“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.”
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.
I guess this explains why I feel so trapped. Like a pawn to my own circumstances.
To live life is to live in servitude. I'm a slave to my own needs of bread, water and circus. To supply this never-ending need I must serve someone else too. I must serve the needs of my family as well : they want and expect things out of me too. So where does that leave me? A never-ending cycle of busy-bodying. I can't even get mad or push back anymore. To what end? I'm simply a spectator to my own fate which unravels before me. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. Since it wasn't someone else, therefore, it has to be me. I am just a replaceable cog, but this cog still needs to be put to use in a machine.
This made me realize death is the true gift of God to mankind. An end to our seemingly never-ending drudgery.
I've been playing a bit of chess lately. The rules of the game are deterministic, and the best engines have solved many positions completely. Nevertheless, it's still fun to play, for me. I'm trying to play the most optimal move, and yet, nevertheless, what comes out, is the most nvader move. I don't have the free will not to choose as myself.
But I still get to be a part of some really fun games. I still feel shame if I blunder a piece, or the thrill of hunting down a vulnerable king.
And every so often, a pawn makes it to the back rank and promotes to win the game.
Based on your posting here I’m guessing you actually have enough freedom to be doing almost anything you want but you’ve “trapped” yourself in some awful situation that allows you to abdicate responsibility based on how terrible it is for you.
You're probably right, whether we have free will or not, we still cannot tell the future, so we should act as if we have it. This poster is clearly conflating their own life situation, which might limit them somehow, with the universe at large. I could get divorced and disown my son and run off to another place to start another life, but I "can't" do that because of my own morals and limitations for what I'm willing to do. The OP could do a similar thing, but chooses not to because of whatever thing is limiting then from that decision.
>“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.”
Huh? Why?
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
As much as I have a personal will, I will continue to will the same thing if we replay the situation -- all other things being exactly the same.
I don't chose something at random. I express who I am, based on my life story in space time.
To make a light example, if I'm a person who prefers Big Macs over Chinese, I will pick a Bic Mac if I'm asked to make such a decision, no matter how many times we rewind and replay the universe state.
Free will is not about me suddenly picking some random alternative. How would that ever express who I am (and thus, my, _my_ personal will?).
What's "free" about this free will since its inexorably tied to my space-time history? Well, it's exactly the fact that it's my space-time history, and can't be altered based on some external factor.
It's not "free" as in arbitrarily changeable, but free as in "expressing me and only me" (that is: my space-time history who made me what I am).
This is not an argument for the existence free will. I think it’s an argument that free will’s absence is no loss, since the deterministic choices of humans are expressions of unique paths of their consciousness in space time. Uniqueness as a salve on the painful claim that one is deterministically driven to always order the Big Mac.
This has always seemed to me to be the inherent contradiction in free will but I struggle to elaborate it. If it’s my choice then doesn’t that mean it’s determined in some way? In which case it’s not free. But if it’s random then that’s not “will” either. What then is the thing that could be both free and willed?
There is no resolution to that contradiction. The concept of a “free will” is absurd, and arose because of the psychological illusion of choice. It is a rationalization of how we feel as we exist in the world.
This realization can be difficult to process. The illusion of free will is intensely persistent, even after we’ve accepted that fact. Personally, I try to focus on the higher-order positives that come with this understanding: increased humility, greater compassion for others and oneself and equanimity via acceptance.
I had once strived to grok Zen Buddhism. I think shedding my belief in free will brought me much closer than drugs, meditation or reading religious texts ever did.
>If it’s my choice then doesn’t that mean it’s determined in some way? In which case it’s not free.
It is free in the sense that it's determined by the essense of you (your journey in space-time) - as opposed to some external factor (e.g. someone making a machine that makes you take a certain choice without it having anything to do with your experiences).
It's not some "action at a distance" that has nothing to do with you, your past, your experiences, etc. If that was the case, it wouldn't be _your_ will (whether free or not).
It's free as in not determined by external factors. Factors pertinent to who you are (like where you grew up, your friends, your parents, your experiences and so on - that is, your space-time history) _are_ pertinent to who you are. You can't separate from them, and I wouldn't call separating from them "free".
