How Do You Do Science Without Free Will?
A necessary condition for doing any science is choosing/determining which evidence to believe and how much weight to give it. How do you do that without free will? Because without free will, you're simply compelled to believe that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis. It might, it might not.
Comments (214)
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.
Free will = making choices is not a standard definition of free will used in arguments about free will. I happen to define it that way myself but what the great (?) philosophers mean is that the choices are not made consciously like it seems when you make them, thats is an illusion because (in a nutshell) determinism. The thought/choice is being made subconsciously, and you are just aware of that choice and as you become aware it feels as though somewhere in your conscious mind a decision is being made but its not, the choice was made by deterministic factors before you could even know about the choice at all.
So your argument only applies to your own idiosyncratic definition of free will, which you sorta defined but didnt offer any support for that definition.
Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/
Right. The way you are using it in your OP doesnt match that. You are acting as though the lack of free will means no action can take place. The action still occurs, its just that YOU aren’t the one deciding what to do, thats happening as a result of (basically) determinism. The feeling that you are making a conscious decision is an illusion, the action itself still happens.
In the portion you quoted, the capacity to choose isnt the same as free will as you are using it in your argument.
"You are acting as though the lack of free will means no action can take place."
No. In a deterministic universe, action still takes place.
Right so the “necessary condition for doing science” is an action. Choosing/evaluating is an action, it is something that you are doing.
As you just said, the action still takes place. Free will doesnt determine whether it does or not. In order for your argument to work it would have to. You have to adjust your argument so it addresses free will, not the act itself. In order to do that, you need to offer support for defining free will as the act, which as I said I agree seems a more sensible way of defining it.
Easy. All you gotta do is figure out that you don’t have to will yourself to be a scientist. If you do science properly, which presupposes you know how, you are automatically a proper scientist. No willing required.
Does anyone really think a good scientist has to will himself to perform the right experiment in accordance with a prediction, rather than automatically recognize a certain experiment to perform based on the empirical necessity that a prediction demands?
Physical science divorced itself from subjective predicates such as free will for a reason, with humanity in general being the beneficiary.
Quoting RogueAI
How are you arriving at that premise?
How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? If you're simply compelled into believing a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you were compelled to believe is right, but how would you ever know?
No, I'm not following this line of argument either. Why does being compelled (by whatever factors) to believe something make that belief inherently a less reliable correspondence to 'the way things are' than one which was arrived at with "free will". A computer is certain to come to a more reliable conclusion about whether an equation is correct without free-will, than I am with it.
"IOW if one's evaluations are utterly determined they may not be based on what we think they are based on. We would also be compelled to think we are rational, though not necessarily at all because we are rational and because of what we think is evidence of it."
Yes.
Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on fire". How can you do that if you can't even choose whether to believe the person is reliable or not? Is lying or not? Is in a position to know about your house or not? Those are all choices you have to make before you can even begin to assess (A)'s impact on the hypothesis.
Nope, still not seeing where choice causes an increase in accuracy. You could have a predetermined conclusion on all those questions with no less liklihood that such a conclusion would be right. Why are predetermined conclusions of less use?
But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely chosen, or itself 'determined'. If so, the fact that science requires 'choices' to be made says nothing about the necessity of free will to underpin science. What matters is how 'choices' are to be understood, not weather or not they occur in the practice of science. The equation of free will with choice seems to be a mistake.
First, your experience would be no different than it is now. You'd be compelled to believe that evidence x supports hypothesis H where it seems to you as if you're freely believing that for reasons that you consider to be good reasons to believe it.
How does AI work? How does a computer program determine which calculations to do? Prebuild instructions in the case of no free will.
Quoting RogueAI
No? Where do you get that. That's like saying "look at this pong AI, it is simply compelled to always move the bat up while never moving it down" which is obviously not true
"But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely chosen, or itself 'determined'."
If we have free will, then our choices are being freely made. That is a necessary condition for free will. If your choices aren't being freely made, then you obviously don't have free will.
If science involves the evaluation of evidence, which it does, then choices are occurring in science. For example, in order for Pasteur's flask experiment to confirm germ theory, one must first decide whether Pasteur's experiment was good evidence or not. I see no way around this.
My point is an epistemological one: I'm not claiming good science isn't going on. I'm saying, how do we know that what we're doing is good science or not?
You could argue that, if we're compelled to make choices, evolution would have weeded out those of us who made bad choices, and that works for things like "should I pick those berries or not?". It doesn't seem to work so well for more esoteric stuff, like "Is Mercury's eccentric orbit strong evidence for relativity, or, since it was known before Einstein developed his theory, is it an example of ad hoc reasoning?" That also requires a choice, and I don't think evolutionary pressures can explain how we would get that one right, if we were simply compelled to believe what we believe.
Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made. The determinst simply has to reply that of course choices are made all the time - only that those choices are not freely made. So the argument that we need free will in order to practice science collapses. I.e.
"3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices."
Is false.
"Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made."
No, I said science requires the evaluation of evidence, and the evaluation of evidence requires the ability to freely make choices about things like "is this a good or bad piece of evidence?". So, if you can't freely make choices, then you can't evaluate evidence, and if you can't evaluate evidence, you can't do science.
What part of that chain do you take issue with?
"The determinst simply has to reply that of course choices are made all the time - only that those choices are not freely made."
I have no problem with that. My question to the determinist is: if there's no free will, how are we able to do science? If science IS impossible without free will, and we're DOING science, then we have free will (or, more narrowly, we are freely making choices).
""3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices."
Is false.""
You can make choices without free will? How does that work? You can be determined to do an action, as we would be in a deterministic universe, but that is not the same as choosing. Choosing requires there to be at least two options. How are there any options if everything is already determined?
There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple (to eat). The determinist says: the choice was not one freely made.
Here you have both options and determination, neither of which are incompatible with the other.
We're getting bogged down in semantics, but I'll address this: "There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple. The determinist says: the choice was not one freely made."
In order for there to be choices, there have to be options. In a deterministic universe, there are no options. Everything's already been set. You are determined to eat whatever. It appears you have a choice, but if you end up with the apple, in a deterministic universe, you were always going to eat that apple. The pear was never an option. No options, no choice.
We cannot arbitrarily decide what criteria we will use to determine what seems most reasonable, most logical, most in accordance with evidence, most consistent with our overall knowledge and understanding and so on. Those criteria are "built into us" on account of nature and culture: our intelligence, education, general knowledge, critical thinking abilities and so on.
They may change gradually over time, but cannot be arbitrarily chosen in the moment, like as if if I was to deliberate over whether to eat chocolate with nuts or plain chocolate. I doubt that, at any given time, we could even imagine alternative criteria for judgements, unless we happened to be geniuses who had come to find the conventional paradigm full of inconsistencies.
What if the universe is indeterministic? This wouldn't make any practical difference to our situation regarding judgements, as far as I can see.
Of course. You are determined to eat the apple. But you still had the option between apple and the pear. You just chose the apple, not freely. There is a choice, and what is chosen. That you didn't choose it freely is irrelavent to there being a choice.
Deep Blue chooses between two possible moves in a chess game. Everything about it is determined. Yet it still makes a choice, among the possible options, to castle or to check, to move the queen, or sacrifice the bishop. This is what Deep Blue is designed to do. Make choices.
Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
4. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
5. The universe is deterministic.
6. Therefore, the ability to make choices is impossible.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.
"Of course. You are determined to eat the apple But you still had the option between apple and pear."
Not in a deterministic universe. How are there any options in a deterministic universe?
AND, even if there are options, how are you navigating between those options, as making a choice requires, in a deterministic universe?
Your point doesn't work on two levels.
Circular reasoning. If Deep Blue is choosing, then there have to be options, and there have to be options because Deep Blue is choosing.
Consider it a reductio.
"And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined."
These two sentences contradict each other. I'm going to just drop this part of the discussion and recommend Peter van Inwagen's book "an Essay on Free Will".
Yet, Deep Blue is real. Between contradicting sentences and contradicting reality, best to choose the former, and reevaluate what we understand of contradiction.
Choices are not antithetical to determinism. And it is not axiomatic that they are. At the very least an argument must be presented. Something has gone wrong in our understanding of one or the other or both if they are taken to be as such.
I assume you mean "how do you do science without libertarian free will". The answer: with compatibilist free will. Compatibilists account for free will in a manner consistent with determinism. Some people feel that's not free enough because they don't like the idea that what they did was, in principle, determined.
Quoting RogueAI
Don't you believe you actually make choices? It seems absurd to deny this. The act of making choices and evaluating evidence could be described algorithmically, so it's consistent with determinism.
Reflect on a choice you made at some point in the past. Why did you make THAT choice instead of an alternative one? Clearly you had reasons for making the choice that you did. Is it possible that you could have landed on all those reasons and made a different choice? You arrived at those reasons after deliberating on your options, anticipating what would happen with each. The strength of various desires entered in. Maybe you overlooked some things, or failed to anticipate something. But given the series of thoughts and feelings that led to constructing the reasons for your decision, how could you have made a different one? With hindsight, you may have come to wish you'd made a different choice, but this hindsight constitutes knowledge you didn't have at the time, or an amount of self-control that you lacked at the time. If indeed no other option could have been selected after that exact deliberation, then your decision was determined by that deliberation.
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I don't understand what Van Inwagen's argument has to do with what you are presenting here. Van Inwagen's argument is about the necessity of moral responsibility, and the incompatibility of that with determinism. It makes (as far as I recall) no mention whatsoever of judgement of correspondence with reality, which is what are required to make scientific decisions.
This isn't an epistemic argument: "1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence."
That's saying that if we can't really make choices, despite the fact that it seems as if we can, then we can't evaluate evidence/we can't do science.
Yet particular members of the human species have been engaged in what has been conventionally established as the doing of science from at least the early 1600’s. So either the human species hasn’t really been doing science at all, or your argument is junk because it’s conclusion is catastrophically false.
......Eenie meanie minee moe......
Free will is only there whether to choose reason and logical thinking or not. Beyond that, it's on automatic pilot.
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Quoting RogueAI
In the above, (1.) is wrong. (3.) is wrong. Therefore (7.) is a false conclusion, because it depends on (1.) and on (3.), among other things, for it to be true.
The ability to make choices is a necessary condition to set up details of experiments, for instance, but it is not a necessary condition to evaluate results. Evaluating results is straightforward.
The choices presented when making up an experiment will invariably result in one set up at a time, and one setup only. This feature accommodates the rigour of the deterministic world.
Evaluation of evidence is possible without making choices. It is actually pretty straightforward. If a result agrees with the hypotheses, or disagrees,is all one needs to observe. We don't decide whether it agrees or not; it is the data that satisfies the prediction of the hypotheses / theory or it dissatisfies it, which allows us or disallows us to draw conclusions from it.
[i]3.1 No Forking Paths Argument
The No Forking Paths argument (van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Ekstrom 2000) begins by appealing to the idea that whenever we make a choice we are doing (or think we are doing) something like what a traveler does when faced with a choice between different roads. The only roads the traveler is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road she is already on. By analogy, the only choices we are able to make are choices which are a continuation of the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature. If determinism is false, then making choices really is like this: one “road” (the past) behind us, two or more different “roads” (future actions consistent with the laws) in front of us. But if determinism is true, then our journey through life is like traveling (in one direction only) on a road which has no branches. There are other roads, leading to other destinations; if we could get to one of these other roads, we could reach a different destination. But we can’t get to any of these other roads from the road we are actually on. So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future; we are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do.[/i]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/#TwoReasForThinFreeWillIncoDete
Fixed will is dynamic; it grows, as it must, to a better, wider fixed will every moment, to whatever degree.
Deep Blue is designed to make choices based on logic applied to all possible moves and countermoves. I can make choices based only on logic, too. But I also make other choices based on ideology, cultural or historical significance, emotions, habit, etc. I can broaden my choices beyond logic based on alternative value systems.
