Coercion, free will, compatibilism
I think compatibilism is nonsense. This topic is not about its merits. Rather, I want to look a little at something compatibilists often claim -- that the important notion of free will is that we are not being coerced by anyone, not that we are metaphysically non-determined. I think this is plainly false, but whatever, let's look at the weaker version of free will.
Are we ever not coerced by anyone? A compatibilist will have to say, I suppose, that if coerced into a bad situation, say of being a slave, anything one does in that position within the confines of slavery is not really a free choice, in the same way that handing over our wallet is not a free choice with a gun pointed at us, because we are being coerced on pain of being killed, beaten, or whatever it might be.
Unfortunately, life itself is such a coercive situation, since it is impossible to consent to being born, and all 'decisions' made while alive are within the context of that coercive establishment. So even if we give the compatibilist everything he wants, he is still wrong about free will insofar as he further makes the positive claim that people actually can be, or are, free.
Are we ever not coerced by anyone? A compatibilist will have to say, I suppose, that if coerced into a bad situation, say of being a slave, anything one does in that position within the confines of slavery is not really a free choice, in the same way that handing over our wallet is not a free choice with a gun pointed at us, because we are being coerced on pain of being killed, beaten, or whatever it might be.
Unfortunately, life itself is such a coercive situation, since it is impossible to consent to being born, and all 'decisions' made while alive are within the context of that coercive establishment. So even if we give the compatibilist everything he wants, he is still wrong about free will insofar as he further makes the positive claim that people actually can be, or are, free.
Comments (196)
Also, I would contend that if you dislike society so much, nobody is stopping you from becoming a hermit or killing yourself. This shows that in the romantic existential sense, we are indeed forced into a situation that we did not ask for, but in the day-to-day basis I would think that to find one's life to be enslavement itself would either warrant a trip to the psychologist or a quick death. Otherwise you're grabbing at straws and being disingenuous.
Nobody is stopping you from doing anything, but you best be prepared for the consequences of your actions. That's all compatibilism is. It's unfree will, with emphasis on the will.
A compatibilist holds that free will is compatible with determinism, the belief that everything is pre-determined. He's not disagreeing with the notion that every single event in his life (including being born) is beyond his control and subject to pre-existing causes. The compatibilist defines a free will (and there are alternate ways the theory is presented) as one that is acting on one's own motivations, wants, or desires as opposed to one that feels coerced. It points to the fatally obvious difference between eating a bowl of ice-cream because one enjoys ice-cream as opposed to eating a bowl of ice-cream in order to avoid being shot in the head.
That being said, it's not as if the compatibilist argument has no problems or that it is an ultimately acceptable solution to the free will question. I don't think, though, that the problem with it is that it doesn't accept the consequences of determinism. It tries to distinguish between different types of deterministic forces in distinguishing which it will designate as a free choice or a not free choice. It holds that whether a choice is determined or not has nothing to do with it being free because every choice is ultimately determined.
You do not have authority over decisions made under coercion or duress, and being born is coercive.
There is no question of 'degree' here; and in fact, the coercive institution of birth is a prerequisite to that of slavery.
Quoting darthbarracuda
There is nothing romantic about it. It is a very real thing, as are its effects (the suffering that ensues under coercion).
Quoting darthbarracuda
'Nobody is stopping you from keeping your wallet, but you best be prepared for the consequences of your actions' (getting shot by your mugger).
Yet the perosn who gives up his wallet is in no way freely doing so. Same for anything done in life.
The point is that all things in life are coerced, in that they take place within a coercive institution (birth). While the ice cream does not hold a gun to your head, it does hold a smaller consequence over you -- the pain of desiring, but not getting, ice cream. But it doesn't matter, because the desire for ice cream is itself a product of a coercive institution (birth).
And of course, in being alive you do have a gun held to your head at all times, in a very real sense: you must work perpetually to eat or die (and all the attendant suffering of starvation).
Quoting Hanover
What I am saying is that the compatibilist's weaker notion of freedom as being free from coercion or in accordance with one's own (metaphysically determined) desires is not even right, even if you grant him everything else.
Being brought into the world by means of coercion does not mean that you are a slave once born.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No doubt there is suffering. But there's also no doubt that I don't consider myself a slave because I have a will that can be satisfied at any time. I am not physically restrained. I am free to do what I want to do. And so this romanticized idea of everyone being captive in their bodies and unable to become free is rubbish.
There's a reason why the existentialists thought that freedom and happiness might be mutually exclusive. They surely didn't feel captive in the sense of being physically restrained. They felt captive by the responsibility of being completely free.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Such as? What consequences and actions are you thinking of here? Of course we are going to condemn those who murder other people or steal their wallets. The existence of a law of the land does not mean life is necessarily enslavement.
What kind of freedom do you want/were you expecting and continue to be disappointed by the lack therefore?
Again if you don't fancy this whole life thing, you don't have to continue.
Yeah. I got very upset at university when compatibilism came up. It was plainly just a (not very) special case of determinism and seemed like an abuse of language to me.
Anyway, one might be able to defend a notion of degrees of freedom. Total freedom is, arguably, only possible after death, as to exist is to be constrained and differentiated in some way, and perhaps non-existence is just total lack of constraint. So no existing person can be free. But one person can be more free than another. While no one is free from the need to eat, for example, some people are free from the need to eat nothing but millet every day. Consider also that relative to a particular decision, some people are free while others are not. Someone who doesn't give a shit about politics, for example, is therefore free with regard to what party to vote for, whereas the person who gives a shit is constrained to vote for the party that is conducive to his shit giving.
EDIT: I guess also that one could take the non-shit-giving to its logical conclusion. We don't give a shit about anything and act totally arbitrarily for as long as we lived, which wouldn't be that long, as it is highly unlikely that any food or drink would happen to go into our mouths by accident. I guess this is the closest approximation to free will we could have without ceasing to exist.
A slave lives only within coercively determined confines.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You are not free to do what you want to do. If you actually think that, it's possible you are suffering from a psychotic delusion.
I think that within the confines e.g. of being a slave, these degrees are trivial: you're still a slave. And they do not allow the compatibilist's weaker assertions to go through. That is, the coercion involved in being born is so complete, and what 'choices' you might be offered once it is finished so trivial, that it doesn't matter.
If you go over the other forum, you'll see a post I made a while back in the religion section that was about how if god existed, our lives would be a nightmare because there would be no escape from him. This is enslavement.
To say that you want to be able to fly, and you have a will to fly, and yet you don't have wings, and so therefore you're a slave is really just...meh. So what if you can't fly? The only thing restricting you is an impersonal biological factor, not an actual agent. To expect anything more is to just set yourself up for disappointment.
You've basically just re-defined what counts as a charitable interpretation of freedom of the will in order to make your argument work.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Ooo, tell me more how I am a delusional shill while not backing up any of your assertions. You can't just say that I'm not free to do what I want to do and expect me and everyone else to be content with your claim.
An actual agent placed you in the position by choosing to birth you.
Once again...if you find your life to just be filled to the brim with repression and slavery, nobody is stopping you from ending it. You have that freedom as well as many others.
If you were locked in a cage and tied up by rope, you would be denied your free will in the important sense seen by the compatibilist.
If you stand on the edge of a building and want to fly but can't because you don't have wings, you are not denied an unacceptable amount of your free will. It doesn't matter that our will is unsatisfied by our biological bodies, so long as we don't find this to be overwhelming. I wish I could fly, but alas, I cannot. Shucks. But I move on because it's really not that important. What's important are the times that my will, my ability to act, is so severely restricted that I cannot operate and live a good life.
NO. You are insane if you think that every parent knowingly and willingly wished pain and burdensome worries upon their child. Bullshit. Parents have children because they: 1.) want children, 2.) want a relationship with their children, 3.) want to see a part of them live on after they die, 4.) "re-live" aspects of their lives through their children, 5.) because they genuinely think they are doing a good thing by having a child, ... etc.
Everyone was once a child themselves and was placed into this world by their parents, who were also children themselves at one point. We can see this as somewhat tragic/ironic, but we can't say that parents are evil, wicked, mwahaha let me bring more children into the world to torture!!! Grow up.
Basically what this thread has turned into is an exhibit of how far you are willing to go to justify your negative value of life.
To have a child is, in the words of Rivka Weinberg, a risk imposition. Life is not inherently a gift. We have to continue to move, eat, shit, sleep, etc. just to stay alive. If you wanted more, too damn fucking bad. Either be more resilient and rebel like Camus advocated or get on with the logical conclusion of your apparent disgust with the way things are.
But they did. They knew full well that life entailed these things and wished life on me.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I never said they were evil or wicked. They did something terrible, but I don't think they, any more than anyone else, are responsible for their choices, since they likewise were coerced into living. Responsibility isn't a useful ethical notion; what is important is stopping the act.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I am getting on with the logical conclusion, which is that people should not give birth.
So it's now about you instead of every child? This thread is quite personal it seems.
Regardless, there are worse things your parents could have done to you than to merely give birth to you. From the looks of it, it seems like you basically hate life since you're willing to go to the extreme of saying your parents are culprits that are guilty of a heinous crime.
When you drive your car (assuming you have one that is), you usually don't spend the time worrying about all the consequences of driving your car. You could hit a child and paralyze them. So if this actually happens to a person on accident, are they responsible for paralysis or even the death of the child? No, we call it manslaughter. There was no motive. Similarly, I highly doubt that your parents "knew full well" the trials of life they were placing upon you. They were high on endorphins and other neurotransmitters, they were keen for some sex, they were interested in starting a family. I doubt they actually considered what they were actually doing might be a mistake. What they were doing was all too human.
Quoting The Great Whatever
So then why are you complaining about your parents "wishing" life upon you as if they did so in a highly reprehensible fashion of neglect?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Well, that's part of the logical conclusion.
No, it is typical in philosophical discourse to use pronouns like "I" and "you" to serve as examples for general cases to make general points.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, but all bad things a parent can do to a child are predicated on them giving birth to them.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Actually, I do worry about this: once I crashed into a tree on a sidewalk, and the car was out of my control, so had things gone differently, there is a very real chance I could have killed someone. I think automobiles are very dangerous and should not be treated lightly.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That depends: they could have been driving irresponsibly, and been doing so even knowing that this would increase their chances of killing someone. In the case of giving birth, we all know that being alive entails large amounts of suffering (it is not avoidable), yet people give birth anyway knowing full well how the world is.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Because giving birth to children is a terrible thing to do, and it would be better if people came to understand this so that they would stop doing it.
This is coming from the person who has repeatedly made it clear that he rejects the notion of a "traditional" philosophical method...
Quoting The Great Whatever
Of course, but have they happened to you? That's why birth is a risk imposition, you are risking someone else's life. And that's not just the things parents can do their children...
Quoting The Great Whatever
Agreed. I almost got into an accident the other day. A vehicle is a weapon.
Quoting The Great Whatever
What you fail to realize is that people have this weird idea that their lives are typically better than what you suppose they are. Strange, huh? Not everyone is acutely aware of their existential dilemma, and if they are, most seem to distract themselves. It's not like birth is the most rational action. Nobody in their right mind has a child if they know how much they will suffer and care about this fact.
So instead of characterizing parents as culprits, perhaps you ought to characterize them as being misled by their hormones and emotions.
Quoting The Great Whatever
What's done is done. If you don't like it, there are ways out. Get on with your life.
I have rejected no such thing, I believe in the traditional Socratic method, and that has nothing to do with these posts anyway.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Large amounts of suffering are guaranteed in every life, though for some people more than others.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Then you should probably retract the car analogy.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I am aware that people not thinking about or understanding how bad their actions are plays a role in why they commit them. This is why the abolition of ignorance is important.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So are all culprits, though.
Quoting darthbarracuda
There are actually no ways to get out; suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Offering apologetics for atrocities will not stop them -- you must face up to them.
Nor do I see how your apparent inability to get on with your life has any weight against compatibilism.
Quoting The Great Whatever
True, but these "large amounts" are usually spread apart. They generally pass even if they suck while going through them. It's a matter of how tough, how resilient you are. If you can't handle it, sorry, nobody said life was fair. That's why birth is so problematic, because you don't know if the child will be able to cope with the burdens of life.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Why should I?
Quoting The Great Whatever
And what an unfailingly noble pursuit this must be! Tell me truly, how many people have you talked to today about birth?
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, they are fellow sufferers who make mistakes. Being a culprit implies having intention.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Pretty sure if you die, and that reincarnation/afterlife is not a thing, you'll stop suffering.
Do you ever think that perhaps the reason why nobody seems to get our line of reasoning is that they have the necessary psychological walls? Advocate all you want, you're really not going to change anything.
I'm not upset at all. Come, stop trying to move the goalposts and avoid answering my questions.
Nor do I see how your apparent inability to get on with your life has any weight against compatibilism.
Quoting The Great Whatever
True, but these "large amounts" are usually spread apart. They generally pass even if they suck while going through them. It's a matter of how tough, how resilient you are. If you can't handle it, sorry, nobody said life was fair. That's why birth is so problematic, because you don't know if the child will be able to cope with the burdens of life.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Why should I?
Quoting The Great Whatever
And what an unfailingly noble pursuit this must be! Tell me truly, how many people have you talked to today about birth?
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, they are fellow sufferers who make mistakes. Being a culprit implies having intention.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Pretty sure if you die, and that reincarnation/afterlife is not a thing, you'll stop suffering.
Do you ever think that perhaps the reason why nobody seems to get our line of reasoning is that they have the necessary psychological walls? Advocate all you want, you're really not going to change anything.