So it's not free as in "random" or as in "independent of your history deliberation by something external to your body (e.g. a soul) that's unaffected by your past".
I once wrote an article about that specific idea. For me, it's a question of scale and definition. If someone doesn't agree on the existence of a "self" they won't agree on free will either.
I've always done what I did because, while other options existed for my agency to persue, I didn't chose them, I chose what I did, and so at that time, was the only possible choice I could make, obviously, since it was what I made, it was what my entire life here on earth had set me up to chose continues arguing around the same cirle forever
Quantum theory is probably not going to save us from this, even if it at some point is fully and entirely proven and understood in a grand unified field theory. Even if something is not deterministic, does not mean that the thing is "will" or even a part of it.
Even on a macroscopic scale we can have unpredictable events, at least practically unpredictable ones, which can change our behavior, but that's just it, external events chainging our internal state. For all I know, a high energy particle may once every so often hit one of my synapses, changing its chargs just-so, making me decide to opt for the smaller menu at Mc.Donalds.
I think it's pretty obvious that free will is an illusion.
No matter what, every action -- even if that action is somehow clearly defined as an act of free will (I guess the "classic" example being one of rebellion or a wholly unexpected action) -- springs from a cause. That cause has its own cause. And so and on and so forth, until you pass the barrier between what we call consciousness and what we call organic hardware and pass into the realm of the (currently) measurable and predictable.
Just as a technology, sufficiently advanced, appears to be magic, so then does a complexity, sufficiently complex, appear to be something other than what it is. I bet everyone on HN a Coke that Consciousness will one day be understood than to be nothing more than a whole lot of complexity masquerading as something more. Ditto for any concept of free will within the universe, though I suppose that'd be a whole hell of a lot more harder to prove ;)
Free will simply does not exit, no matter how complex reality is or brains are.
Side-note: while they're pretty bad movies over all, the Matrix sequels summed this concept up pretty will with the whole idea of the One being essentially the free will machine of the Matrix, the "Integral Anomaly" -- essentially baked-in variety/novelty/choice/etc, which is still no less part of the machine itself. Just as a random number generator function returns a random number, it's still programmed to do it.
I personally find it highly likely that the decision mechanism emerges from physical computation in the brain.
However, when we talk about decision mechanisms, we inevitably introduce the question of whether this decision mechanism can work better or worse.
“Free will” may be seen as a computational notion of “health” for this decision mechanism, similar to how we use the term health for our physical bodies. A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness.
Second, many people, myself included, hold the assumption that the ordering between options A and B is not purely subjective. If there exists an ordering of options which is objective and external to the agent of choice, then the choices that are actually made can be compared to that external ordering. Free will in this sense denotes the observation that our choices may reflect an ordering which is significantly different from the ordering imposed by reality. This is not a scientific claim and cannot be disproven scientifically. Holding this assumption is in fact a choice.
I personally find it highly likely that the decision mechanism emerges from physical computation in the brain.
I think it's more likely that the decision mechanism emerges from a race condition between multiple competing signals. We choose the one that arrives first, even if it takes time to be consciously aware of the choice.
> A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness.
Isn't the drug example a contradiction? If my brain was healthy ("free") when I decided to take drugs, why would the resulting drugged state be less "free"? After all, it was my "free" choice to take the drugs and alter my mental state.
Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
Consider hypnotics used during light medical procedures to keep you awake but compliant. From a state of more freedom you can freely choose to enter a state of arguably less freedom. Why would this be a contradiction?
> Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
Yep, insights and definitions of illness will keep changing. But while insights in the details of e.g. psychosis may vary, few would deny a correlation with chemical issues.
Things either have a cause, and then they are causal.
Or they have no cause, and then they are random.
But in the opinions of some, the laws of physics stop at the neck, beyond which things are neither causal nor non-causal nor random nor non-random but 'free'. Whatever that might mean. (Apparently it's some sort of unmoving mover which moves itself and interacts with the universe without being interacted upon by the universe.)
> Things either have a cause, and then they are causal. Or they have no cause, and then they are random.
This is probably the most succinct statement that sums up the problem with "free will". As soon as you start to try to define "free will" in terms of the natural sciences you run into insurmountable contradictions that suggest that it must be an illusion.
