Do People Have Free Will?
This is a great question because I think most people early in their life say: "Of course I have free will: I make choices! Why is this even a question?" But as we think about it longer, it becomes more clear that we decide less. But for me it doesn't have to be an all or nothing, as I believe that compatibilism is possible.
Can free will and determinism be mutually compatible and be logically consistent? In this discussion, Free Will can be as loosely defined as: The ability to imagine or do many different things, and uniquely being able to want or reject any variety of them of your own volition. In the compatibilism sense, you can want whatever you want, but you may not get everything you want.
If compatibilism is worthy of debate, how much of a person's action (which includes purely mental thoughts as well as physical action) is subject to personal free will, and how much is subject to determinism. At this point, I'm going to score free will at less than 1% and the rest are the cogs of a machine turning right on time.
What might this <1% of free will look like? Let's look at this theoretical situation: you're faced with deciding between two choices. All of the forces that would make you want either choice are absolutely equal. Would you be unable to choose? If you were able to choose, would that be the sliver of free will or would that just be randomness? Is randomness even possible?
If you have a different opinion on this subject, that was not your choice. Your opinion on this subject is based on the evidence that you've had access to and the way your mind organizes that evidence. For some people, choosing to post here could be a bona fide choice! What's your choice, or should I say, what are you compelled to do?
Can free will and determinism be mutually compatible and be logically consistent? In this discussion, Free Will can be as loosely defined as: The ability to imagine or do many different things, and uniquely being able to want or reject any variety of them of your own volition. In the compatibilism sense, you can want whatever you want, but you may not get everything you want.
If compatibilism is worthy of debate, how much of a person's action (which includes purely mental thoughts as well as physical action) is subject to personal free will, and how much is subject to determinism. At this point, I'm going to score free will at less than 1% and the rest are the cogs of a machine turning right on time.
What might this <1% of free will look like? Let's look at this theoretical situation: you're faced with deciding between two choices. All of the forces that would make you want either choice are absolutely equal. Would you be unable to choose? If you were able to choose, would that be the sliver of free will or would that just be randomness? Is randomness even possible?
If you have a different opinion on this subject, that was not your choice. Your opinion on this subject is based on the evidence that you've had access to and the way your mind organizes that evidence. For some people, choosing to post here could be a bona fide choice! What's your choice, or should I say, what are you compelled to do?
Comments (70)
No it would be "(another part of)will" deciding to chose, because you don't like indecision for instance.
We decide, "we" are "our will"... but we do not decide what our will is.
If it's will it's not free, if it's free it's not will. The concept doesn't make sense.
This leads to an interesting philosophical argument to the bigger issue of whether the reliable evidence we can consider indicates whether we should believe in free will or not. If our choices regarding what to attribute our behavior and thoughts are either they are controlled by you or something else, and only you are certain to exist, then strict logic would tell us that the thing which is certain to exist should take precedence over things which may not exist. In this sense, we would be compelled to beleive in free will, which is of course a paradox in and of itself.
But for human beings, free will is truly impossible to achieve. We do not have the whole control of our actions, mainly because our acts are related to our brain capacity, and how the brain function. If you got brain damage, your mind will change. But in general any brain dis-functions.
I don't have free will, cant fix my back-pain, or addictions with it anyways.
I don't think anybody really believes that they are the only thing that exists, even if logic would show that is the only thing we can be certain of.
But even assuming for a moment that you are the only thing that exist, how would that you be free, in the sense that you can decide who you are? What is it that is deciding who you are, if there is no pre-existing you that has already has some content, that is already defined to some extend?
Going through this discussion, this statement made me uneasy. You may not be the only thing that exists, however, the entire outer Universe is egocentrically attached to your perception of existence.
Right now I'm watching at my screen and there doesn't seem to be an entire universe attached to it... so
I'm not sure what to make of that statement. Maybe if you explain it, it might make some sense, or maybe not, I don't know.