Furthermore, you are not the big boss who gets to decide what is discussed and what is not. I think that this entire discussion stems from your extreme negative view on life. If you disagree then you are going to have to give good reasons for this, because otherwise your entire OP falls apart.
Now, if you don't want to respond, that's fine. I won't, in fact I can't, restrict your will to respond or not. But please don't make it seem like it's my fault that you're not willing to have a discussion.
Alright, so you have two options here: determinism where everything is coerced or libertarianism where there are uncaused causes. The former is consistent with our understanding of the world, and the latter is incoherent. It simply makes no sense for something to spontaneously occur, and it makes even less sense why we should think we are responsible fpr those decisions we make that are uncaused.
So, along come the soft determinists/compatibilists who try to allow for both free will and determinism, but they get hit with the objections from the hard determinists like you who insist that there's nothing special about internal causes versus external causes.
But, things hardly simplify when you bite the bullet and declare yourself a hard determinist who insists there is no free will. You sink into a world of nonsense under such a position. To say you are a hard determinist because the logic leads you to that is self delusion. The reason you think hard determinism is the truth is no different from why you think anything and that is because you are coerced into thinking it. All judgments rendered by you cannot be said to be the result of careful deliberation and consideration, but you must acknowledge that your statements are just barks and screeches with no particular meaning or purpose, but are just the things you are forced to do. That is to say, nothing makes sense under hard determinism and it's self contradictory to say that hard determinism is true based upon reason when the theory itself requires that you admit that your conclusions about hard determinism must be based upon random prior causes.
I tend toward the Kantian view that the existence of free will is a required assumption in order to understand the world. It's no difference from time and space in that regard, where the elimination of it leads to incoherence.
(Note: I am quoting this from the OP, but I read the whole thread before responding)
It is unclear to me why your ideas about coercion ought to trouble compatibilists. The main debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism concern, precisely, the idea of the compatibility of free will and determinism. It is true that some compatibilists will differentiate among acts that are causally determined (in a world governed by deterministic laws) those that are, at the moment of deliberating or choosing, coerced from those that aren't coerced. What you are referring to as the "weaker version of free will" thus is the compatibilist version that identified free actions with actions that aren't coerced (even though they are causally determined). You are objecting that this weaker version is empty or near empty since the situation in which we assess alternatives is severely restricted, on your view, by the circumstances of our birth.
What is unclear though is whether you mean (1) to be making an argument from ultimate responsibility, or (2) rather wish to insist that the "weak" compatibilist freedom falls short from some stronger version that would be the only one, on your view, worth having or worthy of being called freedom at all.
On the first construal, you would be making an argument on the lines of Galen Strawson's "Basic Argument" for hard incompatibilism according to which an act can only be free if, not only is it uncoerced at the moment when it is chosen, but also, all the antecedent causal circumstances of the choice (including the character and states of mind of the agent) would also fall (directly or indirectly) under the responsibilty of the agent.
On the second construal, you would seem to be arguing for a conception of freedom according to which an act is freely chosen not just if the agent is free and responsible to chose among the options open to her (that is, the options that only are directly constrained by her own choice) but also if her range of options is unconstrained by anything. On that view, maybe she can't fly because she has been born a human being rather than a bird and hence doesn't have the ability to fly. Or, she wish that she would be able to live a life free of any suffering and human life isn't like that, and hence she isn't free.
Those two arguments are importantly different. The first one centers on the notion of ultimate responsibility -- which a libertarian incompatibilist may wish to salvage -- while the second one advocates for a notion of freedom that seems extravagant even from the point of view of most libertarians.
I would also wish to note that both incompatibilist and compatibilist libertarians can construe coerced act as free inasmuch as the source of the coercition has the form of a threat or incentive rather than a hard physical constraint. Hence there is a categorical difference between being constrained to remain in jail because of the thick walls and the lock on the door, and being constrained to remain on pain of being shot. In the later case, the prisoner may freely chose to remain in her cell because she values life more than "freedom". But that doesn't entail that her choice among the two alternatives wasn't free. Circumstances outside of her control merely restricted her options to two unpleasant ones; whereas in the first case, she doesn't have any option to get out, though she may still have an open range of options regarding how she is going to spend time in her cell.
Neither determinism nor libertarianism makes more sense than the other. But the point here is not a metaphysical one, but baser: even in the weaker sense of 'free will' as lack of coercion, nothing we do is free (i.e. uncoerced).
Quoting Hanover
This does not follow. Whether an idea is right or not can be judged by its own internal coherence and explanatory merit. Whether it was coerced or determined or not makes no difference to the quality of an argument, nor does it make it 'meaningless.'
The point is that not even the weak version holds, so it does not matter what argument the compatibilist makes so long as the point is to defend some sort of freedom.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
No, it doesn't have to be unconstrained by anything, but the circumstances of birth determine our possibilities so completely that there is no real difference between the 'freedom' of acting once born and the 'freedom' (by analogy) of giving someone your wallet 'freely' when they point a gun at you. Systematically coercive circumstances remove the possibility of free action; birth is such a circumstance.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
That is not a free action, it is obviously coerced.
You did not disambiguate in between the two possible interpretations of your argument that I highlighted. You have an heterodox view of coercion according to which it threatens the possibility for action to be free. Is this so because acts are "coerced", in your view, that we aren't "ultimately responsible" for, as hard incompatibilists such as G. Strawson argue -- such that we never have more than one genuinely open "option" before us at any given time -- or because the unchosen antecedent circumstances of our lives merely narrow the range of our options?
This also glosses over another distinction that I was making. In what sense is it coerced? Obviously, it answers to the ordinary language use of the term, but your own philosophical use of the term deviates significantly from the ordinary use. This case is arguably extreme, but it is an extreme along a spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum can be found cases such as one having to chose between chocolate or strawberry ice cream. Suppose after some reflection and hesitation, I settle for chocolate. Was my choice "coerced" by my antecedent preferences and prejudices? Maybe on your view of coercion it was. But then this would deviate from ordinary use. And if you wish to appeal to ordinary use to characterize the agent's choice to remain in jail rather than being shot as being coerced, then that still leaves much room for freedom in ordinary life where most choices are uncoerced like that.
No doubt the first words out of your mouth after you emerged from your mother's vagina, all covered with blood and gore, was "How could you do this to me?"
How many decades have you been in this snit about your unfortunate birth and wretched existence?
The issue of "free will vs. determinism" seems to me pointless--not because either side is so obvious, but how can we, in a world which might be deterministic or which might allow for free will, know whether our thoughts are determined or free? If there is ubiquitous determinism, then everything we might do or think is a result of predetermined causes. Why would a deterministic universe include the concept of free will?
In the end, does free will matter? We do what we do, never knowing for sure how we were moved to act. Sure, gun pointed at your head, "Your money or your life", we can pause to decide. Is this determinism or free will? Damned if I know -- but you don't know either. The discussion is a waste of time.
There is nothing heterodox about holding that coercion limits freedom or makes it impossible In fact if you denied this I would ask if you were joking, or assume you didn't know the meaning of the words.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think that it is not a free action in a perfectly ordinary untheoretical way that any person understands, that has nothing to do with metaphysical determination: that is, it is clearly not free even if we grant the compatibilist (or the libertarian) everything they want about their metaphysical position. A coerced action isn't made freely, but forced.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
In the sense that the prisoner is constrained against their will. Quoting Pierre-Normand
It does not, once you make the move, as I am doing, to considering birth, which on the ordinary use coerces individuals in much the same way (perhaps even more drastically) as imprisonment.
Being familiar with the various drive and coercive practices that themselves govern the practice of giving birth, I know fairly well how parents could do this to their children. That does not justify it. It is not a random avoidable atrocity but a deeply ingrained system of cruelty.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You do not give up your money freely when someone points a gun to your head and demands it. To claim that one can 'never know' whether this is so is ludicrous.
It is still not remotely plausible to argue, on the basis of the ordinary usage of the word "coerced", for the idea that all our actions are coerced just because we haven't freely chosen to be born. You claim your view of coercion to be quite ordinary and uncontaminated by contentious metaphysical prejudice. But on the ordinary view, whether a practical choice, and the action that has issued from this choice, has been made freely or not -- and/or is or isn't coerced -- doesn't require that *everything* that led to the specific range of options that are open to the agent must have been in her control. Hence, on the ordinary view, whether or not the action performed by someone, seemingly under duress, is or isn't free, doesn't depend on the circumstances of that person's birth.
It is still unclear, since you've declined to argue for your point, and merely asserted that your view rests on the ordinary concept of coercion, whether your view depends on a requirement about ultimate responsibility or, rather, a requirement that genuine freedom must be freedom from any (involuntary) narrowing of the range of possibilities open to one. Maybe you have a third argument but you haven't stated it.
Your view of coerced action also seem to neglect an essential feature of the evaluation of action. You earlier dismissed the concept of responsibility, and this may symptomatic of a conceptual problem, it seems to me. The main reason why we don't hold someone who acted under duress accountable -- when we don't -- is because the circumstance of the duress marks the choice to disobey as unreasonable. It is always relative to some alternative, or range of alternatives, genuinely open to one, that we evaluate responsibility for actions. It is when someone acts irrationally, immorally (or illegally, etc.) in the face of reasonable alternatives that we condemn someone. We further require that the person who chose badly must have been aware of the existence of alternative (and better) options, or that she could be held accountable for her lack of awareness of them (e.g. in the case of negligence).
Hence, a compatibilist can argue that even though all actions are determined by antecedent "circumstances" (including the character and states of mind of the agent) her choice can be deemed free if it is rationally (or morally, etc.) appraisable in light of the range of opportunities that were open to her from the point of view of her practical deliberative circumstances, at the time when she was called to choose. The alternatives compared in the appraisal of the actions never are the actual action compared with the possibility for the agent not having been born. The fact that one was born without having had any say in the matter doesn't absolves one from the responsibility to choose among the alternatives that later become open to one.
Oh, that was at least 50% flippant -- that's why I included the Jack Benny bit -- "I'm thinking it over."
The serious point: we can't know whether a behavior is determined or freely chosen. No matter what I claimed, or you claimed, the claim would be open to challenge.
"Deterministic factors forced me to eat the whole quart of Hagen Dazs ice cream." "I freely chose to eat the whole quart of Hagen Dazs ice cream." I can't finally be certain myself, you can't be certain as an observer, whether this dessert debauchery was freely chosen or whether I was compelled (by learned behavior, by insatiable hunger, by an unpleasant desire to make sure nobody else got so much as a spoon full).
But just because we can be sure, doesn't exclude determinism, it doesn't exclude free will. What it excludes is certainty that we can tell the difference.
For purposes of "justice", we make the assumption that the person found guilty of a crime voluntarily, of their own free will, decided to pull the trigger and kill the victim. The defense may suggest that the crime was determined (couldn't be a free choice) by insanity. During the sentencing phase the defense will bring out all sorts of relevant factors showing that determinism was in play from infancy foreword. The prosecution will stick with free will.
We reward scientists who make important discoveries with large prizes, and praise them for all the ideas they invented in their freely operating minds. We don't respond to a wonderful discovery by sneering at them. "Well, of course you discovered a new planet. With your very big telescope and large staff, you were practically forced to discover something. Congratulations, but no cigar."
We make these assumptions, because they "make sense". But we don't know, and that cuts both ways: Neither determinists nor free will advocates can claim proof in the area of human behavior.
You are still using the nonsensical libertarian version free will here. The compatibilist rejects this notion of free will. For the compatibilist, free will is about being the actor in a deterministic chain, without which events would be different. It's not about getting a good or pain free outcome.
So, for example, in the case of the gun being pointed at us, we have the choice, as we are the actor, of whether we ignore the command (and risk being shot) or follow the orders of the gunman (whether that be to hand over our wallet or press a button to partake in an act of genocide). In many cases, if not all, acts of free will our performed under the influence of coercion. It is still, however, our choice. We are still the actor who defines whether one things happens rather than another. One could say that compatibilism is the realisation that free will is concurrent, rather than mutually exclusive, with coercion. Free will is not whether one can do whatever they want without consequence. It is that one acts one way or another in a world where there are consequences.
That's a misstep. We know the behaviour was determined (the causal chain leading up to that point) and we know it was freely defined (nothing prior to that behaviour defined its presence). To ask whether the act was determined or freely defined doesn't make sense. It was both. Whether it is thought a "choice" or not will really come down to if you are talking about an act someone consciously plans or subconscious response, and exactly how you are considering choice in that context.
You are arguing that we can't know whether an action is free as soon as the claim regarding its motive is open to challenge, of if we can't be certain what the motive is. What kind of epistemology is at play here? Cartesian epistemology demands that knowledge be certain. But the ordinary concept of knowledge doesn't demand it. All empirical knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is uncertain. It still can be considered knowledge when it issues from a faculty that normally enables one to gather, fallibly, knowledge about the world.
For sure, there are cases where we are uncertain, misguided or clueless (or repressive, or self-delusional) regarding what motivates certain human actions. In some cases, for purpose of ascription of responsibility, the motive may be fuzzy or even irrelevant, because nothing much of significance hangs on the choice that has been made. There just isn't any point to evaluating it rationally or morally. In other cases the choice is significant (i.e. it is rationally or morally appraisable) and it can also be as certain as anything ever is what motivated someone to indulge in ice cream eating in spite of a dietary restriction. This may be a case where that person can't disown (and wouldn't even be tempted to disown) responsibility merely on the ground that the causal chain that underlies her gluttony extends further in the past. It's just irrelevant that it so extends, and the point regarding determinism just is orthogonal to the point about epistemology.