Edit: I wonder what proportion of posters here believe both that "free will" is not an illusion and that "strong AI" is possible.
We have no ethical framework to turn the scientific method towards what is going on at the deepest levels of the brain without some crazy cloning stuff or a horrible dystopian future.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. We've done plenty of tests on animals and found nothing that would contradict either known physics or chemistry.
Moreover, even if human brains were somehow special relative to animal brains, there's no reason to think they operate in a way that that's separate from all the other matter in the universe. And as the GP said - interactions between matter are either causal or random. There's no "free will" interaction. Such a thing would be - almost by definition - supernatural.
I'm surprised at an article on free will that mentions neither Skinner nor Kahnemann. Skinner's studies on behaviourism and operational conditioning led him to question free will in quite a dramatic fashion - in some ways I think akin to how Darwin was able to reason from "reproduction with modification" to evolution, without ever having a mechanism for modification in mind (gene theory came along much later).
More recent studies of cognition and reaction have provided some of the counter-mechanisms, the things we do without deciding to do them, such as reflex arcs (the mechanism in action that causes us to withdraw our hands from something hot before our brains have realized it was hot, e.g.,), and, more importantly for the free-will discussion, Kahnemann's (and Tversky)'s two-systems model.
The basic idea of that model is that our body and brain do a lot of prefiltering, dealing with much of what we encounter and manage without ever involving the conscious mind. Think of driving on a familiar, quiet road. You never think about it, you might not even be aware of much of the drive, but you drove safely.
That "fast", low-energy-requirement system only flags things to the conscious mind - the slow, high-energy-system that we identify as ourselves - when it cannot make sense of what it encounters or when there are surprising happenings.
The workings of the fast (aconscious) system are inaccessible to the slow (conscious) system.
So we have within us a system that decides a great deal without our being involved, at least not consciously, and that only presents for our conscious consideration things it needs help with.
We make conscious, free-will-like decisions, based on filtered and reduced information. How free is that, really?
Of course, the definition of consciousness is a question all its own.
Sam Harris very recently published a podcast where he updated his stance on free will - worth a listen as he explored in depth the direct quote towards the end of the article: "If one pays sufficient attention, one can notice that there's no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own."
In saying that he says that most of our actions simply come out of the fast thinking system, and when we think something through slower we have an "illusion of free will" but still act in a way that to an external observer would say was "in character".
As we can't train ourselves *not* to see an optical illusion (even if we know it is an illusion), I think we're also stuck with the experience of free will, even if we conclude it is an illusion. But like illusions, we can use our knowledge, rather than our experience, to guide our response to the illusion. Revising the criminal justice system would be a good outcome, and I am glad to see this mentioned!
Material nature, although allowing us only a limited choice, deludes us into thinking we are completely free. But our freedom is like that of a prisoner who has the privilege to choose between a first-, second-, or third-class prison cell. He has three choices, but in all cases he is still in prison. Like a prison, the three modes of nature restrict our original free will. The instinctive sense of free will that we now feel is factual, but it is only partially realized.
Our destiny in this material world is determined by a combination of our partial free will and the three modes of material nature. According to our previous karma, we are destined to face certain situations in this life. In those situations we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how we want to react. Once we choose, we come under the control of the mode associated with our choice, and we are obliged to accept the consequences, be they happy or miserable.
Fate and free will, as described in the Bhagavad-gita, are analogous to the relationship between the state, the law-abiding citizen, and the criminals in prison. A citizen is considered free only if he obeys the laws of the state. If he breaks the law, he goes to jail. A prisoner may enjoy limited freedom to choose between reading a book or writing a letter: between Jell-0 or ice-cream for dessert; between work in the barber shop or in the kitchen. But he is not free to abandon the prison altogether. By comparison, the free citizen is in a better position, but both are controlled by the law. Practically, the only unconditioned exercise of their free will is in their decision to choose between being a good citizen or a criminal.
“Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.“
I guarantee you that nobody outside of a tiny group of academics would care at all. The only reason that people care about evolution is that they feel insulted at being called monkeys. Call them mammals instead and you’ll get no response, because it doesn’t trigger the same emotional reaction. Call them animals, they’ll protest. Call them vertebrates, shrug. There’s no logic involved. People just react to the connotation of what an “animal” or an “ape” is and then rationalize that reaction after the fact. If you just the word “hominids” instead of apes they wouldn’t care. People are idiots, it takes years of training to be able to think the way a scientist does.
Free will is an airy abstraction. Nobody cares about that. Only someone like Harris could possibly think they would.
You want to make me cringe? remind me that I got into an email conversation on my theory on this topic with an internet stranger and it turned out that person's name was daniel dennett, who I would assume assumed that I knew who he was and that I was an internet fan boy.
I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I wouldn't know which century, but would guess all of them.
I am the deterministic set of operations and coefficients that calculates my choice. My will is not caged by a deterministic universe, the deterministic universe is the the constraint ensures my choice is the true reflection of who I am, the true has of the private key of my character. A quantum magic spinny wheel doesn't liberate me, it would undermine the integrity of my choice.
This is hilarious. I had a nice email back and forth with Daniel Dennett about 15 years ago, but I knew who he was and initiated contact on purpose to talk about something he was an expert on. Good to see he is still approachable.
Well true (small scale) randomness, combinatorial explosion and intractable complexity/chaos do exist, which should be plenty to keep things interesting even in the face of considerable behavioral determinism.
I found that playing Rock, Paper, Scissors against an AI opponent demonstrated at least to me that I was not even able to make what I thought were random choices. The only way I could hold the AI to a draw was by using an external source of random numbers.
QM can also only "look" random. If human- or machine- intelligence cannot recognize a pattern and cannot predict an outcome doesn't mean another being should be the same.
>“This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.
This sort of hubris is astounding. It boggles the mind that a "scientist" could make such a definitive statement when there is so much we don't understand about physics, and the universe(s?) in general.
From what I understand of the Many-Worlds Theory, if it's correct, we can have both 'free will' and 'determinism': a man orders pizza, in 90% of possible futures he chooses a Margherita which is his favorite, but in 10% he orders something else.
My understanding of Many Worlds is probably wrong then. I assumed that every outcome exists (every possible world in the — relative to you right now — past, present, and future), and that any particular outcome is only 'special' to the copy of you in that universe.
“Nevertheless, the free will problem is really depressing if you take it seriously. It hasn’t made me happy, and in retrospect, if I were at graduate school again, maybe a different topic would have been preferable.”
I think self consciousness is the sticking point for a mechanical or probabilistic universe. It exists. It eludes quantifiable definition. It makes no sense in a mechanism. It is central to free will.
As long as self awareness is an input at least in part independent of the rest of the world, if makes your outputs non deterministic if it’s not taken into account. Yet self awareness defies explanation at the moment. Ie there is no known way to account for it.
If I hallucinate prismatic shapes overlaying everything, it does not follow that there is some non-physical phenomenon which is responsible.
“It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”
No, actually, that’s the point they allude to: that free will might be an illusion, a hallucination.
No one denies the lived experience of free will, the inquiry into it asks if we can quantify that qualia without resorting to complete determinism.
If we can’t, it is perhaps an illusion. There is ample precedent for lived experience being an illusory lie told to our minds by our brains - visual hallucinations are the closest example to hand.
Beings without free will can’t prove anything though since the verbs available to a being without free will is an empty set, and passive descriptions are more apt.
BS! Free will emerges from the accumulation of checksum errors in the file system of the quantum foam storage of the Akashic Records. Because bit rot is universal, regardless of the substrate information is stored, computed, running on, and in.
Only pointing out that there's no meaningful convo to be had at hardware/micro level. IMO there is no free will there.
Free will only becomes important on a personal (I do x because it's meaningful to me) or social contexts (I'm responsible for consequences of x action).
I doubt the philosophers are trying to say anything about our day to day lives and that's where most of the opposition is coming from (ie no free will, therefore no meaning in life or responsibilities for anyone).
Well, I still don't think there's any souls/free will etc in the academic or "objective world" that is provably out there.
However I don't think we're living there. We live in our own minds with a limited view and understanding, mostly dealing with social problems day to day, and emotions coloring that view however they see fit.