I can also apply logic to adjust my habits, for instance, or apply cultural significance to improve the application of logic-based management systems. I can choose what evaluative system to base my choices on, or I can construct my own, evaluate its effect in relation to experiences/observations/measurements, and make adjustments for future applications. Of course, I can also choose NOT to be aware of the evaluative systems I apply to a choice, and allow it to be determined by my experience of past events with little to no conscious interaction. Such is my freedom.
Application of free will may not be a necessary condition for all science, but in my view it frees scientific endeavour from the ignorance of certain ideologies, and keeps logic-based evaluation systems from losing touch with the human experience.
Just printing out the argument isn't going to help and shows a complete unwillingness to engage. I'm familiar with Van Inwagen's argument, I don't need it repeated. What I don't understand is how it relates to your position. The no forking paths only means that whatever route we take in a deterministic universe, that was the only route. So it could easily be that the 'right' [what appeared to be]choices in an scientific investigation, were, in fact, the only route we could have taken. It's still the 'right' route. Nothing about the no forking paths argument prevents us from being on the 'right' path as far as scientific knowledge is concerned.
There's alot of weird modal shit going in a statement like this. Take 'choose' out of it, and this becomes a tautology: "We are never able to do... other than what we actually do". But what would it mean to do otherwise than what we do? Say doing otherwise were 'possible'. And then you did otherwise. But then, you could not have done otherwise than that. So, no, obviously, you can't have done otherwise than what you did, or do. And the same considerations apply to statements like this:
"So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future".
One can only say to this: of course our actual future is our only possible future. What other future could there be? Another possible future? But were that 'other' future 'actualized', that too would be an actual future. And that too would be the only possible future. So one has to wonder what the qualification 'if', in 'if determinism is true' is doing in a statement like this. I mean, what other state of affairs ought to hold? That other possible futures are... possible futures? Tautology again.
Conceiving the future in terms of "possibility" is where the root of the problem lies, but it suffices to point out the strangeness of the above statements for the moment.
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for choosing what garment to knit.
2. Choosing which garment to knit next is a necessary condition for knitting.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, choosing which garment to knit next is impossible.
5. If choosing which garment to knit next is impossible, knitting is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, knitting is impossible.
I brought up Inwagen because the person I was responding to wasn't getting what I was saying (I was making a point about choice being impossible in a deterministic universe due to lack of options).
Inwagen said it much better than I could.
In other words, if we were to use logic, one could argue that a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is essential in science for moving the thought forward, as well as realizing the resulting discovery and uncovery of such things... ?
So I suppose the 'choice' to be curious or having a strong sense of wonder, along with being glass half-full to the spectrum of possibilities is some of what you are getting at... ?
No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is.
Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?
No, I was trying to show that science is impossible without the ability to freely choose, and since science is clearly moving forward, we have the ability to freely choose. From there, it's a short hop to "we have free will".
We have the ability to sensibly choose, according to how much sense we have in our will. Some do it better; some worse; some are naturals; some struggle. We end up, hopefully, in professions we are good at.
I generally agree with this, most of the objections you've got stem from an interpretation of the word 'choice' different from yours (you're obviously referring to free choices here, which a deterministic machine isn't able to make).
However as someone mentioned, if people's actions were predetermined then it was also predetermined that what we call science would evolve the way it does, so science "moving forward" does not imply free will, however in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained.
Really? What coincidences can only be explained by free will.
The conclusion of course happens to be true, but the argument alas does not run. Never mind Deep Blue, we have programs that deterministically evaluate their own performance and modify themselves accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero. Trial and error, evaluation, learning, improvement... what was it again that a deterministic mechanism cannot do? Freely choose? But it doesn't choose at all; science allows itself to be entirely determined by the facts. It follows a method that deterministically converges towards truth. Thought is not where freedom resides, because thought is itself mechanical. Freedom lies in awareness, and has nothing to do with choice.
There's certainly no reason that an utterly determined process couldn't be right. But a person who thinks their conclusions are utterly determined would always have to consider that the sense that those conclusions are right is utterly determined and not because they are.
How more free must you be, Pinocchio, to yearn for more than the innocuous?
Good night, sweet prince, may your rights rest with the other real boys~
Indeed, it would be foolish to take my word for it - find out for yourself.
From the POV of thought or of AlphaZero, as it were, it is necessarily the case that a decision cannot be determined in advance of the determination; decisions are always conditionals, and thus program branches. Running the program determines how the branches are navigated, the program itself does not choose.
I have wrestled with the idea of freewill for so long with zero results. From what I can see the issue is foundational to everything and yet no one has a definitive answer. A theory here and a a theory there but nothing conclusive or even vaguely satisfying.
I can see that choice is part of your argument and from what I've observed it's a key piece of the puzzle. Let's take a more general viewpoint and not just science. Are choices and the ability to make them really evidence of freewill.
We need to qualify choice with "free from influence". Thus qualified, free choice, its existence, can be used to prove freewill. This is where it gets difficult because we don't know how causation works physically or psychologically with regard to choice.
That said one thing worth mentioning is awareness has a big role in freewill. We've all had the experience where we resist our urges which I take as weak evidence for freewill and a requirement for this ability is that we must be aware of the influences that compel us to act in a certain way. If for a moment we let our guards down we're back to behaving like an animal - instinct driven and machine-like.
Humans have, for better or worse, a "more" evolved sense of awareness, specifically self-awareness, that allows for more self-control (freewill if you prefer). I guess we could say freewill is evolving which, sadly, the news channels clearly contradict.
(1) Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians who invented it to solve the problem of evil.
(2) Freedom can and ought to be decoupled from the mystifying notion of 'will', which is no less theological and also had to be invented by a bunch of hysteric Christians grappling with the problem of the biblical devil ("beginning in the third century, the Fathers and apologists use it [will] as a technical term to express the mastery of the will over actions in a particularly delicate sphere: that of the origin of evil and responsibility for sin. In this sense it is found for the first time in Lactantius (Divine Institutes 2.9.49), referring significantly to the devil", Giorgio Agamben, Karman).
(3) The connection between freedom and choice also ought to be completely abolished insofar as freedom to create the very conditions of choice, to establish new possibilities, and not simply 'choose' between pre-existing ready-mades is the only manner in which freedom has any significance whatsoever.
(4) The idea that freedom is some pseudo-psychological 'inner' concept needs to be abolished once and for all in favour of an understanding of freedom as at once biological, social and political: a centrifugal rather than centripetal understanding of freedom, one that finds its roots in places far beyond our bodies rather than in some indefinable, inexplicable vanishing point in some mysterious locus in the brain. Freedom must be understood ecologically or not at all.
Every time someone talks about freedom in terms of 'free will' and 'free choice', they are in no way talking about freedom, but theology. A heuristic: if you cannot talk about freedom without talking about choice and will at the same time, you're not talking about freedom. As if science needs 'free will'. Christianity completely fucked our intuitions regarding freedom, and science would do well to be rid of the theological trash that is 'free will' to all the better understand what freedom consists in.
As what did it exist?
These are the sources...
Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy
Timothy O'Keefe, Epicurus on Freedom
R. W. Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate
David Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists
Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame
Later in the article, someone can read the following, attributed to Epicurus
and this, attributed to Lucretius...
and...
It seems that the christians were not the original 'hysterics' or 'theologians'. One wonders how Agamben and his readers managed to miss all that. Probably too mainstream to bother!
"One of the few questions on which historians of ancient thought seem to be in perfect agreement is in fact the lack of a notion corresponding to that of the will in classical culture ([Eric] Dodds, p. 6; cf. [Albrecht] Dihle, p. 20). ... Precisely because the will “is not a datum of human nature,” but “a complex construction whose history appears to be as difficult, multiple, and incomplete as that of the self, of which it is to a great extent an integral part” (ibid., p. 50) [citation from Jean-Pierre Vernant], it is necessary to keep up our guard against anachronistically projecting onto ancient people our way of conceiving of the behaviors, free choices, and responsibilities of the subject.
It is significant from this perspective that the Greeks, to express what we designate with the single term “will,” would have had recourse to a plurality of words: boul?sis (and the corresponding verb boulomai), “desire, intention”; boul?, “decision, project, counsel”; thel?sis (and thel?), which means being ready or disposed to do something (also in a purely objective sense: thelei gignesthai, “it wants to happen,” as Tuscan peasants used to say: non vuol piovere, “it doesn’t want to rain”); orexis, which indicates appetite in general, the faculty of desiring. None of these terms correspond to our notion of will, understood as the foundation of free and responsible action.
[These terms] do not have a moral origin and therefore do not refer to subjective conditions that make agents the ethically responsible cause of their actions. Instead we are dealing with juridical categories, by means of which the Greek city sought to regulate the exercise of private vengeance by distinguishing, according to the passionate reactions that they aroused in the citizens, diverse levels of punishability. ...It is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. To the preeminence accorded by modern people to the will, there corresponds in the ancient world a primacy of potential: human beings are not responsible for their actions because they have willed them; they answer for them because they were able to carry them out."
"The term “free will” (liberum arbitrium) is used by Christian authors to translate the Greek expressions autexousion (literally “what has power over itself”) and to eph’?min (literally “what depends on us”), which in Neoplatonic treatises and Aristotle’s commentators designate the capacity to decide on one’s own actions. The modern translation of the term as “freedom,” which is frequently encountered, is equivocal, because the context in which it is used is not that of political freedom (which is called eleuth?ria in Greek) but the moral and juridical one, which is by now familiar to us, of the imputability of actions. The origin of the term is, after all, juridical: arbitrium is the decision or faculty of judging of the arbiter, of the judge in a lawsuit (arbiter dicitur iudex, quod totius rei habet arbitrium et facultatum) and, by extension, the subject’s faculty of deciding.
...In the general convergence of late-ancient culture toward the same insistent problematic nuclei, the question of the autonomy of human actions was posed by philosophers in relation to fate. Exemplary from this point of view is the treatise Peri heimarmen? (On Fate) of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the “exegete” par excellence of Aristotle’s thought. Against the Stoics, who seemed to accord a preponderant part to fate, for him it was a question of “preserving what depends on us [ to eph’?min sozesthai ]” (Alexander, p. 38/60). ...
The strategy within which the free will of the Fathers functions, while showing some obvious analogies with those of the philosophers, is essentially different. For Alexander, the problem is in fact still the Aristotelian one of the ambiguity of human potential, and the eph’?min consists essentially in “being able to do opposites” (dynasthai ta antikeimena, ibid. p. 24/58; dynasthai hairesthai to antikeimenon, p. 25/58); for Christian theologians it is instead a matter of singling out in the will the principle of imputability of human actions, and to this end, they must first of all translate the problem of potential into that of will (de libera voluntate quaestio est, “it is a question of free will”; Augustine, On Free Will, 2.19.51)."
"Ancient human beings were people who “can,” who conceive their thought and their action in the dimension of potential; Christian human beings are beings that will."
I omit the specific engagements with Lucretius and the Stoics for the sake of space. There is of course, the rest of the book which continues much in this vein as well. In the meantime, I wish you well on your future Wikipedia research and citations of works you have not read.
"None of the Peripatetic and Middle-Platonist authors is concerned with free-will, with that which depends on us, or with moral responsibility, when they discuss contingency, or two-sided possibility. True, that which depends on us is included in the contingent, but so are other things. Accordingly, neither in Plutarch nor in Boethius nor in Alexander does that which depends on us enter the discussion..." "...There is no evidence at all that Chrysippus or any other early Stoic grappled with the problem of character determination and moral responsibility, let alone the problem of character determination and free will."
"...The Stoics did not require a concept of freedom to do otherwise, since they did not connect moral responsibility with such freedom. As a consequence, they had no reason to concern themselves with any free-will problem. Theirs is the problem of the compatibility of autonomous agency and causal determinism. On the Peripatetic side, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] faced no free-will problem either. ...A problem of determinism and freedom to do otherwise thus arises only in the confrontation of the two philosophical systems, when later Stoic causal determinism meets late Peripatetic freedom to do otherwise—with such freedom understood as a necessary condition for moral responsibility". (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy).
