Are we doomed to discuss "free will" and "determinism" forever?
"Free Will" and "Determinism" are perennial favorites in philosophical discussions. I end up wondering, again and again:
"What are discussions of free will really about?" I can not simultaneously be subject and object in an analysis of my own behavior and thoughts (which is the basis for thinking about free will and determinism). I can't observe anyone else's mind. I am stuck with this problem and I believe you are too.
The material universe which would allegedly determine everything is infinitely more complicated than we can grasp. We can't obtain enough information, even if we could process it all, to show how the long history of the physical universe has determined that I will write these words.
In the close-up and very short term I can observe determination or free will at work. Blood sugar drops and one then feels hunger. In the kitchen there are 4 foods: a can of tomatoes, an apple, a donut, and a raw pork chop. Is the food that I ate the result of an exercise in free will? Or a mechanical choice-behavior driven by material factors? You would mechanically choose the donut and be satisfied. (What actually happened was that I freely willed to make a sandwich of the donut and raw pork chop. Later I became violently ill.)
In a longer-term context, Christians theologians and believers have been nattering on about free will for 2000 years (figuratively, if not literally). "Free will" is usually believed to figure into "salvation" so it is a hot issue for believers worried about "eternal damnation". Had history worked out somewhat differently, would the discussion of free will been over millennia ago?
OR, is "free will" a perennial discussion BECAUSE we can not separate our minds into distinct "subject" and "object", preventing us from obtaining a clear view of what causes our own thoughts and behaviors? In other words, discussions of free will are determined by the limited capacities of our minds?
"What are discussions of free will really about?" I can not simultaneously be subject and object in an analysis of my own behavior and thoughts (which is the basis for thinking about free will and determinism). I can't observe anyone else's mind. I am stuck with this problem and I believe you are too.
The material universe which would allegedly determine everything is infinitely more complicated than we can grasp. We can't obtain enough information, even if we could process it all, to show how the long history of the physical universe has determined that I will write these words.
In the close-up and very short term I can observe determination or free will at work. Blood sugar drops and one then feels hunger. In the kitchen there are 4 foods: a can of tomatoes, an apple, a donut, and a raw pork chop. Is the food that I ate the result of an exercise in free will? Or a mechanical choice-behavior driven by material factors? You would mechanically choose the donut and be satisfied. (What actually happened was that I freely willed to make a sandwich of the donut and raw pork chop. Later I became violently ill.)
In a longer-term context, Christians theologians and believers have been nattering on about free will for 2000 years (figuratively, if not literally). "Free will" is usually believed to figure into "salvation" so it is a hot issue for believers worried about "eternal damnation". Had history worked out somewhat differently, would the discussion of free will been over millennia ago?
OR, is "free will" a perennial discussion BECAUSE we can not separate our minds into distinct "subject" and "object", preventing us from obtaining a clear view of what causes our own thoughts and behaviors? In other words, discussions of free will are determined by the limited capacities of our minds?
Comments (91)
And, I meant and.
If enough sufficiently predictive science had accumulated 2000 years ago, we might have already done away with the notion of free will. Determinism could remain as a possibility (it's not an either or dilemma) but it might be riddled with quantum caveats, such as epistemic limitations based around our ability to measure systems and our ability to calculate/simulate outcomes, or inherent indeterminacy among specific attributes of some quantum particles...
Christianity can eventually get there though. In fact I think that Jesus' message of infinite forgiveness is best supported by the tentative assumption of determinism in the first place (when every action everyone does is determined by physical causes instead of some ethereal and inherently blameworthy component of their being, it makes no sense to hold individuals ultimately morally accountable for their actions). It is very easy to forgive someone when you recognize the external and uncontrollable causes which contributed to their behavior (note: forgiveness is different from pretending no crime was ever committed; we can forgive transgressors but we still need a justice and rehabilitation system for our own protection), and while we must still hold individuals accountable for their own actions to some degree for pragmatic reasons, the idea that bad people deserve to suffer becomes incoherent. It clearly delineates revenge as immoral, and permits the moral forgiveness of anyone for any reason (though it does not permit absolution from pragmatic reprisal). Rehabilitation becomes the only sensical approach to punishment where affordable, and all other moral intuitions remain unaffected by the presumption of determinism.
The idea of free will as a component of the soul is why Christians have such a hard time learning to stop worrying and love determinism, but with some slight finagling it can be made compatible (god has a pre-determined plan/works through determinism, and your soul can be influenced by external causes, and therefore can be forgiven for its moral faults). Then, we just have to say "hell" was a bluff all along, and that god only threatened us with hell because he is a wise king of kings, or whatever, knowing that it was exactly what we needed to find our way.
So long as people think this life is somehow a test of moral character, the free-will concept is required to underpin it.
So long as science continues to yield its fiendishly (almost satanic) high level of reliability and utility in describing causal relationships, determinism to some degree will be a necessary consideration.
I have read nothing to date that undermines his position. Debate upon the subject merely illustrates a lack of understanding or familiarity with Schopenhauer.
Unfortunately for Philosophy it is often the vehicle used express and protect preconception, rather than the means to arrive at the truth of conception.
Philosophy is a whore and will sleep with anyone.
