Stove's Gem and Free Will
@Banno has long championed Stove's Gem around these parts. After re-reading the article on Stove's Gem that he recently re-posted, it struck me as being analogous to recent thoughts I had had about free will.
I should state from the outset that I haven't read very widely on the subject of free will, but I have given it some thought over the years.
Those who want to better understand Stove's Gem argument are welcome to read the article, but this statement captures the sentiment that I want to express:
I wish to make a similar observation about a style of argument that is commonly made against free will, which is that we do not have free will because we are not free to choose our own desires, or our own will.
SEP offers a form of this argument from Galen Strawson:
In Stoveian fashion (as I understand it), I would say this is likewise a bad argument, because to have free will (in everyday terms) means that we are free to choose according to our will or according to our desires. We shouldn't be expected (in philosophical terms) to "get out of them" in order to remake the will as we desire. For then we would have no desires with which to choose how to remake the will.
I do not rule out that I have misunderstood Stove's Gem, or the everyday or philosophical meanings of free will, or the philosophical problem of free will, or Strawson's argument, or this post.
I should state from the outset that I haven't read very widely on the subject of free will, but I have given it some thought over the years.
Those who want to better understand Stove's Gem argument are welcome to read the article, but this statement captures the sentiment that I want to express:
These arguments – or, less euphemistically, dogmas – are versions of Stove's `Worst Argument' because all there is to them as arguments is: our conceptual schemes are our conceptual schemes, so, we cannot get out of them (to know things as they are in themselves).
I wish to make a similar observation about a style of argument that is commonly made against free will, which is that we do not have free will because we are not free to choose our own desires, or our own will.
SEP offers a form of this argument from Galen Strawson:
Strawson associates free will with being ‘ultimately morally responsible’ for one’s actions. He argues that, because how one acts is a result of, or explained by, “how one is, mentally speaking” (M), for one to be responsible for that choice one must be responsible for M. To be responsible for M, one must have chosen to be M itself—and that not blindly, but deliberately, in accordance with some reasons r1. But for that choice to be a responsible one, one must have chosen to be such as to be moved by r1, requiring some further reasons r2 for such a choice. And so on, ad infinitum. Free choice requires an impossible infinite regress of choices to be the way one is in making choices.
In Stoveian fashion (as I understand it), I would say this is likewise a bad argument, because to have free will (in everyday terms) means that we are free to choose according to our will or according to our desires. We shouldn't be expected (in philosophical terms) to "get out of them" in order to remake the will as we desire. For then we would have no desires with which to choose how to remake the will.
I do not rule out that I have misunderstood Stove's Gem, or the everyday or philosophical meanings of free will, or the philosophical problem of free will, or Strawson's argument, or this post.
Comments (132)
I might go back and take a look at the logic of the argument again before continuing.
I think the issue is that free will in everyday terms doesn't give you the kind of agency that is necessary for moral responsibility, so it doesn't really matter for the argument whether we have that kind of free will or not. Or in other words the issue I think he raises, is that you would in fact have to be able to choose your will to retain the idea of moral responsibility. I'm not sure I entirely agree with this, but I think that is the argument anyway.
There are two aspects to any individual. The physical body and the mind and causality seems to operate differently for them.
The body is affected by, well, physical stuff and there's no way we can transcend physical laws of nature - if you jump off the third floor of a building you will get hurt.
Although it's true that ideas are a matter of preferences - our belief systems adapt to our mindset - there are many times our mindset adapts to beliefs. Rationality is the primary agent that brings this about. Yet, rationality isn't in the business of offering us choices - it demands allegiance to beliefs that have been demonstrated true or else prepare to live a life of pain.
Yet, it can't be denied that not matter what reason dictates, we still can choose what to believe and what not to believe. Reminds me of someone who once said, paraphrasing, "truth is something that doesn't go away even when you choose not to believe it". Whatever truth may be, the sentence let the cat out of the bag - we're free to choose our beliefs no matter what logic or reason says.
As you can see, two forces are at play here. On one side of the ring are our preferences that have the power to influence our minds and on the other side of the ring is rationality that can exert an opposing influence. It boils down to this then: we're prisoners of our preferences but rationality is our get out of jail card but we've enough freedom to defy rationality. It's like being in a cage of our preferences, in possession of the key to the cage, rationality, and being completely free whether to use the key or not.
What's your opinion on this?
Yes, this is how I also understand Strawson's argument. I'm calling it a bad argument because the will is the source of our choosing between options. According to Strawson "how one acts is a result of, or explained by, “how one is, mentally speaking” (M)." To have truly free will, Strawson argues that we must be able to choose M (or how one is, mentally speaking) from scratch, whereas I would argue that one requires M in order to be able to choose anything, so one is not able to choose M without M. If "how one acts is a result of...M", then one cannot act without M (in order to choose M).
I was conscious before posting the OP that I had omitted any mention of determinism. However, I think the deterministic argument is of a similar form or makes similar assumptions as Strawson's argument: namely, that one needs to be able to choose M in order to be the cause of their choices in order to truly have free will. See the post above.
Ok, I fully agree to all of this... I think we make choices and our will determines those. In fact we need a will to be even able to make choices.
Where we possibly disagree, is that I wouldn't call that will free, precisely because we don't choose our will. You might say we are 'free' to make choices according to our will, but what does the word free really mean in that instance? I can see making a distinction between making choices based on our own will and being externally coerced into certain choices, but that to me isn't so much a difference between free and not free, but rather between externally or internally determined.
I will say I think of the concept of 'free will' as a religious invention to make people feel guilt with the purpose of controlling or manipulating people, so I'm biased against the idea... so maybe I'm not giving the most charitable interpretation of the concept.
It could mean, as you note, that nothing outside our will is forcing us to make that choice.
Quoting Luke
Yes, and I wouldn't have a problem with that per se. But what really matters is not so much if there is an account that would be acceptable, but if that account suffices to be able to speak about moral responsibility right? That's what really at stake it seems to me.
What's lacking, or what would such an account require in order to "suffice" in this way?