I disagree that anyone (except maybe some philosophically inclined expert witnesses) assume that the accused acted freely rather than under the impetus of unconscious factors that absolve her from responsibility (and hence also undercut the ascription of free will, in the particular case under trial). The prosecution may be biased towards drawing this conclusion (on the basis of available evidence) while the defense may be biased towards drawing the contrary conclusion. But the regulative standards of the judicial process enjoins finding out whether the accused indeed acted freely, and culpably, or can be exculpated on ground of insanity (or rational incapacity). It's not two incompatible philosophical doctrines about free will that are put on trial, it is a human agent. It is an assumption made by both the prosecution and defense (and also, more importantly, by the judge or jury) that free will is possible but can be undercut in specific cases or circumstances by medical factors that fall outside of the scope of an agent's responsibility. In criminal cases, and many jurisdictions, certainty isn't required either, only evidence beyond reasonable doubt.
I'd take my description a bit further. Free will is not even at stake here. These legal categories are measuring specific coercive factors on an agent, not whether their act was freely defined. The question is not whether anyone had a choice or not, but rather the circumstances of the choice and how it relates to legal and moral culpability. What we are trying to work out is not whether someone was free to choose otherwise. It is whether they chose in a certain way, so that we know how to respond to them and the risk they might pose in the future.
This rather sounds to me like an attempt to redefine, or salvage, traditional legal categories in the framework of an utilitarian conception of justice that aims to accommodate the metaphysical doctrine of causal determinism. This move is equally available to the hard incompatibilist since they also are determinists -- and, indeed, Sam Harris sometimes argues similarly, though he also sometimes argues, like Galen Strawson, for the medicalization of the "justice" system. What distinguishes the compatibilist from the hard determinist, thought, is her pretension to salvage the idea of free will, not explain it away, or attempt to retain it as a flawed concept that it is useful for us to (pretend to) believe in. Saying that it is practically on point, because socially useful, to sentence criminals because, though their actions are entirely governed by their circumstances, sentencing them has a useful effect on their subsequent behavior, is a move that also is available to the compatibilist precisely because she marks out those circumstances where sentencing, or the threat of sentencing, is effective as those in which actions constitute act of free will in the compatibilist sense.
On edit: Let me note, also, that Anthony Kenny argues, (in Frewill and Responsibility, Routledge, 1978,) for an interpretation of the concept of mens rea in criminal law that is also quasi-utilitarian and rests on a compatibilist view of free will. His interpretation also highlights the deterrence function of sentencing, but emphasizes particularly the deterrence effect on the public at large rather than its effect on potential recidivists who already have been caught. Awareness of the potential threat of sentencing is thus viewed as a sort of scaffolding to the flawed practical deliberation of agents who haven't quite internalized moral principles well enough to be motivated not to wrong their fellows merely on ground of the fact that doing so wrongs them (or society).
Yes we can. A coerced act is not freely chosen.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
A free act cannot be performed under coercion.
In the sense of "free" that is at issue in most debates about free will, determinism and responsibility, coercion doesn't negate freedom. To say of an act that it was coerced just is to say that the agent likely wouldn't have been motivated to do it in the absence of the coercion, and that the coercitive circumstance exculpates the agent, that is, makes her action permissible and rational.
Rational and irrational actions both can be performed freely according to compatibilists and libertarians. It is precisely because there are (and only when there are) alternate possibilities for and agent to have acted irrationally, in the (external) circumstances where she actually acted rationally, and vice versa, that she is deemed responsible for her action, and that it is therefore qualified as free. One can be motivated to act irrationally, and do so. The main difference between the compatibilist and incompatibilist (i.e. libertarian) conceptions of freedom is that the former holds even free actions to be entirely determined by antecedent circumstances (including internal "circumstances" that pertain to the agents character and motivations), while the latter views the agent herself, rather than antecedent circumstances outside of the scope of her power of agency at the time of acting, as the source of her free action. Compatibilists tend to have a impersonal event-causative view of causality while libertarians are more prone to endorse an agent-causative view.
I believe we have free will and I believe that we can be subjected to coercion and be forced to act against what we wish to do. I believe that there are some impersonal (and no so impersonal) determinative factors that powerfully shape our behavior. This is the compatibilist position, as I understand it. I am not at all sure I can prove that I freely willed something, decided to perform an act without influence.
Will I buy Hunt Tomatoes or Del Monte Tomatoes? I might respond to one label more favorably than the other; I might have happy memories of one brand over the other; brand recognition might be better for one label than the other. Can I identify how any of these influences might have come into play? Perhaps; perhaps not. Suppose my metabolism, unbeknownst to me, requires more salt than the average person; based on this biologically determined feature, I might prefer the saltier tomato, without knowing what was driving the preference. If I was born colorblind (thanks to genetics), one label might not look much more appealing than the other one.
In fact, I prefer Del Monte. I choose their can over Hunt's, or some other brand's tomato. I make a freely willed choice, even if it is influenced, even if determinative factors are in play. Some people don't even like tomatoes. We were fed tomatoes a lot when I was growing up -- homed canned ones. Commercially canned tomatoes seemed special and exotic. I suppose that's why I prefer Del Monte -- it was the label on the cans that were available at the time.
I decided it would be good for my 70 year old brain to learn a language. I was influenced in this decision by reading articles in the New York Times (and elsewhere) on aging. What language should I learn? Had Spanish and I don't like the sound of the language. French or German, then? The part of the country I live in has lots of Germans and Scandinavians, and few French. I probably know more about some periods in Germany's history than France's. As far as the French and German people go, I have both positive and negative feelings about each, with maybe an edge of positive feelings for the Germans.
I decided to learn French. First, it fits into my long-term interest in the history of early English. English is a "Germanic language" but it isn't very German. The French donated far, far more words to English than the Germans did. Secondly, I thought French would be a bit easier to learn. Whether I learn it at all remains to be seen. I decided to buy Rosetta Stone. Nobody pointed a gun at my head and said "buy it or else". I was influenced by the fact that Rosetta Stone was 50% off at Barnes and Noble.
I don't think there were any coercive factors at play in this decision, either. Influences, yes; but not determinative or coercive ones.
It is probably a waste of time to try to convince TGW that life isn't continually coercing us to act, and that life isn't all suffering. I was trying to undercut his certainty that everything is pre-determined.
I just dozed off. I did not choose to fall asleep. A part of brain decided that a short-term shutdown would be a food idol fddd;;;;;;;;;;;d""""""""""""
Dozed off again. Not a choice. The choice would be to post this and go get a cup of tea, which is what I shall now do forthwith.
As I mention in the OP, I'm specifically responding to a compatibilist claim that does think that coercion negates freedom, and defines the weak notion of freedom that may nonetheless be metaphysically determined as that which is uncoerced.
Didn't we already go over that? You also say in the OP that "Unfortunately, life itself is such a coercive situation, since it is impossible to consent to being born, and all 'decisions' made while alive are within the context of that coercive establishment."
This seems to fallaciously slide from (1) the idea of being put against one's will in a situation in which one is restricted to chose among a range of options that is narrower that one might have wished to have been put into to (2) the quite different idea of being coerced to do something specific.
For instance, a prisoner is, in a sense, coerced into remaining in her jail. But then she might steal an apple from a fellow prisoner. Just because she might not have stolen the apple from her fellow prisoner if she had not been put in jail doesn't entail that she was coerced into stealing it. This gloss on the situation may or may not be reasonable depending on further assumptions. Was she malnourished (while the fellow prisoner was well fed) to a degree such that the stealing of the apple was reasonable? In that case, yes, her having been put in jail could be said to constitute circumstances that deprived her from the opportunity freely not to steal the apple, according the weak notion of freedom that you ascribe to the compatibilist.
But then, in slightly different circumstances, a different gloss on the situation would also agree with this compatibilist conception on freedom. This is the case where the prisoner had reasonable options, white still being constrained to staying in jail, other than to steal the apple. We imagine that she would still have preferred not to be jailed, and hence not to "have to" steal the apple, but she still isn't "coerced" to do it just on this ground alone. To pretend that she would thus be unfree (or coerced) not to steal the apple just because she would have done something else had she not been coerced to remain in jail (as she indeed was) is an unjustified inference, even when your weak conception of compatibilist freedom is the chosen measure of freedom.
This view of freedom that you ascribe to compatibilists can be contrasted with a specific libertarian construal of the principle of alternate possibilitities (PAP) according to which an act can only be free if there was a possibility, in the specific circumstances in which one acted, that one might have acted differently. That is, whenever one does A, one can only be said to have done so freely if one had the power, to refrain from doing it, or to do something else, in the exact same circumstances. Further, in this particular libertarian construal of the PAP, the circumstances at issue include the agent's character and states of mind as they were up to the moment of decision. Compatibilists are right, it seems to me, to reject this construal of freedom as too stringent. The PAP can nevertheless be salvaged by them through allowing that internal circumstances that make up the motivational state of the agent be allowed to vary in the alternative possibilities under consideration. So, on that view, one can be powerfully conditioned to chose to do A over B, proceed to do A, and still be free just because if one rether had (counterfactually) been conditioned to chose to do B over A, then one would have done B instead, in the same external circumstances.
I think this view of "powerful conditioning" is suspect and you are right to be skeptical of the possibility for one to rule out that one can know not to be under the influence of any such conditionings. You nevertheless accept the possibility of freedom in ordinary cases of (seemingly) free decision making. But this means that you are rejecting the strong libertarian construal of the PAP, as well you should. This rejection is consistent with a rather more moderate view of libertarian freedom -- which still contrasts with the compatibilist version sketched above -- and according to which conditioning circumstances that determine our preferences or desires aren't all freedom conferring (as the strong compatibilist would claim) or freedom negating (as the strong libertarian would claim) but are sources both of the makeup of our volitional character (which is partly constitutive of our free agency) and of specific cognitive dysfunction that can sometimes provide exculpation from some acts through diminishing our freedom.
Hence, although it may be difficult to assess whether someone acted freely on the basis of motives reasonably acted upon, or under the compulsion of desires that clouded her good judgment through no fault of her own, the crucial point is that this uncertainty doesn't concern the strength of the antecedent conditionings but rather their roles as either partly constitutive of practical rationality (and hence of freedom) or as providing impediments to its exercise. Further, in the case where "strong" conditionings are sources of impediment to the exercise of practical reason, it must still be decided whether, in the circumstances, the bad choices that resulted are or aren't excusable. This is highly context dependent. Only when their presence provides exculpation can we say that the action wasn't free.
Why? Is that meant as a philosophical thesis or a common sense truism? If the latter, then that would seem to depend on the nature of the jail. If you are hanging with all four limbs shackled to the wall of your cell then there isn't much you can do, let alone do it freely, indeed. In some other jails prisoners can work for money, socialize, and pursue an education. You would have to argue that even in those cases none of their actions are free before you are allowed to slide to the argument that human life is akin to a life sentence to jail, just because we don't chose to be born, and that, therefore, none or our actions are free.
Anything? Are you free to breathe? Are you free to think? Are you free to eat, blink, shit, burp, crack your neck, and sleep?
Lots of liberties are restricted in jail. That's why it's meant as a punishment, or better yet as a way of removing harmful people from society so that their free expression of radical freedom does not impede others' free expression.
So, in your view it is simply true that having been born is akin to having been jailed, and you are inferring from this allegedly true premise the conclusion that no human action is free. You should have said in the OP that you hold your premise to be beyond discussion and that you also are unwilling to address any challenge to the validity of your inference.
No; breathing is demanded by your physiological makeup. You literally breathe on pain of death.
Same with eating, blinking, shitting, and sleeping. All of these are clearly coercive as much as being robbed; the cost of not doing the is literally dying painfully.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Thinking is a little trickier, but generally when compatibilists talk about freedom they have in mind things more substantial and consequential than mere (disembodied?) thinking. Insofar as thinking implies action, you are obviously not free to think very much at all.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That's exactly what I just said. I didn't think claiming that jailed people aren't free would be so controversial.
Yes, it also seems true to me that jailing someone severely restricts the scope of her freedom of action but doesn't necessarily obliterate it, or absolve her from all responsibility for anything that she might do while jailed. (I also hold that responsibility entails freedom).
No no no, see, you are using the word coercive outside of its common usage, i.e. manipulating definitions to suit your argument.
A need does not have to be coercive if one does not mind having to satisfy it.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Compatibilists are also more concerned with physical restrainment, not with disappointment at the failure to realize wishful thinking.
Also, thinking does not imply action necessarily. I can think about stuff all I want without acting upon it.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Their freedom is restricted but not so much that it would be inhumane (at least it ought not to be). So of course they are not completely free, but that's not what you were claiming. You were claiming that by being in jail, you are without any freedoms whatsoever. That is clearly false.
If you are going to respond by saying that by holding our breath long enough, we will die, therefore we are "coerced" into breathing, then I would say that no, you are not "coerced" into living at all. You can glue tape over your nostrils and face and die of suffocation if you wish. You are free to do so.
You lopsided view of "discussion" seems to me just as extravagant as your view of "coercion". In this thread, you mainly reasserted your disputed claims while systematically ignoring my objections and requests for clarification.
What do you think 'coercive' means, exactly? I'm pretty sure what you just said is not what it means.
Quoting darthbarracuda
We're talking about jail, right? Prison, rather?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Of course you are; no one choose to be born. It's not even possible.
To force someone to do something that they do not want to do.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes, we are. Prisons are not concentration camps.
Quoting The Great Whatever
You are not coerced into continuing living. Again this is just devolving into your negative view on life. Insofar that you do not desire to continue to live, then the various institutions in society surrounding you as well as your own self-preservation mechanism are indeed nudging you along to continue your life. They aren't coercing you, though, nor are they prohibiting you from ending your life if you do so wish to.