M
I honestly think that many of them are driven by what Eric Fromm called 'the fear of freedom'. The freedom that is offered by the modern conception of the individual is actually scary, because, on the one hand, many traditional roles and social structures have been stripped away, and at the same time we're told we can 'be whatever we want'. And that can be quite a frightening responsibility. So I think a large part of the attraction of determinism, is the idea that we really aren't free in that way; we can hand it off to biology, genetics, or whatever.
Yes... :)
My Joke:
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Since Libet's findings started to trickle out ---
there was plenty of nonsense about our Free Will... :)
What???!!! My Free Will is useless???!!! I'll give it up... :gasp:
Here, my friend, take it and tell me what to do... :worry:
Now, how could I give up something I do/did not have... :cool:
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I have started this joke on 22 May 2011. It offers several scenarios to prove that we have Free Will. They are so simple that experiments can be conducted in a cafe, for example... :)
Deterministic [cause & effect driven universe] paradigm is now in progress of being replaced by [agents driven universe] paradigm... :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system ... :)
Enjoy the day, :cool:
Well, perennials keep coming up. As opposed to annuals which you have to plant again.
Unlike, say, Kierkegaard's esthetics or structural realism, "free will" is the sort of subject where most people feel they can jump in without any learning or reflection. Most free will discussions are therefore trivial and confused, with people talking past each other, without even stopping to think about what free will is, or why they think of it the way they do. And I am speaking as someone whose attitude towards this subject has changed - an all too rare occurrence - from learning more about it.
It would go a long way towards making such discussions more worthwhile if participants were at least somewhat aware of the history of the subject; its relation to freedom, voluntary action, agency, autonomy, responsibility, control, determination; the role it plays in law, ethics, psychology, sociology. There is, of course, massive literature on free will in philosophy, including experimental philosophy (yes, that's a thing).
:up:
Because 'determination' is not singular, consistent, or unidirectional, and we seem to have some degree of freedom (so that we can make voluntary choices with executive agency), we can be held responsible--at least to a significant extent.
We can do whatever we want to do (provided armed guards aren't standing in the way), but we can't choose to want it.
So it is that exempting an adult from the responsibility for actions taken with personal agency is a very big deal. That the innocent by reason of insanity (an odd phase) are few in number is a measure of how much we don't want to let people off the hook of responsibility.
I like to go to the local farmers market. All the behavioral cues are there: "fresh", "locally produced", "Organic" (maybe), "farm to table in one step", and so on. There's is a festive community atmosphere (unless it's cold and raining). Quite often a small band will play for publicity. I may think I am freely willing to bike over there and buy food but, in fact, I am being driven to this market by a set of cultural beliefs and habits of long standing. Beliefs are deterministic, and I did not freely choose most of the beliefs I have. Preferences, also never deliberately put together, are also deterministic. Habits are deterministic. Lots of personal and social features drive our behavior.
Very true. Yet, to me at least, the only meaningful distinction is between a Humean Compatibilism and that of Determinism. If determinism, than all agency is an illusion—as is all responsibility. If compatibilism (again, as per Hume and not as a semantically altered version of what yet remains a metaphysical determinism; the latter being our typical modern understanding of the term) then—though we can never choose the alternatives we choose between at any given instance of choice, nor choose the very impetus to make choices—the very act of choosing between the given alternatives at any given time will ontologically be dependent on nothing else but the chooser/agency in a metaphysical self-caused manner—i.e. via a metaphysically valid freewill (which is not the same as indeterminsim when interpreted as ontological randomness due to lack of causal determinism)—thereby leading to a noncontradictory justification for responsibility in the choices one does make ... and to the ontic reality of agency.
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Edit for greater completion of argument: Freewill does get complicated by influence(s). Tell someone they need to do X to not go to hell but instead be welcomed into heaven and you will have influenced their choice, for example. But, under compatibilism, their choice will yet remain their responsibility—together with their choice to believe these notions of hell and heaven to be BS and the person to be a malevolent manipulator, for example. Influence upon some choice does not amount to a causal determination of what will be chosen. Alternatively: holding a gun to someone's head will strongly influence their choice, but it will not causally determine it.
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But for the determinist, of course we’ve been predetermined to endlessly debate free will v. determinism; agency is an illusion, we’re all predetermined automata, and anything we do, believe, will, etc. is part of a fully deterministic whole. Talking about “living within an illusion” philosophies … this is it.
I agree. To the people who promote free will, I would keep asking 'Why?' like my determined 2-year-old does. I think they would quickly determine that behind every will, there was a preceding way...
Answers to stubborn "why?" questions need not lead to a regress when the events at issues are acts of the will or of the intellect such as the intentional actions or beliefs of a rational agent. When you ask someone why it is that she believes something to be true, she can give you her reasons for believing it. Those reasons may appeal to empirical facts. You may then ask why those empirical facts obtain, or how did it come about that she has the capacity to know them. But those followup "why?" question then would have shifted to a different topic and hence wouldn't lead to a troublesome regress. It would simply point back to to questioner's inexhaustible curiosity (or obnoxiousness).