And since you cited Epicurus so prominently, lets hear what she has to say about him too:
"There is no compelling textual evidence for the assumption that Epicurus was concerned with freedom of decision or choice or with a problem of free will. There is no evidence that he discussed, or even had a conception of, freedom of decision or freedom of choice. There is no evidence that he had a concept of moral responsibility that is grounded on freedom of choice, or on freedom of decision. There is not even any direct evidence that he thought freedom to do otherwise was jeopardized by atomistic determinism. There is further no compelling evidence that the swerve played a role in the formation of volitional acts of decision processes.
I hence suggest that the whole idea that Epicurus was concerned with the free will problem is anachronistic, and that - at least as long as no positive evidence comes to light - the view that Epicurus thought there was such a problem, and that he endeavoured to solve it, should be dropped". (Did Epicurus Discover the Free Will Problem?).
I would quote her on Lucretius too, but whipping the dead is mean. Guess things are pretty easy to miss when the depth of one's 'reading' goes as far - or rather as near - as a Wiki page.
If we were even half as advanced as the ancients were about freedom, we'd probably have dropped the stupid notion of free will and free choice a long time ago.
Premise one is wrong, therefore your conclusion does not follow
"No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is."
RA, I think you may be overlooking the obvious. Would you not agree that raising the ' scientific question' in itself is a necessary part of the evaluation process?
And if so, is that not called human wonderment? But if not, then why choose to evaluate at all?
"Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?"
Of course you are joking right (or maybe I misunderstood)? Here's an easy one for you: every event must have a cause.
What about the Fundamental event?
What fundamental event?
Never mind....doesn’t matter. That any fundamental event has a fundamental cause is still a synthetic a priori proposition.
Nice editing. You forgot to quote her when she says that the concept of the will and therefore the problem of free will and of the compatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise can be found, besides Christians, in Platonists in the second century. Platonists who, according to her, were also trying to solve the problem of evil. Which denies Agamben's claim that all this was first introduced by the Christian Lactantius in the third century or Dihle's claim that Augustine came up with it.
You also forgot to quote her saying how influential Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and Alexander were in subsequent thinkers and how the later formulated their doctrines based on the ideas of the former. Which denies Dihle's claim that Augustine, or the other Christians, had to find their sources of the concept of will in Old Testament. And deflates the importance of the notion that we have to search for the problem of free will within a specific thinker's system. Even today, no one besides libertarians or those who specifically argue against them, need to be troubled by free will within their own system; yet, they're still part of the same discussion, the way Alexander and subsequent Platonists or Christians were parts of the same discussion.
False.
Quoting RogueAI
That's a loaded question, the unwarranted assumption being that freedom is required.
Quoting RogueAI
That's a non sequitur, and makes no sense whether you make it about free will or determinism.
"If you simply freely will yourself into believing that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you freely willed yourself to believe is right, but how would you ever know?"
Bad arguments like yours are a good case against free will, at least from my perspective, because I cannot freely will myself to find them convincing enough to believe or accept over more convincing alternatives. If I cannot, then how is that free will? It isn't free, and it doesn't seem like a matter of will. It's a matter of what I find convincing based on my ability to asses the evidence.
That is nonsense. Why would you needlessly insert "choice" into that scenario, when it isn't necessary, and when it actually makes the explanation worse?
They are conclusions that would need to be reached. And people do not "choose" to believe anything at all, because beliefs are not chosen, they are acquired.
It's supposed to turn out catastrophically false. It's a reductio ad absurdum. :roll:
It was supposed to?
Damn. I missed all the clues that would have informed me which of the author’s major or assorted minors were intentionally frivolous. All this time, I thought he was seriously claiming science can’t be done without free will. You know.....thread title and all....
You had me lulled into believing that I could say whatever I liked to you, because you wouldn't see it anyway.
No one is exempt from the reach of my subliminal powers.
I don’t ignore anyone; you just happened to say something I found worth commenting on.
Yes. The ability to choose is impossible in a deterministic universe (see Inwagen's argument).
I briefly talked about this. It's likely we evolved to be the kind of beings who mostly come to rational conclusions (even in a deterministic world); the irrational ones were selected against long ago. That has some merit, and I don't have a good counter to it yet.
Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of you totally abandoning the authors you initially quoted in favour of some last minute updates because you thought a Wiki article was in any way an adequate source of anything.
As for Bobzien's unnamed and uncited 2nd century Platonists, I'm more than happy to concede that, insofar we're still talking more than 100 years after the birth of Christ, with Lactantius himself writing in the 3rd century AD. And insofar as these unnamed and uncited Platonists were themselves wrangling with the problem of evil, that's precisely the context in which I originally said the so-called 'problem of free will' stems from anyway. Happy to amend: "Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians and super late Platonists who invented it to solve the problem of evil". That free will is a late historical invention is by far the point I'm most interested in making. As for Bobzien herself, I quote from her aptly titled The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem:
"It is then presumably only a slight overstatement when I conclude with saying: the problem of physical causal determinism and freedom of decision entered the scene in the 2nd century A.D., by a chance encounter of Stoic physics and the fruits of early Aristotle exegesis, with the contemporary focus on the culpability of mental events and the introduction of a power of decision making as catalysts - and it was not part of the philosophical repertoire for long."
The crypto-theologians in this thread can continue their Christian apologetics by pretending that free will is anything but a religious issue, and that those 'rich intuitions' that people think they have of free will are more than just historico-cultural memes ratiocinated onto ambigious feelings after the fact. In any case I'd wager that the preponderence of this obscure theological problematic in our time has alot more to do with the modern market economy than any apprarent 'perennial' metaphysical problem.
Good post.
I think because free will seems impossible in either a deterministic or indeterministic universe. Inwagen talks about this. But yet the intuition that we are freely making choices is one of the strongest we have. So there's tension between the idea that, in this type of universe, free will seems impossible and yet we all act like we have it.
I would say that freedom of choice is a necessary condition for free will, but not a sufficient one. If you can establish that we really are making free choices, it wouldn't establish free will, per se, but you would be very close to it.
Yes, the idea that we are biological robots run completely counter to the rich inner life we all have. That is the last thing you would expect a machine to have. The existence of consciousness is a huge problem for those who regard us as automatons. I think it's catastrophic.
You probably couldn't hear me because of your deafening retreat from the original thesis that it was Christians who invented it. Is the concept of free will concept a historical invention? Wow, who would have thought? Damn amazing, it must be the only one, the rest being platonic shit flowing somewhere out of history.
"Bobzien's unnamed and uncited 2nd century Platonists"? But you've read the fucking masterpiece (and her article), so you know it's there. Let me quote it for you though, not that it's needed, since you backed off from the initial claim.
So, even in Bobzien's very restrictive sense, the free will thesis was clearly spelled out by non christians at the latest in the early second century. Long before Lactantius, far longer before Augustine. Also, funny how concepts originated in supposedly 'non-theological' discussions can give rise to 'theological' discussions, but the opposite can't happen for some reason.
Yet, per Bobzien, Alexander doesn't face a free will problem within his system simply because, against the Stoics, he rejects predetermination of human actions by divine providence. A totally non-theological issue. Otherwise, according to Bobzien again, 'he regards a concept of freedom to do otherwise as a prerequisite for moral responsibility'. And the Stoics, despite the fact that they had a doctrine of divine predestination, didn't face a free will problem within their system simply because, according to their doctrine and against Alexander, the freedom to do and choose otherwise is not a prerequisite of moral responsibility.
Lo and behold, all the necessary ingredients of the restrictive free will problem are here, just not all gathered unambiguously within one single system. It was a matter of time and historical circumstances for this to happen and the notion that it necessarily takes a hysteric christian theologian to make it happen is nothing but hysterical theology.
"If Alexander wasn't Alexander, he would have invented free will! If the Stoics weren't Stoics they would have also invented free will!". Well done, A+ for creative thinking. You can go back to Wiki class now, don't forget your packed lunch.
That they didn't face it 'within' their respective systems is Bobzien's expression. Didn't you find it curious that she had to write that and what she might mean?
Nope. Not at all, cause either way, she concludes that the free will notion (in the restrictive sense in which she's examining it) was formulated in antiquity, the problem is by whom exactly and these writers are legitimate contenders even if they weren't the ones who did this. That's why she had to write a fucking masterpiece and not an ignorant and arrogant post in a forum, like you. I already explained why she had to make the distinction. It's because
So, it was not independently within these two systems that all the necessary parts of the doctrine were combined, but at their intersection. All the necessary doctrines were already part of the discussion and it just took someone else, the platonists of early second century, to rearrange them and make them all parts of the same system.
Next time make sure not to cite Agamben and not to attribute it to 'hysteric' Christians.
Whereas ancient people attributed the invention of fire, paper, smelting, etc. to divinities, we believe we invented all those things. In short, we sucked all the divinity in the world into ourselves.
Christianity didn't spontaneously accomplish this, but its monotheism (early on modeled on the Neoplatonic trinity), contributed to it (or was a vehicle for it, depending on your POV).
Maybe it's just a pendulum and one day humans will lose ownership of themselves again and see themselves scattered across the stars and their emotions lighting up the sky during storms.
Either way, @StreetlightX, it's nothing to be angry about.
I think Mmm is right, me saying God caused the big bang would be synthetic a priori. Nevertheless, guess what....that's why we have natural sciences that objectively measures phenomena, along with those important assumptions no less ( synthetic propositions are required to do natural science) !!
Specifically, where for the ancients responsibility was action oriented and objective, Christian philosophy reoriented responsibility by interiorizing it within a subject. That is, responsibility was once was a matter of sanctioning a penalty for an action and not a fault to a subject: guilt was objective (proportional to a punishment) and not subjective (proportional to one's intention or 'will'). The difference is roughly between 'you have done a wrong thing' and 'you are in the wrong for having done the thing'. To reuse and expand a quote above:
[The Greek volitional terms] do not have a moral origin and therefore do not refer to subjective conditions that make agents the ethically responsible cause of their actions. Instead we are dealing with juridical categories, by means of which the Greek city sought to regulate the exercise of private vengeance by distinguishing, according to the passionate reactions that they aroused in the citizens, diverse levels of punishability. ...It is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. [In Christian philosophy] the connection between action and agent, which was originally defined in an exclusively factual way, is now founded in a principle inherent in the subject, which constitutes the subject as culpable. That means that fault has been displaced from the action to the subject who, if he or she has acted sciente et volente, bears the whole responsibility for it." (Karman)
It is in fact precisely this reconceptualization of responsibility that allows Christian philosophy to link freedom and the will: by displacing responsibility from an objective to subjective category, it opens the door to a subject mired in sin: delinked from action, responsibility becomes a category unto itself such that only a Christian can say that one is born in sin from the very beginning. 'Free will', in turn, helps explain sin. This is another reason why Hairy's insistence that 'free will' was 'already there' and just needed a bit of a reorganization of terms is so laughably and historically tin-eared: the introduction of 'free will' required an entire conceptual upheaval that could only have been theologically motivated. So yeah, the pop-Nietzschean story you've relayed needs a great deal more to it to adequately reflect the changes wrought by the misery of Christian philosophy.
"By attributing to the human mind (and hence the human person) the character of voluntary self-control and self-origination, Augustine turned away from a Greek classical conception of the mind (and hence human nature) as characterized by its cognitive capacities of critical thinking and insight, theoretical contemplation, natural discovery, and logical deduction and argument. Augustine’s fateful turn reoriented Western Latin culture away from the Platonic intellectualist conception of human moral nature as either clear-sighted or confused and benighted (and in either case within the natural order) and toward the idea of a human person as fundamentally moral or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, obedient or sinful through choice of action rather than through understanding and character.
