Is Belief in, or Rejection of Free Will a Matter of Faith?
Assuming we all agree that the concept of Free Will is a coherent concept, then....
Is belief in, or rejection of free will a matter of faith? Is it even possible to be agnostic on the issue? (Edit: How would someone who is agnostic about free will act?)
Is belief in, or rejection of free will a matter of faith? Is it even possible to be agnostic on the issue? (Edit: How would someone who is agnostic about free will act?)
Comments (218)
It's also possible to accept and reject it at the same time (as in the case of Schopenhauer).
Are you responsible for your actions? or are you merely a victim of a deterministic universe? Are you convinced by the supposed evidence coming from neuroscience that suggests we don't really control our own actions (because it is really our uncontrollable subconscious that makes all decisions)- that all feelings of choice are really just illusion?
And what does it mean to be responsible for your actions? What is the self? Are responsibility and determinism even incompatible? These sorts of questions need to be answered first.
I think your posts highlight the exact point that I made. It's not even clear what it means to have free will. It seems to be one of those things that people talk about but, when they reflect on it, find themselves unable to actually make sense of. Which then suggests that there's no actual content to their belief. It's just empty assertions.
So, I'm perfectly justified in asking, "How did come to that conclusion?"
Free will is axiomatic in science, and explicitly so in quantum mechanics. The experimenter has to be able to set up her apparatus as she wishes.
However, many scientists (maybe even most) deny free will. Very odd!
I haven't gotten a sense of whether or not there is a consensus among scientists.
The same is true with the concept of Platonic Forms and the soul and obligation (or morality in general).
Or you are literally claiming that no one has ever explained what they mean by free will?
Which definitions are you rejecting? and why?
So, again, could you explain to me what you mean? What's the difference between being responsible and not being responsible for one's actions?
If you could explain what definitions of free will you are rejecting, it might help.
Just look at our discussion. I ask you to explain it and you avoid it. That's what others do. So rather than wonder why it hasn't been explained to me, why don't you actually explain it to me.
Are you rejecting all explanations as incoherent? or just some of them?
Try this link...
Are you rejecting all those explanations as incoherent? or just some of them?
I understand that some people do reject the entire idea of free will as incoherent. I think it's reasonable to ask, "What concept of free will do you have in mind, when you reject the concept of free will?"
Now, for the last time – because this is getting tiresome – are you going to explain to me the difference between being responsible and not being responsible for one's actions? Because if you're not then I'm going to take it as confirmation of my claim that the concept of free will is nebulous, if not entirely vacuous, that you don't even know what you mean by such a thing, and so that there isn't even anything for you to believe or not believe in (hence my selection of "Other" in the poll).
Well, you'd be wrong. I'm more interested in what other people think about the concept. I still don't know if you literally have not read anything on the subject, or if you just reject the explanations you have read, because you came to the conclusion that they are incoherent.
It's one thing to reject the concept, and another to refuse to read anything about it.
I've read about it, but like I said, the explanations don't amount to much of an explanation at all (or, upon closer examination, don't actually convey what is intended). As such, it seems that the notion of free will isn't at all clear, and so there's nothing of substance to either believe or not believe in.
And I've told you what I think about it. So if you want to show that what I think about it is mistaken then you need to actually provide me with a meaningful account of free will, of the difference between being responsible and not being responsible for one's actions, of what it means to make a choice, and so on. It's only then that we can look to see whether or not there are good reasons to believe one way or the other.
Let's see - to sin or not to sin - that's the vulgar understanding of free will. If that is so, then you must admit the possibility of sin for free will to even make sense. But that seems strange - for free will, a good thing, depends on the possibility of sin, a bad thing. This doesn't make good theological sense, thus St. Anselm proposed free will to be defined as the ability to choose the Good for its own sake, and for no other reason. Thus free will depends on love, which depends on Goodness. So if you believe in virtue (goodness), you also believe in free will.
Yes, no and other. For starters you've got to decide what you mean by faith. If faith is voluntary then it proves the existence of some degree of free will in which case it becomes a matter of knowledge rather than faith anyway. If on the other hand faith is involuntary, if you cannot help what it is you believe, then is it really faith at all? The whole question is so beset with paradoxes that it ultimately becomes meaningless.
Consider the position of someone who accepts the existence of free will. Presumably consistency demands that he or she accepts that they have freely chosen to believe in the existence of free will which means that they could equally have chosen not to believe in the existence of free will but if they had so chosen then they would have been committed to the view that there was no such choice even though they had just made it. Similarly the determinist, if consistent, must accept that the dice could have landed either way and it is equally possible that they could be a believer in the existence of free will which would have committed them to accepting that the decision was a free one even though it was pre-determined.
Ultimately it is an undecidable question and the truth is that we are doomed to a life of acting as though free will exists (even the most ardent determinist has to decide what to have for breakfast) without ever knowing one way or the other. I'm really not sure that 'faith' even begins to describe how we stand relative to an undecidable proposition.
I do understand there are various ways to describe and define free will. I'd rather talk about the descriptions that do exist, including the pros and cons, vs make my own claims about free will.
I understand that some people truly believe the entire concept of free will to be incoherent, to such an extent they believe there can be no valid explanation of free will, such that it can be said "free will does exist".
Others understand that there are various ways to describe and define free will, and that some definitions of free will are more likely to be the case than others. For these people, they could be convinced that free will is the case, depending on how it is defined.
Not everyone who believes in free will accepts that sin exists. Can one believe in sin and yet not have a belief in any God? Or perhaps God does exist, but He Himself doesn't consider any act sinful.
I have difficulty in understanding what you mean by not believing in God - what does it mean not to believe in God? How do you act and go around differently if you don't believe in God, as opposed to if you do believe in God?
Quoting anonymous66
That is impossible - it would imply that God is not Just.
LOL. I could make the equally valid claim that either sin does not exist because God doesn't exist, or that we know so little about God, I could reject any claim that "X is a sin" because there isn't enough evidence to support that conclusion.
If God's existence isn't a foregone conclusion, then how could one be sure that sin exists?
If God does exist, then we can't prove He wants anything, or that He has defined any action as sinful.
Because of the latter, simply stating the former doesn't help much. It could be that one concept of free will obtains and another doesn't, or that one account of free will has empirical or rational evidence and another can only be asserted on faith.
Take, for example, the compatibilist. Is he using the same notion of free will that the incompatiibilist uses? Or are they both using the same concept but just disagree over whether or not it is compatible with determinism?
No you actually can't. You can make a claim though, but that wouldn't mean it's "valid", if by that you mean true. Second of all the existence of sin - the belief in it - is an existential attitude one takes in front of evil. For example, it is sinful to rob a defenceless old man - that means that I take an existential attitude towards the act, placing my faith in the fact that it is objectively wrong for such an action to take place - it is objectively unjust, and deserving of punishment.
Quoting anonymous66
There is quite a bit of evidence, such that it hurts one or more persons (including the doer of the action), it puts one or more persons at risk of hurt, or it brings about future suffering for one or more persons.
The question isn't one of "hurts", the question is, "what does God call sin?"
What do you mean you're skeptical of God's existence? How is your day to day life different because of this skepticism that you claim?
:D LOL! >:)
You might as well ask "assuming there's a coherent concept of the soul, is a belief in or rejection of the soul a matter of faith" – in which case the answer (as well as the answer to whether or not the belief is true) depends on which (coherent) concept you're using. If by "soul" I just mean "personhood" then the belief in it would be rational and true, but if by "soul" I mean something supernatural then it would require faith and possibly be false.
So, as I keep saying, you're going to have to tell us what you mean by free will, else the concept, and so the question, isn't clear.
If determinism consists in denying that anyone could have done otherwise than they have done, then I don't see how it could be compatible with what to me seems to be the only genuinely coherent notion of free will.
On the other hand, I don't believe it is possible to show by any empirical means, whether we really could have done otherwise than we have done. Also when we try to analyze how free will could be possible, how we could decide, decide to decide and so on, we come up against an aporia; it seems that free will is not analyzable. So belief in free will must be a leap of faith, based on an intuitive sense that we have about ourselves.
The other consideration is that freedom vs determinism (as well as many other metaphysical issues) is not susceptible of logical analysis, since any attempt will produce antinomies. This means it is a matter to be decided only by individual preference, that is it is a matter of faith.
Surely it is better for our lives to believe that we could have done otherwise than we have done, and so feel responsible for our actions, and also think and feel that the future is genuinely open, than it is to feel that our every action is utterly determined by forces outside our control. On the basis of this practical consideration, it is rational to believe that we are free; especially since this belief accords with our most direct intuitive sense of ourselves.
How is this any different to one's behaviour being random? And given the role of probability in quantum effects (and assuming that this isn't just a measurement issue), particles could have done otherwise. Do they have free will?
So assuming that one would want to say that particles don't have free will, and that free behaviour isn't the same as randomly occurring behaviour, this definition of free will wouldn't work.