So IMO the "soul" and "free will" (or whatever other beliefs one may have) are ultimately metaphors for navigating the complex inner world. They can be very important/useful for the individual and society yet non-existent in the "objective world".
> It’s true that since Laplace’s day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain.
> But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings.
Free will or no free will, is not the assumption in point 2 fundamentally flawed?
Quantum mechanics is surely at the heart of all interactions and so at some level is responsible for the ‘illusion’ making any difference between free will and predetermination unknowable.
If this universe has free will, did everyone in this universe have the free will to decide to be born into their current life? Did they decide to be born with free will?
WILL, a kind of abstract but measurable power. We don't know exactly what it is, where it is contained, or how it works, but we can intuitively point to somewhere in our world and say, "that person has lots of willpower" or, "that action required lots of willpower to pull off". So it's defined about as well as consciousness is at the moment.
FREE is a loaded word; It can mean free as in no cost, or free as in without restriction. These are interrelated; Restrictions increase cost. Resources diminish restrictions. But no action in the universe is completely without cost nor restriction.
Even when you generate power you're not creating it from nothing, you're extracting it from one form into another, more usable to you. After use it transforms into yet another, waste form, economically unviably unusable to you personally, but not any kind of "absolute waste". One being's waste is another's food.
Even the most powerful systems in the known universe are subject to restrictions of the physical laws. Humans have long theorized the existence of god(s), systems that transcend all limitations. But they have never been observed scientifically. Every system previously thought "ultimate" in any way has been discovered to be a measurable part of our universe. Currently the most "ultimate" thing challenging our comprehension are black holes. Compare them to god(s): They cannot be seen directly. They are the most powerful things we think might exist. They affect everything around them. We know almost nothing about them, besides how they affect the universe.
So then what is FREE WILL? We can intuitively point to instances of it, and it seemes to be some kind of power that facilitates change in the universe. Humans seem to have more of it than other animals, on the basis that we've changed our world in more numerous and complex ways than any other animal. It might be an energy source we can draw from, like the Sun or black holes. Something we're not sure where it's coming from, yet. Once we discover the exact nature of it, what revelations about our universe might we achieve?
Consider that at one point in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, the Sun was this magical, invisible, distant, ambient energy that some organisms learned to harness with a process later named photosynthesis. Plants probably still don't understand the nature of the Sun, but their proliferation of the surface has allowed us to thrive and understand it. And for most of our civilized history we only knew it's a cyclic point energy source that makes everything go more alive when there's enough of it, and increasingly dead when there's too much of it.
Is the Sun an illusion? Of course not. Is free will an illusion? Of course not. We just don't know what it is, yet.
> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist.
This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we are talking about something else.
The debate between "no free will" and "magical supernatural free will" is silly and pointless, and yes, it should have been settled long time ago.
But it bugs me that so many people are eager so claim that because magical free will doesn't exist, that means no free will can exist. Compatibilism is not a new idea either. The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.
Suppose an argument between two sided: "Bigfoot exists" versus "no non-human apes exists". Is it moving the goalposts to point to gorillas?
Or suppose we're in the 1700's, and people are discussing vitalism: The force that separates dead things from living. The two sides debate whether the "vital spark" exists, or whether life is an illusion and it's meaningless to talk about living things at all. Is it moving the goal posts to try to find a non-magical definition of life?
To me it's pretty clear that we have free will, and that has nothing to do with determinism.
The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.
It is moving the goal post because it just changes the definition of free will into some triviality. I had a choice between apples and oranges and I picked the apple because I like apples more. Sure, you can call this free will if you want to but what is the point? The max function had a choice between 1 and 2 and picked 2 because it likes bigger numbers more.
Maybe you want to contrast the above situation with a situation where the apples are sold out or someone forces you at gunpoint to pick the orange. But this is now an entirely different thing, now we are talking about external constraints. And you can move into all kinds of directions and define free will to be this or that but the result will always be kind of trivial.
Do you really think the difference between someone coerced and someone free is "trivial"?
Or between someone who is free to make a choice because they are informed versus one who can't make it because they don't know of it? Or between someone who is capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and someone who is not?
These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.