I'm not quite sure as I indicated in my first post. Maybe there is a problem with our conception of morality being tied to freedom in the first place. Maybe we just lack adequate or accurate psychological descriptions at this point to make relevant distinctions for the purpose of assigning moral responsibility... In law for instance we do see some attempts at this, in that we do exempt people in some cases from legal responsibility, like age, (temporal) insanity etc... but we do not exempt other things that seem otherwise pretty similar. I feel like there's something there, but it does all seem a little bit murky and arbitrary to me.
Maybe to clarify.
If we do not choose our will, and our will determines what choices we make... you could say that that implies there is no way in which we could have chosen otherwise. Acting otherwise implies in some sense that we would have another will, which we have no control over.
Can you say someone is morally responsible if he couldn't have acted otherwise? Maybe if the ability to act otherwise is not a criterium for moral responsibility etc...
Even if there are causes that determine what will happen next, it remains that we do not know what that will be; the complexities are such that even a deterministic future is unpredictable.
SO even though what happens is in this sense determined, we don't know what it is we will do next.
It seems to me that we are trying to join together two disparate ways of talking. On the one hand we have physical laws that set out what will happen in something like a "bread loaf universe", on the other we have the fact of not knowing what we will do next, of being in a state of existential uncertainty, with all the consequent angst.
It's tempting to think that the determinism narrative overrides the choice narrative, so that we seem to be unwilling puppets. But that doesn't quite make sense, since we do what we will ourselves to do. It's tempting to see free will as an illusion, but again that seems to be wrong, for much the same reasons that, say, having a pain cannot be an illusion.
I'd describe these two ways of describing a situation as contrary, not contradictory.
And that puts me in mind of the sort of analysis offered by Austin in Sense and Sensibilia. There are those who do offer the argument that since we can only see that tree over there (it's always a tree) using our eyes, we can never see the actual tree. It's an absurd argument. If you are not seeing the tree, what exactly is it that you are seeing? And how is it that what you see and what I see are the very same? And how is it that you can on occasion be mistaken as to what you see, if what you see is not in some sense seperate from what is actually out there?
Same for the notion of conceptual schemes, as used here: we can never understand except by using our conceptual schemes, and hence we never understand what is actually going on. But if your understand is not, rightly or wrongly, about what is actually going on, then what is it about? And if your understanding is restricted just to you, how is it that we can agree, or even disagree, as to the facts? And how could you be wrong, if all you ever understand is what you want to understand?
(I reject the notion of conceptual schemes on other grounds as well - See Davidson's On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.)
So does this, as @Luke suggests, work for free will?
Strawson is saying that we are not responsible for what we've become.
What we've become is our will.
Banno, I think I agree that they are two ways of description on a different level or from a different perspective, but I don't think I'm pitting free will against determinism here. It's more an argument at the conceptual level I think, and I don't know if that necessarily has a lot to do with determinism. Maybe it does, I'm not entirely sure...
We make choices. What is that we that is making the choices? I'd say we are our will, by and large. That's still not really all that illuminating maybe... Let's say our will is a compound of different forces competing with eachother, maybe mediated by reason, maybe influenced by external sources etc... Whatever it is, my question would be, where does the freedom come in? What kind of, or what degree of freedom is it, if there is any? And what kind of freedom do we need or expect for moral responsibility?
Maybe reason could play a role there, but it still seems like you need some pre-existing volition to make a decision ultimately, logic on it's own can't tell you that. So it seems even only at the conceptual level, free will doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Therefor i'm tempted to say, we have a will [period]. It's not really free because we (our will) do not choose our will.
If free will is only the claim that we make choices, then yes I have no qualms with that, that seems (maybe trivially) true to me.
So instead of "we have eyes, therefore we cannot see", it would be "we have desires, therefore we cannot choose"...
At first blush this looks pretty good. A close analogue.
A few issues to iron out, though. The tree, in the sight example, and the reality described by our conceptual scheme in the second example, are in a sense external, outside of and hence distinct from the seeing and the thinking. Are our desires external, in a suitably analogous way? And is this a fair representation of what Strawson has argued?
Good OP...
I just don't think that will, despite its philosophical credentials, is any where near adequate to a description of the self.
And I would add to that, in descriptions of the self in the psychology I have read and in cognitive science, the will, while it might sometimes feature, does not dominate in the way that would be expected if Schopie and the moustachioed one were right.
@Isaac knows his psychology. Perhaps he will chime in.
But then again, I don't think I'm the only one that doesn't know. And maybe that's part of the problem with morality and free will that it just assumes a kind of agency without really knowing what is going on.
On the contrary, that we don't know is at the very heart of the matter. In that regard, I take Sartre as presenting a clearer view of the situation than Nietzsche. The fact of not knowing is what sets up the existential crisis of choice.
It would be insincere, and confused, and indeed disingenuous, to claim our choices are determined by our will, yet still maintain that our choices are free.
Well, I may not know exactly what's going on, but probably just enough to know that Sartre's idea of radical freedom is maybe a bit to radical :-).
Anyway, I do like the Moustace, but I take your point that his idea of will is probably a bit outdated by now.
Indeed...
As far as I understand your opposition then I don't understand how a will can ever be "free". If you can choose between food item A or B, you need some sort of will to be able to choose. If you have to choose between will A or B you still need some sort of will to be able to choose. Having a will is required in order to make a choice. So by necessitating that a will must be chosen in order to be called "free" you create a sort of infinite regression because in order for a will to be free it must have been chosen by another will which must have been chosen by another will which must have.......
I feel it's a bit unfair when you define "free will" as an inconceivable concept and then proceed to say "free will doesn't exist". Sounds like "A square circle doesn't exist" to me. It's not a meaningful definition and is not what most people refer to when they think "free will" (though probably many people don't know what they refer to when they say it)
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
There is no proof that people couldn't have acted otherwise even given what you say. Determinism is very difficult to swallow not only because of recent advnces in quantum physics but also because it is completely untestable. After something happens you can't go and test if something else could have happened.