It's not controversial at all. One one natural reading of the claim, it's a truism. On another, more contentious, reading of the claims, it is quite disputable. Your argument trades on a equivocation between those two readings, as I've already explained a few times. What is questionable is the claim that *any* action preformed by a person who is jailed is thereby also "coerced". Also questionable is the claim that being born is akin to being jailed in the relevant respect required for your argument to go through.
I've already acknowledged that people in prison may have the scope of their freedom severely restricted. This doesn't help you much in securing your wild extrapolation to the claim that being born is akin to being restricted to just the sorts of actions comparable to the fulfillment of passive bodily functions. You never defend the wild extrapolation beyond reasserting the very weak premise from which it doesn't follow.
Okay, that says nothing about whether you 'mind' doing it.
Maybe your problem is that you have a schizophrenic way of making claims: they are either philosophical or non-philosophical. But I don't see that as something that I have to answer for; rather you do.
If there is a reading that appears naturally to you on which such a claim is false, may I suggest that perhaps you can't read. (Or that the way you've been taught to read hasn't done you much good).
But...it does...if you don't mind doing something, than you either have no preference or you actually want to do it. If you do mind doing something, that means that some kind of incentive must be made to make your do it (i.e. coercion). Otherwise you wouldn't do it.
Forget about philosophy and philosophical theses, then. Let us stick to the ordinary senses of freedom at issue when we say (1) that jailed people are deprived of freedom and (2) that people coerced to act in some specific way aren't free to act differently. They are still two distinct uses of the concept of freedom. It's not quite the same thing (1) to have some of your basic freedoms curtailed (e.g. being coerced to remain in jail) and (2) to have all of your options removed, at any single time, except one unique course of action (e.g. being coerced to eat your broccoli). You are trading on this equivocation between two ordinary, albeit distinct, uses of "being free" in order to slide from the premise than jailed people "aren't free" to the conclusion that people who simply have been born "aren't free" in whatever they do.
Furthermore, it's kind of odd that you are complaining about being "coerced" into living, and yet take offense when someone points out that you actually aren't and that you have the ability to end it if you actually do think you are being coerced. If you actually did think that you were being coerced into living, you wouldn't take offense by me pointing out that you have other options.
Well, if they had all the options of that we enjoy outside of prison, then there really wouldn't be any point of prison now would there?
That would depend on the prison you have been forcefully put or born into. Have you been born in Alcatraz? Or in North Korea? Or in Norway? Or on Earth (while being free to move to any country, or to a desert island)? Don't you see some gradation in point of freedom? For your argument to run through you have to call them all prisons and deny any gradation. But what justification do you have for calling them all "prisons" without begging the question?
You are simply wrong in your description; people go apeshit at the idea of suicide, and there are systematic and painfu pressures in place to keep the coercive institution going once in place.
These are manipulating mechanisms but not inhibitory (coercive) mechanisms. They can manipulate you and make it harder to end your life if you do so please, but they do not prevent you from doing so (as evidence of the rising percentage of suicide rates).
Quoting The Great Whatever
Well, of course they go apeshit, because they're scared out of the minds of death. But it's not coercion.
I don't see an argument. There is just equivocation. If your premise is that any restriction in the scope of freedom, however tiny, is the same as the total annihilation of freedom akin to coercion to do one sigle thing, then your premise is question begging. It is just a rephrasing of your contentious conclusion.
In many cases, yes, they will physically prevent you from killing yourself if you try. Psychiatrists nd psychologists for example are entitled to have you interred against your will if you intimate that you are thinking of killing yourself, and suicide is also literally illegal in most places (with illegality always backed by force).
In addition the many unofficial social mechanisms that serve to shame, bully, threaten, etc. the suicidal are coercive in that they inflict large amounts of pain as a mechanism for preventing suicide or making it impracticable.
Finally, even if suicide were completely free, birth would still be coercive, because one cannot consent to it. The fact that it might be possible to undo does not make it any less forced (and much of the pain endured happens before it is possible to kill oneself).
Not all places, though. And it's sad that suicide is illegal. In many cases these preventative instincts will stop you from killing yourself. But they are not 100% failproof in the way a jailcell is. You can actually commit suicide quite easily these days if you just sit in the garage with the car on and some classical music playing.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Not always.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No shit, I've been saying this since day one.
Actually, many cars no longer work for suicide, and people generally want to find ways to stop people form killing themselves (making helium tanks non-lethal, etc.)
Quoting darthbarracuda
Suicide is almost always committed under great duress and in extreme pain.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Okay? Then why are you arguing with me?
You denied that there is any significant gradation in between the series of examples that I offered for your consideration: from being forcibly jailed in Alcatraz to being born on Earth. You implied that my suggestion that there might be a significant gradation that your are failing to acknowledge is merely a pointless verbal dispute -- a symptom of exposure to philosophy. This means that, in your view, it is indisputable that being put in jail is the same as being born on Earth. This is precisely the question begging premise that you are pushing.
In those cases these measures are not taken to prevent intentional death but rather accidental death; preventing intentional death is an addition.
And I'm sure if you really wanted to kill yourself, money would not be an issue for you if you wanted to buy a cheap car that could kill you.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Sure. But the act itself does not require extreme pain. You're grasping at straws here.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Because you're wrong in other areas.
I am simply pointing out that birth is such an institution, though people do not acknowledge this.
You are wrong about this. Some companies, for example, mix oxygen in with the gas in helium tanks specifically to prevent the tanks for being used for suicide.
That would be something worth acknowledging if all the choices that anyone makes in life are trivial and inconsequential. But this thesis more resemble a philosophically loaded nihilistic view of human existence than it does resemble a truism that one can simply "point out".
Exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time.
Those who think about birth seriously are in my experience (1) radical feminists, (2) racists (against race-mixing, etc.) and eugenicists, or (3) anti-natalists, including pessimists and fringe environmentalists, (4) people undergoing a pop-sci momentary scare about the earth being 'too populated,', (5) the Chinese government. Of these, only (1) and (2) question the legitimacy of the institution itself. The issue is not that this takes place in some special philosophical jargon (and if it did, it wouldn't matter), but rather that it is an issue accessible to ordinary opinion that does not receive much attention due to historical and biological pressures.
Do you understand that your position makes no sense? Some rando on the street has more of a say than the person themselves as to whether they live or die? In what sense then do people's lives actually belong to them, and in what sense is the institution of life not obviously coercive?
I never said I agreed with governmental enforcement of life. Straw man...
I would hesitate at your (seemingly) assumption that the only reason people continue to live is out of instinct. I would say that those who have not analyzed their lives sufficiently do indeed continue to live out of instinct and habit. But there are people, more rare though, that continue to live out of spite and out of rebellion (re Camus) or because they feel they have an overarching purpose behind their lives.
If you would argue that these too are indeed merely psychological walls to keep us entrapped, then I would hesitate and ask you if you believe that a person ought to end their lives. This does seem to be the deciding factor in whether or not instincts and society are indeed coercive. Because if there is no impetus to end one's life, then clearly this means that the influential forces of instinct and society have no weight as they aren't contributing to keeping you from ending your life.
Additionally, I would also argue that these instincts are not necessarily bad in themselves. I believe Becker himself argued that one thing humans need are better, sturdier psychological walls in which we can live our lives in peace without the looming threat of death always on our shoulders. This goes back to what I was saying about the normativity of death. If these psychological walls not only shield us from thinking about death but also give us bountiful purpose and meaning from culture, art, music, philosophy, scientific inquiry, relationships, etc, then surely there is no inherent problem with the implementation of these walls. They may distract us, sure, but they work. Even Zapffe knew that there was a fourth option for those who cannot seem to attach, distract, or isolate themselves: sublimation.
And so we can live Absurdly and change these [s]"coercive"[/s] "influential" modes of thinking into something that we simply accept and move on. We can treat it as one would treat the ability to fly: ultimately not possible for a naked man but given his intellect and ability to use tools, actually possible if he does so desire. It only seems coercive if you have never tried or have tried and failed due to poor planning, but it's not coercive in the way a jail cell is. The ones who have succeeded are proof that our instincts are only "coercive" insofar as we allow them to be. And sometimes if we give in to our instincts, they can lead to some great things (mentioned above) that doesn't make it seem like it is "coercion".
So the question here is whether or not it is in the best interests of an agent to die, and if so, then the instincts and societal institutions do indeed act as some kind of barrier, obstacle, or Catch-22 that a person must overcome in order to perish. But let us not forget that the existence of a barrier does not prevent one from breaching it, nor does it prevent one from living a life peacefully and in harmony.
If you believe the nonsense that human action is somehow defined without any reference to our circumstances, sure. The compatibilist rejects this. For them the sort of freedom you are talking about doesn't exist. Free will doesn't exist in that sense for them. In this respect they are in perfect agreement with you. No human action takes place in an environment without the presence of some sort of force which limits or threatens the actor involved.
This is an excellent point. Without adversary, without need, humans would do nothing or perhaps die of boredom. The very existence of an adversary to our wants and needs creates a system of value.
[i]"In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we
conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has
about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not
exaggerate in this direction. In a man’s attachment to life there is
something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s
judgment is as good as the mind’s and the body shrinks from
annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the
habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death,
the body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that
contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is
both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is
the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion
that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of
another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live not
for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it,
give it a meaning, and betray it.
Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion"[/i]
It is the contradiction between the body's will and the mind's will that leads to the Absurd. Is this the kind of "coercion" that you are speaking of, that the mind sees true that suicide is rational yet the body prevents it from annihilation?
No.
No, assuming determinism true, an idea will be judged by pre-existing causes and whether your conclusion is actually based on internal coherence and explanatory merit will be entirely happenstance. That is, all your discussion of what can be is meaningless. Everything is predetermined and there is no way to speak in terms of what could be or not.
Your belief that free will is incompatible with determinism is due to the fact that you are required by the laws of determinism to think that period. The justification that you provide for your belief is simply what the laws of determinism require you to think is an adequate justification. Any suggestion that you can consider various reasons and choose the correct one assumes the ability to meaningfully choose, which you reject.
One can distinguish two concepts, or two conditions, maybe, of freedom, called liberty of indifference and liberty of spontaneity. Liberty of indifference is the condition under which human actions aren't fully determined by their antecedent circumstances conjoined with deterministic laws. This is the stringent incompatibilist requirement that if someone freely performed some actions A, in given antecedent circumstances, then it should have been possible for this person to have refrained from doing A, or done something else, in those exact same circumstances. The requirement that you are stressing is the requirement of liberty of spontaneity. This is the requirement that actions not occur at random but rather conform with what the agent wants or decides. For this requirement to be satisfied there indeed seems to be required an effective causal link between, on the one hand, the agent's decision (or, broadly, her antecedent motivations and beliefs) and, on the second hand, her subsequent actions. Her action must be intelligible in light of her reasons and motivations in order that it could be ascribed to her qua agent, let alone be ascribed to her as her free action
It's not clear that the second requirement entails that determinism must be true, however, since the sort of law of causation at issue, which links an agent's motivations and practical deliberation abilities to her subsequent actions, need not have the same form as deterministic and exceptionless laws of natures (assuming there are any such things). They may rather be principles of practical rationality, and there is no reason why one ought to assimilate such principles to deterministic laws. Under some accounts of action, the causal model that links antecedent psychological states of agent, including states of the will, to actions, is indirect. It is a model of agent causation, where the antecedent cause is an agent -- a substance -- rather than events or states. Hence, one can have liberty of spontaneity consistently with the negation of determinism. The negation of determinism mustn't be assimilated, though, with the idea that events or processes (or actions) that aren't determined by the conjunction of laws of nature and antecedents circumstances thereby are uncaused or random. It may be the case that the stringent requirement from the incompatibilist libertarian is indeed too stringent, and that it is not possible that the agent who did A could have done something different in the exact same circumstances. But it need not follow from this that her action was determined by those circumstances since there is no law of nature that links those circumstances with the action.
In the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes the empirical character of causality from the intelligible character of causality. The former reveals empirical "events" in nature to follow from antecedent "events" in accordance with deterministic laws. The latter reveals other "events" (i.e. actions) to follow intelligibly from non-deterministic principles of practical rationality, on the basis of an agent's assessment of her own practical situation (not quite Kant's own formulation, but rather my gloss on it). The two sorts of accounts seem to conflict when actions are identified with (some of) the "events" that natural sciences disclose as conforming with deterministic laws. But it is unclear that human actions can be disclosed through such an empirical stances, and hence that they can be identified at all outside of the proper hermeneutical context within which alone they are disclosed as intelligible occurrences in the life of rational animals.
Honestly, this argument is so bad I don't really think it's worth responding to. Sorry.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Pretty sure that means that society/instincts are keeping us from killing ourselves (the "coercive establishment").
Regardless of how you interpret your own OP, this is how it came across and furthermore, you have responded to me defending the position that we cannot commit suicide because of this coercive establishment.
It obviously doesn't, since I've explicitly included suicide among those possible actions.
I'm interpreting this as meaning suicide is indeed not a viable choice.
Quoting The Great Whatever
From page 4.
Quoting The Great Whatever
From page 5.
Quoting The Great Whatever
From page 5.
What does that have to do with suicide? It was about breathing, etc. not being freely done because they're done on pain of coercion.
The rest is about how people instill incentives against suicide. That doesn't mean suicide can't be possible or viable -- I've assumed it is this whole time because people, after all, do it (but then often in great pain or duress because of the mechanisms that act against them).
Dude, I have literally been saying this for the past couple of pages. The only reason I said it is because I thought you held the position that suicide was not viable (that we are "coerced"/"forced" to continue to live even if we do not want to).