I was only pointing out that free will cannot be compatible with determinism but only with indeterminism. Of course randomness (in the sense of genuinely indeterministic events) is the necessary ontological basis for the possibility that our actions could have been other than they have been, but this does not mean randomness is sufficient for the kind of free will to obtain that any coherent notion of moral responsibility depends on.
As I have said, free will in its fullest sense, is not analyzable. Perhaps it would be fair to say that no conception of ourselves as being exhaustively physically constituted (at least in any sense in which physicality is currently conceived) is compatible with free will. If our wills are not merely the result of physical processes, whether deterministic or indeterministic, then freedom is possible, but not in any way which can be modeled in terms of causation. It seems fairly obvious that to propose to model freedom in terms of any causal explanation is to propose a non sequitur.
Are you saying that it requires probabilistic causation or that it requires spontaneity (i.e. that our actions are uncaused)?
Which seems to amount to what I said at the start; that the concept isn't at all clear.
If it be posited that we are exhaustively physical beings then it requires both that causality not be rigidly deterministic, and that our actions are not caused by anything other than our own wills.
If it be posited that we are not exhaustively physical beings then it requires only that our actions are not caused by anything other than our own wills. In that case nature can be rigidly deterministic, but our wills would be understood to be, at least sometimes and to some degree, operating from beyond the ambit of determinism.
Many intuitively clear concepts are not analytically clear: time, space and causality itself, for example; so freedom is not alone in this regard.
So we have free will if reductive materialism obtains, if the relevant brain states are the exclusive causal influence of our behaviour, and if the causal influence of our brain states is probabilistic rather than predictable?
So we have free will if emergent materialism obtains, if the relevant mental states are the exclusive causal influence of our behaviour, and if the causal influence of our mental states is probabilistic rather than predictable?
I question this notion of "intuitively but not analytically clear". I think it's more the case that we (more-or-less) thoughtlessly talk about them without any proper understanding. The same is true of things like obligation and the soul, as I previously mentioned.
No, that's nonsense; we have no control over our brain states; we are not even aware of them. You are trying to pas what I have written through the lens of your own presuppositions.
Quoting Michael
I don't agree; we have a very clear idea what is meant by such statements as "I am free to do whatever I want tomorrow", but if we try to analyze the situation and come up with an explanation (and explanation which will necessarily be in terms of causality) of how that freedom is possible, we can't do it. Of course we can't do it, because we are trying to explain something in terms of it being caused that is posited as being uncaused; which is a contradiction.
I interpreted "if ... we are exhaustively physical beings" as "if ... reductive materialism obtains". How else was I to interpret it?
We understand such statements as a matter of ordinary discourse, where being free is contrasted with being physically coerced or blackmailed or drugged and so on, in which case the (meta)physics of the self and causation is irrelevant. However, if we want to address the philosophical notion of free will where such things matter then I would argue that we don't have a very clear idea of what is meant by such statements.
Compare with the fact that I understand talk of the self or obligation in an ordinary context but not in a philosophical context.
Yes, but look at what I wrote; I said the condition was necessary, not that it was sufficient. I also said it would be necessary that our wills not be determined by anything (such as brain states).
Quoting Michael
Yes, as I said there are many things which are not susceptible to analysis in terms of causality. But we may be able to talk about them in a philosophical context, if we don't restrict philosophical talk to analysis in the mode of causal explanation.
If reductive materialism is the case then our wills are brain states, so it's not clear to me what you mean here.
I didn't mention reductive materialism, that's you putting words in my mouth again. I said "if we are exhaustively physical beings" and that makes no necessary assumptions about what the nature of the physical is. As I said earlier our understanding of the physical may change.Presently we understand the physical in terms of the causal paradigm; it is obviously impossible, to understand free will coherently in those terms as I have already pointed out.
Free will can;t be demonstrated so you either choose to believe in it, or not ( the latter if you are genuinely capable of living the believe that you do not have free will). Whether we should believe we have free will according to our intuitive understanding of it or not is a perfectly coherent philosophical question, that does not require that we be able to explain 'what it is'.
Reductive materialism doesn't make any assumptions about what the nature of the physical is. What it argues is that mental phenomena can be reduced to physical phenomena – which seems to be exactly what is meant by "we are exhaustively physical beings".
If free will requires a rejection of causation then it requires that one's actions are uncaused, i.e. spontaneous. Does it really make sense to say that we have free will if our actions occur spontaneously?
Even if we are exhaustively physical beings it doesn't follow that our wills are brain states, but merely that they are physical in some sense we may have no understanding of.
Quoting Michael
It only requires that acts of free will are not caused by anything beyond that will. If our will is spontaneous how would that contradict it being free?
So your notion of free will depends on a notion of the self that we have no understanding of? In which case we have no understanding of what it means to have free will.
That depends on what it means for one's will to be free. Some might not consider a spontaneously-occurring will to be free.
And what's the relevant difference between a spontaneously-occurring will and a causally determined will?
It's true that some might not consider a will that functions spontaneously to be free, but I can't see any good reason for that, because that is precisely what 'choosing freely' means. And it doesn't, as some mistakenly think, mean having no reason for choices (i.e. that choices are utterly random), rather it means not being causally determined by anything at all to make those choices, that is, to choose one reason over another freely.
I think free will, our ability to act as author without being determined to act in a certain manner is real, and it does not require a leap of faith. The physical causal argument that I am determined to do x because of some other event y does not work in the narrative I tell myself about the world.
The meanings I give to what I experience are not the same as those experiences. Meanings are mental, normatively and linguistically generated. They may depend on a deterministic universe, I don't know for sure about that, but I am sure that there are no meaning 'out there' that I have not generated, or accepted as part of a society.
What I do depends on my understanding, which is based on the meanings I have mentally, normatively or linguistically constructed for myself. The causality of the meanings I have attached to experience is not the same as these events. My reconstitution of past events are not those events. In so far as I can create meanings for myself, I have 'free will'
Re the other question, of course one can be an agnostic on the issue of free will. That one isn't an agnostic on the issue doesn't imply that one's view is a faith-based view, however.
No idea what could constitute "good evidence", but one assumes that Reality obeys the laws of physics, which are deterministic.
By "deterministic" are you just referring to causal determinism (every event has a cause) or to the stronger nomological determinism (every event has a cause and each cause has just one possible effect)?
General relativity is isomorphic with the statement that Reality is a stationary block spacetime. The Wheeler-DeWitt synthesis of gravity and quantum mechanics is a stationary wavefunction. In the absence of the free will axiom quantum mechanics is superdeterministic.
So, according to the prevailing conception of science, Reality is fully determined. Given the state of reality at any time - initial, final or any time in between - and the laws of physics, it is possible to predict what has occurred, and retrodict what will occur.
We are not only at the state of knowledge where we are able to predict the big-bang, but also the fine details of that event!
Thus most educated people are avowed determinists.
So here's the first one:
You're claiming that the "prevailing conception of science" is the block universe theory of time simply because the block universe theory of time is isomorphic with general relativity? (Also, could you clarify if you're using isomorphic in a stricter mathematical sense or a looser sense?)
Not quite what I wrote, but anyway. I'd be surprised if anyone found anything non-standard, let alone contentious, in anything I wrote. Relativity mandates we take a 4D view of reality, and there is no way of escaping the block. We are space-time worms. We don't have free will.
But of course, you could argue in the other direction and show that because we *do* have free will, general relativity must be at best, an approximation. You are unlikely to convince anyone however, I've certainly not been able to.
Knock yourself out: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160719-time-and-cosmology/
Depends on what you mean by the above. Rejection of free will requires "faith" in the scientific method which leads us to determinism.
All of it. This is getting tedious by the way.
Do I have to cut and paste the entire article, paragraph by paragraph?
Einstein once described his friend Michele Besso as “the best sounding board in Europe” for scientific ideas. They attended university together in Zurich; later they were colleagues at the patent office in Bern. When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein — knowing that his own time was also running out — wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s family. “Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote of his friend’s passing. “That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Why is that illusion so stubbornly persistent?
But even if I "knew" it was true, I would live with the burden of decision.I would constantly make choices that I could not unmake, not knowing what waits further off in the woods in that direction or what I sacrificed in the other direction not taken. So the truth of the Block would only be an abstract comfort, assuming the continuation of worldly hopes and fears. In short, man is condemned to at least feel like he's free, most of the time, anyway. Do we want call our usual state "false", even if in some sense it is ? It's all about this "in some sense," I suppose.
This seems wrong. The general theory of relativity is not inconsistent with the laws of physics being indeterministic. GR is a deterministic theory of gravitation, but gravitation doesn't govern everything that happens in nature. GR is distinguished from Newtonian gravitation by the specific way in which it specifies the metric of spacetime as a function of the stress-energy tensor (a mathematical entity that specifies the energy and momentum flux and density at each point of spacetime); whereas Newton's theory makes the gravitational field dependent merely on the instantaneous distribution of (invariant) mass. Either theories are deterministic and both are consistent with a 4D block universe depiction. If, however, the laws of physics that govern the evolution of the stress-energy tensor itself (which merely is an input for the determination of the gravitational field in GR) are non deterministic -- as they likely would be from our empirical perspectives if quantum mechanics were right, under some interpretations -- then the 4D depiction of the universe would be invalidated. In that case one would rather have a branching out picture of the universe, with any specific contingent history of the whole universe (i.e. one single "branch") satisfying independently Einstein's field equations. There is thus no inconsistency between GR and physical inteterminism.