In the Platonic tradition, by contrast, the body’s corruption was responsible for the mind being morally clouded; hence moral ignorance—not active sin but the Greek hamartia, “missing the mark”—was the result of the problems inherent in embodiment. Aristotle’s view was a nuance on the Platonic: his was an account of moral action as stemming from moral character. In this theory, early socialization shaped desire, enabling a person to have the capacity for moral discernment and understanding, as well as deliberative reasoning. Augustine, in contrast, explicitly rejected the body as the source of ignorance or error, neither of which, in any case, could in his view ever account for sin. He regarded that view as pagan and said, “Those who suppose the ills of the soul derive from the body are in error.”
...The upshot of Augustine’s reduction of all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will is a new theory of moral psychology. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in worldview—in the conception of the human person and of the universe that human beings inhabit and, hence, in the conception of moral agency—initiating a decisive break with the past by focusing on the freedom of the will and a concomitant demotion of nature. It is this worldview that we have inherited" (Heidi Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself).
Compare Agamben: "Hence the intellectualistic character of ancient ethics, which seems so abstract to modern moralists. According to the Socratic maxim, every evil action is actually ignorance, because no one “does evil voluntarily” (ouden h?kon hamartanei; Protagoras 358b). We are so accustomed to refer the problem of action to the will that it is not easy for us to accept that the classical world thought it, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of knowledge. As has been effectively observed, one could say that for the Greek person “as soon as the good is known, freedom of action, which is for us in the last analysis the decisive thing, is abolished” ([Julius] Stenzel, p. 173)."
You presented so much information, I'm not sure what to comment on. But let's start here. What was Augustine rejecting? It's not an ancient Greek conception of responsibility. It's a competing Christian conception. Christianity has always been ideologically diverse because of its origin. That foundational diversity is why Protestants could later embrace a deterministic theology and still be fully within the domain of Christian ideas.
Have you read Augustine or anything about his life? If you have, then you know he was a thorough-going Neoplatonist prior to his big conversion. Neoplatonism is monistic idealism. In it, physicality is an emergent property (in the same way we think of consciousness as emergent). The Neoplatonists became a little foggy when explaining how physicality emerges, but the basic idea is that it's a state in which the divine mind (which human minds reflect) is becoming thin. Since goodness is associated with the divine intellect, physicality is evil. This isn't a condemnation. You're supposed to take it literally.
When Augustine first learned Neoplatonism, this would have been a familiar idea because it's part of Manichaeism, which is actually a kind of Christianity. It's not the kind that Augustine eventually converted to, though.
With my Nietzche-esque take on history (you're right about that, BTW.. in unnerves me a little to read Nietzsche because I do the same thing he does), the picture I'd like to convey is this:
The world Augustine lived in was a soup of religions, cults, and competing ideologies. Christian entities absorbed Neoplatonism and then argued with each other about details. There isn't much that's purely original with Christianity, though. For instance, the moral perspective that comes through in the earliest days of Christianity is Persian in origin. The Hebrews swallowed Persian themes and outlooks in the same way Christians later swallowed Greek and Roman themes.
Christianity as we know it is what grew up out of all of that.
Whether or not he meant to reject it or not, that's what he effectively did, and that's what we were addressing. William Connolly's The Augustinian Imperative is probably the work that explores the concequences of Augustine's renewed conception of responsibility best, if you were ever to bother to look it up. The rest of your post is irrelavent.
I didn't understand that you were that zeroed in on Augustine. I thought you were talking about Christianity in general. See 1 Corinthians 9:27 for a much bigger theological gun talking about morality and the body (the effects of that scripture throughout the history of Christianity are well known.)
Point is: Christianity is pervasively self-contradictory. That's why it's impossible to trace any particular historic trend back to it. For the time that it was a living religion it was a forum for ideas, not a dictator.
You don't need a sense of wonderment to raise a scientific question. Military necessity does quite nicely.
Are you sure about that?
I'm not exactly sure, are you wondering now?
Clue: physical science theories' always use synthetic propositions because they make statements about the facts of nature that can be tested. In layman's terms, isn't that a sense of wonderment?
"I'm not exactly sure, are you wondering now?"
About every event having a cause? Yeah. If the event in question was the beginning of time and space...
"Clue: physical science theories' always use synthetic propositions because they make statements about the facts of nature that can be tested. In layman's terms, isn't that a sense of wonderment?"
I guess, but it's not a necessary condition for doing science. I can have no sense of wonder and still make statement about nature if my life depends on it.
I'm happy to learn you're seeing a little of that now. I think the salient point to be made is that those characteristics of human nature are unique. Similarly, to answer your concern about whether your life depended on it, I doubt you would spend time working out mathematical formulas,/theories if you were caught up in that.
And oddly enough, the ability to perform mathematics is also unique to us as humans too. Not only does it not confer any biological advantages, the knowledge of mathematical formulas (laws of gravity) are not exclusive to or required for eluding falling objects and avoiding danger.
In summary, my point is that we are unique creatures indeed. It begs the question of why we have these abilities if survival in the jungle didn't require it (?).
Wrong. You can trace plenty of conceptual innovations back to Christian philosophy, and as lots of authors agree, free will is precisely one of them. Those ignorant of this history still continue to argue over 'free will' and 'free choice' as though these concepts were in any way exhaustive or even remotely adequate to thinking freedom. The irony being that such concepts were invented to all the better subjugate people to the idea of an all powerful, forgiving God. Free will as a tool of extreme unfreedom.
It's probably the cosmic return that represents forgiveness, right?
"What you take vengeance on is what men inflict on themselves, for even when they sin against you, they do evil to their own souls. Man's iniquity lies to itself, whether by corrupting and perverting their own nature, which you have made and set in order, or by immoderate use of things permitted to men, or ... by a burning lust for that use which is contrary to nature .... Such things are done, when you are forsaken, O fountain of life, who are the sole and true creator and ruler of the universe .... Therefore by humble devotion return is made to you, and you cleanse us from evil ways, and are merciful to those who confess to you and graciously hear the groans of those shackled by sin, and you free them from the chains that we have made for ourselves." (Confessions)
"The soul, in fact, rejoiced in its own freedom to act perversely and disdained to be God's servant; and so it was deprived of obedient service which its body had first rendered. At its own pleasure the soul deserted its superior and master; and so it no longer retained its inferior and servant obedient to its will. It did not keep its own flesh subject to it in all respects as it could have kept it forever if it had itself continued in Subjection to God." (City of God)
"Every man is separated from God, except those who are reconciled to God through Christ the Mediator; and that no one can be separated from God, except by sins, which alone cause separation; that there is, therefore, no reconciliation except by the remission of sins, through the one grace of the most merciful Saviour, — through the one sacrifice of the most veritable Priest; and that none who are born of the woman, that trusted the serpent and so was corrupted through desire, Genesis 3:6 are delivered from the body of this death, except by the Son of the virgin who believed the angel and so conceived without desire." (On The Merit and Forgiveness of Sins)
I mean, there's no way your question is entirely irrelevant, is it?
The whole fountain is God. Everything is God. That is Augustine's problem of evil. He rejected both Plotinus' solution and dualist solutions.
His solution is vaguely like Leibniz' though obviously that was a different problem of evil.
I just can't make this thesis work. But I did try.
First let me say that you can argue that Augustine introduced the idea of free will this way:
Plotinus' view was deterministic in the sense that evil is just an inevitable part if god. Augustine argues that there actually is choice in the system because the whole thing chose to come into being. So the fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity brings the distinction determinism/free-will into the light of day.
The concept of free will wouldn't have meant much previously because there wasn't anything to compare it to.
Much later when Augustine's metaphysics is gone and the subtleties of his view are overlooked, we have a more personal God who shepards his creatures and hopes they use their free will wisely, but gets really pissed off when they don't. Now forgiveness has become God's mercy (where before it was a journey to union with the One).
So one could endorse the notion that free will originated out of a theological issue.
There is plenty of 'yeah but', but we can leave that to the side and move on.
Does it? To me that's an argument that you need to justify just as much, if not more, than the original one.
Quoting StreetlightX
That's a circular argument. The correct conclusion is "and then, you could have done otherwise than that", because it was already set as a premise that the non-hypothetical course of action could have been done.
Quoting StreetlightX
A jump from "couldn't have done" to "can't have done". I disagree with at least the first one, maybe with both, but even more I disagree with drawing one as a conclusion from the other.
Of course we can only do what we do, because that is what we do. The issue with moral responsibility is different, though. Moral responsibility is predicated on the idea that we could have done otherwise than we did; that an alternative course of action under the control of the actor was actually, and not merely logically, possible prior to the act. If a murderer never could have refrained from murdering, then there would be no logical justification for holding him or her morally responsible. The act would logically have to be seen as being akin to the act of an animal or a natural phenomenon; that is, completely amoral.
That's the whole point of what Streetlight is saying though (if I understand it correctly). That there is a logical problem with the proposition "We are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do", or rather the argument that such a dichotomy is coherent at all, and yet such a dichotomy is required for exactly the moral culpability reasons you provide.
The argument, then, is that in order to provide a framework for moral culpability (to explain evil), theologians had to introduce a conception of being able to do other than we actually do despite the fact that the entire question of whether we are or aren't able to do other than we actually do isn't even coherent.
The two logical possibilities are that we could have done differently than we did or that we could not have done differently than we did. Whether we could have done differently than we did is a question the answer to which, for obvious reasons cannot be empirically determined, but I don't see why that should lead us to think the question is incoherent.
Moral culpability is logically based on the premise that we could have done differently than we did, so we must for practical reasons assume that to be so, unless we wish to either dispense with moral culpability, or dispense with the requirement to have a rational justification for holding people morally responsible.
We could have done other than we did is a different proposition to that we are able to do other than we did (which is the actual quote). The former might be read as ignoring our personally capabilities, only being a statement about our understanding of parameters within physical systems. The latter is making a claim about capability, that we had it within our power to do other than we did. This is very much moving away from the topic of conversation here, but that's the point about moral culpability.
Quoting Janus
I don't see why removing moral culpability removes all rational justification for holding people morally responsible. If anything, it weakens the argument. The less directly we assume other people's actions to be determined by their social environment, the less reason we have to believe that punishment and morals are going to make any difference at all to their behaviour. The whole reason behind setting clear societal rules of membership is that we presume such rules will have determining influence on the behaviour of others. We can't then say that someone brought up in an environment where the rules are different is then responsible for their actions as if their different upbringing made no difference, that would undermine the justification for us making public statements of morality by punishing offenders.
If we were to conclude that one's behaviour is entirely determined, then it would follow exactly from that the we should create circumstances (including deterrents to crime) which become those very determining factors for the behaviour we desire.
If we conclude the opposite end of the spectrum, that people are entirely free-willed and make their own choices without determining influences, then there's no point in punishing them at all, it's not going to determine any better behaviour in those observing the punishment.
There's an interesting short-circuit here isn't there? An actual possibility. A possibility whose status is - actual. A possibility which is not merely "possibly possible" but actually possible. A transcendental question in other words, a question regarding the modal status of possibility itself. And I agree that this is precisely where moral considerations play out. But note the specificity of this: it's an issue not merely about the sheer 'existence-or-not' of possibility (possible vs. not possible), but the status or 'kind' of possibility (actually possible/not actually possible) at work. Morality deals with the "real conditions of possibility", as it were.
But this is precisely what vulgar thought experiments like the garden of forking paths do not deal with. The possibility involved with such thought experiments are always 'possible possibles'. This is reflected in the very metaphor in which the (possible) paths are laid out in advance, and the question of 'choice' turns upon the possibility on taking one (possible) path over another (possible) path. 'Possiblity' here is ramified to the second degree. This is how it has to be in order to be coherent at all: otherwise the whole problem falls into the stupidity of asking if the actual could be otherwise: but the very definition of the actual is that "it is as it is" (and not otherwise). "We can only do what we do, because that is what we do".