I don't see how will never being free is a problem really. I would be a bit like saying that it's unfair to define water as wet because we happen to have a concept like "dry water". We don't have a right to a will that is free just because a concept like free will exists.
And yeah I think you're right that most people don't really know what they mean with it, other than some vague reference to the fact that we make choices. We experience ourselves making choices, yes, but I don't think you need free will to explain making choices, "will" would be enough it seems to me. So my question remains, what does the word free do there?
I think it's a religious concept to talk people into guilt... and it seems reasonable enough to me to question concepts we get from those kind of sources. It's not because we have inherited a concept like say "orginal sin" or "souls" that we absolutely need to find a meaning for it so that it makes sense right? We can also say, yeah no it doesn't make sense, let's just do away with the whole concept.
There is no proof right, but then again nothing ever really gets proven in science, that's the purvue
of logic and math only.
On a macro-level things do seem to behave according to deterministic laws, by and large . Brains then would be an exception to the rest of the world, which would be a bit odd it seems to me.
And although I'm no expert, I don't think quantum indeterminacy really plays at the macro level.
I'm not mourning the non existence of something that can't exist by definition. It's just that when philosophers use the word there is usaully a conceivable meaning behind it.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Some say it is a substitute for "uncoerced" for one. That's what it means in the legal sense at least. I can't think of anything else but there are probably other wackier definitions
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
But you can't consider decisions in the brain "macro level things" I think. I remember reading Synapses and microtubles are small enough for quantum effects to actually matter.
Well, I'd say that's a bit of a contentious claim since philosophy has been the handmaiden of religion for a couple of millennia.
Quoting khaled
Right, so maybe there is a problem with the concept since it isn't really clear what it means? Like, for how long have we been having these discussions... that seems like a clear indication that there is a problem with it.
Quoting khaled
I'll refrain from making any claims about this, because I don't know enough about it.
Yes, I see. If free will is the ability to choose, then what is relevant to moral responsibility is the ability to choose actions which are socially/morally appropriate, or the ability to choose against actions which are socially/morally inappropriate.
I think that the meaning of "free will" does involve the view that statistically normal adults have the ability to choose to act (or refrain from acting) in appropriate way(s). The law may therefore view (e.g.) children and the insane to be deficient in this ability, and so exempt them from the same penalties that get applied to statistically normal adults for breaking the law.
Moral choices may have more serious implications, but I don't find it necessary to restrict the ability to choose only to the subset of moral choices.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I assume that our will is what allows each of us to choose between two or more available options, and that that choice is made in accordance with one's will and/or desires (or, per Strawson, in accordance with "how one is, mentally speaking"). This gives the appearance that one is in control of the choice, or that the choice is, at least, ours. This is what I take "our will determines what choices we make" to mean.
If this control or ownership of making a choice is illusory, then so is the control or ownership of one's own will. If making a choice is illusory, then it is not our will, or "us", that determines what choices we make, but something external to oneself. It would not be "our" will that determines what choices we make, or "our" will at all.
As for the conceptual problem of "choosing our will", I have already addressed this.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
"Acting otherwise" would seem to require having another will and another body. But that's not the same as the ability to choose (or the ability to have chosen otherwise, which I take to mean no more than having genuine options available to choose from).
I assume you mean Kant. I'm surprised that he would say that free will and desire are incompatible. In what sense incompatible? Do you have a reference?
Yes, I agree. A presentation of the argument from the article which is even more relevant to free will might be:
Simply replace "cannot know ethical truths" with "cannot have the ability to choose".
Quoting Banno
I didn't think that the issue with Stove's Gem was externality, but perhaps I've misunderstood the argument. The analogy I had in mind was something more along these lines (again from the article):
And just as "all there is to them as arguments is: our conceptual schemes are our conceptual schemes, so, we cannot get out of them (to know things as they are in themselves)", so too, our will and our ability to choose is ours, so we cannot get out of it (to choose "in itself", or to be able to choose our ability to choose, i.e., the choice from nowhere).
But because of language we know all too well what is expected of us. We can change our auto responses and our likes and dislikes through learning and deliberation. Genetics can be changed too, by environment.
We think in language. Because of that we can understand complex concepts. Because of that; unless you are mentally ill, damaged, unable to learn and understand, you are responcible for your actions.
Where Strawson's argument can be criticized is in how he caches out this sourcehood. Strawson in effect identifies sourcehood with causality. His theses is that in order for you to be responsible for your decision, you have to be its ultimate causal source. He then argues that since you are just an intermediate element in the causal chain (this isn't exactly his argument, but it can be restated this way), then you cannot be ultimately responsible.
This identification of responsibility with causality is, again, not entirely unreasonable. What I think makes Strawson's argument bad, and not just flawed or mistaken, is that he takes this framing of sourcehood for granted, without any reflection and argument (at least that was my impression from his oft-cited paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility). This also characterizes most free will discussions on the 'net (including this very thread), where people plunge into arguments without bothering to do any philosophical groundwork, without asking questions that need to be asked, and often just talk past each other.
Which desire do you desire?
AT some point such talk becomes incoherent.
Not so fast.
What more is there to having a will than making a choice?
And if that's all there is to it, then how could having a will preceded making a choice?
I have to make a choice. I need a will to make a choice. That will is the thing I chose with. This looks like a story that adds layers while not actually explaining anything. Hence we now have a thread that spends its time discussing the reified will when all that was needed was to talk about choice (, ).
(Bolding seems to be more in fashion than the quieter italics - a sign of the times I thought I might try just to see what happens.)
You might be right.
While it is possible to think one is seeing a tree when one is not - one is mistaken, there is an hallucination or an illusion - it is not possible to be mistaken about being in pain,
What about desire? Can one be mistaken as to what one wants? That's not out of the question - I thought I wanted a mango ice but that vanilla really hit the spot...
I wonder if it is a coincidence that the cultural relativist who "inveighs bitterly against our science-based, white-male cultural perspective" in the quote is a "she". I think the response Stove gave here is what one might expect, were the cantankerous old professor invited by a female student to consider if his perspective was lacking in breadth. Care might be needed that we not use the arguments here to sideline folk who see things differently.