I think ultimately a human being desires to continue to live (on top of other desires). So suicide is not a choice in the way I would choose an ice cream flavor. It's a way of escaping/solving something. It's not that life is inherently bad that warrants suicide, but that the current conditions are unbearable to experience anymore. And so someone is torn between their desire to live and their desire to escape their pain (psychache).
But a person who commits suicide is not coerced. They are torn between two options and decide to go with one of them. The pain of leaving the other option is what gives a person their psychache. But it is not as if the experience of pain is actually forcing us to commit suicide in the same way a person who pushes you off a cliff would be forcing you to die.
Perhaps you could argue that desires are themselves a type of "coercing" because they are so strong. The Buddha recognized this and advocated ceasing desires and living in a stable state of equilibrium so we don't feel this intense need for something. But again, many people, including myself (and presumably you as well) have certain desires that fall outside of this. I desire to write this response. I feel good by writing this response. So it's not coercing if I enjoy it and feel as though I am doing it by my own "free will" (a la compatibilism).
Someone killing themselves by their own judgement is not an example of coercion. An outside agent forcing the person to kill themselves on threat of torture is coercion.
A coercion requires the victim to not want to do something as well as preventing them from fulfilling their own personal desires. Take your example of breathing. This is not coercion. I don't mind breathing. I'm certainly under a kind of pressure to continue to breathe, but I don't mind it. It's a function of the body, a body that I identify with. Like I said above, humans have a desire to continue to live. Breathing is a necessary requirement for us to live.
I get your idea though that it seems like we are slaves to the whims of our bodily needs. But if you also look at yourself, that is, your psyche, you will realize that you have needs as well, needs that you personally identify with. One of these needs would be, to me, to be in equanimity with your environment, which includes your own bodily functions.
So in order to argue that we are coerced into breathing, you have to argue that we actually do mind breathing (it's a pain in the ass perhaps), and that we don't want to live a life that requires us to breathe. Sure, as both of us have contended, you are coerced into a life of breathing. But ultimately it is still your choice whether or not you desire to continue to live a life that includes breathing. For many of us, it would seem that breathing does not matter at all because it does not impede on our desire to continue to live (in fact it allows us to live).
The worst philosophers are those who con you into thinking they had something to say and then you realize you've wasted your time.
Basically, what this means is that you are clinging to an idea of an entirely free will in a universe that is devoid of it, and then wonder why it seems like you are being coerced. It's because it's not compatible with the way things are. It's as if you are not willing to let go of the experience of having control and then wonder why it seems like everything is out to get you.
No, I understand, it's just a terrible argument. A variant of it is used by certain sort of religious apologists often. Not that that discredits it in of itself, it's just a really common thing.
Quoting Hanover
Why not? The qualities that make a good argument would be the same either way, all we have to do is look and see.
Yes you do, hold your breath for three minutes.
It doesn't matter whether my thoughts are determined or not to whether they're true.
I would say I'm a 'hard indeterminist' overall, but acknowledge (a) that certain local configurations for all intents and purposes can be modeled as hard deterministic, and (b) there may exist a certain kind of narrow freedom that arises in exceptional cases, but I'm not so confident on this point.
Why would I want to? I fail to understand what you are getting at here.
Quoting The Great Whatever
But "truth" in this case is in accordance to whether or not we are coerced into anything. If you are a hard determinist, then you cannot be coerced! You are pre-determined to do and be subject to whatever you happen to be. To be able to be coerced is to have some sort of (free) will. The phenomenal aspect of having the impression of having control over your actions (a will) leads to compatibilism (soft determinism). A frustrated will is coercion. So you are essentially holding hard determinism to be true while simultaneously holding that for some reason our wills/desires are important because they are frustrated. It's absurd to ignore the phenomenal impression of having a will, and so hard determinism as far as I can tell is untenable.
But this thread wasn't supposed to be over hard determinism but rather its soft cousin, compatibilism, in which case the (illusion) of having a will is important, primarily due to the ethical considerations regarding a frustrated or externally-suppressed will.
I would say that for the sake of charity and to further the discussion without devolving into hair-splitting definitional semantics, I will grant that our bodily processes can be interpreted as being "coercive", or at least "forceful". However, I want to make a distinction between active "coercion" and passive "coercion". An active coercive act is immediately identifiable as frustrating someone's freedom. An example of this is blackmailing someone by threat of abuse or death. A passive coercive act is one that could be interpreted as being coercive but is not explicitly obvious. An example of this is your own body apparently "blackmailing" you into breathing by a threat of pain and death. The difference between the two has to do with whether or not the individual gives a shit about what is happening to them. Would I care about being blackmailed by another person? Yes. Do I care about that fact that I have to breathe to continue to live? Not really.
So I think that perhaps it's not necessarily a difference in kind but a difference in degree. The problem I see with your view in that you are equivocating one with the other. I follow the laws of the road when I drive not because I'm being coerced by the government but because I genuinely understand that to be safe requires me to follow these rules. I would not follow the laws of Nazi Germany, as those would be often oppressive and explicitly coercive. In each case you could use the world "coerced" to describe the situation, but it sounds more like an equivocation gone too far than a legitimate description.
This goes back to one of my original posts, which said that your positions stems from your (overly) pessimistic view on human life. Actually considering breathing as a coercive mechanism is not at all in line with what most people on Earth would consider it to be. It's a necessary act, often subconscious, that we must do to survive, but most people on Earth would say that they would rather continue to live. It's only when you bring into the picture the idea that we ought to die that the mechanism of breathing becomes coercive. If you don't bring this into the picture, then the "coercive" mechanism of breathing (the pain and threat of death), no longer are seen as coercive but rather as an alarm mechanism to alert the person that, hey, they should probably start breathing again if they want to continue to live. It may not be the most gentle mechanism but I'm sure many people appreciate the warning calls when they come.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Some philosophers/cognitive scientists think that our higher-level cognitive processes allow our will to not initiate actions but rather suppress actions by formulating internal, private truth conditions. A devotee to Dennett would say that Popperian and Gregorian minds are capable of this internal formulation.
All too often we confound ourselves when talking about the causation of future states. We take the abstraction of a meaning of casual states (e.g. "laws of reality)" and treat them as if the are an outside actor which acts to force future events to one logically necessary outcome. We ignore that any casual relationship needs it determined result (the effect) to be defined. The abstractions we like to offer up as the supposedly limiting "laws of reality" are actually immanent to specific causal relationships we have encountered. The outcome of a causal system is not determined into one outcome by an outside force of the "laws of reality." It is an expression of that specific system itself (those existing states of cause and effect together).
Therefore, in casualty, the determining of a future state, places no limit on what is possible. The abstractions we have noted in past casual relationship needn't apply to any other we encounter. That's always a question of the particular state of the case and effect of the specific relationship. Determinism is not the opposite of possibility, but runs concurrently with it. Everything is determined in a world where anything possible. For any action taken or event caused, it was possible for it to be otherwise.
"Laws of reality" do not determine anything. States of existence (including our will and actions), in there respective causal relationships, are the determining actors. They are the "deterministic laws" and so there is no outside force which can constrain states of the world to one necessary outcome. Prior conditions cannot form a causal (and deterministic) relationship. Determined events have no link to "laws of reality," whether we are talking about our will or the movement of a rock (any time it's possible a rock could have moved differently) .
Thus, there is no need to negate determinism to maintain liberty of spontaneity. We have liberty of spontaneity under determinism. Any action we cause, we determine, with our will could possible be otherwise. Agent causation, as you describe it, is an unnecessary effort to protect possibility in the world. It's a response to the idea determinism entails the elimination of possibility. It's an attempt to paper holes left by the mistake of posing of casual relationships as defined by a prior state alone. Far better to get to the root of the problem and take out this logical error in our analysis of casualty entirely, to call out the error of supposing that deterministic relationships can be given by citing a prior state on its own.
Agents, I would have thought, are rational animals and thus belong to the category of substance (ousia). A state is a particular determination (in one specific respect) of a substance. It is expressed by a predicate, whereas an agent is typically designated by a proper name (or demonstrative), and characterized as the sort of substance that it is by a "substance form" concept, (e.g. the concept of a human being). I don't know what it could possibly mean to say that agents are states. What would they be states of?
Determinism is a concept that applies to certain sorts of systems: those, namely, that evolve according to deterministic laws. The system as a whole, (or the totality of the object that make it up) can be in a determinate state at a time, and if its being in this state at a time in conjunction with the laws that govern its evolution uniquely determine its state at any other time then we say that the system is deterministic. Systems, thus defined, belong to the category of substance since they are what states are predicated of. Thus the doctrine of determinism is the thesis that the universe as a whole constitutes a deterministic system. I doubt that the doctrine is intelligible or coherent because it relies on the concept of the state of the universe at a time, and I don't think there is any such thing. Real systems are deterministic relative to a set of laws that characterizes the connections between some definite set of predicates (that make up the vocabulary of a specific science or empirical domain). But the very idea of the universe -- the set of everything that exists in space and time -- isn't restricted to a particular set of predicates (e.g. it isn't restricted to the set of physical properties).
The doctrine of determinism thus may rely on the flawed intuition that all the predicates that designate real properties somehow can be defined in term of physical predicates, and that the laws of physics are (broadly) deterministic (modulo quantum indeterminacies). In other words, the doctrine of determinism relies on the intuition that all the genuine empirical properties of all the "real" entities in the world supervene on physical properties. Even if we accept that this idea can be cashed out and made plausible (which I doubt) it still would no follow that just because the universe qua physical system is deterministic therefore all supervening sets of predicates must designate properties (possible states of real objects) that evolve deterministically. Denying this still is consistent with the idea that any "event" -- described in whatever vocabulary (e.g. the vocabulary of chemistry, geology or psychology) -- has a cause (or several causes). But this denial of determinism also is consistent with the idea that there are no sets of deterministic laws that connect states with earlier states, as those states are singled out by this "supervening" vocabulary. Davidson't anomalous monism is a instance of this idea of supervenience of the mental on the physical that doesn't carry the determinism holding at the supervened upon level to the supervenient level.
Also unclear to me is what you mean to signify with "laws of reality". Are the principles of theoretical rationality, and of practical reason, that we (often though not always) hold our beliefs, deliberations and intentions answerable to, laws of reality in that sense?
So we are coerced into living by being born? "Living" is equivalent to handing over one's wallet and "being born" to having a gun pointed in one's face, to parallel the other example you gave?
If so, I quite like and am drawn to your argument, but I find there is one issue with it. "Who" is being coerced into being born prior to being born? Fetuses are not persons, as far as I'm concerned, so there is no one to be coerced and no one to consent in the first place.
So, if offered two options, going to the store or coming home, you are compelled to do that which was pre-determined. If the preexisting causes lead you to come home, you will come home. Your decision is not free.
If offered two options, accepting evolution as true or not accepting evolution as true, you are compelled to do that which is pre-determined. If the preexisting causes lead you not to accept evolution as true, you will not accept evolution as true. Your decision is not free.
The same holds true for everything: whether that be to come home, to accept evolution, to make arguments supportive of evolution, to believe evolution to be true, to be convinced that evolution is true, etc.
When you tell me that you believe evolution to be true for 10 different reasons, you tell me that only because you are compelled to. Whether your reasons are true would just be happenstance. Maybe they are, maybe they're not.
That doesn't follow.
It absolutely follows unless you impose reason into the universe, which requires that all deterministic forces lead conscious beings to truthful beliefs. I still don't know how you'd know that though, considering all that you think you know is just what you happened to be determined to think you know.
Why do I think the earth is flat? The same reason you think the earth round. It's because the laws of nature caused me to believe that.
So what exactly do you think follows from that? Above you said this means that whether the beliefs are true is just happenstance. But this simply does not follow.
You see instead of just asserting that it doesn't follow, it would be kind of nice if you took the time to explain why it doesn't follow. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.
If our beliefs are the result of pre-existing causes beyond our control, what follows is that our beliefs cannot be asserted to relate to truth. To the extent that we believe that there are rocks because there are actually rocks, that would be happenstance. It could not be said that we arrived at that conclusion based upon our own independent judgment, but just as the result of some cosmic coincidence the causal chain led us to form a correct belief.
What follows from this is that the inadequacy of compatiblism is not that free will is incompatible with determinism, but it's that determinism negates the possibility of knowing anything.
One could possibly be some sort of a compatibilist for the case of belief formation too (though I am usure if this resembles what TGW is thinking). That's not my view but a determinist could argue for that. On such a view our beliefs are indeed settled by antecedent causes that lie beyond our control. But it wouldn't follow that what beliefs we have can't be (broadly) explained through reference to deterministic cognitive mechanisms that "implement" our best epistemic principles, as it were. What follows from this, analogously with the case of free will, is the denial of the principle of alternative possibilities: which is something that compatibilists believe they can dispense with (dispense with the PAP, that is).
That is, if one comes to believe that P, in some antecedent "circumstances" (including inner "states" of the cognitive agent), then it isn't possible that, in those very same circumstances, she could have failed to come to believe that P. But that would fall short from showing that her coming to believe that P isn't the actualization of an efficient cognitive power. We can imagine programming a deterministic robot that would explore its environment and come to form true beliefs about it, non accidentally. It would thereby be true that the beliefs of this robot are fully determined by antecedent circumstances that the robot has no power over, and also that the robot has the power to form true beliefs (and that those beliefs thereby can come to constitute knowledge, on many accounts).
Again, that isn't my view, but it seems to be a view that a compatibilist about free will would find agreeable enough, and isn't obviously ridiculous. I just don't know if it is consistent with TGW's other commitments.