The world is egocentric, that is, it revolves around your perception of existence. As an individual, I have no other possibility of perceiving the world besides my own, as you can only perceive the world through your Being.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
This use of "I" that makes my proposition correct.
Yes, I think I could agree with that. I don't think anything I said is at odds with that. Is there some point I'm missing?
I just wanted to comment because of the whole discussion, that statement of yours was the one that interested me the most.
Sure.
Probably rarely will, at least directly. One might will to flip a coin in the case of two equally good or neutral options, but the actual choice at hand is left to chance. Or, in the case of two equally bad options, one might lose one's temper and lash out, altering the choice through unintended violence against one's environment: an entirely unwilled action.
Sorry, but that is just not right. Free will is about being able to choose willingly from options that are possible to the subject of free will. It's about making a choice. So the question here is: did I chose to post this (rather than not) without any impetus different from my will?
No, I did not. There is a lot of things that pushed me to do this. But in the end, it was still I who accepted that push by not going against it.
Circumstance of an overpopulated world and the society it spawned has no reflection of an absolute definition of free will. Yes, there are billions of people here and the law and society is adjusted to safely accommodate for it. Therefore, I circumstantially, have less freedom in a world or society with .. billions and billions of people as opposed to if it were just me or a few hundred or shoot even a few million.
It'd be like saying if I'm chained to a tree in a flatland prairie there's no such thing as a mountain.
Yes, I agree with the above. There is an interesting area of study in psychology called cognitive bias. The more I studied the many common biases that everyone has, the more I could catch myself from repeating those same mistakes. But I continue to be influenced in the majority of my behaviors. I don't know if absolute free will is ever achievable, but learning about my surroundings may get me closer.
1- Deterministically (Like kicking a football and it moving)
2- Randomly (Like in quantum physics)
3- "Free will"ly
Absolute determinism is saying that (1) is the only way something happens. Modern forms of "There is no free will" say that (1) and (2) are the only ways something happens. People who say free will exists can mean that 1,2 and 3 are the ways things happen. They can also say that even though (1) and (2) may be the only way things happen that that STILL constitutes free will (This is the compatibalist view)
All of these positions EXCEPT compatibalism debate whether or not (3) exists. Does (3) exist? I don't know. I can't really test that. I could be making what I think are "freely willed" choices but they could just be a combination of randomness and determinism. Compatibalism states that "free will" as we care about it is not a metaphysical 3rd option for things to happen but that the combinations of 1 and 2 are meaningful free will.
I lean more towards saying that: Our choices are always freely willed but only seem from the outside to be determinsitic and random. Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that A has free will and B doesn't. You put both A and B in a room with a bunch of things to do and then you ask a scientist to tell you which one has free will. No matter how much the scientist statistically analyzes their behavior he will never be able to tell which one has free will. That is because although A has free will from the outside he acts just like a very smart robot that occasionally makes a random choice. If that is the case I would argue that ALTHOUGH the scientist will be able to create a very accurate "mental profile" of both A and B and predict with very high accuracy what they will do next from studying their behavior, that doesn't mean that A didn't have free will. I don't know if that counts as compatibalism.
The problem is, you don't choose your likes and dislikes, you just have them and devote your life to appeasing them. Where do they come from? Your genetic/biological predispositions set against your environment, which refers to education, experience, parental influences, needs, etc.
All that manifests as will. So free will is like saying free predispositions, or free conditioning. An oxymoron.
But that changes nothing. We learn. We know what is expected of us. We can change our feelings/ likes and dislikes through learning. We have language that allows us to understand complex concepts. Thus, unless you're mentally disabled by damage or disease etc, you are responsible for your actions. No free will required, just the ability to understand.
Perhaps we rely too much on certainty and logic to determine our relation to the universe. It’s not as if I exist as a singular, fixed central perspective, around which the world revolves, is it?
I enjoyed your argument and reading it, but I look at it a little differently.
