions that we performed because we voluntarily chose to do them, and the events happening to us (and to our bodies) which we aren't responsible, on a personal level, for having brought them about (e.g. so called involuntary 'actions' such as sneezing, say)."
Also, I didn't ask you to justify your feeling that you are responsible for your sneezes. I asked you in what sense are you feeling responsible for them. That would help me to assess if the phenomenon of sneezing constitutes a counterexample for the general thesis that I meant to illustrate, or if, rather, they just aren't a good example and I ought rather to pick another one. It is difficult to imagine that the former rather than the latter might be the case unless you really mean to suggest that people feel responsible for all their consciously occurring bodily movements and reflexes regardless of their involuntariness.
I wouldn't say there are different senses of responsibility that I'm using in this regard.
What different sorts of senses of responsibility are you using?
I already provided the example of strict liabilities, a legal concept that can rather straightforwardly be extended to cases of ordinary life, e.g. when we accidentally bump into someone and incur a felt obligation to apologize. Likewise if we would sneeze during a quiet moment at a public recital. Another sense attaches to the voluntary production of intended results when we act intentionally. I would have guessed that it's not quite in that sense that you mean that you feel responsible for sneezing.
I wouldn't say that those are using the idea of responsibility differently, though. They apply different legal upshots to responsibility based on whether something was voluntary or not, but it doesn't seem to me that they're employing different senses of responsibility.
Whether you are conceiving of them as different ways to apply of the very same concept, or different senses of 'responsibility', is rather beyond the point. We were discussing the phenomenology of action. There is no special phenomenology that attaches to the unintended production of an effect that you are responsible for due to a context of strict liability. You may not even be aware that this effect is being (or will be) produced until long after the fact.
No it isn't. There are either different senses of responsibility being used, or it's the same sense and there are simply different penalties. You claimed that there are different senses of responsibility.
...and a different phenomenology, obviously. But the point is moot if you aren't conceiving of your own alleged sentiment of responsibility when you are sneezing as something akin as a strict liability. Are you? If not, are you also feeling responsible for your arm rising if someone else suddenly grabs it and raises it? If not, what's the difference? Is endogenous production of bodily movements sufficient, in your view, for your feeling responsible for them?
First, let me clarify if you're talking about legal liabilities per se.
I suggested that the concept could straightforwardly be extended to non-legal contexts and provided the examples of accidentally bumping into someone or sneezing in the concert hall.
Which could just as well be meant legally. I'm just clarifying what you're asking about.
What is a strict versus non-strict liability in a non-legal sense?
If was not familiar with the philosophy community, however I was really happy to listen in on this discussion. To answer deep philosophical questions on a radio discussion, and to give instant replies is not an easy task I would think. The discussion covered many aspects of the debate, seems like they talked about everything.
For some reason, the spoken word is much easier to understand that the written word, for me at least.
Here is another video which is quite thought provoking to say the least "you don't determine your thoughts'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fecQUZ-ehKQ
So the question is, is this predetermined (according to Daoism?)
The criterion for 'strictness' of liability is simple enough and just the same in the legal context as it is for my suggested extension to ordinary contexts. In both contexts, for cases of strict liability, Mens rea and good or ill will are irrelevant since the outcome (or involuntary bodily movement) was not consciously intended. It wasn't even a result of recklessness and it doesn't reflect on one's rational abilities or moral character and in any way. It's just like sneezing. It has nothing to do with the will.
Time unfolds (real psychological time, not scientific time) as a manifestation of all that is happening including the choices being made. There is no concrete future. Nothing is predetermined.
Okay, and are you claiming that distinction just as a personal idiosyncrasy, or as a statistical commonality with respect to usage, or are you saying that it's a fact independent of usage somehow?
No. I don't think my recognition of the quite trivial distinction between our attitudes towards involuntary bodily movements or unintended consequences of actions, on the one hand, and towards voluntary actions that achieve intended results, on the other hand, is a personal idiosyncrasy. It's rather more of a truism that this distinction is relevant to ascription of responsibility, including self-ascription as part of the phenomenology of action.