Determinism would seem to negate the possibility, not of knowing anything, but of having any justifiable confidence in the rationality of judgements. Of course if you are one of those who is determined by nature to have confidence in the rationality of judgements, and determined to think that confidence justified, then...
A view similar to the one that you are expressing is called internalism about epistemic justification. It is the view that knowledge requires not only that beliefs issue from the actualization of a reliable method (or mechanism) of belief formation (in order that they would qualify as knowledge), but also that the epistemic agent be justified (in each separate case of belief formation) in believing that her belief is issued from such a reliable power. If the agent thus has a power of knowledge, this very power must include this specific reflective ability (at least tacitly).
The first condition -- of the reliability of the method of belief formation -- is the only one required by externalists about epistemic justification. This externalist condition is easily endorsed by compatibilists with an account similar to the one that I sketched in my previous post (without quite endorsing it). One could compatibly have one's belief that there is a cat on the mat determined by conditions that held one billion years ago and, also, conceive of this belief being the actualisation of the reliable power to form true beliefs about cats and mats when one encounters them. (Likewise in the case of compatibilist free will, it could have been determined one billion years ago that I would chose vanilla ice cream today, while, compatibly with this fact, my choice can be regarded as the actualization, today, of my "free" power to chose, and obtain, the ice cream flavor that I want.)
So, the area where compatibilism might clash with the possibility of knowledge concerns the specific condition of internalism about epistemic justification that you are alluding to. This would be troublesome for the compatibilist if it could be shown that belief in determinism (or lack of knowledge that determinism is false) isn't consistent with one being justified in holding the (second order) belief that one's empirical beliefs are, on a case by case basis, actualizations of a power of knowledge.
I don't endorse such a compatibilist conception myself (while I do endorse internalism about epistemic justification) but that's because, as is the case with compatibilism about free will, the idea of universal determinism, which such conceptions incorporate, seems flawed for reasons that I alluded to in a previous post. If one, however, grants such an idea of (universal) determinism to the compatibilist, then, it seems to me, it might be rather more difficult to argue that belief in determinism is inconsistent with the condition of internalism about epistemic justification, as this inconsistency would need to be demonstrated in order to find fault with a compatibilist conception of knowledge in the way you are proposing. (And also, the compatibilist could be an externalist about epistemic justification, but the shortcomings of such an externalism can be argued separately from any consideration about determinism).
And in order for one to hold the belief that beliefs about the world are typically true because determinism just happens to be set up that way, one has to have faith. That dogma would read as follows: Your beliefs reflect reality when you feel you have an adequate justification for them even though your justifications are entirely beyond your control but are forced upon you by your genetics and environment. How one responds to conflicting views is problematic as those other people with varying beliefs would supposedly subscribe to the same dogma.
If I'm going to take a leap of faith, I'd likely not make it so limited and complicated. I'd likely just say that I do have free will to the extent that I really can choose to do otherwise, even if I can't fully make sense out of that concept.
This is really the Cartesian problem of the brain in the vat. We can't know whether all of our perceptions and judgments are accurate because an evil genius might be probing our brains and inserting all of these ideas in us. Or, using a more modern example, we don't know if we're in the Matrix.
The evil genius planting thoughts in us is a deterministic force. It is that force that negates our ability to know anything about the world. Whether that deterministic force is an evil genius or just the omnipotent power of the causal chain, we can know nothing about the world.
To remove us from the evil genius (or the causal chain) is the only way to make us an autonomous agent, fully capable of knowing reality. That is why free will is necessary for us to have knowledge.
I'd also point out that the solution to this mess is exactly as Descartes suggested and it's what has been suggested in this thread. It's to just assert that a good God would never so deceive us and make us believe that which is not true. So, yes, we can simply assert that determinism is just set up to give us correct knowledge, just because it's a good world I suppose.
Which implies nothing about whether those beliefs are justified, correct, true 'only be happenstance,' etc. But this is derailing anyway.
Under that scenario our power of knowledge is indeed abolished since, if the belief that a cat is on the mat, say, would be forcefully inserted in us while the cat isn't on the mat (or while there isn't even a cat, or a mat, etc.), then our belief that a cat is on the mat can't constitute knowledge, and that's true even in the case where, accidentally, the outside world is as we believe it to be (assuming that we could so much as make sense of the idea of empirically contentful beliefs in such a brain-in the vat scenario, which we arguably can't). The reason why we can't be ascribed knowledge, in that scenario, is that even in the case where the cat is on the mat, and our belief happens to match the way the world is, this matching isn't an outcome of a power of empirical knowledge but rather the result of an intervention of an evil genius, and the actions of this evil genius, let us assume, are (counterfactually) insensitive to the way the world is. That is, we are assuming that the evil genius would, or would be liable to, insert in us the belief that the cat is on the mat even in cases where it it isn't, or where there is no cat, etc. This is what makes the evil genius evil.
If, however, we imagine that the "evil" genius would merely ensure that (or enable the possibility that) our beliefs reliably have the content that they would have if they were the outcomes of a normal (albeit fallible) power of empirical knowledge, as such a power could also conceivably be realized in a non-deteministic (thought regular) world, then the activity of the genius drops out of the picture. It is a helpful genius of that kind that a compatibilist about the power of knowledge could pictures determinism to be embodying. Such a genius would (effectively) be looking out in the world before inserting into us a matching belief. Hence, in the case where we form the belief that there is a cat on the mat, because the evil genius is aware that there is one (and that there aren't any observational circumstances that would ordinarily defeat our fallible power of knowledge) then the counterfactual conditional claim that we wouldn't hold this belief if the cat weren't on the mat also holds true.
Consider again the deterministic robot that I discussed earlier. If the robot is designed to detect and pick up empty soda cans, and can reliably do so in some particular kind of environment, then it is irrelevant if the laws that govern the robot's interactions with its environment also are deterministic (such that the robot+environment constitute jointly a single deterministic system). The robot can still be credited with an ability to form true beliefs about the locations of empty soda cans (and manifest this ability through picking them up reliably) even though, in each case, it was already "determined" what the robot would do, even before the robot saw any soda cans, and that it would form the true belief that there is a soda can there. The compatibilist thus may view determinism as an enabling rather than coercitive "force" in relation to the robot's cognitive powers. And so can the compatibilist view our situation qua naturally evolved cognitive engines embodied in flesh in a deterministic world. This is how the compatibilist accommodates the externalist requirement about epistemic justification.
In order to rebut this account, you must, I think, either question the coherence of the view of universal determinism tacitly assumed (to be intelligible) by the compatibilist or target her ability to accommodate the internalist requirement for epistemic justification (or both).
Yes, the wording is defective. But I think TWOD may be making an argument similar to mine, targeting the very idea of universal determinism. In a way, I am both a compatibilist and an incompatibilist. That is, I hold the issue of determinism at the level of micro-physical law to be irrelevant to the analyses of free will and of the power of knowledge. Hence, our self-conception qua free cognitive agents ought not to be hostage to whatever discovery physicists might hold in reserve. We can still establish a priori that the doctrine of universal determinism spells trouble for our self-conception, but that this doctrine however is, fortunately, unintelligible. So, I hold free will (and the possibility of knowledge) both to be consistent with the possibility of determinism holding at the level of physical law but to be incompatible with universal determinism; while the latter can't be true anyway.
So, I think TWOD is right to question the coherence of the idea that our beliefs can be determined by the past (in the sense that they would necessarily follow from the past "state of the universe" conjoined with deterministic laws). For sure, our beliefs can be strongly influenced or, to some extent "governed" by intelligible social or cultural or cognitive forces (e.g. strong sources of cognitive bias that social or evolutionary psychologists are studying). Those are conditioning forces, or hurdles, that fall short from absolving us from our cognitive responsibilities and hence, also, from negating our powers to acquire knowledge.
So, there are two sorts of deterministic forces that we are subjected to. Intelligible forces of the first kind (cultural/cognitive, etc.) are sources of bias in our abilities to judge, but they fall short from completely determining us. Our awareness of them doesn't lead to a justified sentiment of powerlessness, but, on the contrary, ought to raise our awareness of our cognitive responsibilities. We have the power to, and therefore are responsible for, defeating our own biases. And then there are sources of "determination" of our "behaviors" that are strict and inescapable. We can't violate the laws of physics, and those laws, in conjunction with the past (physical) "state" of the world govern what it is our physical "bodies" do and how our brains are configured. But the doctrine of universal determinism is incoherent because it attempts to lawfully bridge the gap between (physical) "body" and human bodies, between physical process and human behavior, between brain states and states of knowledge. But there are no such bridging laws. Physics and psychology disclose only partially overlapping empirical domains. The concept of a cause may also bridge them somewhat, but not in accordance with deterministic laws.
Ah, but that is the metaphysical error which is at stake here. We cannot be of substance. Substance is constant. No matter what happens in the world, substance remains the same. In the chaos of ever changing, destroying and forming states of existence, substance doesn not move or alter. Substance is identical at all these moments (i.e. "the world," "the set" which is of all existing things). The distinction and change which is characterises states of existence cannot be found in substance. To say otherwise would be to argue that, for example, that my hand and my foot had the same identity as existing states. They don't. My existing hand and foot are always different. Substance cannot be an existing state. We (and everything else) are states of nothing.
The reverse of the common approach is true: substance is of states. Any existing state (whether a human emotion or a rock) exists on it own terms and expresses substance. Substance cannot have any form.
All the controversy over predicates and proper names is born out confusion about substance. Since we initially consider substance and then search for its form which defines and object, we limit the definition of any object (existing state) to what we say or name in that moment. Our reasoning about substance prevents us from considering objects on their own terms. We think there can't be an object which extends beyond what we say because, we think, there can be no object without us saying the form of substance.
If, on the other hand, we begin an object, all these problems disappear. Speaking meaning is no longer required for an object to exist. Form of an object becomes not a feature of existence (i.e. a form of substance) but rather an expression of the object (i.e. substance is of the object). Existing human aren't present by the concept of a human being. Instead, they are an existing state which expresses the concept of a human being. Agents are existing states which express the concept/meaning of awareness and reaction to their environment.
Speaking an name or a predicate is no longer required to define the object. Any object may have more than meaning than is spoken in a given name of predicate. Indeed, all objects have more meaning than is spoken in a name or predicate, for neither name or predicate amount to a description of every aspect and relation of an object. Sometimes there is even meaning which is not spoken about in a used language. There are an incalculable transfinite number of meanings we could speak about every object. The meaning expressed by any object extends beyond the description we give about it, in any and every case.
Read this claim over and over again until you realize that it's nonsense. I really don't want to discuss this, it's not what the thread is about and I never committed to metaphysical determinism anyway.
How exactly are you planning on executing free will in this situation? This argument suggests free will must executed by one's present belief, such that one's beliefs weren't determined by a prior state of oneself. How then can states of myself prior to my present belief control that I hold the belief in the future? Free will becomes impossible. No matter what I think, my beliefs will always be of random whim. I would have no control over them because I couldn't take action prior to the belief which would cause myself have it in the future.
In other words: all our beliefs would be happenstance without determinism.
I’m afraid to say this rather missies my point. Under my argument, there is only one sort of determining force: existing things causing other existing things, whether those things involves the expression of “laws of physics (e.g. rocks failing to the ground)” or “cognitive responsibility (e.g. whether or not someone understands that a group of people have particular right or not).“ All that’s different between these deterministic relationships is the states of existence involved and their differing expressions.
We can break the “laws of physics.” All it would take is a change in causal relationship (e.g. nearby masses react to stay in the same spot unless acted on by an outside force) between existing objects. In this sense, the world is no more “restricted” then our own behaviour. It’s just the objects which are us, as far as we have observed, are caused to express certain meanings more often than we’ve seen the world breaking present “laws of physics.” The behaviours we end up taking are, in fact, inescapable, in every case. We can no more violate what we end up doing than the path of a rock falling to the ground. Our bodies and decisions are “physical” in nature (similarly, “laws of physics” are just as "escapable," as QM alludes to; how the world works might change at any moment) .
Like all sorts of other systems in nature, they are cause of action we end up taking. Physics and psychology are overlapping empirical domains by definition: both involve the existence of humans states responding to the world around them. They are about the same objects. Indeed, the causation of “cognitive responsibility” involves the relationships of the “laws of physics” (reactions within the body and to the environment, chemicals, molecules, atoms, etc.,etc. )”
“Universal (pre)determinism” is about something else entirely. It’s not about trying to bridge the gap between humans and the rest of the world. Rather, it’s about trying to say some state of the world is logically necessary on the grounds of another, such that we could merely look at the position of an atom and tell everything that would ever exist. Without, you know, actually ever observing or even knowing anything about a future state of the world. The goal is to say that, logically, because X (X on its own), Y must be. It’s actually about possibility rather than the determination of any state. “Universal (pre)determinism” is about claiming there are no possible outcomes, in favour of saying there is a logically necessary one. Its problem is it attempts to talk about future caused events while denying they can be (as there are no possible outcomes) entirely.
Yes, I must acknowledge that I had (mis)understood your argument to be much simpler than it actually is. But you are working from metaphysical assumptions so radically different from those I am relying on that it is difficult to meaningfully engage; though we may, of course, try.
Don't you mean that it is a claim about the absence of alternative possibilities (alternative to what is actual, that is)? I would rather say that determinism is the doctrine according to which, given the "state of the universe" at any time (and the laws of nature), then there is just one state that the universe can possibly be in at any other given time. Of course, this means that what will in fact occur necessarily will occur given what was the case in the past (or given what is the case now). This doesn't entails actualism (i.e. the idea that only the actual is possible, and hence that possibility entails actuality) since one can still maintain, as compatibilists do, that many future outcomes are possible conditionally on whatever state one (and the universe) might possibly be in at earlier times. Only if the "initial state of the universe" is the only initial state possible, does determinism entail actualism.