So it's only by de-realizing the actual and treating it in the mode of the possible (one among others, this possible path rather than that possible path) that the question gets off the ground in the first place. But this vitiates any analysis of what you rightly referred to as 'actual possibility'. Understanding the 'actuality of possibility' - which possibilities are open for the taking in the here and now - requires what one might call 'material analysis' (and not mere logic chopping): what are the concrete, 'on the ground' conditions which enable, influence, or prevent choices? What factors are operative in self and environment, and how and in what manner are they apprehended and practised and modified in various contexts? All of this informs choice, informs what we even count as a choice (informs who and what we are), and makes choices meaningful and evaluable.
Yet for Augustine and a bunch of shitbrains in his wake, all of this is condensed into a single, utterly emaciated question over whether we have some pseudo-psychological faculty of 'will', over which a single, snivelling, binary question is meant to answer whether or not we are free: 'do we have it?' (herp derp). The 'thinness' of this question merely reflects the thinness of the concern it was formulated to alleviate: how can God be Good when there is evil in the world? That's it, that's all that 'free will' is meant to secure, the innocence of God - at the price of the guilt of man. It only incidentally has anything to even do with humanity, let alone freedom, and one of the biggest philosophical swindles of our time is that anyone thinks it does.
@Isaac is entirely right that 'free will' is destructive of responsibility, and not in any sense an enabling condition.
Notice how this could have been uttered by Marcus Aurelius.
What is a puppet responsible for?
If behavior is entirely determined then we either will or will not create circumstances which become those very determining factors for the behavior we desire.
I don't think many would say that free will involves making "choices without determining influences". It is one thing for choices to be influenced and another for them to be entirely determined. It seems you're thinking in overly 'black and white' terms here.
My point was simply that moral culpability or responsibility is logically predicated on the idea that moral agents could have acted other than they did. It is only on that basis that a coherent and consistent distinction could be made between moral acts and merely natural events. If the murderer could not, actually as opposed to merely logically, have refrained from murdering, then the act of murder is logically no different than a natural event.
Assuming that kind of strict determinism of course we would probably (that is if we were determined to do so) still punish people for performing certain acts in order to deter others from doing likewise; but there could be no rational moral justification for such punishment, there could only be practical justification. More than that, the whole idea of justification becomes irrelevant if we consider human actions to be entirely determined.
The protection of society would be moral, making the lock-up necessary for other than punishment, although somewhat 'punishing', hoping for learning.
So, I have not been saying that the idea of moral responsibility is founded on the idea of absolutely unconditioned free will, but merely that it is justified by the idea that one actually could have done other than one did, and that this idea can never be empirically confirmed or dis-confirmed. In that sense it is an absolute presupposition.
Unfortunately, as humans, we live with a great deal of inevitable ignorance.
Sure, but that is more a practical than a moral matter, at least as far as moral responsibility is ordinarily conceived.
Is it? Explain to me then the mechanism, the neurological difference between being influenced by something and being determined (in part) by that thing. How does an 'influence' have a non-deterministic effect on our neurology? You sound like you're confusing deterministic with sufficient. For something to have a deterministic effect doesn't require that it and it alone causes the consequence. Only that it is one of an exhaustive set of factors which together result in the consequence.
So choices being only 'influenced' rather than determined implies that when one adds up all the factors having a deterministic effect on one's final action, there is still a gap, the set is not exhaustive. So what fills this gap, if not yet another influence?
This is the 'free will' problem that I think Streelight is referring to. We have to invent a magical force to make up the last bit of this process simply to account for Evil. It is not sufficient for us to admit that the brain is so unbelievably complex that we couldn't possibly work out how people will behave in response to factors with any accuracy. That should be sufficient to explain the unpredictability we see in human nature. The only reason it's not sufficient is if you invent a higher mind, capable of seeing all complexity. A mind that should have known better. Then you need a quick fix of magic to paper over the crack.
Quoting Janus
Yes. But again, the point I think @StreetlightX was making (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it being a natural event. Floods are natural events. Doesn't stop us from trying to prevent them. It's only for the problem of Evil that we need to place some 'free-will' type of culpability on the individual, rather than simply a pragmatic culpability. Otherwise, what exactly is the problem with there being no moral justification for punishment? There's no moral justification for plumbing, but we still have it.
The need to revamp and demolish almost all of our 'spontaneous' modern philosophical intuitions, in other words. Putting religion in the ground once and for all would be helpful too, but these are two sides of the same miserable, rotten coin anyway.
Stated this way, we can hopefully avoid at least some of the circularity and vagueness concerning the meaning of free-will (or determinism).
When asking counterfactual questions like "What if Hitler had won the war?", there are philosophers who regard such questions as referring not to our past, but to either the potential outcomes of potential new experiments here or elsewhere, or to the histories of other potentially existing Earth-like planets whose circumstances are sufficiently identical to ours to be considered suitably analogous to answer such questions.
To me, this interpretation of counterfactuals seems to avoid the main epistemological concern of 'world-intervention' skepticism - that the past could merely be a story in which we play our part. For even if the past is merely a story, counterfactual inferences under the potential outcomes interpretation presumably remain viable, assuming that one isn't also skeptical of induction. For our story might be a-causal, but who is to say that it cannot follow a pattern?
The point is that if some event determines someone to a particular action, then there is no possibility that the determining event could obtain without the ensuing action obtaining. If some event is merely an influence then it could obtain without the ensuing action obtaining, although it might arguably increase the likelihood that the ensuing action would obtain. As I see it that is the logical distinction between determination and influence.
Quoting Isaac
No, I am not claiming there is any "magical force" just that there would be other influences at play when some event could be said to be an influence towards a certain action being committed, such that the influence could not be counted as strictly determinant. In other words, the subject might randomly favour some influences over others in the moment.
I mean in the real world it is always a nexus of counter-balancing forces at work on people's actions. It is only if we posit that nature is strictly deterministic that we can say that all those influences are strictly deterministic and that what a subject does is totally dependent on which determinant is the prevailing one, disallowing the possibility of any merely random variance.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with considering human actions to be merely natural events; but thinking that way is not logically consistent with imputing moral responsibility and culpability, that is all I am arguing.
The difference between plumbing and punishment is that the latter causes significant harm and would seem to be unfair unless we can impute moral culpability. But again, I am not primarily wanting to claim that the world is, or even should be, fair (of course, I would prefer if it was, though); I am merely trying to unpack the logic that underpins the ideas of moral responsibility, culpability, praise and blame and punishment.
Ah. I see where our crossed wires have been now, to a certain extent. Saying that an event determines some particular action (in combination with others) is not the same as saying an event is sufficiently causal. To say an event is determinate is to say that it is a part of the the state of the world at time t which taken together is a part of the same connected system as the events at time t1.
In terms of the 'free-will' debate, we are forced into talking in causal terms in order to answer the issues raised by those who wish to argue for free-will, but causality doesn't really make sense here once free-will is consigned to the wastebin. We are free then to look at the complex system as including the time dimension, and potential quantum weirdness (which I do not even pretend to understand), and say something is determined if is has all of its links within this system.
Putting the wider concept of determinism aside again. Insofar as this discussion is concerned, we can perhaps intersect our concepts sufficiently to still discuss by saying that some factor F determines some event E if it's part in the web of the world is sufficiently related to E for us as humans to see some part of that relation.
So back to your example, the issue is...
Quoting Janus [my bolding]
The favouring. is at the moment a magical force. If the subject's 'favouring' is not also a linked part of the interconnected system (one whose connections we could theoretically trace to other factors), then it must be outside of that system ie supernatural/magical.
It's possible (though I personally don't hold to this) that quantum randomness might manifest eventually in a truly random selection from options, but that, even if true, certainly wouldn't get us moral culpability because the selection would be random, not 'freely' chosen.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but it's that argument I'm trying to get you to expand on for me to understand it. At the moment, I don't see the logical inconsistency. If we carry out some punishment it has a high likelihood of bringing about a state of affairs which are better than if we didn't (it has this likelihood because of the deterministic nature of our actions on others). That seems an entirely moral justification for punishment, no?
For sure, the conditions you outline there do seem to be "a.... justification for punishment", but I'm not too sure about the "entirely moral" part. In any case they would not be a rational justification for imputing moral responsibility and culpability. You might say there is a pragmatic justification for imputing moral responsibility and culpability, insofar as people might not be inclined to accept the rationale for punishment otherwise.
I don't have time to give adequate responses to the other parts of your post right now.
So, when you've time, I'd appreciate if you could expand on this. What do you find immoral about it?
Quoting Janus
Is doing that which is pragmatic not rational?
How would it be free, then?
It (free will) is free, not dictated, but not peeled off from the universe - so it may influence it, or be influenced by it.
Free will, as you may discern, is a mixture of freedom and will.
To offer an analogy it's half water and half vessel.
Freedom deals with the water, which by itself is formless; whereas will deals with the vessel, which is rigid.
So for free will to function, you would require will to mould freedom; which obviously allots for determinability.
That your decision may and is influenced does not negate the freedom of the act, but capitalises on it.
The freedom in free will is what allows it to be influenced; if it was absolutely free, it would be no different from absolutey determined and equally unyielding to influence.
I feel we see the same thing, but you're focusing moreso on how the two clash, whereas I, and perhaps Janus, focus on how freedom and determinability compliment each other.
Regardless of whether that's true or not, I did so, and that was determined. So whence the supposed freedom? Isn't that just an assumption, and an assumption contradicted by the acknowledgement that my course of action was determined?
Quoting Shamshir
But you haven't explained how that's even possible. You're just saying things without proper explanation.
It was determined - but partly, not fully.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
And this is not my assumption, but observation - though if my explanation isn't sufficiently thorough, perhaps Janus or someone else may offer a better one?
Perhaps though, this isn't something to be analytically explained at all - and is more so something to be innately understood, as for instance - time?
Which part are you claiming wasn't determined, and how do you know this? And besides, it wouldn't then be free will, but partly-free-and-partly-determined will, or partially free will.
Until it happened, it was in the state prescribed to Schrödinger's cat - in that it equally could and could not happen.
This lack of necessity in due allows for the action to be free - but as aforementioned, the rigidness of the happening or acting is what makes it partly determined. Earlier I likened this process, to moulding water through a vessel.
If there is no rigidness, or this determined part - there can be no acting.
Likewise, there needs to be some freedom to allot for this rigidness.
All in all, you're quite right that free will is partly-free-and-partly-determined will.
It is essentially a flux, that allows for free interaction - but interacting itself, obviously requires determinability.
And you still haven't specified which part of the example scenerio you think wouldn't be determined, or would lack necessity.
Quoting S
It is difficult to describe as anything but an innate understanding; but essentially, if flux permeates then that would allot for chaos which would subsequently allot for freedom in place of necessity.
Obviously this does not wholly exclude necessity; as we've discussed, flux includes necessity in order to have freedom function.
Regardless if our interaction is autonomous or scripted, flux is present and we are aware of it.
If flux is somehow a falsity, then the question falls void - as nothing is actually happening.
So if we trust our awareness, flux is indubitable and thus this would allow someone to know that there is free will, with its lack of necessity.
Even if the person in question was puppeteered, he would share in the free will of his autonomous operator.
I am, because it isn't free, only partly so. Why not call it "determined will", on that same basis?
Quoting Shamshir
So it's as I suspected: just a feeling. Nothing substantial to go by.
Quoting Shamshir
Flux? What on earth are you talking about, and how on earth does that allow someone to know that there is free will?
Quoting Shamshir
No he wouldn't, that's just wordplay. The puppet would have no free will over his actions at all.
It's not that the puppet would possess free will, it's that the puppet is an extension of the puppeteer who possesses free will, and thus that free will would be relayed to the puppet; so the puppet by itself isn't autonomous, but autonomous in regard that it is being autonomously operated.
To be concise - the puppet doesn't posess free will but is possessed by free will.
So my left foot is autonomous? No, I still think that that's just wordplay. And there's no case for free will, anyway, if it's just a feeling.
That's fine.
I didn't say it was "immoral". Amoral perhaps.