In any case on my view physical determinism doesn't entail universal determinism, and the possibility of (mere) physical determinism has little bearing on the philosophical problem of determinism, free will and responsibility.
Newton's gravity is incompatible with special relativity: it allows action at a distance and is not Lorentz invariant. Whatever you might want to construct out of "gravity", it can't be a 4D spacetime block with a Lorentzian signature, and no such construction is forced upon you. Under relativity it is unavoidable. So Newton's laws are deterministic, i.e. the future is determined by the past, while according to relativity, the future already exists. Under gravity, time is a universal parameter, under relativity, it is a dimension. If you were to describe relativity as fatalistic I wouldn't argue.
As I mentioned earlier in the tread (perhaps more than once), free will is axiomatic in science and explicitly so in quantum mechanics. If you remove the free will axiom - or the FW loophole as some prefer to call it - then, quantum mechanics is superdeterministic.
Of course not. It is rather invariant under Galilean transformations.
The Lorentzian signature is a feature of the metric of spacetime, and, it is true, encourages the '4D block' picture since it does away with the idea of a unique present moment univocally defined throughout all of space (i.e. it does away with a uniquely defined space-like hypersurface). Hence, if there is no such thing as the present state of the universe, one may be tempted by the alternative idea that the universe exists, in a sense, all at once. But that still is optional. There can still be a local definition of the present, and there still remains regions of spacetime that belong to the absolute pasts and to the absolute future, from the point of view of an observer (namely: the past and future regions of the light-cone centered where (and when) the observer is located) and, if the overall laws of physics (besides Einstein's field equations) are indeterministic, then GR is a true theory and the universe still branches out. The 4D picture is still out and not forced upon you either by special or general relativity.
In short, physical determinism is an open question regardless of the truth of GR; and the falsity of physical determinism is inconsistent with the "4D block" picture.
Try this http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2408/1/Petkov-BlockUniverse.pdf
You are simply refusing to accept an inescapable consequence of our best theories. Nothing in reality has ever been discovered to contradict GR, or the standard model, both of which are time-symmetric theories.
This is why most scientists don't believe in free will, because it doesn't fit with what they know.
Thanks for the reference. I'll read it carefully. At first glace, though, it seems like the author advocates his block universe view as the only possible alternative to presentism (the view that only the present exists). Although I don't endorse the block universe view, I am not endorsing presentism either. In The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch has effectively argued against presentism, it seems to me, without thereby endorsing anything like the block universe view. I don't think either view is coherent, and both seem reliant on what Hilary Putnam has criticized as metaphysical realism. (This is a criticism that Putnam developed after he had published the paper Time and Physical Geometry Petkov discusses). So, Petkov may be arguing on the basis of a false dichotomy.
I have not suggested that anything that we know contradicts GR (although we don't yet have a quantum theory of gravitation, and so GR is at best an incomplete theory, nothing that I said depends on GR being inaccurate at any level). Rather I am questioning the validity of your inference from the truth of GR (or from the truth of special relativity) to the idea that the block universe is a mandatory view.
While some scientists are hard determinists, other philosophically informed scientists rather are compatibilists about the issue of freedom and determinism, so you are seemingly making another unwarranted inference. Even if the block universe view were correct, this would not entail that we must reject the reality of free will, unless one would also provide a convincing argument against compatibilism. Such arguments usually are of a philosophical nature -- relying on the conceptual analysis of the very ideas of agency, freedom and responsibility -- rather than being based on empirical physical theories that have little relevance to the elucidation of those concepts.
LOL. I can tell all kinds of narratives (in one of my favorites I'm the best at X- and I don't want to tell you what X is.) It doesn't make them true, or agree with what is the case. How would anyone go about proving that free will is the case? I am operating under the assumption that it can't be done.
One might as well try to prove that God does or doesn't exist.
The article indeed seems to portray the view as being, if not contestable, at least contested. While Andreas Albrecht was defending it, Avshalom Elitzur, Lee Smolin and George Ellis were arguing strongly against it. Jennan Ismael, a philosopher rather than a physicist, was only arguing that our experience of the flow of time is consistent with the block universe view.
And the article certainly isn't stating that the block theory is the received view in the sciences.
The physicists, many of whom are prominent experts, who do not like the block-universe implication of Relativity, are doing the right thing - they are trying to discover new physics. They have to do this because they are experts, and they know relativity implies the block. Best of luck to them because they have met with zero success so far!
Well, that is your own assessment of the situation. While general relativity on its own may suggest (rather than logically entail) something like the block universe view, quantum mechanics rather suggests that the fundamental laws of physics are non-deterministic. There also are no-collapse interpretations of QM, such as the many-world view, that may be construed as deterministic, but that would still make the evolution of individual coherent histories, as experienced by sentient observers such as ourselves, non-deterministic. The debate then turns on the question whether what we call *the* universe consists in the specific 'world' (or 'coherent history') that we are experiencing, or rather consists in the superposition of all of them (including 'worlds' or 'histories' in which we didn't evolve). In either cases, the issue would seem to have little relevance to the problem of free will and determinism. It doesn't make any contact with the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate, and it doesn't seem to conceive of nomological determinism at the correct psychological level of analysis such as to make it relevant to the possibilities of freedom of choice and action.
Secondly, even if we would grant that the "block universe" might consist in a superpositions of all the individual histories, it would still be quite unlike the classical block universe view suggested by relativity. We don't have a fully worked out quantum theory of gravitations, and QM has as much theoretical and empirical support as GR has. So, what gives? You seem to favor the block universe as a matter of personal preference and hence take GR to trump QM.
Finally, universal determinism -- either of the causal or nomological varieties -- are philosophical doctrines that can not be decided merely on the basis of physical theory. The selfsame physical theory often admits of different philosophical interpretations, some of which are usually overlooked by physicists. Kantian views of the experience of time, for instance, are usually ignored by physicists, or, when briefly considered, are dismissed on the basis of crude misunderstandings. For some exceptions to this philosophical naivety among physicists, consider Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Midway) or Michel Bitbol (Some Steps Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Quantum Mechanics and Reflective Metaphysics: Understanding Quantum Mechanics from a Kantian Standpoint).
General Relativity mandates a stationary space-time block. All general relativists admit this. Those who do not like it, for whatever reason, are engaged in overturning GR.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread (perhaps more than once), non-collapse versions of QM lead to the Wheeler-DeWitt synthesis of GR and QM, which surprisingly has achieved some experimental corroboration. The wavefunction is stationary and timeless, much like spacetime.
No idea what you think Coherent Histories has to do with this?
Einstein's theory of general relativity is a theory of gravitation that is formulated within the framework of classical physics. It is an obsolete theory, albeit empirically accurate at the macroscopic level. Everyone who seeks to harmonise GR with quantum mechanics is "overturning" GR, in a sense (just as GR itself overturned the special theory of relativity). It is better to say that the goal is to account for the empirical success of GR within the framework of QM. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation just is one step towards a quantum theory of gravitation, and there are alternative approaches (such as string theory).
Sorry, I meant to say "consistent histories". It is relevant since, as I suggested, the timeless wave-function describes a superpositions of all the consistent histories that we, as sentient observers, may experience, and hence its static nature doesn't entail determinism at the empirical level that interests us. The latter, as well as our experience of time, is a result of the decoherence of the timeless wavefunction into multiple independent consistent histories. If the laws of physics don't determine, given our own specific past history, what it is that we will experience in the future, then the mere consideration that all possible outcomes (i.e. all the outcomes not ruled out by QM) are somehow 'realized' in some coherent history or other (i.e. in some parallel 'world') is of little relevance to the issue of free will conceived as a capacity potentially exercised in one single 'world'.
There seems to be some inconsistency in your choice words here, which creates ambiguity. You refer to all the "consistent histories" which we "may experience". Correct me if I'm wrong, but "histories" refers to past events which may or may not have been experienced, and it is nonsense to speak of histories which we may experience.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What do you think could cause such a decoherence? Since our experience of time is key to our understanding of free will, then this decoherence must be of the utmost importance to this issue.
I mean to be referring to the history of the world that we find ourselves in when we make empirical observations of any kind. It matters little for the purpose of the present discussion whether the events that are part of this history are past (inferred), presently observed, or reliably predicted. Consider the case of Schrödinger's cat. When we open the box, and find that the cat is dead, we can infer that it died more than an hour ago (because its body is stiff and cold, say), and also reliably predict that it will remain dead in foreseeable the future.
Even in those cases (most usual!) where our observations are observations of events that already are determined (as a result of the quantum wave-function of the observed system already being 'collapsed') -- such as our learning on the basis of historical documents that Caesar crossed the Rubicon -- we also are 'experiencing' (in the relevant sense) events that belong to our past history, and thus can rule out the possibility of our being part of an history in which Caesar wimped out. The past or the future aren't unknown to us just before they aren't 'directly' (meaning presently) observed by us.