Hmm...
“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
? Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Indeed...
I don't understand how the former leads to the latter. If you are choosing between A and B you need some sort of mechanism by which to make the choice. That mechanism is called will. So what if all will is is a mechanism by which people choose. Since you made a choice you must have had the ability to do so beforehand.
Quoting Banno
But I just don't think it makes sense to talk with any fewer layers than this. The concept of "choice" doesn't make sense without someone making said choice. And said someone must have some mechanism by which to make a choice which we called "Will". What would talking about "choice" without someone who makes the choice look like?
To me this reads like "I have to eat. I need a mouth to eat. That mouth is the thing I eat with. This looks like a story that adds layers without explaining anything. Hence we now have a thread that spends its time discussing the reified mouth when all that was needed was to talk about eating"
Maybe I just don't get what you're saying because I'm simultaneously listening to a zoom class.
Well if that's all one is doing, go for it. But take care that one doesn't try to do more... see
Quoting khaled
If that says "having a mechanism to make a choice is required in order to make a choice", well and good - nothing untoward has been said. And while that's what you are doing, I'm not so sure about others (named above) here.
"free will" quickly becomes a philosophical fetish. If one views it as merely a mechanism for making a choice it loses its power to mesmerise.
Like what?
"the will to power" sounds cool. "The mechanism by which you chose power"... daggy. "Choosing to be an egotistical twat" ofttimes much more accurate.
(Donald Trump as the Ubermensch...)
Absolutey right, and for good reason. People can suffer loss of volition in various forms, and woe betide the clinician who then announces that they no longer properly exist!
Just to tack something OP-related to the post, I don't think the concept of free-will even makes sense (other than as literally 'no other person made me do so', or 'neither choice was excessively onerous'). That said, I think @Luke's right about Strawson's argument being an example of Stove's Gem, notwithstanding my dislike of that which he opposes, he didn't do so well.
For some reason that I can't fathom the philosophy of will (at least that I've read) cannot avoid little homunculi dealing, like a miniature post-master, with all the desires, senses and thoughts which arrive, unbidden, on his desk.
I think yours is a good argument for free will. It's the (or a) compatibilist argument, if not mistaken.
The main issue with Strawson's argument is that he separates 'how one is mentally' from 'one'. Such that there is this 'self' which is other than 'how one is mentally' which could, in theory, be responsible for choices. His coup de grace is that in reality the self is not able to choose actions freely because actions result from 'how one is mentally' and the self has no choice about that.
The massive problem (which is where I see commonalities with Stove's Gem) is that 'the self' is part of 'how one is mentally' - it's not a separate element.
Yes, which is where the similarity to Stove's Gem lies. If his 'self', his 'one', just is some mental state, then to say it cannot be responsible for one's mental state is definitional. This is why Stove's Gem is the 'worst argument in the world' because it tells us nothing. If it were not even possible for 'one', the 'self', to be responsible for one's mental state (because one is one's mental state) then we have not learned anything at all surprising in discovering we're not, there was never any option whereby we were.
I'm not saying we are responsible for our mental state, only that arguing we're not by re-defining 'we' isn't answering the question in the terms it was asked, which I think is what Stove was getting at.
Fair enough, that's kind of where I'd got to.
Quoting SophistiCat
This I struggle with. It seems to 'define away' responsibility. Once one assumes determinism, as Strawson surely does here, then there is no thing which is uncaused. As such 'responsible' becomes a word without a referrent. That, to me, seems silly. Rather, we'd work out what it is we still mean by 'responsible' despite determinism.
Quoting Isaac
That would be a very different approach indeed (and one that I would endorse): start from the commonsense assumption that there is such a thing as moral responsibility, then work out what it is. Strawson, on the contrary, comes with presuppositions of what moral responsibility is, or rather what it cannot be, and then asks whether we can have it.
Yeah, I can't really stand "...therefore X doesn't exist" conclusions (where X is some common feature of our language). I think, 'well what on earth have we all been talking about all this time then?'.
We can also get rid of determinism.
And replace it with...?
Good to see reference to Strawson's actual article. I admit to being guilty of replying to the OP and not to the article itself.
SO you raise the question of whether the version of Strawson in the OP is accurate. Ill have re-read the article.
I want to add a bit about the supposed link between free will and ethics. The distinctive characteristic of ethical statements is that they set out what it is we believe other people ought to do. The notion of free will is distinct, only being related to ethics by introducing punishment, which is not something I'd like to see.
That is, even if we did not freely choose, ethical responsibilities remain.
So if I throw a ball in the air I should act as if it may or may not come back down again?
You're welcome to, especially if you manage to exceed escape velocity.
Another thing you could do is read about indeterminism. :-)
I didn't ask your permission, I asked if you think I ought to.
No, just an ordinary human throw.
So you're saying that whether the ball comes down or not is determined by factors in the environment?
So how do we decide which things are predetermined and which are not (or to what extent)?
Not sure what you mean.
You mean gathering and analysing evidence, yes?
So when you said "We can also get rid of determinism" with regards to the causes of our behaviour you presumably mean "...only on the basis of evidence that it can be so discarded in this case"
So what would your evidence be?
This seems like a very odd approach. Scientific theories suggest the some quantum scale events might possibly be not determined and you take that as reason to presume every pairing of cause and effect in the world is indeterminate unless proven otherwise?
Seems something of an overreaction.
Just saying: the scientific evidence so far points to indeterminism.
What's your evidence that the present state of affairs in the universe - our discussion here included -- was fully predetermined as early as a split-second after the Big Bang?
But it doesn't, not in the least bit. It points to the fact that there may be (perhaps even more likely than not), indeterminacy at quantum scales. All the evidence we have so far, from classic physics to just plain experience, is that this resolves somehow to almost complete determinism at human scales.
Quoting Olivier5
I've never made such a claim, so I'm not sure why you would think I'd have evidence for it ready to hand.
I don't think so. Complex systems -- eg living organisms -- are not fully deterministic. Biology is not fully deterministic in its outlook. It doesn't claim that life is fully determined by chemistry.