I would argue that the conditioning and predispositions are formed by the will. We don’t just have likes and dislikes as if they dropped in our laps. They are causa sui. What I mean is, when information enters a person’s biology it becomes a part of his domain, or at any rate, of him. Insofar as a person is his biology, he literally controls what the information does from the moment it contacts his senses. Ironically, he couldn’t do otherwise.
It would be a mistake to call this control a conscious choice, but nonetheless, the self manipulates the outcome—not as a little homunculus making decisions and pulling levers, but as nothing more or less than the entire, physical organism controlling every process within its being. Even the seemingly automatic and “subconscious” processes such as the heartbeat can be found to be determined in a similar manner. They are willed, and freely, by one thing in the universe and nothing besides.
Obviously I’m equating will, body, person and self, but only because I believe they are one and the same. I think the sooner we come to admit this the better.
When considering personal responsibility I don't think it's right to equate "will, body, person and self." I'm not responsible for being allergic to peanuts, or having a phobia of spiders, or for the behaviour of my alien hand.
Although I wouldn't go so far as to say that the conscious mind and the body are wholly separate, I also wouldn't go so far as to say that the self is identical to the body. The self is part of the body, just as some of my bones are part of my hand, but also part of my hand isn't bones, and part of the body isn't the self.
Your conclusion doesn't follow. Even if we don't choose our likes and dislikes, it doesn't then follow that we don't choose how to behave. Likes and dislikes may influence our behaviour but that doesn't mean that we're slave to our desires.
And even if we were slave to our desires, your conclusion still wouldn't follow. If to have free will is for our will to be the cause of our behaviour, and if our likes and dislikes are component parts of our will, then for our likes and dislikes to be the cause of our behaviour is for our will to be the cause of our behaviour.
You would need to argue that our likes and dislikes (as well as other things like knowledge, experience, etc.) are separate to our wills. But what would the nature of such a will be? Some immaterial "soul" that incidentally happens to have things like likes and dislikes attached to it?
Seems in opposition to
Quoting Michael
Haven't you just asserted the exact thing you said was yet to be demonstrated? Your phobia of spiders is a 'dislike', which you claim not to be responsible for - hence you're already seeing your dislikes as something other than the 'you' which may or may not be responsible for them?
I'm not responsible for having the phobia, but I am responsible for the things I do because of it, e.g. setting fire to my house to kill the spider inside.
OK, but the theory goes that if the phobia makes you want to behave a certain way (and you consider yourself not responsible for it), then we have a model of factors outside of your responsibility influencing behaviour. Presumably there's no a priori reason why there should only be one such influence? So it seems, not only a valid default, but even a likely one, that the final behaviour is the net result of all the influences pulling in one direction or another...influences you've just determined are outside of your control. Afterall, the only factors we have in our model so far are such influences.
To avoid this, you'd have to introduce a new factor into the model other than a like/dislike influence.
This seems to me to be the weak spot in such an approach. This factor - free-will - seems introduced, not on the basis on an independent phenomenon, but purely to 'balance the books' of an inadequate model.
I said as much: "Likes and dislikes may influence our behaviour but that doesn't mean that we're slave to our desires." Is there any reason to believe that these influences fully explain our behaviour? Perhaps we nonetheless have a choice, albeit one constrained somewhat by external factors.
Quoting Isaac
It's not a new factor; it's one's will. One's will is one component that makes up the self, a self that includes other things like likes and dislikes, memories, personality, conscious thought, etc.
None. But neither is there (yet) any reason not to. Hence my comment about the inadequacy of the model.
But what I was actually interested in was how you squared the idea of not being responsible for your dislikes (phobia if spiders in this case) with the idea that likes and dislikes were synonymous with our 'will'. If you're not responsible for your likes and dislikes, then you're not responsible for your will, which makes it sound like you have no freedom there.
I'm guessing, from the above response, that your answer would be that likes/dislikes are only part of our will, but not all of it.