Decoherence, in the framework of the many-world (or consistent histories) interpretations of quantum mechanics, plays a role that is similar to the role played by the collapse of the wave-function (or reduction of the state-vector) in more traditional approaches such as the so called Copenhagen interpretation (which actually covers many interpretations). See the wikipedia articles on quantum decoherence and consistent histories.
Decoherence views (no-collapse), as opposed to collapse views (e.g. Copenhagen) have the advantage that they don't require actual measurements performed by intelligent agents to explain how macroscopic quantum systems become entangled and thus 'measure' each other, as it were. But they also have the inconvenience of leaving undefined the limit between the 'classical' and quantum domains. They promote a sort of a view from nowhere on quantum mechanical systems that isn't very appealing philosophically. One recent approach that has sought to overcome this limitation is Quantum Bayesianism. Michel Bitbols' work on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics is related to this and it directly adresses the issue of the cognition of time. But, as is the case with all of the above, however metaphysically enlightening, it has little direct relevance to the alleged problems of free will and determinism, on my view.
Actually it makes a big difference. Do you recognize a difference between the numerous logical possibilities of what may have occurred in the past when it is believed that only one of these possibilities is what actually occurred, and the ontological possibilities for the future, when it is believed that any one of these possibilities may actually occur?
When our attention is directed toward the past, we assume that one thing actually occurred, yet if we do not know what actually occurred, we allow logical possibilities for what actually occurred. We may proceed towards narrowing the possibilities, and determining what actually happened. When our attention is directed at the future, we assume many things may actually occur, these are ontological possibilities. We may choose a possibility as a preferred one, and proceed toward ensuring that this occurs. Do you recognize the difference? With respect to the past, we determine the possibilities, then choose the one most representative of what actually happened, i.e., what has been determined by the passage of time. With respect to the future, we determine the possibilities, then choose the one which we prefer, and cause it to occur.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
OK, let's say that we infer from relevant documents, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, just like any observation of any event, we infer from the relevant evidence, what has occurred. In this way, we are as you say "experiencing" the event. Now, how do you propose to extend this principle to the future, such that we "experience" what may occur?
All the relevant evidence, in relation to the future, indicates to us what may happen, what is possible to happen. But there is no way to experience the future event until it actually happens, in which case it is a past event. The evidence of "what may happen" cannot be construed as an experiencing of the event, in the same way that the evidence of what has happened can be.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Well, I suppose I could I ask the question again, what do you think causes decoherence? All you've told me is what doesn't cause decoherence, measurement.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What do you mean by "cognition of time"?
How can you say that this is not relevant to the problem of free will? Free will, to be real, requires the intuitive substantial difference between future and past. The fundamental principle is that we cannot change what has occurred,
It may not make them true or even "agree with what is the case", but if you admit that you derive meaning from what you experience, and, that this meaning is not in the experience, then you admit what you are the author of your meanings which creates your own inner causality, and you are aware of this... that in my estimation is the basis of free will.
As a side note, I think the hard determinism position is a left-over from the belief in God's omniscience, and it is just about as capable of being proved.
I think there is at least a fourfold distinction between logical, metaphysical, historical and epistemological possibilities (and there likely are several grades of metaphysical possibility). But you are quibbling away from my very simple point -- in initial response to your initial question -- that what is known to be actual (or epistemologically possible) from someones point of view extends further than the immediate present, such that it makes sense to speak of that person's history rather than our being constrained to talking merely of her present knowledge of her immediately present situation.
Of course there remains an essential asymmetry of past and future. From a merely theoretical/observational/passive point of view, prediction and retro-diction are very similar. When one learns, in the present, that a cat has been dead for a while, then one learns many facts about both the recent past and the nearby future. But, regarding the future only, can one know what will happen not merely through inferring it from known present and past constraints, but also through deciding what to do. Although the peculiar asymmetry that stems from this specifically agential perspective (i.e. our ability to control the future, and our inability to control the past) is relevant to the freewill and determinism issue, it is quite unconnected to anything that general relativity or quantum mechanics teaches us about the physical world, it seems to me. I think your concerns are completely different from Question's.
That's very simple. When Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, this became a historical fact. It will remain true in the future that Caesar crossed the Rubicon -- and similarly for everything this facts entails logically or nomologically. For sure, a wide range of future events are consistent with this past fact, which is why QM is a non-deterministic theory even under the many histories (or many-worlds) interpretations. It encourages a view of the 'multiverse' (of the universe's wave-function) evolving deterministically, but my main point against Question, is that it (QM), just like general relativity, is quite consistent with the world (our empirical reality) being non-deterministic from our empirical point of view. This is so precisely because our past history is consistent with a variety of future histories. But this is only tangentially relevant to the other fact -- which you rightfully call attention to -- that the future (our future) has this additional feature that we can determine some features of it it through deciding what do do, and aren't constrained merely to stand-back and wait for quantum indeterminacies (or other epistemic or historical possibilities) to randomly resolve themselves.
I think they're still logical possibilities.
Say you're in a casino and you toss a die onto a craps table. As the die tumbles along, you may imagine 6 different outcomes. But you know apriori that every event has only one outcome.
If the die lands with the 2 face up, it is impossible that any other number also is. So in what sense were there 6 possibilities? Only logically.
That's because nothing is traditionally regarded to "cause" the collapse of the wave-function, or decoherence to occur. Decoherence just is a branching out of the possible consistent histories of quantum systems (and their observers), from some observational perspective. Also, I am not committed to any particular interpretation of QM. I am merely bringing up the many histories view in order to show that, even of Question is right, and there exists an all-encompassing timeless view of the 'multiverse' (as represented by the Wheeler-DeWitt formalism for quantum gravity) this fact has no bearing on either the non-determinism of our empirical physical laws (e.g. as those laws loosely constrain our empirical future from our own lived embodied perspectives) or to the topic of free will and determinism.
It may be the case the the die, while tumbling, already is set on a deterministic trajectory such that it is merely an epistemological possibility that it might produce an outcome different than the outcome that is poised to occur. This would indeed be a possibility that merely stems from our ignorance of the detailed physical circumstances. But I think Metaphysician Undercover can have two different kinds of possibilities in mind regarding the future, both of which can be regarded as ontological rather than merely logical/epistemological. The first one is the sort of indeterminacy that stems from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanical systems that limit how much the present state of the tumbling die restricts the future outcomes. Micro-physical quantum indeterminacies can quickly be magnified onto macroscopic indeterminacies under such chaotic circumstances as the multiple tumblings of a small object in a ragged environment.
The second sort of ontological possibility, quite unrelated to the first one (in my opinion) occurs when one considers what do do among some range of options -- to see to it that P, Q, or R, say -- then one has to pre-select such options, as being worth deliberating over at all, only when they are still open options rather them being foreclosed by past and/or current circumstances. That is, one makes sure that it is presently within one's powers to see to it that any one of P, Q or R could come to be true. It is a bit of a dogma of hard-determinism that when one actually decides to see to it that P, then this reveals the alternative options to have been merely epistemic possibilities rather than them having been genuinely open ontological possibilities. But this is where the debate about free will and determinism ought to lie, and quantum mechanics (or general relativity) have little relevance to it.
You don't seem to be addressing the point. The point was that there is a fundamental difference between talking about someone's future, and talking about someone's past. By saying that we can talk about something other than someone's "immediate present", really misses the point, because I never mentioned the present, and I don't know what would be meant by someone's "immediate present".
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Let me put it this way, it is impossible to know what will happen without knowing what one will do. And, it is impossible to infer, without a doubt, what one will do, "from known present and past constraints". So it is impossible to know what will happen, simply by knowing present and past constraints.
Quoting Pierre-NormandIf the principles of special and general relativity lead one to believe that there is no substantial difference between past and future, then we cannot say that the two are unconnected.
Quoting Pierre-NormandYou seem to be missing the point of the question. You describe past events such that we know that they are true, because we experience them. We experience Caesar crossing the Rubicon, by reading about this. How can you say the same thing about future events? Can we read about what will happen in the future, then conclude that we have experienced this event by reading? Do you not find that there is something wrong with this principle? Do you really think that we can experience an event, and therefore know that it is true, by reading about it? Reading about an event gives us information about it which is other than the information given in experiencing it.
Quoting Mongrel
By saying "if the die lands with the 2 face up", you have produced a proposition which indicates that this has actually happened, the die has landed with the 2 face up. If this occurs, then it is in the past. The only way that the die can land with the 2 face up, is if this event is now in the past. Prior to this though, when the throw is in the future, there are six possibilities.
It is for this reason that we must maintain a clear distinction between past and future. Prior to the event occurring, it is a possibility, along with other possibilities. After it occurs it is an actuality.
I agree with that.
There are definitely six logical possibilities. When we say "The 2 has a 1/6 chance of appearing face up.", we're talking about logical possibility.