Also, the world is one. Your brain is made of quanta. Everytime you see fluorescence, you see a quantic phenomenon. Evolution works through mutations which are mostly due to radioactivity, a quantic phenomenon. Hence mutations can't be predicted. Hence evolution can't be predicted. Etc etc.
That's not something the evidence points towards at all (as in distinguishing true indeterminism from mere pragmatic uncertainty). Notwithstanding that, it would still be the case that the vast majority of biological processes are considered to be classicly causally determined. The whole of science is based on the principle that one variable is a function of another. How far do you think you'd get in investigating biological systems without the presumption that a change in some variable causes a determinate change in the related one?
Quoting Olivier5
None of which has any bearing on the extent to which these effects resolve to determinism at the scale of mental proceses.
You seem to have taken some sketchy and speculative theories at the fringe of very specific fields and decided that their existence should shift the presumption of cause and effect on which our entire interaction with the world is built. I just wonder if it's worth it.
QM is a little more than "a sketchy and speculative fringe theory", I think. I would rather integrated QM in my world view than consider it a mere detail, unworthy of my attention... I think it's worth it.
But to each his own. Your philosophy is quite classical, verging on the medieval sometimes. Mine is more current.
We weren't talking about QM. We were talking about theories where it doesn't just resolve into determinism at the scale of biological processes. Theories proposing that kind of effect (the kind that could act as initiators for behaviour, for example) are definitely sketchy and speculative.
Quoting Olivier5
We are talking here about determinism in the context of behavioural causality or neurological decision-making processes. What 'current' experts use your approach?
I thought I was getting a sense of déjà vu from this conversation so I checked back through my posts and indeed I've had virtually this exact discussion before. Anyway, I found this quote from Chris Koch.
Or is 2006 too medieval for you?
Sometimes you may want to conclude that what we've been talking about all this time is not what we thought it was, or that it's just not a well-formed concept, and we may be better off leaving it alone than trying to precisify it with philosophy. I've been drifting towards such a conclusion with respect to free will, especially after looking at some sociological research.
My previous position was to treat free will as something that is real, insofar as people treat it as real: they refer to it, they evaluate their and other people's behavior based on whether they think they exercised their free will. They even appeal to it in a court of law. But it seems that, going by the actual use, the concept of free will is heterogeneous and inconsistent. More importantly, those aspects of free will that matter to us - responsibility being foremost - can be dealt with on their own, with no reference to free will. That is, if you want to consider whether we are morally responsible in such and such circumstances (e.g. when our actions are physically determined by an earlier state of the universe), why not just talk about that? Why confuse matters by bringing up something that no one is quite sure about?
It should be said that in The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility paper and some other related works Strawson does specifically talk about moral responsibility, rather than free will. And he starts his entry on Free Will in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy with these words:
Quoting Strawson, RET
In the rest of the article he mainly talks about the second question, i.e. the question of moral responsibility.
I am not aware on any scientific theory saying that the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics resolves somehow into determinism at the biological scale. That makes very little logical sense to me, to start with. What process would be at play, to achieve that?
Quoting Isaac
Modern biologists wouldn't typically pretend that life is fully deterministic. They are more modest than that. More humble. It's a big claim to make when in biology all you can ever measure is a mean and its variance, and the only tool you can use to establish causality is statistics.
I've a lot sympathy with that position. 'Not a well-formed concept' I think is something philosophy can often help with, so there's merit in discussing the various ways in which a concept is made use of to see if it can be made more efficacious. Some are, however, lost causes, sure.
What intrigues me is the expression "what we've been talking about all this time is not what we thought it was". I'm afraid I can't quite make sense of this. A word has to mean what we (community of language users) think it means doesn't it? Could you perhaps rephrase?
Quoting SophistiCat
Definitely agree with you here. I think, though, it's more of a problem for philosophers and psychologists to make sure they don't equivocate over the various uses than it is for the community of language users to kind of 'get their act together'. Another of my pet hates is philosophers telling other language users what a word 'really' means (not suggesting that's what you're implying).
Quoting SophistiCat
Absolutely. This thread becomes an example. What really matters morally is the difference between having one's actions driven by desires an thoughts one considers one's own, and having one's hand forced by the unwanted desires of others, or desires and thoughts one does not consider one's own (psycho-pathology). All of this can be dealt with without having to send a single electron through any slits! We just don't need to know, in most cases, anything about ultimate cause, we only need go a few steps back and see if such causes are still within or outside of what we consider ourselves.
What I think does matter, is the opposite. It matters that we can demonstrate a deterministic relationship between mental processes and behaviour, so that we can help people with various psychological or physiological injuries and so that we can have a fair legal system to deal with the challenging behaviour which comes along with such injuries. But you're absolutely right that 'free will' is completely redundant here.
To my knowledge, they all do, but I'm no expert. I may be using the terms incorrectly (@Kenosha Kid could correct me if so). It's my understanding that all the quantum weirdness 'resolves' at the scale of cells, that (like Koch says) all such interactions can be dealt with classically.
If you know of any neuroscientist who consider cell-level interactions to be non-deterministic, I'd be interested in some citations. How would they even go about conducting research? What would they research?
But cells are still tiny, and confinement amplifies quantum effects. Quantum biochemistry is a thing but unfortunately not one I know a lot about.
Thanks.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I watched a thing by Jim Al-Khalili about something like that a long while back, but not having much understanding of the basics I didn't really come away with anything more than a very general picture. I didn't get the impression that biochemicals were going to suddenly start reciting Shakespeare or forming an impromptu dance troop any time soon though, so I think we're still safe to presume they'll continue to have the effects we've so far discovered them to have!
And yet neither thermodynamics, nor chemistry nor biology are deterministic in nature. They all use probabilities to make predictions. Something does not compute here.