But if so, it seems like an odd space to leave. I'm struggling to think of a behaviour to which no likes/dislikes could be attached, and so can't see the explanatory need for this additional factor other than that you'd prefer it to be there.
One example would be chosing between two equally inconsequential options, like in some experiments where one is asked to chose between a red and a green button to press, repeatedly.
It was the explanatory need I was trying to establish. It would not be at all difficult (let alone necessarily impossible), to model the choice between red and green switches as mediated by minor preferences.
Compatibilism is bait and switch applied to moral philosophy. The bait is that you can have your moral cake (responsibility stemming from free-will) and Humean-Kantian causality (time sequence by rule) too. The switch is that the kind of "free will" that is compatible with time sequence by rule does not support human responsibility.
To be responsible for an act, one must be the origin of that act. If the act was already predetermined before we were born, clearly it does not originate in anything we did. So, compatibilism is fraud.
But, you may ask, if free will is incompatible with strict determinism, and determinism is a consequence of causality, then surely we cannot be the cause of our acts. Hence, either way, we cannot be responsible for our acts and there is no free will in a sense that would make us responsible.
This argument is fallacious, resting on an equivocal use of "cause." Clearly, if we are the cause of, and so responsible for, our free acts, we cannot be using "cause" in the sense of time-sequence by rule. What other sense is there?
The problem is that most moderns are too lazy to study the history to philosophy. When you do, you find that for over a thousand years, philosophers distinguished two kinds of efficient causality: accidental (Humean-Kantian time sequence by rule) and essential (the actualization of potency).
We all know that if you plant tomato seeds, you are the cause of the tomato plants that subsequently sprout and that there is a rule linking the first event (planting of a certain type of seed) to the second event (the subsequent sprouting of the corresponding plant). This is an example of accidental causality. If you think about it, or if you have read Hume, you also know that there is no necessity linking the first event to the second. Since we have two separate events, there is always the possibility that something may intervene between them to disrupt the expected sequence.
Because accidental causality has no intrinsic necessity, it is a strange basis for arguing that whatever we choose, we choose of necessity, i.e. that we have no free will that would be the basis for moral responsibility.
Those who have done their homework/due diligence know that in his Metaphysics Aristotle distinguished a second kind of causality, which is the kind that makes us responsible for our considered acts. This is essential causality. Aristotle's paradigm case is a builder building a house. Of course, the cause of the building is the builder, and the effect is the house being built. He notes that the builder building the house is identically the house being build by the builder. (These are identical because they are merely different ways of describing the same event.)
Since there is only one event, and not two as in time sequence by rule, there is no possibility of disruption by an intervening event. Since the cause and effect are linked by the identity of the event, this kind of causality acts by its own (and not a prior) necessity. -- The prior physical state of (a pile of building materials) does not necessitate the form of the finished house.
If we think about Aristotle's example, we see that it is simply an instance of a potential (of the materials to become a house) being actualized by an agent (the builder). So, any actualization of a potency by an agent is an instance of essential causality.
We can now see that free choices are not uncaused choices. They are the actualization of one of several possible courses of action by the moral agent. So, causality and free will are compatible, just not the kind of causality modern philosophers think of.
Well then we would indeed need to add some other mechanism of choice to our model. I just just don't see that we need to, or even ought to. Is the evidence that such circumstances exist really that compelling? Literally no preference at all.
Nothing else developed an allergy to peanuts. Nothing else developed a fear of spiders. So what, then, is responsible?
I understand the need to define parts of the body for the sake of understanding. But no matter what part of the body we can point to we are still pointing to the body. Though I am able to fathom why a being who cannot see the back of his own head may come to believe he is not the whole, and may identify with some part or other, further examination proves otherwise.
No. If my theory is correct it would be impossible to set up. It would be impossible to create two bags of barley so equal in every way that there would not exist even the most miniscule preference for one over the other (not to mention the donkey so astonishingly attuned that it could correctly judge that the two bags were miraculously equal in every way, rather than mistakenly judge one to have some advantage over the other).