And likewise in the case of actions: the agent may provide the reasons why she thought her action to be the right thing to do. She needs not be thereby straddled with the burden of explaining what justifies the premises which those reasons rest upon (or explain why the circumstances obtained in which this was the right thing to do). The burden may rather shift to the enquirer to explain why, according to her, the proposed reasons might be bad.
“Augustine’s fateful turn reoriented Western Latin culture away from the Platonic intellectualist conception of human moral nature as either clear-sighted or confused and benighted (and in either case within the natural order) and toward the idea of a human person as fundamentally moral or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, obedient or sinful through choice of action rather than through understanding and character. In the Platonic tradition, by contrast, the body’s corruption was responsible for the mind being morally clouded; hence moral ignorance—not active sin but the Greek hamartia, “missing the mark”—was the result of the problems inherent in embodiment.
Aristotle’s view was a nuance on the Platonic: his was an account of moral action as stemming from moral character. In this theory, early socialization shaped desire, enabling a person to have the capacity for moral discernment and understanding, as well as deliberative reasoning. Augustine, in contrast, explicitly rejected the body as the source of ignorance or error, neither of which, in any case, could in his view ever account for sin. .... Augustine’s reduction of all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will is a new theory of moral psychology. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in worldview—initiating a decisive break with the past by focusing on the freedom of the will and a concomitant demotion of nature. It is this worldview that we have inherited.” (Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself).
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"The passage from the ancient world to modernity coincides with the passage from potential to will, from the predominance of the modal verb “I can” to that of the modal verb “I will” (and later, “I must”). Ancient human beings were people who “can,” who conceive their thought and their action in the dimension of potential; Christian human beings are beings that will. [For the ancients] ... it is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. To the preeminence accorded by modern people to the will, there corresponds in the ancient world a primacy of potential: human beings are not responsible for their actions because they have willed them; they answer for them because they were able to carry them out ...
We are so accustomed to refer the problem of action to the will that it is not easy for us to accept that the classical world thought it, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of knowledge. ... The primacy of will over potential is brought about in Christian theology through a threefold strategy. It is a question, first of all, of separating potential from what it can do, of isolating it from the act; in the second place, of denaturalizing potential, of separating it from the necessity of its own nature and linking it to contingency and free choice; and finally, of limiting its unconditioned and totipotent nature in order to render it governable through an act of will... The Christian conception of the will, which modern ethics will inherit, frequently without benefit of an inventory, is a peremptory absolutization of the modal verb “I will,” which, separated from every possible content and all possible meaning, is used in vain: “I will to will"." (Giorgio Agamben, Karmen).
You miss the point. Sure, you have the theistic willing agent coming eventually into hard opposition with scientific determinism during the Enlightenment. But Aristotelian metaphysics already took a position that was more complex than this simple dualism.
Simple material determinism was itself already wrong for Aristotle. He argued for the reality of chance or tychism as well. And then still there had to be the Tertium Quid - the insertion of agency into the story. Which today we would understand in terms of semiotics or embodied modelling relations - the information dimension.
So there was something to be said way back then. But also the right kind of answer was on offer, if you are charitably inclined.
Alas, the Augustinian predicament doesn't merely afflict significant parts of the philosophical scholarship about the conundra of freedom, determinism and responsibility. Many of the same issues that arise from problematizing the relations of the spirit to the flesh also arise from problematizing the relations of the mind to the material body. This is of course prevalent in the social and cognitive sciences. The latter issues stem from the modern shift from a metaphysics of natural substances, their powers, and the natural (and/or social-conventional) circumstances of exercise of those powers, to a metaphysics of universal laws and the events that are subsumed under those laws. Fortunately, some of the scholarship about the topics surrounding "free will" aren't beholden to the later reductionist view. They are rather committed to explaining how the alleged problems in accounting for agency and responsibility in a natural world tend to dissolve when our attempts at naturalizing those familiar phenomena appeal to rather more relaxed (embodied and situated) Aristotelian conceptions of nature, life, rational agency and causation.
Yeah, I'm aware of those moves, but I'm still of the mind that 'free will' has been so compromised by hundreds of years of theological poison that it needs to be dropped altogether. It's not 'freedom' I have a problem with, so much as 'the will'. It's that connection - unnecessary, overdetermined and intellectually disabling - that is what needs to be broken forever. A good dose of Spinoza - superior by far to Aristotle on this issue - would do everyone alot of good.
My main point was that the original sin that you ascribe to theology has been co-opted by modern (late-seventeenth to eighteenth century) metaphysics and the modern scientific conception of the natural world that co-evolved with this metaphysical shift. So, merely scrubbing dubious notions (such as the purely mental acts of 'volitions') because they are tainted by their theological origins will leave the roots that currently nourish the philosophical confusions on the topics surrounding rational agency and personal responsibility firmly in place.
I don't doubt this, but I think a good first step is in putting to question the very vocabulary involved: freedom, but no 'will' please. This I think would have at least a primarily disorienting effect, which, given just how entrenched the idea is, would have value in itself.
Yep. Surely it is Newtonian determinism that sustains the now neurological-level debate?
Science's mechanical view of nature is what has been at issue. Freewill just becomes the most convincing argument against the modern understanding of the mind being a product of machine-like information processes.
Quoting StreetlightX
Spinoza is pretty irrelevant to dealing with the causal level here issue. Aristotelian biology sorts it.