I avoided that suggestion deliberately. Yes, it is true that many of these arguing "Universal (pre)determinism envision the are talking about the absence of alternative possibilities, but how does this make sense? To say something is a possible event is to speak of context where the future is not yet defined. That's why a suggested outcome is a "possible" outcome, as opposed to "The Outcome."
(Pre)determinism only has "The Outcome." At no point is what is yet to happen undefined such that it makes sense to speak of possible event(s). Under (pre)determinism, there is only the actual (states as will exist). Since everything is defined by an initial point alone, there are no possible outcomes to play in the world. Effectively, all events are subsumed into the one initial event. The presence of the initial event (supposedly) defines the presence of all existence events, logically collapsing the identity of every state into the initial one. This is obviously nonsensical as each state is it's own logical identity. For there to be one state, say a Big Bang, it doesn't define the presence of anything else. If there is to be a universe of plants and galaxies, it take those objects to exist. (Pre)determinism (and its assorted concepts, such as Lapace's demon) is logically incoherent and we are right to reject it.
Determinism is a different question though. What do we mean by it? Well, we are essentially saying that one state will exist after another. Cause and effect. That for each state of the world, there will only be one particular outcome which occurs, regardless of what happens. In other words: we are talking about the actual. To talk about determinism is to speak not of possibility, but rather of the logical expression of the actual. The events that actually happen after one another, to which there can be no challenge or alternative.
Where (pre)determinism goes wrong is failing to realise that determinism is about the actual. Instead, they take the actual and misread it as having consequences for possibility. Supposedly, the fact there is only ever one actual outcome means there were no possible events, as if it didn't take each state in its own moment to define the actual. This is a category error. The possible is not the actual. Possibility is what might happen. The actual is what does happen. They cannot touch each other. What actually happens has no effect on what is possible. One set of events occurring doesn't mean other outcomes are not possible. It just means they didn't happen. Possibility is always concurrent with the actual.
If we properly understand the possible and the actual, what we get is a wholly deterministic world in which anything is possible. The actual turns form being the opposite of possibility to an instance which is possible. All this handwringing over whether events are "deterministic" or not is revealed to a waste of time build on a fundamental misunderstanding of the possible and actual. The question doesn't make sense. It is not a question of finding evidence and proving a deterministic link.
Since any event is actual, it is necessarily determined, not by "the initial state," but by causes prior to it. Any event is also, by definition, one possible instance of what might happen, so it is one instance of a possible outcome. Logic tells us that both determinism and possibility are logically necessary.
Here I am going to agree with the compatibilist for the sake of argument. I don't know, myself, what to make of the claim that there is one well defined "state of the universe" (a state of the universe, that is, that I am inhabiting presently) such that this state is actual and, conditionally to its being actual, the laws of physics ensure that there only is one possible future unfolding of events. But the compatibilist believes that she can live happily with this idea and I am going to follow through on her reasons for believing that she can be free in such a deterministic universe.
The important distinction for the compatibilist to make is the distinction between (1) what is, in a sense historically necessary, from the standpoint of her historicized and embodied circumstances in the world and (2) what it is up to her to chose to do in those very same circumstances. Such historically necessary circumstances don't consist in whatever determines the "present state of the universe", which is something necessarily inaccessible to her limited perspective as a rational agent, but rather what it is about her past history (and the history of her world) that constrains the range of things she can do conditionally to her seeing to it that she will do them. For instance, her historical circumstances can make it impossible that she will get to work on time if her work shift begins in two minutes and her workplace is 50 miles away. But if her work shift begins in two hours and she has access to suitable means of transportation, then it may be (mostly) up to her whether she will get to work in time. There are thus many options that are open possibilities from the standpoint of her deliberative perspective as a rational agent, and it is precisely the availability of those several options that constitute, according to compatibilism, her freedom to get to work in time (or be late intentionally).
The hard determinist will argue that in the case where the agent takes the means necessary to get to work in time, then it was in fact historically necessary that she would have done so, and hence her belief that there were other options available to her, which she had while she was deliberating what to do, was an illusory belief. An impartial observer who would have been better apprised of the agent's "circumstances" (including every details of her cognitive states), and of every constraints that the laws of physics entail, would have known that the agent could only have gotten to work in time.
The broadly correct response that the compatibilist can make to the hard determinist, it seems to me, is that the latter is conflating two distinct ranges of historical possibility that hold relative to two distinct agential perspectives. Maybe the "observer", from her own stance, can see that the agent is bound to get to work in time. But that's because her perspective encompasses the fact that the agent is (or will come to be) motivated to get to work in time. From the perspective of the agent, however, her own motivations aren't part of the circumstances that are constraining her action. They are rather part of what she is. So long as those two perspective (i.e. the observer's and the agent's) are properly kept separate, then the fact that from the point of view of the observer the first agent was bound to get to work in time (and thus that it was impossible that she would have gotten to work late) has no bearing on the range of possible outcomes that are genuinely open to her (and hence possible) relative to her own deliberative perspective -- a practical perspective, that is, from within which her own motivations don't constitute external constraints.
In light of those considerations, I just wanted to make clear that the specific feature of the compatibilist account that I am agreeing with is that the idea of a singular outcome that is necessary conditionally to the universe being in a determinate state in the past (or present) of the agent has no bearing on the range of possible courses of actions that this agent can possibly take, consistently with historical necessity, from the point of view of her own deliberative perspective. But I hold, in addition, that there doesn't exist any such perspective, practical, theoretical, or of any other kind (not even in the mind of God) from which our universe can be said to exist in a definite state; though I haven't argued for this here. Any necessity that is knowable or intelligible to us always has the shape of historical necessity -- and hence there doesn't exist any perspective from which freedom is totally absent.
The way you describe "pre-determinism" and "determinism" they are the same. You are confusing yourself over the ideas of actuality and possibility, it seems to me.
I agree that the idea of universal determinism (which is logically equivalent to TWOD's "predeterminism", although he doesn't seem to see that) is flawed (and utterly unwarrantable).
The problem, as I see it, is that the idea we have of causation is that it is rigid, which leads to this idea of inescapable universal determinism as per 'Laplace's Demon'. This is sometimes expressed as the notion that everything that has happened was rigidly determined (in other words, predetermined) at the Big Bang.
I also think that the libertarian idea of free will is logically incompatible with this rigid notion of predetermination. Free will as absence of coercion seems obviously compatible even with hard determinism, but then, under its aegis, as TGW argues we are really forced to do everything we do, real freedom is then an utter illusion and it then just becomes a question of "of what are we free and by what are we forced?" (as if it could really matter if that really were the situation).
I think the problem is that we have this rigid notion of causation on the one hand and on the other we have the idea that we do and believe things for reasons. The two ideas are utterly incompatible, we have no idea of how to map them onto one another. That is why I agree with Hanover that the idea of rigid determinism completely undermines the idea of doing or believing anything for any reasons. People who want to maintain a belief in both of these ideas simultaneously, wriggle and squirm every which way, but to no avail. Personally, I can see no reason not to believe in freedom, (I think it's actually practically impossible not to assume it) but I also think it is unanalyzable; I don't think it is possible to understand how it is related to, or compatible with, indeterminism; but it would seem that, somehow, it must be at least compatible with it.
I was drawing the distinction between this and "determinism" as it actually makes sense. Rather confusing "(pre)determinism" with determinism, I'm specifying a distinction which allows us to understand the incoherence of "(pre)determinism" while also grasping the deterministic (that there is only one set of actual events of the world) nature of the world. You are ignoring the language I'm using (I agree "(pre)determinism" is the same as the "determinism" you are talking about; that's part of my point) and strawmanning my argument here.
What is it then, in the version of compatibilism that I have sketched in my recent posts, that you find unsatisfying? Is it just a matter of it merely being counterintuitive? We both agree that the doctrine of universal determinism is reliant on a flawed conception of causality (and, I also think, correlatively, to a flawed conception of "universal" laws of nature). And this is the reason why I don't fully endorse compatibilism. But it nevertheless seems to me that the compatibilist account of freedom is partially right inasmuch as it dislodges a faulty assumption shared by hard incompatibilists and many libertarians alike, and this flawed assumption is the intuition that freedom requires that some strong form of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) be true (as I explained recently). The hard incompatibilists and (many) libertarians all are incompatibilists precisely because they believe there to be such a requirement for freedom and they take universal determinism to preclude this strong version of the PAP.
I also wonder why you believe there to be a difficulty in combining freedom with indeterminism (where "indeterminism" is understood simply as the negation of universal determinism). Is it troublesome that our actions wouldn't have sufficient causes? Such an alleged requirement (which may be derived from Donald Davidson's idea of the nomological character of causality) is something that you seem to be granting (as do I) as stemming from a flawed conception of causality. Hence, it doesn't seem to threaten freedom, in my view, because it isn't entailed by ordinary conceptions of the explanation of beliefs and actions that trace them back to intelligible causes -- episodes of practical or theoretical reasoning/deliberation -- that explain them but fall short from being sufficient causes (i.e. antecedent circumstances that necessitate their effects).
I don't understand what you mean by saying that determinism is a position that asserts that subsequent states are "defined by" prior states.
As I understand, it determinism is a position that asserts that subsequent states are necessitated by prior states.
Do you mean 'necessitated' when you use 'defined' or something else?
I've only read several comments on the first page. I just thought that I'd stop by to briefly state that I think that the above analogy does a good job at highlighting the rather obvious flaw in TGW's reasoning about life after childbirth.
If rocks didn't fall to the ground when dropped, the CAUSE of opening one's hand to drop rocks would not exist. The necessary only makes sense when the past and future are taken together. If there is only the prior state, we have only half the equation. I would exist letting go of rocks. But then what happens? No-one knows. It isn't even defined in the world. It could be anything. The rock might suddenly cease to be. It might fly up in to the sky. It might fall to the ground. It might float and start making sounds. My letting go of the rock necessitates nothing. Only when the specific EFFECT from the cause happens is the necessary(the actual) defined. For all instances of prior states possibility is maintained. States which follow could be one of any number of possible outcomes, regardless of what nessesary outcome (the actual) occurs.
Pierre, sorry about the delay responding. As it seems to me you have given an account, in your post 175, which differentiates between two different conceptions of "historical necessity" based on two different perspectives; the first and third person perspectives.
You have posited an ideal observer that can see every motivation of the agent and all the laws of physics and can thus predict precisely what will inevitably happen. And you have posited a less than ideal agent who cannot see her every motivation and presumably cannot see the laws of physics and so cannot predict what will inevitably happen. This is just like Spinoza's example of the stone rolling down the hill (or flying through the air?) which, if it could experience as we do would feel itself free in its rolling (or flying?).
What this comes down to is that we feel that we are free only by virtue of the limitations of our knowledge of the factors determining what we do. The determinist will say that we are thus not really free at all, that our freedom is an illusion. But the compatibilist seem to want to argue, not that we are really not free and merely feel we are, but that our genuine freedom is compatible with our being really determined. Now, I would agree that, within a scenario where we posit that we are really rigidly determined to do everything we do, that fact would be compatible with the fact that we would nonetheless be determined to think that we are free, and I think this would be the correct conclusion, but I don't think it is what the compatibilist really wants to argue.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think that genuine freedom can only be "combined" with indeterminism (insofar as we can think real freedom (as we conceive it) as being genuinely and generally logically compatible in principle with indeterminism and not with determinism; my point was only that we should not expect to be ever able to give an exhaustive or even satisfying account of how freedom is possible.
I think you are equivocating between what would be the case, as it is conceived, under rigid determinism and what would seem to us due to our limited knowledge of determining factors just as with the Spinoza example I gave above.
What would be the real case if rigid determinism were true would be the ontological or metaphysical reality and what we could know would be the epistemological 'reality for us'. This is just to say that your fact that 'present states do not define future states' is just a formulation, which is based on our necessary ignorance, of the illusion that present states do not determine (which would be to necessitate) future states . As I said to Pierre above, I don't think this is what compatibilists are wanting to argue.
Substitute the term "belief" with X and I agree with what you're saying in a very global way. Everything would be happenstance without determinism, including all your judgments and beliefs.
Determinism leads to happenstance as well.
This means that neither determinism nor indeterminism offers a meaningful way for free will to exist. The idea of free will is incoherent under both the determinist (whether a compatibilist or hard determinist) and the libertarian (indeterminate) account of free will. Either your decisions are based upon the pre-existing causes or they are based upon random events that are uncaused.
Free will is therefore a mystical sort of uncaused cause that expresses the decision of the decision maker without reference to how the decision was reached. It assumes that a variety of factors can be considered by the agent, but which should prevail and result in the ultimate decision are never determined and fully uncaused.
By the same token, if one were to accept this position, one is led to admitting a sort of solipsism, where nothing can really be known other than that you exist in some sort of confused state. And so I simply hold to the general idea that the acceptance of the existence of free will is a necessary precondition for interacting with the world and understanding reality at any level. It must be accepted superficially because any attempt to clarify it will lead to incoherence.
That's what I've been saying all along.
The compatbilist’s point is determinism has freedom. Rigid determinism’s error is not in arguing there will be only one outcome which occurs, but rather in suggesting that fact eliminates possibility and freedom. Only when the specific outcome occurs is the one set of events which occur defined. Here freedom is about far more than merely our limited knowledge. Since the outcome is absent, we lack not only the knowledge of what happens, but there is no necessity that any given outcome will occur. It isn’t defined in existence yet. The specific causal(deterministic) relationship hasn’t emerged. There is no effect. Not only can we not speak of any casual relationship, but it isn't expressed in existence yet. Here the past state hasn’t caused anything. Our freedom isn’t an illusion.