No donkey in this world will ever let itself die of hunger because it is faced with two equally attractive bags of barley. It would just go straight to whatever bag. Trust me on this.
What you are saying would work with a machine, though. I mean, a poorly programmed one. If the coder has not envisage a situation of equal desirability of two options, then the program will not be able to chose. So a good programmer would include a routine to chose haphazardly if all the options are weighted the same.
Quality argument. I'll bear the technique in mind for next time.
1. Restate assertion.
2. Add "Trust me on this".
Some people do, some people don't.
You're welcome to try the experience by yourself if you don't believe me. Don’t use donkeys — you don’t understand them. Put two dozen people in as many booths with a red and a green button in front of them and ask them to chose and press one button every 10 seconds for a few minutes. You will see that even the people who like green more than red press red once in a while. It’s not like all of them will chose to press their favorite color for the entire damn test. Since they are explicitly given the latitude to chose, and since there’s zero consequence, they will chose their less favorite color quite often. People are not automatons.
Why is it so hard for you to envisage a mental coin flip?
( note to self: the Buridan’s ass paradox is only understandable by people who have some familiarity with actual donkeys and with how they behave, eg how strong-willed and earnest they can be)
The donkey is irrelevant. It's the circumstances you're placing it in that I'm claiming is impossible. If your not going to respond to what I actually write then there's little point in discussion.
Quoting Olivier5
How would you know a) that the options are exactly equivalent in every way, and b) that the donkey correctly perceives that they are?
Quoting Olivier5
Why would we be presuming colour preference was the only like/dislike in consideration?
Quoting Isaac
Whether or not the donkey is correct in its appreciations of its options is not the point.
The point is that in life, one frequently encounters a certain type of situation, where one needs to make a choice in a limited amount of time (e.g. one doesn't want another donkey to eat one's barley), and yet the options appears equally valuable (correctly or not). In such situations, one has to step back from the assessment and make the following choice: does one 1) continue to assess the situation further in order to improve its precision, knowing this will require time and energy and may not change the assessment of both options by a significant margin; or 2) just go for any of those options, randomly chosen, which may save you time and energy for more important things.
People chose stuff at random all the time. Donkeys too. You cannot survive without this ability; your mind would go in a state of metastable stasis everytime you need to chose between a light grey and a slightly darker grey pair of pants, of anytime you have to chose which of two similar plums to eat.
Computers have this problem of having to make decisions in time. "Metastability" is what happens to a computer when it cannot do so. The thing freezes. You have to switch it off and on again. Does you mind ever freeze when you have to chose between two similar plums? No? That would indicate that you are a lot smarter than a computer and at least as smart as a donkey. You can make decisions based on nothing. It's a feature.
Quoting Olivier5
You've still not provided any argument that either of these things are the case, only that you believe them to be (which I'm already well aware of). The question I originally asked was why anyone might be compelled to accept such a position, what sorts of arguments there might be in favour of it.
Intuitively, I don't think one could ever present me with two options identical in every way, and intuitively I experience a wide range of preferences all at once (aesthetics, novelty, ease, satiation, privation, excitement, calm...). So I don't see any reason at all why I would ever have trouble choosing between two options when it seems so easy to find some minor aspect of difference satisfying one of my many competing preferences.
Even not having to bother moving my head to check out the other option is a preference for the first one.
When asked to 'have one' from a basket of plums, people often choose one without looking closely at them (doing so is considered impolite for a number of reasons) and they often do so by reaching out to the basket and choosing one at random. They all look the same so there's no point in doing otherwise. Like one would pick a card at random... This is something that does demonstrably happen.
Otherwise how would they chose a plum, do you think? Is it your contention that their predispositions to certain hues, certain smells, certain shapes would always predetermine their choice? If we are absolutely predetermined in that way, then has the plum I will choose tomorrow from a basket been predetermined of all eternity, written somewhere in the grand book of the universe right after the Big Bang or something? Is that your theory?