:lol:
I find it useful to speak of the will and of the intellect as distinct faculties albeit ones that a rational animal can only possess conjointly. Those faculties are sets of powers, to decide what to do (and do it), in one case, and to judge how things are, in the other case. It's useful for engaging with Aristotelian and Kantian scholarship about theoretical and practical reasoning. My own view on "the will" is a mishmash of Kantian and Aristotelian notions(*), so I'm using the word "will" to distinguish the power (the will, proper) from its acts or exercises (acts of the will). Acts of the will are paradigmatically intentional actions and, at the same time, expressions of practical knowledge. However, bits of practical knowledge can remain unexpressed, when the time to act hasn't come. In that case, an act of the will can take the form of an (as of yet) unrealized intention.
(*) It owes much to Anscombe and Wittgenstein too.
Yes, I think the third-rate literature that @StreetlightX deplores, because of the confused ways in which it problematizes 'the freedom of the will', can be viewed as a reductio of the attempt to account for agency and practical knowledge from a third-personal disengaged view on the material process of decision making. If agency rather is viewed as a natural (and social) phenomenon that can only be disclosed as intelligible from an empathetic and engaged participatory perspective, then there is nothing problematic in asserting that the will is a power that is being freely exercised by mature and responsible fellow rational agents.
Indeed. We are neither meat machines nor ensouled creations but the third thing of socially-constructed and biologically embodied agents.
I was referring to the idea that 'free will' was in any way at stake in philosophies before its contrived invention by the modern Church fathers. Simply a historical point, with the OP in mind: i.e. that 'free will' is a perineal problem is a bunch of historically myopic trash. That said, I can take embodiment and the rest of it; but the will can go into unintelligible hell where it belongs.
I was optimistic that this discussion could be ended by my joke... :)
Obviously, I was wrong. We are doomed to endlessly debate this issue, for we can not/will not accept the solution... :)
Enjoy the day, :cool:
Not if it doesn't get disproven, in which case it'd be false. That statement could be done about any belief and is thus meaningless.
I can't see why not. It seems clear to me I can observe myself and my observations of myself. It doesn't seem to give any answers though.
Quoting Bitter Crank
We don't need to. Determinism would be proven by observing the space of just one human brain for a second and documenting the causal relationships between each state.
You don't know what you're capable of until you do it, a whole new domain of understanding becomes available to you. Just like with individual experiences. Not having had some food, you really can't enter the discussion about it. Or being at war and having killed someone, or given birth -- but emotions are different than specific experiences, they, like unlock a new dimension of color, or flavor to all experience, and introduce one to new levels and domains of discourse, that without, pass one right by. The sound of the celestial realm is silence.
Related to will, there is being stuck in one's ways. Perfect contrition, or the repenting of those ways, the remorse and hatred of them is necessary to change, and a real regeneration, or rebirth follows. With the love of God, and for the sake of the good alone, this is supposed to bring about the complete destruction of those ways, but imperfect contrition or attrition weakens their hold, or reduces the cravings. In the bottom level of the Buddhist hell, one is entirely slave to craving, and is depicted as having a tiny mouth and huge gut, and just can't get enough.
This is why it is said that one cannot really change, or is themselves helpless without the grace of God that renews the will, or the revaluation causes a reorientation towards better ways, to the best of one's knowledge known through their conscience.
Though, I to reject the notion that this has nothing to do with the body, and much prefer the ancient notion of the "I can" rather than "I will", but the significance of why we can know the right things, and not do them is due to literal attachment, and hardening... which, can be worked out in gradually ways, over time, but can also be shattered in an instant.
What's your problem with free will anyway?
I was inspired there by your post on Augustine's influence. Really informative, I didn't know of those distinctions, and I learned, and agree with your criticism of it.
Old bad ideas die off and newer equally bad ideas take hold. What is becoming fashionable nowadays is to claim that autonomous rational agency and responsibility (either personal or collective, moral or political) are illusions that are being dispelled by cognitive sciences and that unconscious neurophysiological processes are the genuine sources of our choices and actions. It is being alleged that we don't know what our motives are and only science will enlighten us on the best way to pull our own strings. That seems to me more incoherent, and possibly more dangerous, than the rather innocuous religious accounts and myths that rather clumsily attempt to explain how or why animals such as us can be rationally and morally autonomous.
I think there's a deep continuity between both though: the turn to agency and responsibility as illusory are essentially direct responses to the failure of 'free will' as a sensical philosophical position; yet the latter still governs the vocabulary and the grammar of the former, each playing on the same rotten terrain even as they negate each other. Personally, I see the issues stemming from an inadequate theorisation of the subject on both accounts: one offering the thinnest, most emaciated notion of what it is to be a subject ever proffered, the other, denying subjectivity altogether on account of the theoretical poverty of the former. The only way forward is out, to reject even the terms of the debate, let alone the answers to it.
Also, there's a whole thing to be said about how freedom-as-liberal-choice feeds right into a liberal-capitalist worldview which is all too happy to keep such a debate running for as long as possible, all the better to deprive people from having even the barest of vocabulary to speak about questions of genuine human freedom. But that's another story.