How many more questions will I need to answer before you will answer the simple questions I asked you several times and that you keep ducking? What's so special about sneezing -- as distinguished from other similarly involuntary actions -- that makes you feel responsible for doing it? Or do you likewise feel responsible for anything that causes your body to move regardless of your own volition?
In order for me to answer the question you asked, I need to understand just what you're asking. I was trying to answer this: "But the point is moot if you aren't conceiving of your own alleged sentiment of responsibility when you are sneezing as something akin as a strict liability. Are you?"
It's still not clear to me just what strict versus non-strict, non-legal liability is supposed to be . . . I didn't even begin to get to what "conceiving of your own alleged sentiment" is supposed to amount to.. You're one of those posters where the more you type, the less clear it is to me what you're attempting to say.
Re you claiming a conceptual distinction to be a truism, that just seems completely absurd to me.
I didn't say there was anything special about sneezing. I just used that example because it's the one you had brought up.
Of course you did. I then brought up the point about strict liabilities because that was the most charitable way I could think of for interpreting your otherwise bizarre claim that you are feeling responsible for sneezing. You took that putative raw phenomenological fact about your own experience to be some sort of a refutation of the post where I had mentioned sneezing as a trivial example. But if you can't wrap your mind around the idea of there being a difference in point of personal responsibility between intended or unintended consequences of actions (or purely reflexive bodily motions), then I can't help you escape from the corner you painted yourself into. You can stay there if you want.
Based on what?
You wan't me to justify my agreeing with you that I myself had brought it up? You are just playing silly games.
What sort of language is that sentence written in? "Justify my agreeing with you that I myself had brought it up?" What??? Try to keep your sentences simpler until you master communicating in simple English. Walk before you run.
I said that I didn't say there was anything special about sneezing.
You disagreed and claimed that I did say there was something special about sneezing.
I'm asking you what you're basing your claim on that I said there was something special about sneezing. And the answer is?
I explained already, several times, but you keep ignoring the point. Either there is something special, in your view, and then I'm simply asking you what it is such that you feel responsible for sneezing but not for other involuntary bodily movements. Or there isn't anything special and then it's even more puzzling why you'd feel responsible for involuntary bodily movements in general.
Again, I didn't say anything like that, and I'm clarifying that I'm not saying that there's anything special about sneezing versus other involuntary bodily movements. That doesn't imply that I'm changing what I said about sneezing. I'm clarifying that I'm not saying anything special about sneezing.
I used that as an example because you had used it as an example.
If you had used another sort of involuntary bodily movement as an example, I would have said the same thing about that instead.
So, first, let's see if we can agree on something. Did I say that there's something special about sneezing versus other involuntary body movements?
How could I possibly know? I've *asked* you repeatedly if there is, in your view, something special about it. Did you not notice the question marks? That's the only way to assess whether this putative phenomenological fact about your experience of sneezing constitutes, or does not constitute, a relevant counterexample to my general claim regarding involuntary bodily movements in general. But you've always feigned not to understand the question.
Seriously? If some part of your body moves, whatever the cause, you always feel responsible for it?
Yes. It's my body, after all. it's not someone else's.
That's a non sequitur if ever there was one. Maybe there would be a charitable way to interpret this in the strict liability sense of responsibility, but we've been there already and it's just not plausible that, even restricted to cases where the body is involved, every involuntary motion is some sort of a strict liability for the owner of the body. I also had asked you if, on your view, the cause of the movement being endogenous was a requirement (as opposed to someone else grabbing your arm and lifting it up, say) but you had declined to clarify, as usual.
You don't seem to be getting, or you don't agree with yet you're not presenting any arguments about it, that there are no facts re whether something is a (strict) liability or not.