The other kind of probability would make an assessment of some number of die throws... say 1000. Note that this kind of probability has no bearing on a unique event. The number in the denominator would be 1, so whatever the outcome turns out to be, it had a 100% chance of happening. This is all just a side effect of the fact that every event has only 1 outcome.
How is that a point that I am missing? How is that related to anything that was at issue in my argument with Question? I agree that there are fundamental time asymmetries in physics, in metaphysics, and in practical philosophy; and one never relates to one's past in the same way one relates to one's future. So I have no idea what your *point* is or what it is that I might have said that you disagree with. Ordinary quantum mechanics (as applied pragmatically to make predictions about the future or retro-dictions about the past) also recognizes a fundamental asymmetry since measurements yield a wave-function collapse, and there is nothing that yields a wave-function to un-collapse (baring some exotic 'quantum eraser' experiments). The "histories" of the many-histories interpretation of QM just are specific possible trajectories of individuals who make sequences of observations/measurements of their surroundings. The specific history one finds oneself in is determined post-facto. Hence, from any time-situated empirical perspective of an agent, at any given time, her *future* history isn't fully determined yet.
Again, to reiterate, my main point against Question was purely negative. Even if, in a sense, there is a formalism (Wheeler-DeWitt) that portrays the quantum-wave function of the universe (i.e. the 'multiverse') in a timeless fashion independently from any actual observation or determinate experimental setup, and this timeless perspective seems somewhat consistent with the "block universe" view of general relativity, the intelligibility of this formalism has little bearing on the issue of the determinism/non-determinism of the laws of physics that govern the evolution of the observable properties of our empirical world -- let alone on the topic of freedom and determinism.
This is my point also, and it is true regardless of whatever quantum-mechanics (or special or general relativity) may tell us about physical laws. I simply am puzzled as to why you may think I would disagree with this.
Yes, but my view, which I have defended in my discussion with Question, is that the theory of relativity merely is a theory about the metric of spacetime (i.e. about its signature and curvature) and it has little bearing on the topics of determinism or time asymmetry. The idea that the future already 'exists' because it would be part of the timeless "block universe" is a wrong inference from relativity or from speculative theories of quantum gravity. This idea seems to me to be philosophical confusion projected back onto physical theories that are neutral about those metaphysical issues.
That seems to be an epistemological issue about our knowledge of the past that is quite unconnected to the topic of this thread. Myself, I think knowledge from testimony can be just as good, and oftentimes better, than knowledge acquired on the basis of perceptual experience. It is liable to be mistaken if miscommunication occurs or if the messenger lies. But there also are all sorts of ways for our senses to mislead us. This merely indicates that our abilities to acquire empirical knowledge (either through sense experience or testimony) all are fallible abilities.
We treat the possibility as different from a logical possibility. We assume that the way in which one throws the die will influence the outcome. Therefore we assume that before the die is thrown, whatever the outcome turns out to be, did not have "a 100% chance of happening". How do you account for the incompatibility between this and your claim " whatever the outcome turns out to be, it had a 100% chance of happening"?
The point being, that despite the fact that every event has only 1 outcome, we treat "the event" as if it is not predetermined, and can be influenced by our activities. Therefore the nature of "an event" is such that it has no specific identity prior to occurring.
Thanks for the clear explanation Pierre-Normand. Here's one thing I still have a question about:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
According to what you have just told me, all of the histories are determined post-facto. But any particular history must have temporal extension, or it is not a "history". So from the perspective of being within a particular history, as it occurs, or even from the perspective of properly observing one of these histories, we would need a distinction between future and past, within the history itself, to account for the "flow of time" within the history.
Let's assume the empirical perspective of an agent now. If there are many-histories, which are "possible trajectories", how does the observing agent compare the position of the boundary between future and past, in relation to the different possible histories? Suppose we have a number of possible histories. Are each of them supposed to start and end at precisely the same moment in time, from the perspective of the observer, and proceed at the same rate of time passage in relation to the observer? Or, shouldn't we allow for some discrepancy here?
Well, that is at least a bit of progress!
Consider the Andromeda Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietdijk%E2%80%93Putnam_argument
According to relativity, whether an event is in your past or in your future is determined by your motion relative to it.
Good points, all.
And I agree that hard determinism has yet to be proved. I think it's more likely that I do have free will and that no one knows for sure what kind of universe this is (if a multiverse, do we have free will?) than it is that I'm living in the deterministic universe that is being asserted by hard determinists (one that negates free will).
To believe in a hard determinism that negates free will does require faith.
Yes, for sure. This is simply a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity. But the issue of the simultaneity of spatially distant events (that are separated by a space-like interval) has little bearing on the issues of determinism or agency. One still is able to affect only events that are located within one's future light cone. Whatever is either within one's past light cone, or outside of one's light cone altogether, is beyond one's ability to control. Since the regions delimited by one's light cone (that is, the light cone centered where one is located at a given time) are invariant, there effectively remains an absolute past and an absolute future from the point of view of an observer, at any given moment of her life, independently of her state of motion.
This seems lie a balanced view: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.4551.pdf
The word of the day is: Leadbelly.
Not per Leibniz. He said that free will just amounts to the absence of contradiction in some alternate action being performed. I'm not saying you have to accept Leibniz's view. But since one of humanity's greatest minds contradicts you, you should put up some argument for your view. You can't just drop it on me as given.
Remember, we're talking about God and sin.
For all I know, God does exist And He wants us to hurt each other. For all I know, Not hurting people is a sin (according to God).
Let's assume that God exists. Whatever God you please. What does He want? Does God even "believe in sin"? How do you know?
A precondition for understanding the world: that the world is always already conceptually articulated.
By the fool on the hill? :)
Leibniz is dealing in logical possibility. So let's consider whether there really is any other kind of possibility. What argument would you put to Leibniz to convince him that there is?
I could choose to do something which is logically possible, but physically impossible, such as I might decide to grab a hold of the moon, or the sun, and bring it into my house with me. This demonstrates that what really determines what is and is not possible is something other than logic.
Yes, that's right. I think Mongrel's characterization of Leibniz's view may be a bit too thin. Leibniz viewed human freedom as autonomy. Some agent A is free to see to it that P (where P is a timeless proposition -- for instance the proposition that A has eaten a piece of chocolate cake at time t) if whether or not P is true is determined by A and by nothing else. This means that nothing besides the internal states of the agent much be such as to determine the truth of P. We can phrase this through saying that the condition for A, as some time t, to be free (with respect to some outcome P), is if, given the state S of the external world at t (excluding the internal state of A) then it is logically consistent with S both that P or that not P. It is fair to construe this as entailing physical possibility, meaning that for some proposition to be physically possible from the standpoint of an agent is for the truth of this proposition to be logically consistent with S. The logical possibility at issue in Leibniz's conception of free will would thus be a conditional possibility: it is conditional on the logical restrictions imposed on future states of the world by the past and by physical laws. (In Leibniz's peculiar metaphysical framework, such natural/physical/metaphysical restrictions derive from the condition that the world be the best possible world in the mind of God -- which would seem to make the internal state of any agent -- or metaphysical monad viewed as the soul of this agent -- determined as well. This doesn't undermine Leibniz's view of human freedom provided only we cast him as a compatibilist!)
Kant rather had a positive view of autonomy, qua rational autonomy, contrasted with Leibniz's purely negative view (construed as mere logical/metaphysical possibility, as explained above) and he derided Leibniz's view of freedom as mere freedom of the turnspit, since on Leibniz's compatibilist account, it would seem, a purely mechanical and non-rational device such as a turnspit, which moves according to its own internal physical principle, would turn out to be as free as we are.
You disagreed with me while saying exactly what I said. Neat trick, Pierre.
There is a problem here, because "physical laws" are laws which are produced by human beings to describe the processes of the world. So they are internal to the agent, what the agent claims about the world. If, by creating such laws, the human being is given the capacity to impose restrictions on future states of the world, we need to determine how a law which describes the world, can be used to impose restrictions on the world.
With this in mind, the described internal/external distinction breaks down. If the past imposes restrictions on the world, this is the feature of determinism. If physical laws impose restrictions, these are created by the human mind, so the question is, how does the human mind impose restrictions by creating laws? There must be something more than just creating laws, which allows human beings to actually impose restrictions, otherwise I'd create a law which would allow me to grab a hold of the sun.
If the human being cannot impose any restrictions whatsoever, on the external world, in what sense can you say that it has free will? To have free will, it must be logically possible that P, or not P, thus the human being must be capable of imposing the necessary restrictions to make this logically possible. The human being cannot make "P or not P" logically possible simply by asserting that it is logically possible, or else I could make it logically possible to grab a hold of the sun, by asserting that it is logically possible to do such.
I didn't disagree. I said your characterization was a bit too thin. Logical possibility isn't equivalent to opportunity for action in general, but it may be construed as being similar within a highly qualified Leibnizian metaphysical framework. Teasing out unstated assumptions for the sake of clarity isn't a "trick". I'm glad that you are agreeing, though.
I would try to convince Leibniz that the notion of "logical possibility that I could have acted otherwise" is physically meaningless. I would convince him that absolute determinism is true, by using his own Principle of Sufficient Reason and telling him about Relativity.