I agree that the thinness of the disembodied subject, or of the rational soul, is a big part of the problem. On the Aristotelian conception of agency, the subject-agent is a rational animal, essentially embodied and encultured. Since the thorny questions of rational, moral and political autonomy, determinism and responsibility, can be discussed in the context where the thickness of the subject is acknowledged, I don't think those discussions are fruitless. Also, one must grant to the proponent of a crude scientism (e.g. Cartesian materialist), or of a naïve Cartesian dualism, some of her terms if only to be able to draw out the problems inherent to her view and then propose better terms, or better uses of those terms. (Oftentimes, it seems to me, it's not the terms themselves that are at fault but rather semi-technical uses made of them that import philosophical prejudice into the discourse and obscures the nuances of their ordinary usages).
Agamben, whom I cited earlier on his work on the will, attributes to Aristotle the opening of the way to 'free will' precisely on account of his compromised take on potentiality and act (this follows after a discussion of the specifics of the problem): "Aristotle could not have in mind anything like the free will of the moderns—for this the words were lacking for him—but it is significant that, to cure in some way the split that he himself had introduced into potential, he had to introduce into the latter a “sovereign principle” that decides between doing and not doing, potential and impotential (or potential not to)". But this is straying from the topic.
We are limited by what we know in science about the world and universe. The essential problem is at it's core about quantum mechanics and how it's seemingly randomizing a core foundation of the universe. Until we have a unification theory, it's a problem not just in philosophy but in science.
However I think there are a few key premisses that needs to be taken into account. First, the universe, even though we don't know everything yet, seems to act out of probability. The smaller the scale, the more probabilities are possible, the larger things get, the more determined the probability gets. Humans, while seemingly small compared to the universe, are in fact quite large things in the universe in comparison to the scale in which probability gets hard to determine. If we exist on a scale where we could, with enough data on our hand, determine the full consequences of the a number of causes, meaning, with enough data to predict choices taken by an individual, we can see down a deterministic path and predict every choice. Even though it's possible that things gets deviant from that path, the probability is so low that it would only be an academic footnote that a free choice would be possible, even on paper. That free choice is as possible as us using seemingly impossible quantum physics on a larger scale, like for example, walk through a wall. Walking through a wall is indeed possible in quantum physics, but the improbability of it is so high on larger scales, that it's not even a calculable measurement of probability. It's like the different definitions of "infinite" in physics, they do not really apply to the real world.
In conclusion, the probability to have free will is so low that it's pretty much unable to be a calculated as a viable point of measure. We are therefor slaves under determinism and do not have free will.
There are plenty of scientists who agree that we do not have free will, both in psychology and neuroscience. The data we have, points to all decisions being formed by other things, genetics, experience, direct causes, chemistry etc. The combined consequence of all of these creates an illusion of free will, but they are all part of determining the exact choice that's being made. The best example is the traditional one about you wanting something, like ice-cream. Did you choose to eat chocolate ice-cream because you chose to by free will, or because it was a hot day, combined with you establishing a taste for chocolate ice-cream at the age of 4, combined with someone mentioning chocolate, a commercial showing someone eating ice-cream, a temporary dehydration that made you feel warmer than usual, a convenient distance to an ice-cream bar, the right exchange in your pocket and so on. It's easy to say that you chose to eat chocolate ice-cream, or maybe you chose not to. But none of those choices are free of deterministic causes, even the choice to not eat chocolate ice-cream.
Another example is how our gut bacteria adjust our psychology. How if you transplant gut bacteria between two people, a noticeable shift in their psychology can be observed. So, are your gut bacteria part of your free will or another source that helps create the illusion of free will? Most would not give credit to bacteria for being part of their free will, yet it affects many of our choices.
I think that by most accounts, it's already pretty much proven by deductive methods and science that humans do not have free will. But I think the discourse continues on the subject because there are philosophers who A) mix in spiritualism and abandon deductive arguments and rational thinking processes and B) Have problems distancing their own sense of self to that of the rational argument.
In the sense of B, you are right, that our mental process is in our way of actually experiencing the conclusion of determinism as the truth. But just as with quantum mechanics, gravity, electro-magnetism, we do not experience or see any of these things, yet, we know they exist. Same goes for determinism, we pretty much know it's the truth, yet I think it's in a way the same kind of denial as with those back with Newton who couldn't accept his ideas about gravity or those who didn't accept the conclusions by Einstein because it didn't fit their narrative or something they could "see". The ones who argue for free will seems to either not know all the facts, lack in their deductive reasoning around the subject and be generally too bound to their subjective sense of self, without the ability to detach from their humanity when doing the argument.
I have been pondering this subject ever since I started my interest in philosophy, but I have yet to see any viable arguments in favor of free will and the more I've discussed this subject, the less reasonable the arguments in favor of free will gets.
I agree. Accepting determinism is difficult because it lessens the sense of self we strive so hard to create and sustain.
This is kind of Nietzscheque in that it's drawing a captivating narrative out of a chunk of facts that can be just as easily used to draw the opposite conclusion.
Cool.
This is kinda Frankeque in that it's a random unsubstantiated assertion.
Cool.