Because mine is much much simpler: we just pick plums at random.
How does it 'demonstrably' happen? We're talking about the mental processes preceding a choice, how do you propose to demonstrate them?
Quoting Olivier5
Nearest to their hand is one option. How is not wanting to appear impolite not a preference? If it is, then the nearest plum to hand might be chosen because it's proximity best satisfies the preference for not appearing impolite by choosing any other.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't see how that's simpler. You have to now commit yourself to the existence of a mental mechanism for initiating random action, the alternative uses mechanisms we already know exist.
We've seen that already with Buridan's ass: sometimes one cannot determine which option is nearest, it's impractical or impossible.
Two plums at the same distance from one's hand, never stopped anyone from picking and eating a plum.
Quoting Isaac
Of course it's a preference, one that in the circumstances says something like: "I must not appear picky or distrustful by looking at all the plums closely or by hesitating. Given the circumstances, choosing at random is my best option."
You're afraid to commit? To what? The idea of randomness?
You know what I find hard to commit to? The idea that the plum I will choose tomorrow has been in fact chosen for me in all eternity, a split second after the big bang... The idea of a totally closed universe, decided once and for all (by whom?), static, in which time means nothing, and in which we’re not the captains of our own souls on the choppy waters of life, but rather some kind of deluded automatic pilots quite likely to crash when offered something as trivial as two identical and equidistant plums.
I can't at all see how you got from rejecting certain theoretical neurological mechanisms by which we make choices to rejecting the entire idea of randomness, nor can I see where being 'afraid' would enter into it.
A theoretical process was earlier postulated whereby choices were made on some basis other than preference. Evidence that such a process need exist would only come from demonstrating someone making a choice between (what they judge to be) two absolutely identical options. Since you've not provided such evidence (and I've no reason to believe it even possible for you to do so), I've no reason to commit to the idea of this process existing, have I?
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, I'd find that hard to commit to too, that I can't make any sense of it being the primary reason.
Of course not. If this simple and mechanistic view of yourself suffice to account for your experience, you're more than welcome to hold on to it.
I experience, personally, a capacity to choose options at random. I can also think about randomness and even compute probabilities. Therefore the concept of randomness is ubiquitous in our thoughts. It's no stranger to us and to who we are: the product of a haphazard evolution.
I see life (biologically speaking) as robust, heuristic, extremely complex, risk-taking, adaptative, creative and opportunistic. Within this view, it would be simplistic in the extreme to assume that we have one single procedure for making choices, one single logical process that works under every and all circumstances.
Life is much more messy than that but also much more robust than that, in my well informed opinion on the matter.
Surviving system failure is essentially what life is about, and any system may fail. Redundancy in mechanisms is a pretty general phenomenon in biology for this reason. There are by-pass, duplicate veins all over you, because one may fail. Likewise any mental process may fail under certain circumstances.
That would be why we rely on several tools from our mental tool box to make certain decisions, and not just on one tool. At least in my experience.
So do you universally trust your experience to give you an accurate account of your neurological processes, or is it just in this matter that you do? Do you deny the existence of sub-conscious processing entirely, or is that you feel you can just identify it's presence (or lack thereof)?
Quoting Olivier5
I can't see why prima facie. We have only one process for delivering oxygen to the brain, and that's far more important. We have only one mechanism for processing tons of things. One carefully targeted probe and I could remove your ability to see noses. You don't have a backup.
Notwithstanding this occasional lack of redundancy, I never suggested that the processes were simple or even singular, only that we need not impute any other factors than preference when looking to their initiation.
More precisely, I expect my theories about my neurological processes to give an accurate account of my experience. If a theory doesn’t fit with the facts, it must be rejected or improved upon.
Quoting Isaac
There are fours arteries entering the brain, two carotides and two cervical, all connected inside the brain so they work with and even up one another.
Quoting Isaac
Initiation? You mean explaining mechanism? Because you also need a process of comparing preferences with one another.