Many people believe that mental life is reduceable to biology, biology reduceable to biochemistry, biochemistry reduceable to chemistry, and chemistry reduceable to physics. As a matter of fact, none of these "jumps" from one level of organization to the next has been actually understood, let alone 'reduced' by science. Each of these levels seems to follow its own set of rules, that one cannot derive (yet) from the rules applying at the lower level. Far more coherence between the sciences is assumed than proven.
Quoting Isaac
Whatever his opinion on the matter, no neuroscientist will ever be able to predict what he will think tomorrow. If he did, he would think it today and no tomorrow.
I'm not sure how you're seeing your second statement as anything like a reason to believe the first. The use of probabilities could be down to measurement errors, chaotic systems, accuracy at scale, informational constraints, ...etc. Why would you see it as evidence of those fields not being fundamentally deterministic?
Quoting Olivier5
I don't understand what you're saying here. The effect of, say brain damage, on behaviour is quite well understood. Faced with someone suffering from a particular type of brain damage, it's a rare case when the resultant behavioural change will be a complete surprise. You seem to be taking a tiny amount of uncertainty and pretending it means we've no idea what causes what.
Quoting Olivier5
Again, I'm not seeing any link here to indeterminism. An inability to carry out some calculation is not the same as randomness.
I'm saying the techniques they use are fit for apprehending a reality that is not fully determined. These sciences don't assume full determination. On the contrary they assume some randomness, measure it, calculate it, etc. Rare are the scientific papers written in those sciences without some statistical annex. Now you can say that this is just a technique and that it says nothing about the underlying reality, but if we are to use empiricism to understand reality, we should not placate on probabilistic sciences some esoteric deterministic metaphysics. We should instead take what these sciences say seriously, and what they say is that reality appears quite messy even at macro levels.
Yeah, I think it's pretty mundane stuff. Certain quantum phenomena like tunnelling and the exclusion principle have small effects on simple chemicals and atoms. Charge transfer is ultimately a quantum phenomenon.
I haven't caught up on this convo. Is this the usual "
Ah. Yes, having basically the same conversation with the same person on another thread. I didn't really get anywhere with it, but good luck.
Yep. Seems to be.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah, I've been reading that one to see if any progress could be made.
I had all but given up here too, but then I read the last post (above this one). The argument put forward is so exhaustive, well-reasoned and utterly compelling that I've decided to become a monk and dedicate the rest of my life to the service of God!
You seem to take a tiny amount of certainty and make it absolute.
.Quoting Isaac
In the case of the neuroscientist predicting what he will think tomorrow, the impossibility is purely logical: if he can predict his future thoughts, he will think them today and not tomorrow. So if his prediction is correct, it becomes incorrect as a result of being correct.
I was thinking of folk theories, as in folk physics or folk theory of mind - intuitive or conditioned but unschooled understanding of how some aspect of the world works. Such folk theories have a deeper purchase on how we think and interact than just language (if indeed language is just language). And a name like free will can stand in for such a folk theory.
That's not to say that folk theories are inherently deficient. For example, when it comes to moral responsibility (and, to an extent, free will, although as I noted, here things are more muddled), my position is that a "folk theory" is all there is to it. It is just what we personally and popularly believe it is - there isn't anything deeper or truer than that. (Sure, we could look into psychological, sociological, evolutionary, etc. explanations, but those would be explanations of how we historically came to have these particular beliefs about moral responsibility, rather than a better understanding of what moral responsibility really is or should be.)
But for other things - physics, mind - we can indeed gain a better understanding than what we can learn by consulting our intuitions or popular beliefs.
Quoting Isaac
This is where things get complicated. What we hold an individual to be accountable for vs. what we consider to be an external cause can vary quite a bit. Strawson stakes out an extreme position where everything is caused externally, deprecating personal responsibility. No one (outside of philosophy) actually does that, of course, but there is still a lot of variability and inconsistency here. Answers can vary by culture, by individual, and even by how the question is asked or primed. For example, how much does one's upbringing matter? Life experiences? Genetics? Family, nation, race? Do you leave them outside the personal boundary as external causes/influences or not?
Excuse me, I did one post on the matter because I was explicitly asked for input. I am not hijacking the thread.
Ah, that makes sense now, I took the sentence too literally.
Quoting SophistiCat
Indeed, and 'complicated' is certainly right, but is it that you think such a notion of free-choice need be abandoned for that reason? Or are you more in favour of rolling up one's sleeves and getting stuck in nonetheless?
I'm sometimes required to help plead for judicial leniency on the grounds of a person's upbringing or environment. The basis for such action is that somewhere in this muddle we (those involved at the time) can agree that such influences were outside of the person's preferred choices.
The basis for such an action seem more like mercy to me... i.e. the poor fellow couldn't help but turn out that way given his upbringing and has it already bad enough as it is without the extra punishment.
Considering upbringing as something outside of one's preferred choices seems like a strange notion given that, I would assume, one's upbringing is always to some extend part of what determines one's will or preferred choices.
I'm not sure mercy is contingent. There's obviously many different understandings (religious and humanist), but in most the act of mercy seems to be one of abstaining from punishment for abstinence's sake, not because the person didn't really deserve it.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
That's the point. Given a full notion of free-choice we would not be able to make such an argument as, upbringing or not, the person was completely free to choose their behaviour and so can be held entirely responsible for it.
In retrospect, I think you are right that determinism is neither here nor there in the issue of moral responsibility and free will. It's largely a distraction, one that I was proposing to get rid of. The discussion was on Strawson's position "where everything is caused externally, deprecating personal responsibility".
Quoting Isaac
To which I answered: we can also get rid of (strict) determinism. IOW, it's a non-necessary hypothesis and occam's razor applies.
That would in my view make it easier to think through the issue of moral responsibility. One can ask questions such as "should she have reacted differently, or taken the issue more seriously?" And these questions now have a clear meaning, because we assume that she could indeed have acted differently, unencumbered anymore by the gratuitous, useless idea that she's some determined meat machine that could NEVER have acted any differently...
This said, the circumstances need to be taken into account. If I am very hungry, I will steal food, because there IS a determinism of hunger. There IS a meat machine there that wants to eat, and will do anything for it when really hungry.