That doesn't help me make sense of your claim that you are feeling responsible for your involuntary bodily motions, whatever their causes might be, just because it's your own body. The concept of strict liabilities was a suggestion meant to help *you* pinpoint the source of your own intuition regarding sneezes. If it doesn't help, then help yourself. I can't do all your thinking for you.
Do I feel responsible for a sneeze? If it is from a cold, maybe I could have done something to prevent it. From an allergy? Maybe I shouldn't have gone into the area filled ragweed? From sniffing pepper? Definitely shouldn't have done that. From causes unknown? Maybe, I can figure out what is causing the sneezing? This is all qualitatively different from a willful, pre-premeditated movement to push someone down there stairs this the feeling of responsibility will be different and along a broad spectrum. Certainly each person exhibits and feels a different level of responsibility for action of theirs and of others.
However, in the normal course of events there is a general feeling that people, to some extent, are responsible for willful actions (in some cases non-action as in the case of negligence). Such is the case that in general there is a consensus on the population and scientific data that supports the notion that we are making choices in our lives. For example, when the WHO reports that more than 80% of chronic illnesses are due to lifestyle choices, they mean precisely that.
Yes, that would be a perfectly reasonable explanation why you could be held (or hold yourself, and indeed feel) responsible for sneezing on some occasions. In that case, your responsibility derives from earlier voluntary acts or decisions (or blamable omissions) that had the foreseeable consequence that you would later get sick. Your sneezing then is a manifestation of that. It's not merely because your own body is involved in the involuntary occurrence that you feel responsible for it (as Terrapin Station contends). It's rather because of the relevant involvement of your earlier decisions, as you correctly point out, that you may now incur a responsibility for your presently involuntary sneezes.
Yes, indeed, and in the context of criminal law some of those degrees of responsibility are codified as levels of mens rea. Anthony Kenny wrote a delightful little book -- Freewill and Responsibility, Routledge, 1978 (recently reissued) -- in which he draws lessons from carefully scrutinized cases and legal judgments, and the various criteria that attach to specific levels of mens rea, to clarify the connections between, indeed, free will and responsibility.
That's for sure, but observations and studies always are performed on a restricted range of cases and against an already existing background understanding. We look at things through a specific conceptual lens with a definite focus. Philosophical inquiry is distinctive in the way in which it attempts to critically assess this conceptual background and look beyond the predefined boundaries set by the natural and social sciences. Case law and legal theory often is forced to push against its own boundaries because it has no choice but to deal seriously with subjects (the defendants) who had been let loose in the field of social life and weren't restricted in the range of their behaviors like subjects in psychological studies typically are, for instance. This is one reason why case law is instructive from a philosophical point of view.
OK, so like a tree growing leaves and branches to where there was nothing before. Is the Dao then all knowing or timeless, or outside of time?
The link you mentioned has this interesting idea ""the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty". I am not sure how it impacts the free will / determinism argument.
It seems to me that one of the mistakes in the early interpretation of the infamous Libet experiment was a lack of attention to the way in which intentional actions always are intentional under some descriptions and not under other descriptions. It's not just that some consequences of what you do are unintended, but even some aspects that you are perfectly aware (and in full control) of, regarding what you do, aren't deliberately chosen either, and need not be, for your action to count as intentional.
For instance, if you walk in the cereal aisle at the supermarket intending to pick a box of corn flakes, and proceed to pick one, then the fact that you picked one specific box rather than the identical box right next to it isn't involuntary but it isn't intentional either. Your intention, effectively realized in your action, just was to pick *one* box of corn flakes and not necessarily that one in particular. Your responsibility (or freedom) in picking this specific box as opposed to another identical box nearby isn't at issue because there just isn't any reason to chose one over another.
So, similarly, in Libet's experiment, the subjects were tasked with pressing a button at some time chosen at random. Under this description the actions are perfectly intentional and under the full control and responsibility of the agents. They freely consented to abide by those instructions and to push a button at a randomly chosen time. They also were tasked with indicating the exact time when they "intended" (or is it "decided"?) to press the bottom using a visual indicator to help in assessing this precise instant. But there is no such moment of decision. The decision was just to press the button whenever they felt like it. So, of course, there was an "readiness-potential" registered in the motor cortex some time before the button was pressed because there is a necessary time delay before initiation of action and bodily movement due to the finite speed of neural impulses.