Spinoza is actually attacking libertarian free will with that example, not our freedom. The illusion he is talking about is the idea of us sitting outside casualty (determinism). If we knew what was going to happen in the future (knowledge of causes, what’s determined), we could tell what was going to happen in the future. There would no longer be any uncertainty about what would happen. Indeed, this uncertainty is entirely a feature of our lack of knowledge. There has always been one determined outcome which will occur. We just don’t realise it when we lack knowledge of what’s determined. What is at stake here is not freedom, but the uncertainty of future existing states.
Indeed, you are correct that the compatbilist’s is not saying freedom is merely an illusion. But you are also dismissing their argument by rejecting what they mean when they talk about freedom and determinism. Instead of addressing the argument they are making, you are prescribing what they are saying must mean the same as argument for “rigid determinism” and its understanding of freedom. You are stuck using the language the compatbilist is deliberately leaving behind because it is inadequate.
That's a false dichotomy. All events are actually a question of both pre-existing states and randomness. Each events follows what came before. Any future events is born form some pre-existing state. No state in our world is given without pre-existing states.
Yet, it is also true that any pre-existing state, on it's own, does not defined a future outcome (and what is caused). So if we take any pre-existing state on its own, the future outcome is, indeed, random and uncaused. Without the definition of the specific effect and so the casual relationship, it entirely undefined what a future outcome will be.
Consider a book on the table. If no events which follow it are defined, nothing points to what will follow the state. It could be anything. From this position, anything which follows it will be random and uncaused, for there is no rule or law sets what it will be. Why was this state followed by someone picking-up the book than not? Well, it just so happened a person who picked-up the book existed. There's no determining reason. It just so happened it was determined a person who picked up the book would be there rather than not. Underneath all the deterministic relationships, existence is arbitrary and random.
Most of what you have said here is unintelligible to me, but in any case you're wrong here Willow, even just on the grounds that your argument is based on thinking causation is an empirical matter; it is not, it is a metaphysical postulate.
You are making the same mistake most in philosophy have for centuries: trying to define questions of existing states by logic.
Correlations are observed between empirical states, causation is not. This is not controversial.
Without those empirical states, there is no cause or effect. "Causation" might be an expression of logic, the abstracted meaning of a cause and effect, but that doesn't make causes and effects logic. Causation isn't a "force" which acts on states of existence to produce causal relationships. It is a logical expression immanent in existing states, the respective states of cause and effect.
In this respect, causation is most certainly an empirical matter; it is states of the world which do the causing and are the produced effects. Without them, an instance of causation is not expressed in existence.
But, I have not said that cause and effect is merely logical; if it is real, then it is also ontolgical, metaphysical, even physical. But that cannot be determined.
If deterministic relations (cause and effect) are rigid, then that means the future is closed (metaphysically, that is, but not for us, because we have no way of knowing whether it is so).
Freedom would then be an illusion. If deterministic relations are 'loose' ( if indeterministic events affect the system indeterministically), then freedom may be ontologically real. We have no way of knowing one way or the other.
Indeed, but you are ignoring that it is states of existence which are the causes and effects. You keep proposing (pre)determinism on the ground a past state can necessitate will happen in the future. That is treating the cause as logic. It is to say, logically, there is only one outcome which follows from this given state, as if it did not need the presence of the effect to define what was caused. To say that when one rolls a six-sided die, the only potential outcome is one because that's all a roll of a die could produce.
We know the future is closed though, for only the set of events which happen will occur. This is a basic logical point. Any casual relationship, similarly, is known to be closed. If there is X cause and it has Y effect, no other options are open to happening in that instance. Events turning out any differently would would involve talking about a different instance of cause and effect. By identity we know that cause and effect is rigid. (and it is most certainly "closed" to us, for we have no way of avoiding the actual events of the future).
The reason you give for saying the future is closed is really no reason at all for that conclusion. And we certainly do not know that cause and effect are rigid, by " identity" or any other means.
The "ridgid" future is the actual outcome. You are currently thinking of the ridgid future as if it mutually exclusive with possibility. It's not. As you point out, the fact there is one inevitable outcome of actual events has no impact on possibility. In the case of any actual event, other outcomes are possible. A ridgid future does not eliminate possibility at at all.
So, indeed, the presence of a ridgid future does not leave us with one possible outcome, just an inevitable event which is one possible outcome of a set of possible events. This means DETERMNISM, the ridgid future, does NOT invove only one possible outcome.
The proponents of (pre)determinism got determinism wrong. They thought a ridgid future meant one possible outcome when it does not.
This is the compatiblist's point: possibility is there with the ridgid future of determinism. Most of philosophy has been using this incorhent ideas of determinism and possibility.
I still don't understand why you (I think correctly) agree that we have no good reason to think that causation is rigidly determinative, and yet continue to claim that the future is "rigid".
That's not quite my argument. I am not relying on an essential limitation of the knowledge that an agent would face regarding her own cognitive state and causal antecedents, such that in light of this limitation, she would be enabled to picture herself as free (i.e. not predetermined) while an external perspective would reveal her to be thus predetermined by circumstances external to her.
Although there indeed is such an essential limitation of the knowledge that an agent can have of her own internal "cognitive states", for obvious logical reasons, that is not the source of her freedom, on my view. Rather, my main point is that those unknown "internal states" are irrelevant to the identification of the cause of the agent's actions. The external observer who may have a better (or even, let us assume, a perfect) knowledge of the internal states of the agent (and antecedent circumstances) may thereby better, or even perfectly, predict her actions, but will not necessarily understand *why* those actions occurred. In order to understand why they occurred, the external observer, just like the agent herself, must rather adopt the practical perspective of the agent in order to disclose her reasons for acting thus and so, when she does. This perspective will show that the action was only externally constrained by whatever was historically necessary relative to the practical circumstances of the agent, at the time when she deliberated. This is the relevant perspective that must be adopted by both the agent herself and the external observer if they are to assess the action and its causes. But that is not all.
Most importantly, those historical necessities (including some "historical necessities" that the agent might ignore -- such as the bus being poised to arrive late at the bus stop where she is now waiting) only partially constrain the agent's action, since they leave open a whole range of possible options. The choice that the agent makes between those options can't be explained through reference to historical necessities because many of the antecedent "determinative circumstances" of her bodily motions actually make up, or enable, the cognitive functioning of the agent and aren't thus "external circumstances" that constrain her. They rather constitute enabling "circumstances" that make her up, as it were, as a cognitive agent. And those internal "circumstances" can't be understood as what they are except in reference to the agents rational abilities. They are thus only disclosable by means of the interpretation of the agent's reasons for acting.
That the agent acted for some reasons or other, therefore, doesn't show that her action was predetermined or unfree (and this is one main insight of compatibilism). It only shows that the agent's action was determined jointly by the necessary restrictions imposed on her by genuinely external circumstances (what I called historical necessities -- i.e. circumstances that she has no power to change even when apprised of them) in conjunction with the actualization of her power of practical reasoning. It is thus her, and not "external circumstances", that explain, and is the cause, of the unique choice that she makes between all the options that are historically possible, that is, open to her from the point of view of her practical deliberation perspective. This perspective can be disclosed not only to her (as it must be when she deliberates) but also to the "perfect" external observer.
The external observer may be very good at predicting what the agent will do, but that's not because the agent was predetermined by circumstances external to her, but rather because the observer was in a position to anticipate what it is that the agent would have good reasons to do -- or that she would merely believe to have good reasons to do -- and that she would thereby do precisely for those reasons.
Or else, the observer may be able to only predict the bodily motions that the agent would exhibit without understanding what actions those bodily motions constitute in context. In that case also, the observer can't construe the actions of the agent to have been predetermined, since the observer doesn't have a clue what the predetermined bodily motions of the agent amount to, qua intentional actions. So, in order to establish that a specific action was predetermined, one would have to know what action concept the bodily motion realizing it falls under, but this can't be deduced from the antecedent circumstances and the deterministic laws governing them qua material occurrences. The relevant action concept must rather be disclosed consistently with an intelligible interpretation of the agent's rational perspective. And thus the question under which action concept some predetermined bodily motions fall isn't settled by antecedent material "circumstances" and by deterministic laws just because those uninterpreted "bodily motions" might be thus predetermined.
If I have understood you, you are saying that freedom consists in acting, or believing, for reasons. It is the very determinative character of reasons that constitutes freedom.
What is "historically necessary" for an agent is, then, determined by antecedent worldly events; like the bus might be predetermined to be late. So it will be historically determined that the agent will not catch the bus. But then, she might do any of a range of other things.
However it is a strong physicalist claim that whatever she does will ultimately be determined by neural activity. The questions then become: is she determined by the micro-physical brain activity or is she determined by her reasons? Are the reasons only a post hoc rationalization of her actions or is there a genuine 'top down' effect; a kind of 'formal causation' that is itself not reducible to micro-physical determination?
Can it make sense to say that she is determined by both, and if we want to say that, how do we understand the relationship between causal and rational determination?
It doesn't seem logically coherent to claim that any kind of genuinely efficacious formal rational determination of action or belief could be compatible with a rigid micro-physical determinism, and that is why I said that it could only be compatible with micro-physical indeterminism, because that would allow for genuine novelty and creativity.
Actually, I never thought about defining freedom in that way. I merely accept the idea that freedom requires the ability to have done otherwise in the circumstances in which one acted (i.e. I am accepting the weak version of the PAP). And I am questioning the strange and -- I would argue, incoherent -- construal that the determinist makes of the notion of an agent's "circumstances" such that anything that occurs within her own body constitutes for her such "circumstances". This confused notion gives rise to what I have termed the strong version of the PAP, which I reject. It depends on one conceiving the agent as something essentially disembodied. This strong version of the PAP often seems to be tacitly endorsed by both the compatibilists and the incompatibilists in a large portion of the literature on free will (with many notable exceptions).
Yes, what it is historically necessary that an agent will do is relative to the circumstances of her action. It consists in what it is, in those circumstances, that it is not up to her to prevent anymore (or ever). Hence, the range of what it is historically necessary that will occur increases over time (from my perspective, say) since the range of the possibilities for action that are open to me diminishes over time (in other words: I settle things over time); and this range isn't the same for me as it is for you, since different persons don't have the same powers and opportunities.
Yes. It is a reductionist claim that goes beyond the claim that she is materially constituted and that her bodily motions (as they may be described in purely physical terms) are governed by the laws of physics. The reductionist claim goes further than this claim about material constitution since it also presupposes that actions, in a sense, supervene on bodily motions in such a way that whatever determines bodily motions also determines actions.
At this stage in the argument, I think the compatibilist will rightly point out that the question sets up a false dichotomy. The microphysical brain activity settles what bodily motions will occur and the person deliberates and choses what she will do. The former may be part of a story about what it is about the person's neurophysiology that enables her powers to do the latter (i.e. deliberate and act).
I think downward causation is ubiquitous in nature, and it isn't mysterious. Pretty much all irreducible explanations of anything that occurs in nature, and that refer to the powers or dispositions of things, are of that kind. The availability of those explanations, as genuine explanations and not mere "rationalizations", is what is contested by reductionists and eliminative materialists. (To be fair, the reductionist may grant that there are such genuine explanations at the higher level, but question their independence from explanations of what occurs at the lower level).
For sure, explanations of the actions of human agents are, for the most part, rationalizing explanations. But they are not mere (i.e. illusory or false) rationalizations but rather genuine explanations as to why someone acted in one way rather than another way. For instance, I didn't go to the supermarket because I was informed that it was closed. This genuinely explains why I didn't go. It would have been irrational for me to go (because I need to buy some milk, say) while I knew that it was closed. A close examination of what went on in my brain could explain how I was able to reason that it was useless for me to go, but whatever this inquiry discloses doesn't compete with the rational explanation of my action. It merely changes the subject of the inquiry.
Rational determination is a species of causation. It explains things that occur at a higher, more relevant, level of the activity of human beings. It is an inquiry that is concerned more about their intelligible actions rather than being concerned about the etiology of their "raw" bodily motions, or about the physiological enablements of their cognitive abilities. Those three different modes of inquiry are possible, and compatible, but they have three different topics.
This seems incoherent only if you endorse (maybe inchoately) a contentious metaphysical doctrine such as eliminative materialism and can't allow for there being consistent explanations of what happens at different levels of organization/description. Those may be explantations that have different topics altogether. Though, as is the case for the neurophysiological explanations of our cognitive powers (which need not be reductive explanations), some constraints on our abilities are thereby disclosed -- as are explanations of some of our irrational actions, or habitual cognitive biases -- but they are constraints that fall short from determining our actions, in most cases, or so am I prepared to argue.
Where the (pre)determinist goes wrong is not in suggesting causality is ridgidly determative, but rather in arguing such causality constitutes the absence of freedom.
You are still missing the point. Here the compatiblist's is attacking the idea a ridgid future entails the absence of freedom.The point is the common split between determinism and indetermism is build on a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom and causality. They never been opposed. Freedom is always present because no future state is defined prior to itself. All future states follow on from past ones in the ridgid set of actual states. Freedom and determinism are both necessary.
The determinist and the indeterminist both agree that only one outcome will be realized. The determinist claims, in addition to this, that there is only one possible outcome that can (and therefore will) be realized consistently with the present state of the universe and natural laws. So, what does it add to the account of the indeterminist to say that the future is "rigid"? She agrees with the determinist that only one future will be realized. So. in what sense is the future that will be realized "rigid" if one isn't a determinist? The actual future that will be realized is "rigid" in relation to what?