I'm not involved in this thread at all. Stop @ing me in it.
Fortunate then that you have no involvement with these troubled individuals, that you would condemn a person on the basis of nothing more than your ad hoc reckoning as to how things are. I sincerely hope you don't ever work with the vulnerable or ostracised.
Is this sort of passive aggressiveness par for the course around here?
FYI, I do work with all sorts of people, including people poorer than you can ever imagine.
It wasn't passive agressive, just plain agressive. There are people for whom the best science we have indicates diminished responsibility on the grounds of a direct link between mental function and behaviour and you would rather hold them entirely responsible for the choices they make on no better basis than that it 'seems that way' to you. Fortunately in this country guilt (including intent and capacity, where relevant to the charge) must be proven beyond reasonable doubt, not on your personal sketchy metaphysics.
Edit: Also you are being unfair and unjust, accusing a random stranger (me) of wanting to put innocents in jail just because I believe in moral responsibility.
So what's you excuse for behaving as a board inquisitor? You can't help yourself because Mom and Pop determined you to become the Scourge of God on TPF?
But my point is that I don't see on what basis you are going make that argument even if we don't assume a full notion of free-choice. What is the argument then? Some parts of our upbringing contribute to our preferred choice, and some parts that seems to influence our choices (in a bad way in this case) can be considered outside of our preferred choice because ...? What does 'preferred' mean?
Quoting Olivier5
Since no-one here is arguing that single mental states lead predictably to single behaviours, I can't see how to interpret your disagreements in any way other than advocating full responsibility, because the alternative is that we have some force you're calling 'free-will', but it is acted upon by other mental states. Yet if this is the case, then it's not free, it's constrained. You'd then have to make a separate argument as to why those constraints (on a case by case basis) do not thus constrain 'the will' sufficiently to remove any choice at all. But if this is the case then your statement above is false, we cannot assume she could have done otherwise.
To put it a clearly as possible - either mental states do not constrain our free choice at all (which means no one has any diminished responsibility), or mental states do constrain our free choice, in which case there's no logical problem with those constraints being absolute.
I think my word choice has caused some confusion. I introduced the notion of preferred simply to be clear that there aren't any objective measures of selfhood we can use to distinguish external (non-self) constraints on choice from internal ones (like preference). In some cases it will be obvious (a gun to the head is obviously an external constraint) but in some cases we have to take a clients subjective judgment into account (anything from feeling depressed without cause to actually hearing voices which do not feel part of oneself).
So one's environment creates external constraints in obviously external ways, but also in ways which are subjectively external - mental processes which are not identified with the self, which one would prefer not to have, but are present nonetheless.
We are our mental states, own them, identify with them. And so whatever degree of freedom we have is just a part of our mental state's ways of working, not something separate from them.
Quoting Isaac
There are lots of logical problems linked with thinking of constraints as absolute, especially when they don't look absolute. For instance: if you Isaac are completely and totally determined as you seem to think you are, is what you are saying still philosophy, or is it instead just the product of some molecular machine that can't think otherwise?
There are many, many people who do not identify with some of their mental states. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, PTSD, schizophrenia, stress... People experience mental constraints which they do not identify as arising from their free choice and which they report having little or no direct control over the initiation of.
We'd commonly consider someone with a gun to their head as having had their choices constrained. Why would we consider any differently someone who uncontrollably experiences a belief that they have a gun to their head?
Quoting Olivier5
I don't see a logical issue there. You're just phrasing the conclusion in a way that sounds undesirable. The desirability or otherwise of a conclusion is not a logical issue.
Thx for the clarification, this makes more sense... though I'm still left wondering why identification with self would be taken as a criterium for being lenient in court, or for attributing responsibility more generally.
It's not that I can't see some arc or rationale behind it, in the sense that the concept of responsibility seems to be tied to some agency necessarily. And so if something can be said to not be caused by the self, the agency is lacking for attributing responsibility... But this all seems build on very shaky grounds, because there is no objective measure for selfhood as you said... but more than that, identity is also ever changing and not entirely disconnected from how the world will react to certain presentations of self.
I mean, it seems one could expect an accused to present himself in court as someone who didn't want to do what he is accused of, and indeed even come to believe and convince himself that he didn't want to do it, after he realizes what the consequences are.
Maybe that's because you are predetermined not to see a logical issue here.
It depends on what one expects the result of such an inquiry to look like. Moral philosophers traditionally tend to look for simple, universal principles in a theory, modeling it, more-or-less, on fundamental physics. I am skeptical that such simple, exceptionless organizing principles could underlie most humanistic notions, such as responsibility or freedom, so to me the more obvious approach would be more in the line of stamp collecting than grand theorizing. This approach is characteristic of the relatively new field of experimental philosophy ("x-phi"), which uses the methods of sociology and experimental psychology to study "free will" and such as aspects of human attitudes and behavior, and then offers modest generalizations that do not go too far beyond the available evidence.
Quoting Isaac
Oh, interesting. Yes, that's just the sort of example that I had in mind (and how such attitudes can vary, change, be contested, etc.)
It is relevant to the extent that the starting point for Strawson's thesis is the old debate on the compatibility of personal responsibility/free will with determinism. But he argues that indeterminism is no better than determinism in this respect. He is looking for "ultimate" responsibility in a reductive sense; with this framing a person can never be "ultimately" responsible, because the buck will always pass to something else (because he already prejudged that it should!) - whether it is a prior state of the universe + deterministic dynamics or chance events.
Responding in the thread while claiming not to be involved is a performative contradiction :razz: You have no obligation to respond just because you are mentioned, but there's no need to be rude.
Yes, and that is the key take away message for me: whether one adopts a determinist or an indeterminist outlook doesn't change the problem of freedom that much.
Edit: That's because the question of whether somebody could (theoretically speaking) have acted differently now seems esoteric to me, and secondary to a better question, more pragmatic and real, which is whether somebody should (morally speaking) have acted differently. And if you ask the question this way, it is meaningful even in a fully determinist outlook.