I'm doing what I can to separate the wheat from the shaff. @Aaron R attempted this also in a thread on scholasticism a little while ago. Any kind of a "return" to Aristotle, to Kant, to Frege, to Sellars, or to anyone else, must be done with discernement, of course. But it's not just a question of tactics. @Christoffer offered a defense of hard determinism above. While it concludes that free will is an illusion and that determinism is true, his post can be glossed, it seems to me, as an argument that the Sellarsian 'manifest image' is false while the 'scientific image' is true.
I don't think most contemporary compatibilist attempts to reconcile the two images are successful, but I agree with you that the main impediment to the attempted reconciliation is a thin disembodied conception of the self. Maybe some elements of this thin conception already were inchoate in Aristotle and other pre-modern religious thinkers, as you argue. But they have been greatly buttressed and entrenched into contemporary scientifically informed thinking as a result a the movement away from Aristotle, and from scholasticism, which has been in part propelled by the rise of the mechanistic conception of the natural world. In a way, as a result of this, the wheat has been buried under the shaff.
For two reasons; most likely hard determinism is true and second, it doesn't matter since it won't really change the human condition.
However, I think that that the most important aspects of hard determinism is how it affects ideas in ethics. If our actions are a sum of conditions and causes, then crimes does not come out of any abstract concepts of evil, but a quantifiable sum of causes. Crime and punishment then becomes quite absurd and the punishment part very obvious in an eye for an eye concept rather than actually preventing or changing that crime happens in the first place.
Free will and determinism has the most impact on these ethical questions and personally I'm in on the side that tries to convince about how determinism is true and why we need to move away from primal abstract ideas about crime and punishment that only focus on our desire to hurt the one's who hurt others, not prevent or reduce crime in society.
Crime and punishment are functions of the law, and the law is one of the things we do.. And what we do, outside of philosophy classrooms and forums and other such places, has nothing to do with free will or determinism. We ignore them by living. We do things, with no consideration to determinism.
True in the sense that we live without consideration of the argument, but crime and punishment are not functions of the law, since the law is based on the ideas found in philosophy. The entire section of ethics is the reason we even have the laws we have. Philosophy outside of classrooms is the only place in which philosophy has any meaning. The deterministic perspective is important when looking at the reason crimes exist. Most of the time I see people unable to see past their own emotions. There's some famous quote I can't find right now about a politician who tried to apply much more effective methods to handle crime and the question he got was "but what if it was your child, wouldn't you want to punish the offender" and he replied that if it was his child, he would like to kill the offender, but that it's the very reason we need methods outside of our emotional need for punishment and that it's therefor the point that it's not up to him.
Crime and punishment as it is now, is flawed and based on emotional reactions to crimes, we want punishment, we want an eye for an eye, because it's based on the instincts we have. But through determinism we can see how crimes do not exist in a vacuum, that there are reasons for every such choice and that those reasons need to be understood in order to prevent crime. The ethics of this world right now is not based on preventing crime, it's based on punishment, it's based on us silently accepting that crimes exist in order to punish.
If we had methods to prevent crimes in the first place, would we want to use them? Everyone would say yes, but no one is acting according to that agreement. This is because people still believe in the idea of free will, that a choice is made and we have no control over the choices people make. But if a person is through deterministic cause and effects, put on a path to make a criminal choice and we could interrupt that deterministic line of events to steer that person away from the consequences of it, we should. If arguments points out that the world and us humans are puppets of determinism and that any argument in favour of free will seem to fail, I think the answer is quite clear of what we actually need to do about crimes and punishment.
Right now, people doesn't even seem to care for improvements to how we handle crime and punishment. They seem to subconsciously want crimes to continue, because punishment is satisfying emotionally. It's like we handle characters in a story, they follow their wants but in the end they get what they need. Most such characters are blind to what they need, they only see their wants, in a tragedy, they get what they want and loose what they need, in a good ending, they get what they need and give up what they want. That's an important lesson for most things about the human condition, which is why stories are told like this and has been for thousands of years. Yet, the power of stories doesn't seem to change people's wants into needs. Society needs a better handling of crime and punishment, but we want to continue punishing criminals. It's an addiction and we live in a tragedy.
I've been practicing law for longer than I care to say, and have given it some thought. The law as a functioning system has little to do with ethics as philosophy, though practical ethics plays a larger role. I think it's a serious error to conflate law with morality.
But laws and morality didn't appear out of nothing. We invented morality through the need for the group to survive. Killing other people to take their belongings in order for yourself to survive was destroying the group and then the group dies from within. Morals were invented based on the well-being of the group and the self, but as society grew more complex, morals grew more complex. When society grew so large it needed a government, that it needed a system to keep society in order, it invented moral guidelines that formed into laws. Those laws has for thousands of years evolved to what we have today. Philosophy has always been there to form what laws we have, what rights people have in a society and what limits of power the authorities have. Nothing of this exists independent of each other. Philosophical ethics are not law, morals aren't law, but they exist in conjunction with each other. Ethics play a major role in forming what laws we have, how we view morality and morality forms what laws we have. Some nations have laws against homosexuals, does that mean those laws didn't come from the moral teachings of religion that governs the ideas about homosexuality? Does that not mean that 19th and 20th century philosophy, which opposed religious moral ethics and formed new ideas about how to view the morals that governs the laws that are formed, keep evolving which laws that we use in our legal system of our current society?