Quoting Isaac
I follow Kant in making a distinction between pure and practical reason. We might perform acts which are pragmatically justified and yet are inconsistent with, or even contradictory to, our purely rational moral principles.There is not merely one kind of reason. There is deductive reason, inductive reason and abductive reason, for example.
Quoting S
I think there is a continuum between constraint and freedom. It is not a black and white polarity.
Okay, so you also think that will is only partly free. Can you do any better than Shamshir at providing an acceptable basis for how you supposedly know this to be the case? The determined part seems more supportable, whereas this idea of free will seems only to warrant scepticism at best.
Then there would only be what seems to be will, but isn't. And that's the point: from what you've said about the idea of free will, you don't really know that we have it, but are just going by a funny feeling you have.
You've changed your tune. I thought that it was an "innate understanding", i.e. a funny feeling. Those are your words, and I don't see why my interpretation of them is really any different, in practical terms. What's the difference? I have an innate understanding that ghosts are real. I have a funny feeling that God exists. And so on.
If it's logical, then you should be able to put together an argument in logical form. But you haven't done so in response to my enquiries. I have no reason to believe that it's anything like your example about the shape of the earth. You don't even have a premise, do you? What's the observation that's supposed to be like that of observing ships travelling behind the horizon and back?
I do, on the other hand, have reason to believe that it's like the meme above.
Will?!?
I haven't. I told you, and you can quote me, it's an innate understanding with basis in observations that should be plainly obvious.
To use the ship example - you observe ships hind and forth the horizon; and you either get what it means, or you don't.
No amount of analysis is going to change that; which I also implied earlier on.
We can forget about the appeal to funny feelings, or "innate understandings", as you call them. Just get on with describing these observations and put together a valid argument with them as a premise.
Quoting Shamshir
I'm not questioning the shape of the earth. Get on with it. I haven't got all day. Things to see, people to do.
Of course, feelings in general are themselves all bio-social inventions too, but that's another story.
That's an incorrect bias, as it firstly doesn't have to be invented, secondly it would be proposed, not invented, and lastly an innate understanding isn't something limited to the human species.
If you want to be contentious, okay, but this rhetoric is just whining and moping.
Perhaps I should ask my cat about free will then, given your reluctance.
Rotten meat being bad for ingestion is a clear cut one.
It is contentious; let's not fool ourselves.
You're using unawareness as a bias, in the same way I do the opposite.
The issue is that the odds don't favour you.
You know how ships travel behind the horizon and back, and that that implies that the earth is roughly spherical, and not flat?
Yeah, well free will's just like that.
See? I've convinced you, haven't I?
"The great scholar of late antiquity Peter Brown... points out that Augustine has been called the “inventor of our modern notion of will.” Augustine deflected the locus of human striving for meaning and purpose away from the philosophic and scientific search for the human place in nature and the cosmos and toward a concern for the individual will. His achievement was a “shift from cosmos to will,” “a turn[ing] away from the cosmos,” Brown says." (Heidi Ravven)
"An examination of the attempts carried out by Western thought to provide an ethical foundation for sanctioned action (with this term we are indicating from this point forward action imputable to a subject and productive of consequences) shows that, when they are not simply absent, as happens in classical Greek culture, they coincide with the laborious elaboration of the concept of free will in Christian theology and remain, perhaps for this reason, singularly fragile." (Giorgio Agamben)
"It is then presumably only a slight overstatement when I conclude with saying: the problem of physical causal determinism and freedom of decision entered the scene in the 2nd century A.D., by a chance encounter of Stoic physics and the fruits of early Aristotle exegesis, with the contemporary focus on the culpability of mental events and the introduction of a power of decision making as catalysts - and it was not part of the philosophical repertoire for long." (Susanne Bobzien)
"Authors well read in Greek literature have always been aware of this lacuna. Thus [Etienne] Gilson notices as a well-known fact “that Aristotle speaks neither of liberty nor of free will...the term itself is lacking,” and Hobbes is already quite explicit on the point. ... It cannot be “seriously maintained that the problem of freedom ever became the subject of debate in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle”... The reluctance to recognize the Will as a separate, autonomous mental faculty finally ceded during the long centuries of Christian philosophy ... It was in close connection with the preparation for a future life that the Will and its necessary Freedom in all their complexity were first discovered by Paul. ... Hence one of the difficulties of our topic is that the problems we are dealing with have their “historical origin” in theology rather than in an unbroken tradition of philosophical thought." (Hannah Arendt)
None of this, of course, can stand up to the Logical and Innate Feeling of Shamshir's circumnavigating, observational little boat of free-will.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's contentious, if you care to survey philosophical literature on free will, rather than just the works of one or two authors. And no, I am not going to get into a childish flame war with you over this; I am not that interested in history and exegesis, any way. My point of contention is that you are muddying the waters by conflating the intellectual history of free will as an articulated philosophical concept (and a very specific version of that concept, if you insist on tracing it to Augustin et al.) with that which this concept purports to address. What I particularly resent is the attempt to shout down the debate by the unsubtle insinuation that the concept is forever tainted and discredited by its history as an opium for the masses that was maliciously concocted by theologians. You can be critical and revisionist about free will without being stupid and dogmatic.
And of course free-will is tainted by its theological roots - I'm not trying to 'insinuate' this: here's me being explicit about it: free-will is theological trash. It's as if someone were to say 'look, just because the doctrine of the trinity was a tad bit theological doesn't mean we can't use it without reference to some God or another'. Well no, they're both as rubbish as each other and stem from the same poisoned chalice.
As for concepts being 'conflated with that which they purport to address', wtf else are concepts if not designed specifically for addressing 'what they purport to address'. Concepts are not plucked from the air to play with for funsies, they're put to use in contexts which alone give them any sense. That the historically and philosophically illiterate have done just that is just the reason that "free-will" is even more fraught a concept than it was before. At least the Christians knew full well what they were doing when they invoked it, unlike our supposedly 'modern' thinkers who are currently beating an aeons dead horse called 'free will' while asking it to do a little trot for them.
"It is generally accepted in the study of the history of philosophy that the notion of will, as it is used as a tool of analysis and description in many philosophical doctrines from the early Scholastics to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,' was invented by St. Augustine."
If 40 years ago this was 'generally accepted', one has to wonder what, exactly, is the charge of 'revisionism' other than a flagrant fucking rainbow flag of "I don't know my history and I'm making shit up in its place". Actually, looking it up, Arendt's book, The Life of the Mind, from which I quoted was published in 1971. One wonders how anyone at least 50 years too late the party has the balls to speak of 'the literature' which ought to be 'surveyed'.
Well, thank you for being so upfront, I guess - this will save me time and effort. By giving a caricature of your position I was hoping (though it wasn't much of a hope after seeing your earlier posts) that I might be proven wrong or that I might elicit a more nuanced take. But it looks like the caricature was spot-on. Oh well.
Quoting StreetlightX
Fortunately, that's not what I said.
I just wanted to put your criticisms in the appropriate context before I would like to discuss them.
I wonder if you would be hostile to the idea of a reconciliation between an atheistic Sartrean kind of existential freedom with Christianity.
No, I couldn't care less about God. That free will was invented as a theological solution to a theological conumdrum is taint enough. The problem, by the way, is not freedom, but the 'will'. Freedom had a long and illustrious history as a concept before being nailed to the cross of the 'will', on which it has rotted away on ever since. Extracting freedom from its theological context entirely is what needs to happen; not retinkering with theology to make it just so. The first thing to go ought to be the 'will'. We don't need secularized theological concepts. We need concepts utterly indifferent to theology and any of its concerns.
Where do we begin then? How do we approach this? How do we conceive without any reference to theology?
This is precisely why I think some of the intellectual projects undertaken in the 20th century have failed because there is too much theology that is secularized. Maybe coin the major writings as "atheology".
Bataille tried this already. In any case no. The only properly atheist response to God is: 'what's that? Never heard of it; doesn't sound very interesting, got better things to do'.
Quoting StreetlightX
I guess we shouldn't waste another keystroke talking about God then. If we are talking about The Philosopher's God (i.e. Unmoved Mover) then yes I have to agree the proper response is total indifference. All the philosophical arguments for such are simply a non-starter for me. They are not convincing at all and all are in some manner a form of question begging.
However I find God, as understood variously by different religious traditions, to be of a wholly different character that might be worth engaging with. I'm not sure God, as understood here, warrants a wholesale removal to the dustbin.
I said I think there is a continuum between constraint and freedom, I didn't say I know the will is partly free.
To you it may "seem" that determinism is "more supportable". That says more about you than anything else.
Eating, fucking, building, working, lying, typing, listening, standing, staring, crying, holding, shooting, laughing, praying. Willing? Humbug.
A free lunch then?
[The relevance of this is to see if there is an application for the idea of free will or undetermined choice without reference to theology]
Okay, Mr. Pedantic. Then why do you [I]think[/I] that?
Quoting Janus
Yes, it says that it seems to me that it's more supportable for reasons x, y, z, and your reply says that you were in a petty and unhelpful mood at the time you came up with that response.
Ordinarily, freedom refers to an availability of alternative courses of action, in relation to a partial specification of the influences bearing upon a decision making process.
Conversely, determination refers to a causal or logical relation within a partially specified context.
These concepts are therefore compatible, in virtue of them being under-determined. Their use in any given situation is analogous to describing a glass of water as being half-full and half-empty.
EDIT: Is it that my choice is determined, because I'm hungry and want one of those cakes, AND free, because I don't mind which one?
EDIT2: I think there are two choices, the first is the decision to have one of the cakes, and this is determined by my hunger and desire. The second decision is which cake to have, and this is free, as I don't mind which one I have.
From my perspective, by linguistic convention I should at least say that "you have a choice as to what you eat" with respect to the imprecise situation you put forward.
But is what I am saying a claim about yourself, or is what I am saying a mere figure of speech that linguistic convention dictates to be a permissible description of the imprecise observable situation that you put forward?
Supposing you now reveal that you have an allergy for cream. Then i might now say "it appears that you don't have that much of a choice relative to my previous understanding, given your newly admitted allergy for cream"
The question is, does there exist an absolutely precise and exhaustively describable circumstance that you can describe, or that I can observe, under which I am at least permitted to say without fear of controversy, that you have absolutely no choice but to take one of the presented options?
And whatever I am permitted to say here, would this now be a claim about yourself, or again would it be merely a figure of speech in relation to the imprecisely defined concepts 'exhaustive' and 'absolute'?
Compare your question to other borderline questions that are in relation to vague concepts:
Is this adolescent an adult?
Are these grains of sand a heap?
That's about right, but things are complex. Arendt, for instance, fudges a bit Paul's role in the whole thing. She cites Paul as having 'discovered the Will and its necessary Freedom', but in truth not even in Paul does the term 'will' appear anywhere. Rather, he prepares the way for the term insofar as his conceptual 'innovation', as it were, was to insist upon a certain 'voluntarism' of human action that was quite original to Paul, elaborated in the context of the necessity of God's grace. Dihle:
"This difficulty about a term for will, so badly needed in St. Paul's entirely voluntaristic interpretation of man's life and salvation, results from its very nature: the notion, although not the term, of will occurs, with substantial changes and variations in function and meaning, in the discussion of theological, soteriological, and ethical questions. ... Perhaps it is the great variety of different aspects under which the phenomenon of intention and will is considered that prevented St. Paul from inventing a definite term. Each of these aspects could have demanded a separate set of terms to denote the results of speculation. St. Paul's theological reflection embraced his own and his people's religious experience as well as the needs and purposes of practical, above all congregational, life." (The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity)
As for the '2nd century thinkers' Bobzien cites, she herself is a bit fudgy about that too (though she's probs just being intellectual honest):
"Presumably in the early 2nd century, and as a consequence of combining Aristotle's theory of deliberate choice with his modal theory and with his theory regarding the truth-values of future propositions, this concept was interpreted as implying freedom to do otherwise. Who exactly was responsible for this new indeterminist understanding of that which depends on us is unclear, but it seems to have been accepted thereafter both by some Peripatetics and by some Middle- Platonists.