Is this a wind-up? I have never had so many notifications on a thread I have no interest in. And please don't give me lessons on manners. I answered one question directed specifically at me and you accused me of hijacking the thread. Manners are not your strong suit either. Stop @ing me. It's just weird apart from anything.
Yeah, that's basically it.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
True, but it's not as if equally difficult to judge aspects of psychology are not also (necessarily) addressed in court - things like intent, state of knowledge, genuineness of religious belief, capacity to make decisions... Some crimes are only possible to even commit in a given state of mind. So assessing the origin of constraints on choice as self/non-self is just run-of-the-mill practice. It may be shaky, but we're going to do it anyway (we can't not) so we either do it with some attempt at scientific-style objectivity, or we just make it up.
Quoting SophistiCat
Absolutely. I can't think why anyone (except perhaps the religious) would expect a process like evolution combined with a chaotic-dynamic process like societal interactions to result in a set of mental processes which could be described in any universally generalisable way at all.
Quoting SophistiCat
I've not heard of this, do you have any names or reading to suggest?
Quoting SophistiCat
Yeah, the thing about court is that the right and wrong of the action has already been set (the law), so the only leeway allowed is the extent to which constraints on free-choice were external or not. Really, really liking strawberry ice-cream places a constraint on free-choice when at the ice-cream parlour (one is more inclined to choose strawberry) but it's not a defence, nor a reasonable plea for leniency in the case of stealing some strawberry ice-cream. Being forced at gun-point is. So the only issue here for psychology is the extent to which certain constraints from inside one's brain can still be seen as external to one's self such that they count more in the gun-to-the-head category and less in the really-like-strawberry-ice-cream category. That's why I get so cross when people want to take that argument away on the purely ideological grounds that they feel more comfortable about the idea of free-will. It's fine on a random internet forum, but in the real world such nonsense actually threatens years of progress dealing with the mentally ill and socially deprived defendants.
Maybe you get cross just because your braincells determine you to be cross... I'm trying to be really charitable here, Isaac style, by thinking of you as a puppet rather than as an agent.
Maybe this question is born out of ignorance, but what is the attempt at scientific-style objectivity here?
I wonder if "we can't not" because we have some kind of a priori moral intuition that this is the right way to judge these matters... or if this moral intuition comes from our notions of identity and agency. If it's the former, maybe there is some merit to just calling it what it is, a moral intuition, and not to try to fabricate some theoretical post hoc justification.
To me the distinction of self/non-self seems problematic as a basis for attributing responsibility because identity is such a fluid concept. Maybe it works in this case, but it seems like we would run into trouble quite quickly if we were to try to apply it consistently across the board... I could be wrong.
I just mean a move away from individual conclusions on the matter, supported by nothing but convention, toward investigation, testing, increased rigour, etc. I say science-style because I don't think most of psychology can quite call itself a science yet.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Maybe, but by saying "we can't not", I was actually aiming to be much broader than that. In the context of this discussion, I think it extends out to simply that we make assumptions about how changes we make to the environment affect the behaviour of others. The very premise of criminal punishment is just such an assumption - that an environment in which criminals are punished will alter the behavior of would-be criminals to deter them from such activities.
All psychology is, when it gets involved, is a more formalised and better tested collection of these assumptions. Not perhaps the strength with which Geologists can tell us the earth is round, but significantly better (I hope) than whatever some random judge happens to reckon.
So when I say "X's free choice was constrained by his circumstances such that he should not be punished for his actions to the same extent as someone less constrained" I'm not really saying anything about morality. I think the moral intuition is already assumed (that someone with less free-choice is more deserving of leniency - think gun-to-the-head). I'm just making the case about the existence and strength of such constraints.
Quoting Isaac
I want to say I certainly applaud these efforts, just to make that clear.
Quoting Isaac
But, and this is maybe more nitpicking than anything else, I don't think the gun-to-head analogy works here. If it were a matter of free choice that would have to lead to acquittal it seems to me, and not leniency which already implies some guilt... which leads me back to my initial intuition that leniency is not so much a matter of free choice.
I could give other examples, like age-exemptions to responsibility, which also don't necessarily align with the self/non-self distinction and free choice.... but seem to be more a matter of an assumed lack of knowledge of the consequences etc.
There are a lot of different moral intuitions at play here, which you probably don't disagree with.... I guess my qualms are not so much with the methods of testing, but more with these moral intuitions themselves, or rather with the lack of clarity of which moral intuitions are applicable when.
Here is one representative (I think - I am no kind of expert) example, with some thoughts on x-phi: Joshua Shepherd, The Folk Psychological Roots of Free Will (2017). This paper has a larger survey of recent experimental work: Esthelle Ewusi-Boisvert, Eric Racine, A Critical Review of Methodologies and Results in Recent Research on Belief in Free Will (2018).
Interesting to consider why though. If someone forces you at gunpoint to rob a bank, you've still robbed the bank, you're still guilty of that crime. The law may have provision such that in those circumstances there's no actual crime (I don't know the law on this one), but I still see that as leniency, just written into law. The spirit of that law (that stealing is wrong) has still been violated. And it's not as if you had no choice - you could have just let them shoot you, you could have tried some Jason Bourne style disarming manoeuvre. We simply accept that, although you did actually rob the bank, and we can envisage a way in which you could have done otherwise, any normal human being in those circumstances would have done the same.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Don't get me started on age exemptions. Most are either draconian or ridiculous (or both). All are just pragmatic tools to cut down on court time. The degree to which children can understand the situations they find themselves in can be judged to no less a degree than can that of someone with mental health issues or learning difficulties. To suggest that an eleven year old understands rights and wrongs enough to bear some criminal responsibility and yet withhold from them a say in the creation of those laws for a further seven years is barbaric. There's one scrap of science behind any of this, and that's that people's capacity for judgement is still developing until maybe their mid twenties, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for any of the nonsensical stages in between and all it does is institutionalise young people for being young....[continues rant safely away from keyboard].
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Unfortunately we live in a world of 7 billion with probably 7 billion slightly different moral intuitions. expecting clarity here is a lost cause.
Thanks, I will have a read.