The laws we have today did not appear out of nothing. Centuries, thousands of years of philosophy on morals and ethics have formed the laws we have today and it is still being formed by the philosophy of ethics. Laws aren't formed by the legal system, they are formed by the ideologies and ideas of the society in which they exist. How else do our legal system evolve? How else does laws change? The dialectic of ethics forms the laws we have, the legal system only represent the result of reasonable arguments. Unreasonable arguments form societies not worth living in.
Well, certainly nobody can accuse you of understating the significance of philosophy. But I'm merely a practitioner of the law, and so can only know how it works in day to day life, not what it really is--which of course can only be known by a philosopher.
By the mere reason that you are in a philosophy forum shows that you have an open mind to philosophical dialectics about ethics, which means you are above most practitioners of law. That is in any sense of things, a very good thing :smile:
I must look into using philosophers as expert witnesses.
Depends wether you work under a jury system or not. A jury system might not grasp many things, since philosophers tend to be very esoteric. However, if you are a defense lawyer and there is little hope of defense for the defendant, then a philosopher on hard determinism would be a good last resort. Someone that would talk about how no choice is acted out of nothing, that the choices made are always made because of causes, that the effects, the consequence is the result of many things; that they may not be in the control of their actions based on the situation they were given. In todays legal system, it's a very slim chance for defense, but it's a valid viewpoint and if that viewpoint is combined with the idea that if the defendant were given the chance to reprogram the reasons crimes are committed by them, they will function much better in the future, not just be doomed criminals. Only those who were given a chance to view their actions as the result of superficial causes they learned through life, tend to turn their backs to crime. Many view it as the hand they were given, but if given hope, they would rebuild the deterministic reasons to crimes that they've acted on their entire life.
Hope of changing our lives comes from seeing the reasons for our actions in a new light, comes from an open door to an alternative. If the defendant has this door closed, they will continue doing crimes and any punishment will be a waste of time.
I was indulging in irony, I'm afraid. I'm reasonably certain a philosopher wouldn't be allowed to testify.
Yet :wink:
"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."--O. W. Holmes
I think most lawyers dread clients who go to court seeking justice; I do, in any case. Such clients are inflexible, incapable of understanding the wisdom of settlement, invincibly ignorant of the nature of the legal system, prolong litigation unnecessarily, and complain bitterly when things don't turn out as they think they should. I run from them as from a monster.
Are they, at their core, meager attempts to articulate what is distinctive about us as an entity?
I don't quite see how one can consistently hold that view. If there is some generic end that you want to achieve, but that you can achieve in a variety of different ways, then you are going to do it in the way that you want to achieve it (after having pondered over the alternatives ways in which you can achieve it). But then, in that case, by your own premise, you will not be able to chose how (or in what way) to satisfy your generic want either.
That certain processes are understood as epistomologically indeterminate (e.g. QM) does not mean reality is indeterministic. It is only proof that the complexity of reality is such that we can only predict it by approximation in matters of probability. This has opened the door that reality could be indeterministic.
Now, I believe reality is deterministic but that's neither here nor there with regard to free will.
Free will has to be a deterministic process or it wouldn't be free will. If it weren't deterministic I wouldn't be making an informed choice when exercising my free will. If you offer me vanilla or chocolate icecream, I will choose the one I have a preference for. That preference is a result of my previous experience and it's not possible that the outcome could be equally chocolate or vanilla and decided by an ontologically random process an infinitesmal moment before my decision. It's going to be one or the other and it is one or the other based on pre-determined input that can result in only one choice.
So long as people can't wrap their head around the idea that saying "indeterminism is necessary for free will to exist", really means that everything they decide is totally random as a result, we'll continue to have these discussions.
:ok:
Thank you.
The idea that lack of causal determination of actions (by laws of nature and prior events and/or states of affair) entails mere randomness is generally acknowledged as the luck objection to libertarianism. The problem of luck is well known and acknowledged by contemporary incompatibilist libertarians. Robert Kane, for instance, has a fairly sophisticated response to it, which, albeit not being entirely successful, on my view, has some good positive features.
On the other hand, although compatibilist accounts of free will don't have to deal with the luck objection specifically, they have problems of their own. They must respond to the main arguments for incompatibilism such as Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument or Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument. (On my view, dispositionalist accounts of compatibilist free will also suffer from a third problem which is that they tend to narrow the scope of freedom more narrowly than is required to account for our normal ascriptions of personal responsibility to mature human agents). So, it's not sufficient to acknowledge that some amount of causal determination is required for dealing with the problem of luck. In order to secure a satisfactory compatibilist account of free will, one also has to show how autonomous rational and moral agency isn't threatened by determinism just as much (although in different ways) as it would be by indeterminism.
My argument is distinct from the luck argument I guess or Robert Kane misrepresents it in his paper. I'm not dealing with chance and luck but ontological indeterminism, which even means from one moment to the next natural laws can change and the impossible becomes possible. To base free will on the mere fact that not all processes are predictable is even a worse case of not understanding what we're talking about in my view. In that case free will is nothing more than allowing it to fill the gaps of what we cannot predict - in other words our free will shrinks as our predictive models improve. That would be truly sad.