...Alexander [of Aphrodisias] stops short of a concept of free will, due it seems in part to the fact that he believes the human soul to be corporeal. The need of a free will becomes pressing in Platonist and Christian philosophy, in the context of the problems of how vice entered the world, and how god's providence and foreknowledge of the future is compatible with human responsibility. But this is no longer in the context of a physical theory of universal causal determinism, characterised by principles of the kind "like causes, like effects." Rather the determinism is now teleological only, and the context theological." (The Inadvertant Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem)
The road to 'free will' was long and complex, but the brutal condensation is this: it's emergence involved a change from the I-can to the I-will. From Aristotelian potentiality to Christian willing. One of the factors that enables this shift is the disembodiness and omnipotence of the Christian God: evacuated of body, he becomes sheer 'will': only bodies have capacities that can be excercized this this or that manner, in this or that differential context. The Christian God, shorn of body, has no 'need' for capacity, and becomes ephemeral and immaterial word and will. Augustine, who then takes seriously the fact that man is made in the image of God, then transplants 'will' from God to Man, and thoroughly fucks human understanding of freedom for the next few centuries.
Already in 1962 - a decade before any of my previous citations - Deleuze will write that "We create grotesque representations of force and will, we separate force from what it can do ... inventing a neutral subject endowed with free will to which we give the capacity to act and refrain from action". (Nietzsche and Philosophy). Spinoza being the ultimate reference for freedom without will, freedom engendered from necessity, which 'moderns' find utterly perplexing ("Waaaa revisionism!").
"Our texts (Cicero, Gellius, Plutarch) do not allow us to establish in what way exactly the phrase 'depending on us' or 'in our power' (in nostra potestate) was understood. But they contain sufficient information to rule out [certain interpretations] ... First, there is nothing in our sources [that] the concept of moral responsibility ever connected with a belief after the deed that one could have done otherwise, or with feelings of guilt or regret that one did what one did. ... Second, there is some evidence that speaks against such a concept: ... Cicero ... attach[ed] moral responsibility to the fact that the agent is the main causal factor of the action—not to the idea that the agent could have done otherwise". (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy)
Dihle reckons Cicero was simply pretty casual with his terminology and writes that Cicero mashed-up both Latin and Greek cognates without paying all that much attention to the differences: "Cicero, however, used the word voluntas not only to denote what was called ?????????? or ???????? in Greek. Sometimes, even in philosophical texts, voluntas means desire or spontaneous wish rather than deliberate intention,' and in other passages the impulse itself (????), which comes from deliberation or from conscious moral attitude, is called voluntas." The large semantic area which is apparently attached to the word in Cicero's philosophical vocabulary corresponds to the general usage of his time. So he does not seem to have seen any difficulty in the identification of "intellectuaustic" ???????? and "voluntaristic" voluntas, since he presupposed their identity even outside philosophical discussions." (The Theory of the Will)
Augustine even has a go at Cicero for not having anything like this notion of free will: "The concession that Cicero makes, that nothing happens unless preceded by an efficient cause (cause efficiens), is enough to refute him in this debate... It is enough when he admits that everything that happens, happens only by virtue of a preceeding cause (causa praecdente)" (City of God).
That's how much 'free-will' fucked everything up. We can't even read pre-Augstinian philosophy - or Augustine, apparently - without slapping anarchonisms onto it.
Or do you think it's both?
But it describes the way you see the emergence of this particular idea: as a break with the past so profound that we must struggle to understand the people who came before.
Like Newton's gravity.
Yes, I have a choice. I've tried to make the situation precise as we need. Yes, it is idealised and perhaps unrealistic, but I'm trying to keep things simple.
What I'm suggesting is that there are two kinds of choices, those that are determined and those that are not. StreetlightX has suggested that just because a decision is determined by a process of deliberation, does not make that decision any less of a choice, nor does it imply a lack of freedom. And I agree there are choices like that, and that they are correctly called choices. He goes on to say that free will (perhaps in the sense of an undetermined choice) is a pernicious relic that we do not need any more. I'm suggesting that there are, at least in principle, undetermined choices. These are choices where we don't mind which alternative we choose. My cream cake example is one. But perhaps these situations never actually arise in reality, just as perfect circles never occur. Perhaps there is never, actually, a choice about which someone is wholly indifferent to the result. But even if that's the case, the concept is still a useful one - there are decisions that are more or less arbitrary, and these are approaching instances of free will.
Quoting sime
Assume I've given all the relevant information, for the sake of discussion. In the scenario, I am very hungry and want one of the cakes. I have a choice whether to eat a cake or not (according to street). The deliberation involves feelings of hunger and desire (nothing else). I eat one of the cakes. Not eating one of the cakes in this circumstance would involve other factors which I have not given (i.e. madness, cream allergy, diabetes, obesity, hallucination etc). My choice to eat one of the cakes is highly determined.
However I really don't mind at all which cake I eat. I make a choice and eat the jam doughnut. The question is, is this decision determined or not? I don't think it is. I think it is a free arbitrary choice. Is this even possible do you think? It's logically possible. Is it metaphysically possible? Physically possible? Psychologically possible? Or is there always a determinant?
Regarding vagueness, indulge me with this idealised scenario, which I grant might be impossible to actually exist. Just as the non-existence of perfect circles does not stop us calculating using assumptions of perfect circles when designing machines, I want to contrast the concepts of free and determined choice by using an idealised scenario.
A mark of our freedom is being free from unwanted constraint (I guess, off the top of my head).
sure, - of course my point is to say that it is impossible to given an exhaustive account of all the potentially relevant information that necessitates an action; the consequence being that free-will and determinism cannot be absolute polarities but are terms used for the relative comparison of two or more specific situations.
Quoting bert1
At least according to the compatibilist logic of Hume, a 'free willed' action must at least be superficially describable as being 'caused' by one's will; the charge of determinism being avoided, by understanding the concept of necessity as referring to states of psychological compulsion as opposed to causal relations per se that merely comprise of an inferential attitude in relation to a previously observed conjunction of events.
Another source of compatibilism, as i'm trying to point out, lies in the indeterminacy of the very meaning of determinism, as contradictory as that might sound.
Quoting bert1
Isn't the concept of the perfect circle also relative to the situation? 3.14159 being a 'more' perfect description than 3.141 regarding the circumference of the circle on my monitor?
Analogously, is there a notion of perfect determination that applies in every case?
The problem I see is that if you tell ordinary people they are morally responsible then that will only be acceptable to them if they believe that they could have done otherwise than they did. I predict it would pretty much universally be felt as unfair to hold someone responsible for anything they couldn't help doing. We have the ideas of extenuating circumstances and diminished responsibility, but on the assumption of strict determinism, all circumstances are extenuating circumstances and all people have diminished responsibility.
Can we come up with an alternative account of freedom and responsibility that is simple enough for everyone to understand and consistent enough with ordinary notions of fairness such as to be acceptable to everyone? I have yet to see any such account. I have not yet seen any coherent alternative account that is consistent with ordinary notions of personal responsibility at all, whether simple or complex.
I guess the alternative would be to simply tell people that if they do something morally wrong people will judge them for it; it may not be fair, but bad luck! And if you do something unlawful, you will be punished; it may not be fair, but bad luck!
In older cultures that had no notion of free will in the libertarian sense our conceptions of moral responsibility are based upon today, there was also often (or even mostly perhaps?) no concept of justice other than that of revenge.
There are lots of models of ethics and responsibility that make no use of free will. Ancient ethics, to take one example (internally differentiated, insofar as isn't really one big 'ancient ethics') had robust accounts of ethics, responsibility, and freedom, that largely tuned upon our capacities to do: freedom as capacity or ability (I can) and not freedom as will (I will). In these models, our actions follow from who it is we are as people (our 'natures' or 'essences' to use the vocabulary of the Stoics and Spinoza), defined roughly by our ability to do certain things.
Importantly, what could be worked upon was precisely 'who we are': an ethics of the self as a matter of self-fashioning and self-care (the self as a work of art - Nietzsche, Foucault), all the better to act 'in accordance with our natures' and thus act freely. Hence the seemingly strange alignment of freedom with necessity (Stoic 'destiny') that is often found in ancient texts of ethics, incomprehensible to many modern ears. From this also follows an 'intellectualist' orientation of ethics in which ethics requires understanding ourselves and the world around us, such that for someone like Socrates, evil was a function of a deficiency in knowledge. The Stoics and Spinoza will take up this thread in their ethical injunction to act 'according to Reason'. Hence also an alignment of freedom with discipline and pedagogy, such that one learns how to be free.
One feature which I find overwhelmingly attractive about such approaches to ethics is its situatedness of the self in wider contexts and environments, which can enable and cultivate, or inhibit and stifle such understandings and development of capacities. There is a way of conceiving an entire ecological scaffolding of ethics, which underpins our ethical development or regression. And this is where politics meets ethics, at the point at which we find ourselves in a world with others, which itself can be worked upon to better cultivate (or debilitate) our ethical being. The work of the self becomes incomplete without a concomitant working upon our environments. Only in this way does ethics return to its roots as ethos - a manner of dwelling.
All of this in radical distinction to the solipsism of the fucking will, which bursts out of nowhere from some inner who-knows-what, engineered to be deliberately and radically distinct from any environment or world, meant solely to lash us ever more tightly to God least we burn in hell for not following his dictates. Hence Deleuze's remark that the will in 'free will' is the equivalent to a 'denial of existence itself' and a depreciation of all that does exist. Contrary to this, the ethical tendencies which I've outlined can be found scattered all through - at least - the Western cannon (long before the advent of free-will), and have been picked up by plenty of contemporary authors, if one wants to find them. Our pop-discourse about ethics and freedom remains utterly destitute however.
(They've been like six or seven threads on free will in the past week or so on the forum alone, each consecutive one more miserable than the other).
That's great wordage.
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm in one of them lately. We're at the point you hinted at, as a revelation even from a free willer that 'free will' has no definition beyond the trivial ones of no coercion and random.
Be sure not to go against God's will, or else…
In addition, explain having laws - as they would have no sway without the subject possessing the freedom of will, otherwise said, the freedom of self-determination.
Likewise what's the point of the Egyptian ceremony of weighing the heart against the feather of Maat - in other words - what you did versus what you should have done?
Aristotle's analysis of slaves notwithstanding, the takeaway here is that there is no reason to think that man can't be equated with machines, if certain conditions of freedom are not upheld. But thinking in this way would would mean, once again, having to give up the incredibly stupid idea of free will as some kind of a priori metaphysical guarantee of human freedom, served on a plate to man by God. It would require, again, looking at the world, observing conditions, making at effort at understanding, and acting provisionally and with risk. This no doubt offends the sensibilities of those who think humans are in any way special, which can only be a good thing.
In any case, your questions at this point are just poo-lobbing from the monkey pen. They're unthinking knee-jerks beneath response. If you have something substantial and interesting to say, say it. No one gives a fuck about Egyptian ceremonies.
The Devil (the word has a Persian origin) is an image of primal defiance; the existence of a will counter to God's. The message of Genesis is that humans screwed up by listening to the voice of the Devil and should leave behind a free will in favor of a will united with God's. But a person who is all good in every word, thought, and deed would seem to have no will of her own. So in this scenario the idea of a substantial self is directly tied to wrong-doing. The self is a problem, but not the source of good or evil. The sources are out in the cosmos.
This conception of will is similar in some ways to the Stoic version which identifies all evil as a state of disease resulting from straying from the ways of Nature. For the Stoic, evil is always self-correcting because the tree that fails to grow toward the light dies. There's no need to punish it.
In both of these outlooks, laws are divine in origin, which means they come from human discernment, not human judgment. We learn to judge by recognizing the truth of the laws.
Do you think the Egyptian version is like that? Or different?
Funnily enough I wasn't asking about Aristotle, I was asking you - and without fail, you produce a tangent and no answer.
Now here's a little lesson for clarification.