However, the requirement for the participants to attend to the "time of decision" didn't really make sense since the only relevant time that they are in control of is the time when their controlled bodily movements occur in the world, and this is the time of the button press. There isn't a specific "moment of decision" prior to that anymore than there is a "moment of decision" to pick this or that specific cereal box when you just pick one at random. The only choice that the agent freely makes is to pick one or another (just anyone) cereal box. And likewise, in the Libet case, one just presses the button whenever one feels like it, for no particular reason. Just because her brain gets "ready", in a sense, before she feels sure that "now" is the time when she has "chosen" to do it doesn't entail that it's really her brain that has made the decision for her. The good functioning of her brain merely has enabled her to do what she had freely consented to do, and this was just to press the button at any time.
When one holds an agent responsible for her actions it's because for her to have chosen to act in this way (or recklessly let something happen) reflects well of badly on her character. The argument in favor of [s]indeterminism[/s](sic) (I meant to say 'incompatibilism') tends to focus on the fact that if an agent's character is determined by earlier events that aren't under her control, then there wasn't really any possibility for her to have done anything else. She is being moved around by her own character and never ultimately responsible for it. (This is a simplification of the standard argument for incompatibilism).
The standard argument for compatibilism, on the other hand, is that it doesn't really make sense to portray the character of an agent as something that is somehow external to her rather than its being a constitutive part of her. When she gives expression to her own character though acting, as we say, in character, then she simply is in control, and thereby free. She's doing what she wished to do, given that she is thus inclined. This is also, of course, a gross simplification of the standard argument(s) for compatibilism.
I think there are elements of truth in both of those arguments. The difficulty, of course, is to resolve the tensions between them and not just pick one and dismiss the other one without due consideration.
The problem with that approach is that it seems to completely ignore the ontological issues re causality (in the physics sense).
What you need help understanding is that there are no facts re whether something is a (strict) liability or not.
A life form has Will that allows it to choose an action in a particular direction. Results are always unpredictable though probabilistic in nature (this parallels the essence of quantum physics). Willful movement is inherent in life forces.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This implies a choice is made, and as such the so-called deterministic chain is broken. As soon as any non-deterministic choice is made anywhere in the universe, the deterministic paradigm is crushed as is compatibilism.
I just presented a standard argument for incompatibilism (and also a standard argument for compatibilism). It's not a fully developed account of incompatibilist free will, for sure. Once some libertarian philosopher has convincingly argued that free will can't be consistent with determinism (if she has) then, of course, it is incumbent on her to explain how the practical abilities possessed by rational agents can be explained in a way that takes advantage of the leeway afforded by the indeterministic "gaps" in the underlying chains of physical causation. And that's precisely what libertarian philosophers, like Robert Kane, or Christian List (in a very different way), attempt to do. For sure, this raises ontological issues regarding causation, and not only at the level of physical processes. This is certainly not being ignored by libertarian philosophers.
Let me grant that there is no fact of the matter. Very well then. My suggestion was unhelpful. The concept of strict liabilities seems to be of no use for making sense of your strange claim that you are feeling 'responsible' -- in the exact same sense of the word -- for all your bodily motions regardless of their causes. Well, I just can't help you then. Sorry about that.
What does making sense of it amount to for you in a case like this? Surely not having the same opinon, right? How would any arbitrary opinion about either a moral issue (if you're parsing it this way) or a conceptual stipulation be a matter of making sense to you, at least in lieu of it being in respect to something else the person says?