And as any process, this comparison can fail to provide usable information... HENCE it stands to reason that it needs a backup.
Like an economic system can absorb shocks and even sometimes make the best of them, a living organism (or species, or ecosystem) is able to take some hits, and repair itself. And even sometimes learn something and improve upon itself under adversity, by experience or darwinian evolution.
A mechanical clock for instance cannot absorb much shocks. It’s a system obviously, but one far too simple to survive in the jungle, because it cannot repair itself. And you can hit a clock on the head as many time as you want (in the morning usually), it won’t start to avoid you as a risk-mitigation strategy. But living systems do.
Hence the need for a pilot in the system. Life is not mechanical, it’s adaptative. And animals try to avoid trouble and search for food. They move around opportunistically. And every moving system needs a piloting system...
You’re the pilot. Them little cells composing your body gave you the job. What you gona do, let them down? You can quit but it hurts.
In the first sentence you use 'experience' as the measure, in the second 'facts'. I am to take it from this that the answer to my question is 'yes'? You do deny any sub-concious processes - the 'facts' about how your mind functions are synonymous with the experience you have of it doing so?
Quoting Olivier5
I said 'process', not 'route'. I imagine there's more than one neurological pathway by which preferences lead to decisions too.
Quoting Olivier5
No, not 'explaination', just the initial input to process under investigation.
Quoting Olivier5
Why? If I put two liquids of different viscosity in a tube, the thinner will reach the end first. No where does any mechanism need to do the comparing, their arrival time is a function of their viscosity. There's no reason at all why a more pressing preference might not have neurological properties which result in it's causing some behaviour over some less pressing preference. There need not be an external arbiter.
Quoting Olivier5
Again, to demonstrate this model you'd have to show that each process in the brain had an alternative as a backup. You've not yet given a single example, let alone a compelling majority.
I have in fact kept your model intact. All I said is: the model is not complete, it needs a random decision routine as an add-on in case the comparison of preferences fails to yield an actionable result. With this small add-on, the model now looks to me like something that could work, and account better for human experience.
It's a very little tweak to your model, a proposal for a simple and light improvement. I don't understand why you are reacting so defensively to it.
But once again, to each his own. If someone doesn't like his models to be tampered with, it's no skin off my nose.
We've come a long way in not actually getting the problem of free will. No wonder some of our thread makers have lost motivation.
Making truly random choices is notoriously difficult - ask a poker player. There are common situations in poker where random choices are considered to be an optimal strategy. Experienced players sometimes use props, such as a digital watch, to help them randomize their choices, because otherwise an opponent can pick up on a hidden bias and exploit it.
You point out to another such pragmatic case where selection of options via preference comparison is unwise: when wanting to be unpredictable by others.
Isaac's thesis is typical of medieval thinking, in that it uses a mechanistic metaphor to try and understand our minds. It's a bit late for that. Nowadays there are better metaphors available, eg in cybernetics, system theory etc. Those metaphors are much more complex and life-like.
Is actual freedom a necessary condition for the thought of freedom, in other words. Descartes thinks so. However Kant believes only the "idea of freedom" is required. I think Kant's position may involve a vicious regress, however....
Maybe not required, but sufficient? Can we say there is a distinction between the two? And Kant’s position would involve an infinite regress, if he didn’t acknowledge that his idea was merely a stipulation grounding a very specifically predicated theory.
“...I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory....”
Still, the question remains whether or not an idea is itself sufficient justification for anything generally, and a moral philosophy in particular, which we are told by the post-modern determinists, it is not.
Yes, I wasn't being precise, that's correct. But if the whole point is, even if it is just the "idea of freedom", even if that is just an illusion, is it a "free illusion"? i.e. there is still a freedom there.
I can’t see what would be the advantage of such an illusion. There’s no point. Nature doesn’t need to lie to us.
Error is how we learn. It is unavoidable and productive. But I can't see how a systemic illusion about the whole shebang would be necessary or useful.