I would then ensure that he was a committed realist and accepted the explanatory nature of science. Through quantum mechanics I would show that you can recover the physical meaning of "logical possibility" and demonstrate the physical mechanism of free will.
Do you take this to be an objection to the Leibnizian conception of freedom, specifically, or to compatibilist accounts of free will generally? I myself don't accept accounts of either kind mainly because of the Kantian objection that I mentioned. It is not sufficient for one to be free in the sense that is relevant for the possibility of genuine agency and responsibility that the principle of the action of the agent be "internal" to her (in the manner compatibilists usually understand "internal" to relate to desire or motivation). The source must also be rational/intelligible rather than merely natural/mechanical. Further, I don't take the possibility of rationally intelligible actions to be consistent with universal determinism.
On edit: actually, reading further into the SEP article, it seems that logical possibility isn't sufficient for freedom, according to Leibniz; one also needs to act in accordance with one's complete individual concept (as determined by God -- who ensured that the best possible world was actualized) and this actuality is certain albeit logically contingent. See the last paragraph in section 4 of the SEP article linked above.
I don't see that you did that.
If A and B have the same properties, A=B. Show what properties physical possibilities have that logical possibilities don't or vice versa.
Some empirical proposition P is physically impossible if its truth is ruled out by physical law. But if the physical law is contingent, then the truth of the proposition P is logically possible. It could have been true if the physical laws had been different. Only if all actual physical laws are deemed to be logically necessary does the logical possibility of P entail the physical possibility of P. This would mean, of course, that the truth of physical laws could in principle be inferred from pure logical analysis, which few philosophers believe to be the case.
Leibniz knew his CIC (which you mentioned earlier) threatened the existence of free-will. We know this because he explicitly described the problem. He came up with a number of methods for rescuing free will without abandoning his central philosophy. If you'd like to discuss those methods and how one of them might amount to basing free will on what we call logical possibility, you can start a thread on it and I'll join you in the discussion. You probably already noticed that the SEP isn't sufficient for getting the whole picture on Leibniz. I've appreciated Nicholas Jolley's book.
Do you think there is a relationship between physical possibility and logical possibility? If so, what is it?
Rather, only if universally quantified statements that express physical laws are logically necessary does logical possibility entail physical possibility. But it is commonly regarded that the laws of physics aren't logical laws, and hence that something can be physically necessary that isn't logically necessary. You have offered no reason to think that the laws of physics are logically necessary.
If an electron is a wave, yes.
So what are we talking about now? I edited my previous post. Note that I mentioned we can discuss Leibniz further in another thread if you like.
You had issued a challenge for me to show "what properties physical possibilities have that logical possibilities don't or vice versa." I was merely responding to this challenge. It may not be physically possible for you to jump 10 feet high right now, but unless the physical laws that account for you not having this ability can be derived from logical laws, and hence aren't contingent, then it is logically possible that you would do so.
If physical law is necessary, then the set of all physical possibilities is the same as the set of all logical possibilities. Right?
Drop the issue of entailment. It's irrelevant. All that's required for statements of physical law to be necessarily true is that it's true that the universe couldn't have been any other way.
The electron (and the photon) are particles according to the Standard Model. Anyway, the point is, what will happen is determined by the laws of physics.
As a matter of fact, it can be shown that "physical possibility" is an infinitessimal fraction of "logical possibility", so they are not the same thing.
Cool. How is that shown?
No. If physical laws are logically necessary then the set of all physical possibilities is the same as the set of all logical possibilities.
Rather, what is required for statements of physical law to be logically necessarily true is that that the universe couldn't logically have been any other way. You haven't given any indication as to why you think the world could not logically have been different than it actually is.
Your attempt at demonstrating that physical and logical necessity are co-extensive relies on your using "necessarily" equivocally as if there were just one kind of necessity. This is question begging. Of course if you assume that the world can't logically be any other way than the way (actual) physical laws specify it to be, then those two sorts of necessity collapse into one.
No. I haven't. What I note is that your argument starts with a hidden premise:
The universe could have been some other way.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I asked you for an argument. Why are you saying that I was attempting to demonstrate something?
Your argument has as a premise that the universe could have been some other way. Why should I believe that? What do you know about the natural history of the universe that no physicist currently does?
Well sure. Either the universe could or could not logically have been any other way that the way it actually is. Only in the case where it could not logically have been any other way than the way it actually is do the concepts of logical and physical necessity collapse into one. In that case, everything that is actual is logically necessary and nothing that isn't actual is logically possible. This would be the case if and only if the laws of physics, and also the boundary conditions of the universe (the "initial state") were uniquely derivable from the laws of logic (propositional logic? first order predicate logic?). But why would anyone assume this?
I don't think so. Suppose some new discovery reveals to us that the universe couldn't have been any other way (no specifics required... all we need is that such a thing is conceivable.) We'll call it the GNSD (great new scientific discovery.)
If it's true that the universe couldn't have been any other way, then laws of physics are necessarily true statements (though we may not have previously known that.)
So while we didn't know it, we said that logical possibility outstrips physical possibility. Post-GNSD, we realize we were always wrong about that. When we imagined gravity causing things to repel one another rather than attract, we didn't realize that this would conflict with a necessarily true statement and therefore, it's not logically possible.
Problem?
Physicists investigate empirical laws of physics. They don't know them to be logically necessary. We may suppose, if you like, that, unbeknownst to us, those laws are logically necessary. In that case, the concepts of logical possibility and physical possibility would be co-extensive. But they still are different concepts since, for all we know, the laws of physics possibly are not logically necessary. (Not that "for all we know ... possibly ..." is an epistemic modal notion: yet another concept of possibility that isn't equivalent to logical necessity).
Maybe a Hesperus/Phosphorus type of difference. Anyway, for the discerning eye, we just affirmed that the answer to the title of the thread is:
YES.
Not quite the same. The necessity of identity is metaphysical, it is neither logical nor physical.
No, its not a matter of faith since even if one were agnostic regarding the sort of necessity that attaches to physical laws, and even if those laws were deterministic, compatibilists would not be worried about it. Conversely, hard determinists would deem us to be unfree even if the laws of physics were contingent. The impossibility for one not to be constrained by the laws of physics, and/or by the past state of the universe, are irrelevant to the existence of compatibilist free will or to the hard determinist's denial of the existence of free will.
I was talking about intensional vs extensional definition.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Good lord. Walked all the way to the top just to fall straight back down.
OK, yes, if the laws of physics were logically necessary, unbeknownst to us, then the difference between the two concepts of necessity (physical or logical) would show up merely in intensional contexts of belief attribution.
As Tom as alluded to, though, and as some philosophers of science (e.g. Marc Lange) have argued, many natural laws are contingent if only because they are merely locally valid within specific sub-regions of the world (or 'quantum multiverse'). The concept of a physical law being valid only if it has the form of a true unrestricted universally quantified statement is questionable. This concept doesn't capture the way laws of nature are conceived of in actual scientific practice and it misconstrues the logic of ceteris paribus clauses. It is a concept that sneaks in contentious reductionist assumptions regarding material constitution.
Obviously what happens in a black hole stays in a black hole. We were talking about whether the whole universe could have been different.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Reductionists are always sneaky... like Communists and the Devil.
We were also talking about the meaning of "could have been different". I don't know what the point of your comment about black holes is. Some natural laws of insular ecology apply only to island ecosystems and some natural laws of chemistry apply only to aqueous solutions in thermodynamic equilibrium. That's the sort of locality I was referring to. The relatively broader range of applicability of the "fundamental" (so called) laws of physics proper just is a matter of degree, and also a matter of their abstracting away most (thought not all) the substantial-formal features of the material objects talked about. This is what makes them look like (unrestricted) universally quantified statements rather than like attributions of constitutive (albeit fallible) natural powers to contingently existing natural substances.
The concept of natural law isn't without its critics. Having to point out when and where a rule applies isn't much of a threat, is it?
It means that whether or not such a law applies here and now depends on the surrounding conditions here and now. The applicability of this law (and hence the validity of its status as a law) depends contingently on the local conditions. The apparatus of modal logic thus applies where "possible worlds" range over the attainable variations in local conditions. A "compatibilist" about free will can define possibilities for action as possibilities within such a range of contingent conditions. Human agents have both the power to do A, and to abstain to do A, just in those cases where the actual conditions determining whether or not they do A were set by the agent herself, and can thus be traced to her reasons for acting.
It may nevertheless appear that, in case where the actual conditions of the agent are C, and it is a law that the agent does A in conditions C, that the agent didn't have the power to abstain from doing A. But this is a mistake since it is no accident why the agent found herself in conditions C, such that she would "necessarily" (i.e. from physical necessity) do A in the actual circumstances; it is precisely because she had a reason to do A in those circumstances that her conditions were set to C (as a result of the normal functioning of her cognitive abilities and of her underlying physiology). If she had had reasons to abstain from doing A, counterfactually, then her conditions would also have been different and it is her power to abstain from doing A that would rather have been actualized.