My first red flag with Robert Kane is therefore his equivocation of indeterminism and chance. That means he appears to be firmly in the territory of epistemological indeterminism which simply isn't interesting for the reason above. I'll read his full paper later but that's just a first few remarks to clarify my position based on his first two pages.
What paper? Kane has written dozens of papers and, maybe, half a dozen books on this topic.
Sure, but who does that?
Quoting Benkei
Tell me what paper you're reading first. I'm not an advocate of Kane's libertarian conception of free will, myself, but as I've suggested, there are some good point that he is making while he is addressing the problem from luck. So, I'd be interested to hear your objections to his take. They may even coincide with mine.
Thanks. It indeed appears to be a good place to start with Kane's theory of ultimate responsibility and SFAs ("self forming actions"), in order to learn how he's dealing with the problem from luck.
Most everyone when they think luck and change are relevant. It stems from an inability for most to properly understand QM theories, which, admittedly, I only understand at a limited conceptual level but enough to spot the mistake. Too many think QM theory is an example of ontological indeterminism. It isn't.
The question whether QM is fundamentally indeterministic at a fundamental level isn't really relevant to appraising responses to the luck objection to libertarian free will. Those responses avert to facts about human psychology and the processes of decision making that are quite independent of whatever physicists will ultimately disclose about the fundamental theories of particle physics or how the disputes regarding the interpretations of quantum mechanics will be resolved.
Incidentally, I think Kane requires that the laws of physics be fundamentally indeterministic for his account of free will to work, but I disagree with his endorsement of this requirement for genuine freedom of action, and it isn't relevant to his response to the luck objection anyway. The luck objection also can be directed to theories that appeal to complexity, mere epistemic ignorance, and/or features of deterministic chaos.
As I stated above, the luck objection seems to me different from what I meant and I personally don't find the actual answer all that interesting. We behave as if we have free will; good enough for me.
You were implying that whoever defends an incompatibilist version of free will (such that it requires indeterminism) ought to acknowledge that what they really believes, then, is that "everything they decide is totally random as a result". How is it a problem, in your view, that free actions would be totally random? Of course, I agree that it would be a huge problem. We couldn't be able to claim authorship of our "free" actions, or responsibility for them, if they were merely the random outcomes of indeterministic processes. In that case, whether we would be acting well or badly, in accordance with our wishes or against them, would be a matter of chance rather than an expression of our will and character. But that is precisely what the luck objection to crude versions of libertarian free will amounts to. If your objection is completely different from that, then I have no idea what your objection is.
ABSTRACT—Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors)or neutral text.Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a ?awed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These ?ndings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scienti?c and theoretical, implications
I am not sure what the “free” in “free will” represents for different individuals. For me it means human behavior and pretty much the rest of the world as well is free from “hard determinism”, a future dictated precisely in every detail by events of the past.
Of course human behavior like all events is not free from the past but is limited and constrained by numerous factors, some physical limitations, some cognitive limitations, etc.
The choice is not “complete randomness” or “hard determinism” even in QM this is so. For the values obtained by observers (experiments) even in QM are limited and constrained to a certain number of allowed or possible values.
Human choices are likewise constrained to a certain number of possible actions or choices but “choice” implies the ability to do/ or have done otherwise and we all conduct our affairs as if our choices affect our future.
As the above paper shows our beliefs about these matters actually influence our behaviors and asserting that one could not have done otherwise has behavioral and social implications.
And yes, it seems we are destined to have endless debates about will and determinism but our conclusions have implications beyond philosophy.
Here is a link to the source.
Before commenting, let me also point to this short video by Daniel Dennett, discussing this issue, and with which I am in broad agreement.
You're right. One's innate unchosen, ergo not free, desires arch over every single step between them and their fulfillment.
However, primordial desire is nebulous, vague. For instance we feel thirst, a generic desire. This initial thirst may then be specifically satisfied with either water, coke, beer, pepsi, etc. Do you think this process from generic desires to specific fulfillment can accommodate some form of freedom of will?
Yes, because the way in which we are making our decisions isn't merely a process of instrumental specification from generic or blind desires that we are passively being straddled with. The strength of our various desires and inclinations can both potentially help, or hinder, in various ways, the actualization our capacity for practical judgement.
We oftentimes act against our stronger raw inclinations when we judge that they ought not to be given voice in our practical deliberation in light of the rational or moral demands of the specific situation. It is a metaphysical prejudice to conclude that, whenever this occurs, and some of our raw inclinations are being silenced, it is because some other (and equally blind in point of rationality) raw inclination to do the contrary won out over them. The outcome of practical judgement (and hence what we decide to do) often is the outcome of our having concluded, on good rational and/or moral ground, that it is the desirable thing to do.
If our normal inclinations, and our characters, are in good order, then we are more inclined to do the right thing effortlessly. In that case, what is the right thing to do tends to align with what appears to be the most desirable thing to do. If they aren't in good order, then, doing the right thing may require more effort, stronger external incitatives, and we are more likely to fail to make a correct practical judgement.
I don't know, but we seem doomed to debate Theism vs Atheism forever.
Michael Ossipoff