But if there is no freedom then learning would also be an illusion.
Even error would be an illusion.
Any exception to free will is seen as temporary constraint. "I am free to to do this or that unless someone/thing comes and prevents it. Of course this isn't at all what the issue of free will is about. Free will is about the idea that, aside from any external constraints, "I could have chosen to do differently if I wished." So I think a decent working definition of "free will" is just that: the ability to do differently if one wished, which is a very common definition of "free will."
Those who most disagree with this are most often hard determinists, people claiming that everything we do has a cause. And because everything we do is caused then we could not have done differently, therefore it's absurd to place blame or praise. A pretty drastic notion, and one rejected by almost everyone. So whatever else is said about the issue of free will ultimately it must come down to this very basic level: Are we free to do other than what we chose or not? I say, No you are not. Free will is an illusion. But before going into why, we first need to get rid of the term "choice" because it assumes to be true the condition under consideration, freedom to do what we want. So no use of "choice," "choosing," or any of its other cognates.
Here's how I see it.
There are only two ways actions take place; completely randomly, or caused. By "completely randomly" I mean absolutely and utterly random, not an action which, for some reason, we do not or cannot determine a cause. This excludes things such as the "random" roll of dice. Dice land as they do because of the laws of physics, and although we may not be able to identify and calculate how dice land it doesn't mean that the end result is not caused. This is the most common notion of "random" events: those we are unable to predict and appear to come about by pure chance. The only place where true randomness, an absolutely uncaused event is said to occur is at the subatomic level, which has no effect on superatomic events, those at which we operate. And I don't think anyone would suggest that's how we operate anyway, completely randomly: what we do is for absolutely no reason whatsoever. So that leaves non-randomness as the operative agent of our actions. We do this or that because. . . . And the "cause" in "because" is telling. It signals a deterministic operation at work. What we do is determined by something. Were it not, what we do would be absolutely random in nature: for absolutely no reason at all. But as all of us claim from time to time, we do have reasons for what we do. And these reasons are the causes that negate any randomness.
So, because what we do obviously has a cause, could we have done differently? Not unless the causes had been different. If I end up at home after going for a walk it would be impossible to end up at my neighbor's house if I took the exact same route. Of course I could take a different route and still wind up at home, but I would still be in the same position of not ending up at my neighbor's. To do that there would have had to be a different set of circumstances (causes) at work. But there weren't so I had no option but to wind up at home. The previous chain of cause/effects inexorably determined where I ended up. So to is it with our decisions. We do what we do because all the relevant preceding cause/effect events inexorably led up to that very act and no other. We HAD to do what we did. There was no freedom to do any differently.
What does this all mean then? It means that we cannot do any any differently than what we do. Our actions are caused (determined) by previous events and nothing else. Even our wishing to think we could have done otherwise is a mental event that was determined by all the cause/effect events that led to it. We think as we do because. . . . And that "because" could never have been any different than what it was. The operation of our will is at the mercy of everything that directs it. We have no will to do anything other than what we're caused to do. In effect then, a free will does not exist, nor does choice.
Of course this means that blame and praise come out as pretty hollow concepts. If you cannot do other than what you did why should you be blamed or praised for them? To do so is like blaming or praising a rock for where it lies. It had no "choice" in the matter. Of course we can still claim to have free will if we define the term as being free of external constraints, but that's not really addressing free will, and why free will exists as an issue. The free will issue exists because people claim "I could have done differently if I had wished." Problem is, of course, they didn't wish differently because . . . .
.
Good post, Lisa.
I concur with 's well reasoned post. And the 'becauses' that we use include many levels, such as biological imperative, psychological, behavioural and so forth.
I think this is coming close to another post on this forum about morality. Why do we choose to act morally - do we indeed have a choice?
Perhaps then freedom of thought is not so much having absolute (infinite) freedom to choose, but freedom to choose from a finite number of predetermined possible courses of action?