What is absurd? You seem to equate actuality with necessity, and I can understand that from such a point of view the very idea of unactualized powers (in general, or unactualized powers of human agency in particular) can seem absurd. Likewise, from the point of view of radical skepticism, perceptual knowledge of the external world may seem absurd. But from a common sense perspective the notions that I am defending against philosophical prejudice are truisms rather than absurdities. It is rather the dogmatic assimilation of actuality and necessity, without argument, that is absurd.
You really don't have to go past Searle's argument for volition. Extend your index finger. Wiggle it around. QED.
That was a bit of a shorthand but I thought the context made it clear what I meant with the phrase "... depends contingently on ..."
If A depends conditionally on C, and C is contingent, then A inherits it contingency from C's contingency even if the law that expresses the conditional dependence is necessary. Hence, if physical laws make it (physically) necessary that I would do A in conditions C, but C is a contingent set of conditions, then it may still be contingent that I am doing A. The key for understanding compatibilist free will is that the relevant contingent conditions of the action aren't outside of the scope of the powers of human beings, but are partially determined by them in accordance with our rational second-natures -- that is, in accordance with our acquired sensitivity to the reasons that we may have for acting in this or that way in relevant circumstances.
Also the suggestion that I am appealing to pure modal logic in order to provide a foundation for "volition" (a loaded philosophical term that I never even make use of) is unwarranted. I am merely making use of modal logic in order to clarify the structure of the argument as best as I can.
If B (a set of spaciotemporal specifications), then A (where A is a statement of natural law.)
I don't think it's presently clear what it means for B to be contingent (in some way beyond the meaning that we can imagine things being different.) Maybe the universe is like a branching shrub and every possibility is manifest somewhere, sometime. Maybe the Eternal Return is a reality, but there's always room for slight differences. Is there some formalization of physical possibility that really helps make a case for volition?
Laws can't be derived logically from mere sets of empirical observations. If all ravens are black, that doesn't make it a law that all ravens are black, for it may be an accident that all ravens are black. (This is a point famously belabored by Hume). If, on the other hand, it is a law that ravens are black, then this may explain why all (or most) ravens are black. The law would derive from some features of the nature of ravens (i.e. the specific form of life they exemplify) that explain why they come to grow black feathers in normal circumstances. Those contingent circumstances, as well as the contingent circumstances of the past evolution of this life form, would explain this biological law. This would be an example of a contingent biological law about ravens.
Now, it is not within the power of ravens to modify the (contingent) circumstances that account for its being a (contingent) law that they grow black feathers in normal circumstances. If, on the other hand, it follows from some set of laws of physics that Sue -- a mature rational human being -- must do A in situation C, then, if Sue additionally had some intelligible reason to do A, it is usually as a result of Sue's exercise of her rational powers of practical deliberation that she found herself in a situation C such that the laws of physics ensure that she would decide to do A. From the point of view of the laws of physics, which have nothing to say generally about actions of type A, it is simply an accident that the antecedent physical situation C of Sue's deliberation was such that it was physically necessary that she would decide to do A. What rather explains, and necessitate, that this antecedent physical situation was such that she would proceed to do A merely is the fact that it was rational for her to do A in the intelligible circumstances exemplified by C.
[quote=Pierre-Normande]
The law would derive from some features of the nature of ravens [/quote]
To be precise, statements of natural law concerning ravens ideally express the nature of ravens. Expressions of that kind assert what one should expect regarding ravens, so there's a normative aspect to it. At the very least this is rooted in the normativity inherent in language use. Whatever more one says about it will reveal something about how one approaches the problem of induction. It's possible that some ontological commitment will fall out of that.. or not. It depends on the theory of truth in play.
[quote=Pierre]Those contingent circumstances, as well as the contingent circumstances of the past evolution of this life form, would explain this biological law. This would be an example of a contingent biological law about ravens.[/quote]
Sure. It may be that the universe is necessarily the way it is. No apriori nor aposteriori knowledge contradicts this. So it may be that all true statements about the universe are necessarily true. Note that this would still be so if there actually is no such thing as natural law.
[quote=Pierre]If, on the other hand, it follows from some set of laws of physics that Sue -- a mature rational human being -- must do A in situation C, then, if Sue additionally had some intelligible reason to do A, it is usually as a result of Sue's exercise of her rational powers of practical deliberation that she found herself in a situation C such that the laws of physics ensure that she would decide to do A. [/quote]
Sue was born and continues to live with hunger and needs of various kinds. These facts account for most of Sue's whereabouts and situational posturing. Whether her deliberation has any bearing on her location is broadly speaking the very issue under discussion.
I was very skeptical about Mongrel's representation of Leibniz' concept of free will. It really didn't seem reasonable to me, that a man of Leibniz' calibre would define free will in this way.
So this is the next point, and this is what makes free will so difficult to prove. Not only must both P and not-P be logically possible, but also the free willing agent must be capable of proceeding with either one of the actions, P or not-P. If the free willist chooses P, and proceeds, the determinist will say that was determined, and if the free willist chooses not-P, the determinist will say that was determined. It is impossible for the free willist to choose, and proceed with both actions, P and not-P, so it appears impossible for the free willist to prove that one is capable of proceeding with either P or not-P. Even if the free-willist flips a coin to decide to proceed with P or not-P, this does not prove free will.
Quoting Pierre-Normand I haven't seen anything to suggest that the Leibnizian conception is really compatibilist, other than misrepresentations, like Mongrel's. I have no faith in compatibilist accounts, from what I've seen, free will and determinism are genuinely incompatible, and to make them appear compatible requires self-deception, misrepresenting one concept or the other, or both.
It would be a rather crude and philosophically uninformed stance, one informed maybe by some form of physical reductionism, or by Watsonian behaviorism, to acknowledge that hunger has some bearing on the explanation of Sue's behavior while denying that the structure of her deliberative powers can have any such bearing. That is not the nature of the contemporary philosophical debate about free will. Hard determinists who are skeptical about the possibility of free will rather argue that Sue wasn't free in spite of the acknowledged causal/explanatory role of her deliberations. That's because they believe any such episode of cognitive deliberation to be the manifestation of an underlying deterministic process that isn't consistent with her having the ability to do otherwise. This is basically the argument that I have tried to show to be flawed.
This is the sort of argument that I have been attempting to address in this post and this post, which appeared below the post you were replying to.
Whether or not an account can or can't be qualified as compatibilist depends on one's conception of what it is exactly the compatibility with which free will is deemed to be problematic. This is usually taken to be determinism, but there are many varieties of determinism. The SEP article referenced earlier does qualify Leibniz's view as a compatibilit one, albeit not unqualifiedly. It is clear that Leibniz was endorsing the reality of human free will and that he was also, on many accounts, a neccessitatian, and he was unquestioningly defending a doctrine of preestablished harmony. See Clive Borst's Leibniz and the Compatibilist Account of Free Will for further discussion. (I have only parsed it obliquely, but it seems quite informative)
I think you may be right to be suspicious of mainstream compatibilist accounts (such as those of Daniel Dennett, Anthony Kenny, Susan Wolf, or of new dispositionalists such as Kadri Vihvelin or Dana Nelkin). There is much truth in most of those accounts, but the main issue with them, on my view, is that they tend to share too much of their incompatibilist or hard determinist opponents's conceptions of determinism. What seems seldom to be questioned is that the determinism as issue somehow could be a consequence of the content of the laws of physics.
On my view, the mainly empirical issue of the determinism of the laws of physics proper doesn't have much of a bearing on the metaphysical doctrine of universal determinism. That's because the possibility to derive the latter from physical determinism is questionable, often assumed without argument, or, when attempted, is seen to be relying on questionable reductionist theses, or on flawed ideas about global supervenience that are insensitive the the peculiar modal character of laws, norms and principles of animal/rational life that don't belong to physics proper. I hold universal determinism to be false, and its falsity to be knowable a priori, whatever physics may have to tell us regarding the behavior of matter.
If the fool on the hill understands the world. (Why is he always on the hill, by the way?).
Consider a finite physical system. Due to the Bekenstein bound, any such system is a finite state machine - i.e. only a finite number of configurations is available to it. Allow the system to evolve under the laws of physics, from T=0 to T-infinity and list all of these physical environments which constitute a denumerable set:
P1, P2, P3, P4 ...
Now, consider a logical environment of this form: L1 is different from P1 at T1, different from P2 at T2 etc. L1 is clearly not in the set of physical environments, and moreover there is an infinite number of ways of constructing L1. Thus the set of logically possible environments is uncountable.
If only I thought that were conceivable. ;-)
Quoting Mongrel
That doesn't actually follow. You'd need the additional requirements that (a) there are indeed laws of physics (as something real), and (b) we've got the laws of physics right. Not to mention that you'd need truth to be something objective.
Quoting Mongrel
A la a logical or a metaphysical necessity or something else? Unfortunately, you're not actually interested enough in learning about these ideas to bother trying to read the Kit Fine paper.