By the way, the difference between internal and external factors is not the critical thing. There are several ways to restrict people's free will with internal factors - like for example, a person who doesn't know X exists cannot make a free choice to do X.
They are trivial in the sense that you can easily reason about them. Sure, you can construct wildly complex scenarios where available knowledge, resulting consequences, existing constraints, and what not make it non-obvious what can or cannot or should or should not be done but that this will only be a consequence of the complexity of the situation. This is in contrast to [magical] free will where you have fundamental problems of even defining the meaning of your concepts and arguably you are destined to fail because the concept is logical inconsistent to begin with.
I'm sorry, but I still completely fail to understand why concerns about competence, informed decision making, ability to understand consequences and coercion is not _the_ relevant point here.
Why is it relevant how easily we can reason about them?
I agree with you that this are the relevant points but they only become the relevant points once you accept that there is no magical free will. And it seems to me that this is not generally accepted.
> These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.
So why continue to use an unrelated term that has so much baggage? Why not just tackle these issues individually, on their own terms, in language that isn't laundering outmoded intuitions about some magic grounds for responsibility?
Because they _do_ have something to do with _actual_ free will. When you drill down at what "free will" could plausibly and coherently mean, you inevitably end up focusing on these important differences.
And then you can _actually_ begin to articulate why someone is culpable and another person isn't. A magical free will believer can't really make sense of that, because if free will is something indescribable and magic, there is no reason to believe a person does not have free will to do X, just because they e.g. are incapable of doing it.
Conversely, if you believe _both_ in magical free will, and have also thought about the material conditions for free will (e.g. they must be informed, and understand the consequences, and not be coerced etc.), then you already have a completely coherent materialistic belief about free will, and have just awkwardly bolted supernaturalness to its side, completely unnecessarily.
Because they _do_ have something to do with _actual_ free will.
But this is the problem right there, you call it actual free will and someone believing in magical free will will deny this and call magical free will actual free will. Sure, one can do this, overload the term, and figure out from context what kind of actual free will is meant in each instance. But would it not be much easier to give up on the term free will and use new different terms for different things?
It's similar to how both people who believe in phlogiston and people who believe in chemistry call fire "fire" - or how people who believe in the life spark and people who don't call life "life", or how people call light "light" regardless of whether they believe in the ether, the standard model or something else.
No matter the academic discussion of what free will is or isn't, we still have to address the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules. We have to consider the difference between freedom and coercion. We have to address what accountability and responsibility means, and what makes a person morally blameworthy.
This is what people talk about when they talk about free will. That's why people can claim they strongly believe in free will without being able to articulate, or even having thought much about, how free will is instantiated.
In short: Because "free will" is a name for something we concretely observe. We may be misinterpreting what we observe (maybe it _is_ an illusion), but we still only have that one name for that thing.
> the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules
The crux of the issue is that you're wrong here. Humans have this vanity that we're special, but we're really not. We behave according to the same rules, we're just relatively complex systems within those rules compared to dominoes.
When most people think of "free will", what they actually mean is "unpredictability". That's why nobody thinks dominoes have free will, some people think animals have free will, and lots of people think humans have free will. It's much harder to predict human behavior from the point of view of a human than dominoes, but to a superintelligent AI, we're just dominoes.
> accountability and responsibility ... morally blameworthy.
It's actually very simple and doesn't require any such notions. If there is a thing that is causing you or others harm, you act to prevent that thing from causing harm. There's no difference between a murderer and a deadly snake in that regard. I'm not going to ponder whether or not its morally blameworthy as I remove it from my house.
Not sure what you mean by that. If you're looking for a rigorous mathematical proof that humans obey the same laws of physics as everything else, I can't offer you one. However, the burden of proof is on someone asserting that humans are somehow special. I'll believe it when I see it.
In a theoretical vacuum, maybe. However we've done a fair amount of exploring ourselves and the way we work, and we haven't found a soul yet. Asserting that humans are somehow special requires explaining the lack of any supporting evidence.
This is a variant of the god-of-the-gaps argument, which is not turning out well for proponents of religion, as those gaps keep getting smaller and smaller. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.
I don't know where I myself land, but free will gets more interesting in situations like:
* I see a piece of litter on the sidewalk and a garbage can on the other side of the road. Do I pick it up or not. Why/why not?