The word Robot finds its roots with the Bulgaro-Slavic word Rob - meaning slave.
It's in contrast to another similar word - Rab - which means worker.
The difference being in that a slave has no rights, obviously - whereas a worker does, though he serves those higher in rank.
The worker if he wishes to, may stop working - forfeit his rights, and seek his fortune elsewhere.
The slave cannot, as he possesses no rights - he is worked to the bone, metaphorically and literally.
The point of all that being - that the distinction is in the willingless of men to toil, meaning that freedom is in custody of all men, but not exercised by all men.
Which is why it appears coextensive with merely some, rather than all - and has nothing to do with some proprietary status.
So when you say:
Neither is it in contrast, nor is that a distinguishing feature - but a proprietary status.
Quoting StreetlightX
The certain distinction between machine and man - is that man is fully autonomous.
That would mean that although both could share abilities and freedoms - the machine cannot self-determine, i.e will. It requires an operator, because it is a puppet.
And so it's clear - whether the machine is operated by an artificial intelligence or human intelligence, is irrelevant.
So there you go, that's the difference between you - supposedly a man, and the machine you use to write down all this babble.
Quoting StreetlightX
No it wouldn't mean any of that gibberish, you're squeezing in here everytime, to spite something you supposedly don't believe in.
You could have fredom without will, like you could have will without freedom.
What the combination 'free will' suggests is the magnitude of difference between the human psyche and that of an ox, for instance.
Quoting StreetlightX
It would require effort to ride a bike, simply reading a tutorial on riding a bike won't do.
So for you to understand free will, ever, would require the effort that stubbornly refuse to put in thus far.
And man being anything special, isn't only a good thing - it's a thing laden with responsibilities, and those can turn awfully sour.
Quoting StreetlightX
And you being the unthinking knee-jerk decided to respond. Alright.
No one gives a fuck about Egyptian ceremonies?
Quoting StreetlightX
Could've fooled me.
If you're ever willing to get off your soapbox - from which you, mimic the Inquisition which you ironically dislike, persecuting and mocking anything you dislike - telling people to hang themselves and the like - then come and speak to me.
Until then you're just some whiny brat, who wouldn't dare get his hands dirty, but has the gall to call me out on things you're utterly and worse yet maliciously clueless about.
The message of Genesis isn't actually that humans screwed up listening to the Devil - and neither is the Devil implied within the Genesis story. The Devil is a title similar to Satan - in that it means misleader - and it is a title that is implied for many angels, both fallen and not fallen.
The message is actually that the manmaker kept his promise in procuring free will for his creation.
If he were to disallow mankind to make mistakes, he would disallow them free will - so he would have to do what he did with Job, and more or less gamble - having them figure it out themselves.
That said, the Genesis account gets progressively more conflated and chronologically disordered.
It's presented in such a manner that merely reading through it, you're unlikely to understand anything.
There's omissions such as the two Adams and Adam's family prior to Eve.
Whether that's intentional or not - decide for yourself.
That the sources are out there in the cosmos is a good take on things - similar to how the ingredients are out in the field, but the problem of preparing them lies with the cook.
Quoting frank
It's also the stance Paracelsus held.
And implied in the proverb: Hurrying to his grave.
Quoting frank
Their origin is indeed based on discernment, though their prescription is based on judgement.
The laws of physics are discerned - obviously; but whether they are prescribed to a specific something, falls to judgement - singularities being an obvious example.
Quoting frank
I would equate the Egyptian version with the Japanese Right way of Being, often conflated with Chinese Taoism.
As for everything else - my point was that the assumption built into your question about man and machine was faulty, or at least in dire need of some semblance of substance. Going ahead and further assuming the significance of the distinction via a little etymology lesson is not an argument but just more assumption. As for speaking about the 'rights' of slaves, one can only laugh at the complete historical anachronism at work here. The very language of 'rights' was invented literally more than a millennia after the time of Aristotle, so to speak of a slave 'not having rights' is about as true as speaking of them as not having iPads. True, but also hilariously misplaced.
And if what I'm 'clueless about' is some kind of boat on a horizon that is logical and also intuitive but can't be argued for - the closest you've got to having said anything of substance about free will - then I fully assume being clueless about a non-sense.
So what are we doing? Theology or anthropology? I'm not interested in theology because I'm not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. If we're studying human society, we look to how the text has been interpreted for the last few millennia, and so we know the Devil is most certainly mentioned in Genesis (newsflash: it's the snake) and the word Devil is Persian in origin. It has the same origin as deva, and it referred to the gods of the nomadic people who eventually became the Indians.
It's like we're having a contest to see who can be most belligerently wrong about human history.
Quoting Shamshir
Again, you're doing theology, not anthropology. Plus your theology gives rise to the famous puzzle that God apparently set humanity up to fail and then punishes them for it. God the psychopath.
Neither am I; though it doesn't matter.
That said, one goes hand in hand with the other - whether it's ancient Theology contrived as Mystical Teaching, opposed to modern Theology contrived as Scientific Teaching.
Quoting frank
And I told you, over the last few millenia it's been interpreted and misinterpreted to the extent of debilitation.
No Devil, I reiterate, has been mentioned in the Genesis account - only a serpent, and then that serpent has been interpreted and misinterpreted in volumes.
Mind you it's not the Devil but a Devil, since it's a title, I reiterate, like Satan, or Cherub, or Seraph.
The word is also not of Persian, meaning Avestan origin - and neither did those people produce the Hindu populace. It doesn't refer to the gods of nomads, nor any gods at all - but to teachers, which is what now dubbed gods, was back then.
If you actually say Daiva with a V in front - Vdaiva, it means savvy.
Quoting frank
It's a practical explanation.
God gave instructions on what you could and couldn't do - in the same way a parent instructs their children.
He also didn't tell the serpent to go and trick the two - in the same way a parent wouldn't instruct someone to trick his children with 'free candy'.
No, what he did - was give them time and space to grow up, and they - due to their inexperience - committed to peer pressure and made a rash decision, bringing on the consequences.
As aforementioned in the excerpt about the Stoics - they were punished by their actions, not for.
Unless you're going to call parents psychopaths for giving their children some space, then it doesn't follow that the character in question would be one.
Of course Hindus are descendants of the Avesta people. You're quickly sliding off my list of people worth responding to. :(
Yes. Hinduism is timeless. :roll:
What I was looking for though was an account of ancient ideas of moral responsibility which could be rationally consistent with modern ideas of justice. My understanding, such as it is, is that ancient ideas of personal responsibility were, by and large, rationally consistent with revenge models of justice. You would be thought to be responsible in just the way a tiger, or a bolt of lightning, would be thought to be responsible, insofar as humans do, and refrain from doing, only what they can, according to their nature.
The other issue, which is related I suppose, since we are all conditioned to think about personal responsibility and justice in modern "democratic" terms, is whether an alternative model would be firstly understandable, and secondly acceptable, to the person in the street.
So, does the idea of grounding personal responsibility on "can" instead of "will" find a way to be consistent with a logical distinction in kind between human intentional acts and animal acts or natural events? In other words if a human cannot do other than they do, how can human acts be considered to be different in kind from animal acts and natural events, such as to allow rationally justification for imputing moral agency, and the responsibility and culpability that goes with it?
If human acts cannot be rationally distinguished in kind from animal acts and natural events then the whole idea of moral agency seems undermined. I get what you're saying about self-cultivation along Spinozan, Foucauldian or Nietzschean lines, and of course those who can, and want to, cultivate themselves like this will do so, just as those who are able to, and want to, refrain from murder, rape, torture, theft and so on will do so, even assuming determinism. (Saying "can and want to" highlights an interesting point: under the assumption of determinism there would be no distinction between "can" and "want to", because people would always be doing what they want to, unless externally constrained. Also under the assumption of determinism individuals can only want what they want).
But the question of holding people responsible for their actions, not merely because they performed them, but because they could have done otherwise, which seems to be the ordinary, just or fair way of understanding personal responsibility, remains.
So, in short, do you Quoting StreetlightX
Do you think there are alternatives to the "free will" model of personal responsibility which would be acceptable to the person in the street, i.e. be easy enough to understand and seem consistent with common modern notions of justice and fairness?
This capacity for learning is largely (but not altogether) particular to the kind of animals that we are. We have to be put in touch with our natures, as it were. Importantly, it is the necessity of such a discipline of freedom that opens up the moral dimension of human life, in a way largely inaccessible to other animals and say, tidal pools. This is something you'll find for instance in Kant, for whom "man only becomes man by education". Or else for someone like Spinoza for example, it is living 'according to reason' that puts us in touch with (our) nature, and enables us to 'act from virtue'. But it is also the case that we don't always do that, and can act in ways contrary to our reason, and with it, nature.
The big question that gets raised is then over nature itself, and how one can act contrary to nature. That requires a whole discussion in itself, but the main takeaway is that there is definitely room to accomodate the intuition that there is a specificity to human morality that distinguishes our actions from those of hurricanes. In the terms above for instance, we can understand how it is that we might not hold a mentally ill person culpable for their actions: at the limit, such a person might be in-capable of understanding what he or she has done (or is doing), having not had the opportunity to educated into moral sphere. And we can say this without having to recourse to a vocabulary of the 'will' according to which he or she did not 'will' their action.
What ideas would you be referring to here?
Certainly in traditional hunter-gatherers, justice is variably treated as either definitional of the community (ostracisation - "your actions do not belong here") or healing (the removal of "evil spirits" usually). Revenge is, to my knowledge, hardly ever considered a recourse for justice, but a state of competition. The worst example of revenge culture is probably the Papua New Guinean tribes (although much about them is possibly massively overblown). When there is an attack, or a murder, the return attack is spoken of as a matter of pride, of demonstrating status. It's entirely internal to the tribe doing the responding, no judgement is made of the tribe which originally attacked.
So basically, I don't recognise this 'revenge model' of justice. It seems that the problem is with the notion of 'justice' itself. Ancient people (if modern hunter-gatherers are to be used as a proxy, a whole other massive problem!) may not have had a concept of bringing about a 'just' state of affairs at all, only an expedient one.
If true, then what you're looking for is probably not there. The modern notion of justice as related to moral culpability is inextricably linked to the idea of personal, not communal/environmental, responsibility. We still haven't cast off the ideas of Sunday School. All that secularism has done is to put the revenge in the hands of society instead of God.
If you are interested in what people in the street (and perhaps also in courts of law and ethics committees) think about "free will", then perhaps, rather than trying to invent free will from scratch, deduce it from the meanings and etymologies of individual words, or from the agglomeration of historical writings and their exegeses, and then asking whether your model is acceptable, a better approach would be to try to first find out what free will, as well as related notions like agency and moral responsibility, mean to people.
To some extent, this approach has been taken by analytical philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century, although they were mostly posing rhetorical questions to themselves and to their colleagues - but nevertheless the intention was to take into account common meanings and real-life functions. A more empirical approach has been pursued in cognitive and social sciences in the last few decades, and it is at the interface with these areas where I think the most relevant philosophy is taking place.
I did not have contemporary philosophical debates about the understanding of justice so much in mind, though, but rather what would be considered to be common notions of justice, as they are (imperfectly of course) embodied in law and everyday people's everyday attitudes. The reason I think this is important is that whatever philosophers might think about moral responsibility, culpability and justice; if those thoughts are ever to be socially relevant and efficacious, then they would need to be understandable and acceptable to the "average" philosophically uneducated person.
So, if my thought that ancient notions of personal responsibility and culpability were consistent with understandings of justice that we could refer to as "revenge" or "retributive' models, then those ancient understandings would likely not be acceptable to most contemporary people.
I remain convinced that the average contemporary (Western at least) understandings of moral responsibility etc. are logically based on the idea that an individual could have done otherwise, or else the conclusion would be diminished responsibility and that they would not bear (at least full) moral responsibility for their acts.
Apart from that I agree with much of what you say, it's just that it does not seem relevant to the question I am interested in.