The only thing I can imagine working there is if it were a metaphysical necessity that logic worked a particular way. For example, given that I'm an anti-realist/instrumentalist on logic, maybe there's some metaphysical necessity about the way brains work that constrains logical necessity.
But aside from that, if it were to turn out that, say, it's a metaphysical necessity that the Planck mass is 2.176?51(13) × 10^?8 kg. How could that amount to it being a logical necessity that that's the mass rather than 2.176?51(13) × 10^?7 kg? To say that it would amount to them being the same thing seems to miss the idea of what logical possibility/necessity is in the first place.
I like Searle's explanation. He does argue for free will, and he makes a lot of sense to me. It seems we can't help but think in terms of our responsibility. I love his story about someone going into a restaurant and saying to the waiter, "I'll just wait and see what the universe determines that I'll eat."
I can't either. I was granting this possibility to Mongrel merely for the sake of argument. The conversation then moved beyond that. If we move beyond idealized "fundamental" (so called) laws of physics to the more generalized concept of a law of nature exemplified in ordinary scientific practice (including the practice of physicists) then the sort of natural necessities at issue appears quite distinct from logical necessities.
Me too. It resulted from the fact that his central theses clearly ruled out free will. Unlike Spinoza, he wasn't prepared to abandon freedom because of the place it occupies in morality. He played around with backing off of this being the best of all possible worlds, but that notion was designed to save God's character from the problem of evil.
I'm not thrilled by philosophers who start with a conclusion and then seek to built an argument to meet it. Maybe it's my Anglo-Sax cultural bias.
:)
What central theses of Leibniz do you take to be ruling out free will?
It's interesting that, in their own different ways the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz all seem to make free will impossible.
Descartes and Leibniz tried to 'save the appearances' though, whereas Spinoza 'bit the bullet'
The main problem, for Descartes, it seems to me, it to account for the intelligibility of interactionism: how can immaterial souls have effects on material bodies. I don't see how his philosophy makes trouble for free will as such, since the orientation of the will originates in the soul and there is no indication that, for him, the activity of the soul must be governed by deterministic laws. There may be a problem with free will and divine foreknowledge, but that is quite different from the problem of free will and determinism that afflicts materialistic accounts of the mind.
As for Spinoza, his view of the mind is often characterized as a form of epiphenomenalism. If natural processes are deterministic, then he would inherit the problem of free will and determinism. This may be why he bit the bullet. He didn't envision the possibility of some sort of compatibilist solution, as Leibniz did.
Spinoza only rejects libertarian free will. Causality is never pre-constrained to any particular outcome for Spinoza. Any state of the world might come or go. Human will is free insofar it is a particular action taken by us. At any time, we might act one way or another.
In Spinoza there is a foreshadowing of compatibilism since as he denies the separate substantial existences of cogitans and extensa, and therefore the possibility of any causal interaction between them that requires explanation (thus escaping the Cartesian dilemma) he opens the possibility of compatible parallel accounts for (at least human) activity, in terms of reasons and causes, respectively.
But then, he seems to close the door on this possibility and opt for physical determinism, thus seeming to reduce the understanding of human activity to the perspective from extensa, that is, of being seen only in terms of the physical state as being utterly determined by physical causes, and thus rejecting the parrallel possibility of the perspective from cogitans, that human activity can also rightly be understood as rationally self-determined (that is radically free).
Leibniz' view that there are no causal interactions between monads at all, and thus no real causation, but that all the appearance of causation is the result of all actions being internally coordinated by God to bring them into harmony, seems to radically rule out any possibility of free will, and thus also seems to rule out compatibilism altogether, since "it takes two to tango", so to speak.
Personally, I have never found any notion of free will even intelligible, let alone convincing, other than the libertarian.
This is also the issue with Spinoza: unity. Descartes can be interpreted as offering the indubitable statement of duality: cogito ergo sum. Of course, indubitability is a sure sign that we're just mapping out the contours of mind.. identifying what we're bound to think.
Spinoza removes the dualism of substances. For him human minds (i.e. our existing thoughts, feelings and experiences) are extensa. They are included within physical determinism of causality.
You are falling into the same trap Spinoza did. He posited that cogitans and extensa are the two possible attributes, that is, 'parrallel' accounts of the one substance, and then went on to privelege the account from extensa over that from cogitans.
As in my response to TWoD, I think Spinoza in a way sets the stage for Kant also. The unity of substance is not exhausted by either of its attributes of cogitans and extsensa; neither one should be privileged over the other. They are the twin aspects of the phenomenal realm, whereby it is intelligible. However, the posited unity of substance, wherein the two accounts become one, cannot be modeled by human thought; we just cannot bring reasons and causes into intelligible harmony. This foreshadows the 'in itself', or the noumenal; which Kant used to open the door to the possibility of genuine freedom beyond the appearance of determinism. Well, at least that's my interpretation.
Cogitans[/I] was never considered part of causality. It's logical meaning: that which is true regardless of causality. He "privileges" [i]extensa because logic is not an existing mind. To try and invove cogitans here is to say that which does not exist can interact and cause in the world.
There's no trap. Just the recognition non-existing things are not part of causality.
That's to miss Spinoza's major point: Substance doesn't have unity, it is unity. It's what cannot be captured by giving accounts different modes or states.
The point of Substance is that two accounts do not become one. Both accounts are themsleves and they express a unity which is captured in neither.
You're falling into the same mistake again. There can be freedom in cogitans,(the mind) because the mind freely chooses one reason over another. There can be no freedom in extensa (the brain) because its processes are determined by physical causes. These two explanations are parallel; they are both right, but only within their own perspectives. There can be no 'crossover', so the mind cannot influence physical processes; just as physical processes cannot influence the mind.
For me this is the only kind of 'compatibilism' that can make any sense at all.
This doesn't contradict what I have been saying at all. I haven't said the two account become one at all. But they do not "express a unity" ( you ar contradicting yourself if you say they do). The two accounts cannot be unified; although we think the two attributes which give rise to the two accounts are unified. But we cannot discursively understand that unity; and why should we be able to since any such understanding would be from the one side of cogitans. That cogitans can understand only extsnesa in terms of causality and not itself; that is natural, because the essence of cogitans is reason, not cause. It is because it cannot understand itself in terms of cause that it cannot understand, but may only non-discursively intuit or blindly posit, the unity of cogitans and extensa.
Spinoza's point is exactly the opposite: we can understand unity. Rather than approached by understanding many things, it's a different instance of knowledge entirely, one which doesn't even require naming any particular thing.
We can understand unity because knowledge of any attribute is not required. To know there is togetherness, we don't even have to name the attributes of cogitans and extensa. Attributes and states are not the foundation of unity. That's why it doesn't take knowledge of everything to understand unity. Substance is understood without referring to any state of the world or other logical expression.
If I only know about cogitans, extensa, the history of France, my computer or what my friend had for breakfast, I may understand the presence of a unified world. Knowing unity depends on knowing about unity, not all states of the world and every logical truth.
Cogitans cannot understand anything at all. A logical meaning is not an existing person. All instances of human understanding are extensa: a state of the world which is understanding of something.
The essence of cogitans is not reason, at least in terms of how it is usually considered, for it is not an act of thinking.
Are you claiming there could be a concept of unity without an apprehension of diversity?
It's five-dimensional, with the beings with free will being capable of controlling their movement in the fifth dimension.
Well, that's just an example of that theory being compatible with free will. I personally don't buy that because your space-time block doesn't explain causality.
I've abstained from voting, as I'm not clear about the meaning of the question.
For one thing, it's not at all clear what "free will" is supposed to mean. Neither is it clear that each person said to "believe in free will" has the same conception of "free will" in mind.
For another thing, it's not clear what it means for a belief to count as "a matter of faith". We might treat faith as in general synonymous with belief, and then say there are different grounds or reasons for belief. Accordingly, we might say a belief is a matter of faith (alone), in other words a matter of "pure faith", if it is belief without any reasons, or belief even in the face of reasons to the contrary. (Of course in this context "having no reasons" for a claim doesn't mean that there is no reason one has the claim -- there may be a psychological motive or some other "cause" of a belief in one without one being able to cite a reason in support of the claim.)
Along such lines, I should suppose that some people believe in a thing they call free will as a matter of pure faith, and that other people believe in a thing they call free will on the grounds of what they consider to be satisfying reasons.
Of course believing something on the grounds of what one considers to be good reasons does not entail that the reasons are good. And having a conception does not entail that the conception is clear or coherent, or that anything in the world corresponds to the conception.
Quoting anonymous66
All else equal, I suppose one who believes he has a conception of free will and is agnostic about whether there is such a thing as a free will corresponding to his conception, would act the same as one who has a similar conception but is not agnostic about the question, and the same as one who believes he has no such conception, and the same as one who's not sure whether he has the relevant sort of conception.... except that each of these individuals will speak a bit differently from the others as this particular subject is approached in conversation.
What happened, did you suddenly wake up after one year and a half to continue the convo? :snicker:
I noticed I hadn't replied and wondered what happened to @Willow. Revived the thread if not Willow anyhow! :joke:
Edit: briefly revived the thread