* I never feel like working out. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Why?
Sure, you can reduce these down to apples v oranges and just claim they have more variables to check first, but there's a lot of things we "decide" to do outside of preference.
There are always constraints and preferences and whatnot. Do you have time to pick up the can? Do you care about the garbage on the street? And this will result in an action be somehow combining all those bits and pieces. Could be perfectly deterministic but could as well have an element of randomness, for example you care enough to pick up the can four out of five times if no other constraints prevent you from doing so. But whether there is some deterministic logic behind your decision or whether your brain just flipped a coin or a combination of both, there is no deep mystery here, just a very complex system that is hard to predict.
I think decisions presupposing self-consciousness posit an input into the decision making process that doesn’t come from the outside. Surely correlated with the world but not determined by it.
The point of disagreement here probably boils down to the perceived significance of what you're calling "free will" in your final sentence (as opposed to "magical supernatural free will").
On my view it is literally nothing. It's the tautological observation that agents with desires, uninhibited, can and will seek to satisfy those desires. It gives us no grounds for responsibility, punishment, etc etc. (Those are all good things, but their justification has to come from elsewhere.)
But by continuing to call it "free will," you're invoking the intuitions that many people have regarding the magical bullshit variety, and laundering those intuitions/feelings into the new discussion.
That's interesting! In my view, nothing important hinges on magical free will. How could it, when people can't even articulate what it is?
In my view, everything we associate with free will: Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will!
For example, everyone agrees that children are not as morally responsible as adults. Even though children supposedly are as magically free as adults. How can that be? That _only_ makes sense in the compatibilist view.
Suppose someone invents a completely deterministically programmed robot that has general intelligence and understands the world, and people well. Would you sign a contract with it? Would you punish it if it broke it? Would you hold it responsible? Would you be outraged if it decided to lie to you? I definitely would.
> Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will!
And we've found the point of disagreement. I simply think they're not. I believe they have to be justified independently, in terms of the degree to which they tend our lives and our society in a desired direction.
However, is properly exactly the same as deterministically?
Injecting non-determinism makes the question of free will rather funny, in that the standard argument "you would not choose differently" does not work as the act of traveling back in time injects further nondeterministic results...
Under non-determinism, free will would be something like changing location of probability wells for actions. Our brains do that structurally and chemically all the time, and not particularly deterministically either. (Chemistry is involved.)
On the other hand, posing free will as decision theoretic choice, you're facing an outcome of statistical masses of decisions a lot of which are not observable. Philosophically simplifying it to binary choice ends up with absurd results.
Philosophy is one way to try to grok the world. It is deceiving when it claims the universe is finite, bounded and fully quantifiable, without proof.
Determinism in an infinite interconnected quantum universe ceases to have pragmatic meaning. There is order, but we can't measure everything exactly. It's playing out right here with us, but we fail to grasp it all.
The possibility of higher frames of references invalidates absolutism to mind-games. Which is what hypotheticals are, until new actions are made.
Settled? We don't even understand what 'will' is because we don't understand what it means to think. We haven't began answering the question because we don't know where to start.
I think it is the other way around. Taking the standard meaning of free will, you have to add the caveat 'where the choice is not determined by past events'.
Anyway, you are free to chose your definition (and I bet I can predict what yours will be).
All actions are in the chain of events of prior actions. Humans knowing what future actions might look like, decide to counteract believed future actions. It is basic to sentient life. Such actions may break the illusion of karma, by employing dharma, which is divine, from a higher frame of reference.
Just try to define what free will actually means and see things fall apart. The entire idea of free will makes no sense to begin with if one thinks clearly about it.
If all events have causes, then nothing can happen spontaneously. A “will” in that world can’t be “free” or disconnected from the causal chain.
If there are events that don’t have causes, either they are random, or we need to introduce an unfalsifiable explanation. In a random world, a “will” is still constrained by rolls of the dice. It does not express itself. It is not “free”.
If we introduce a metaphysical explanation, then it is no longer science, and can properly be discarded as “nonsense” in the context of the project of inquiry into the physical world. In its company we find concepts like souls, ghosts, deities, magic, etc.
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.