I did not make it a specifically moral issue. "Responsible'' has a non-moral agent-causal (or substance-causal) attribution sense: The lightning strike was responsible for the forest fire; the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is responsible for global warming, etc. In any case, passing off your alleged phenomenological datum that you are feeling responsible for your sneezes as the expression of an arbitrary moral opinion or seemingly pointless conceptual stipulation is even more bizarre.
So how about actually answering the question re what making sense amounts to for you in a case like this?
Well, it doesn't make sense to me. Saying stuff that makes sense rather than stuff that doesn't is generally considered a desideratum in philosophical discussion. Talk about phenomenology isn't an exception to this. And there is rather more to conceptual elucidation than arbitrary stipulation.
Right. We know that. How about we analyze what it would amount to for it to make sense to you? Or is that a problem because you haven't read anything that you can regurgitate on that? You don't mean that you wouldn't say the same thing, right?
It really sounds to me like whenever the tea pot gets warm prime numbers above 17 suddenly get significantly heavier (except for 883, of course!). How about we analyze what it would amount to for this sentence to make sense to you? Of course, I'm not going ever to provide you with the slightest hint what it could possibly mean for me to say that. Why would I need to? It's all just a matter of arbitrary conceptual stipulation, after all. Or is that a problem because you are unaccountably prejudiced against tea drinkers?
Not surprised that you can't answer.
You're right. For some reason I didn't think of that part. Guess it takes philosophy to unravel that bit. Although it does put some parts of philosophy in question, mainly the brain identity stuff. Patricia Churchland wrote an essay on that but that probably needs a separate thread.
The legal system may be in a frenzy.
This is so true. To me it proves, though, that there is no such thing as a will independent of influences already started in the past.
The crunch of the proof comes from "predictability". That is a human concept, designed by, and for, humans. What we can't predict for sure, we can predict with a probability. If the probability of an event is greater than zero but less then one, then there are alternative events.
But in nature, as well as in human lives,there are no true alternatives. If there were, there would be more than one reality, running parallel with itself, in whcih each running parallel reality would represent the events that are probable.
However, that is not the case, as there is only one reality.
The human mind can't possibly compute in all events the probability that is 1 (or 100 percent likely) of enay event. And yet, that is the probability of anything happening, as everything happens only in one version, there are no alternatives according to probability.
Therefore probability and likelyhood are human concepts, to help make humans a predicion, which has multiple outcomes; this only affects human predictions of the future, not natural events as they unfold in the future.
Truth value in nature does not occur, as falshood of a predicted event is impossible. If all factors are calculated in, then each prediction has a 100 percent probability, so a probability that has a larger than zero but less then one hundred percent chance of happening, and then NOT happening, does not occur. If it occurred, then we'd have alternative realities, which we don't. Therefore no truth value can be false, therefore all truth values are true, therefore it is nonsensical to spealk of truth value when everythign is guaranteed to be true.
Not precisely. Because the legal system is one factor that affects future events.
The law says "killers will be punished if caught". This is a factor in causing future events. Many people would kill if this case was not part of social rule.
Of course one could say, "yes, but people still kill. So the effect is not a hundred percent predictive; therefore there is a cause that alters the behaviour, which cause is the free will."
The counter-argument to that would be, "yes, there are other causes, and they are NOT borne by free will; they are borne by circumstances, by events in the past." If a man beats his wife and child, and though provides for them, the woman may consider whethere the infuence of the law overrides the influence of needing to stop the suffering. Depending on the INTENSITY of the two, and depending on a myriad of other factors, the woman will come to a decision, but the decision is based on the effects that influence it; there is no component inlfuence, that is without a cause.
The proof for that is that an influence that is not effecting the outcome is irrelavant.
I want to murder my husband. There is a supernova in a galaxy 5 billion lightyears away, and there is a solution to the general terms of the second degree one unknown equation.
Chances are they are not affecting my decision, because they are irrelevant. So their effect is negligible.
If someone successfully argues, however, that there may be connections between the solution of the equation and my murdering my husband, then it is an effect, and that will satisfy the claim that only those effects will determine my action to murder my husband, that are not irrelevant.