Does free will exist?

[Pendaric]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

[LoneWolf]

This is going to be one of those threads that won't die. I can just feel it.

[Pendaric]

Yes, but is it pre-destined not to die???

[JamesBannon]

Determinism is a crock. It is unfalsifiable.

[Alex]

Even if the cause of my decision or action is directly linked into an indefinitely long chain of other causes, it can often be true that I could have chosen otherwise. If we accept this 'compatibilism' of freedom with determinism, then it follows that, because I could have chosen otherwise, I can be held responsible for what I did choose. Previous events that shaped my choice are then irrelevant.

So when I choose A instead of otherwise (B, C, etc.), it appears that my free will is being consciously exercised. Some future state seems to depend on what I decide.

But once the necessity of causes leading to an action is assumed, we seem to initiate a regress. If, as a hard core determinist, you claim that for every effect there must have been a cause and that causes determine their effects because they are joined to them by universal laws, then what we decide now is determined by the necessity of previous causes. There is no escape from this necessity, and therefore the exercise of free will is an illusion.

These fuzzy considerations suggest there is some kind of conflict between our belief in free will and our knowledge of causes, I think.

[LoneWolf]

As much as I want to believe in freewill, ever since I became an atheist I haven't been able to convince myself how it would plausibly work. I mean, when you get right down to it aren't we just a bunch of chemical reactions? Atoms interacting with each other?

[Bane]

Well, determinism's not falsifiable, for one thing, and for another, it raises the moral question of what we should do about wrongdoers. Let them off, because they would've done it anyway? I don't think so.

[sohy]

As much as I want to believe in freewill, ever since I became an atheist I haven't been able to convince myself how it would plausibly work. I mean, when you get right down to it aren't we just a bunch of chemical reactions? Atoms interacting with each other?


Yes, but I think it's pretty cool. I can't help but think that. ;)

[trendkill]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?That implies that if everything we do isn't determined, then we can have free will. The problem is that a lack of predictable events or predetermination does nothing to improve the conditions for free will. If something isn't predetermined and/or has no cause, that implies it is basically random--there's no "reason" why it happens. How does events happening for no reason give us freedom? :dunno:

I see no way such a state of affairs can impart responsibility; it seems neutral at best, and actually destructive to responsibility at worst, since responsibility requires causation. If you want real choices and personal responsibility, absolute determinism is probably a better bet than indeterminism.

[David B]

I don't see an absolute Freewill as being a coherent concept.

However, life, like chess, forces people to make choices, and one can learn to make better ones in both life and chess.

So absolute Freewill - nope.

Degrees of freedom, evolving to the point where some entities can make morally significant choices - yup.

David (has views on this subject largely informed by reading and contemplating Dennett and Hofstadter)

[Valheru]

Well, determinism's not falsifiable, for one thing, and for another, it raises the moral question of what we should do about wrongdoers. Let them off, because they would've done it anyway? I don't think so.

You're forgetting the other side of the coin, which is, prosecute wrongdoers because we would have done so anyway....

I'm a firm believer in determinism. The only thing that bothers me about it is, what's the point of everything, then? If you allow for true random quantum behaviour, then you could argue that existence is some sort of cosmic experiment. Weird shit to ponder, though.

"Free will", or at the very least, consciousness, operates at a much higher level, whereby quantum indeterminism (or determinism) doesn't make a difference anyway.

If consciousness is an emergent result of the biochemistry of your brain, then the existence of free will would imply that this "voodoo" that emerges can affect the existing biochemistry.

It should be obvious that it can't work that way - mental biochemistry recursively affects the resultant mental biochemistry as time progresses, because it's physics. The emergent voodoo of consciousness that arises from that biochemistry, is just a red herring. It doesn't and cannot affect the biochemistry, because it's just a result. It's not a force in of itself that can affect physics. The only forces at play are biochemical cascades.

[Garrett]

I'm a firm believer in determinism. The only thing that bothers me about it is, what's the point of everything, then? If you allow for true random quantum behaviour, then you could argue that existence is some sort of cosmic experiment. Weird shit to ponder, though.
Science shows that reality is fundamentally indeterminate.

If consciousness is an emergent result of the biochemistry of your brain, then the existence of free will would imply that this "voodoo" that emerges can affect the existing biochemistry.
But whether or not there is volition, the mind obviously affects the body.

It should be obvious that it can't work that way - mental biochemistry recursively affects the resultant mental biochemistry as time progresses, because it's physics.
"Mental biochemistry"? That doesn't seem to be a legitimate term, I guess you mean the biochemistry that produces mental activity.

But anyway, physics is silent about mental activity. That's why there are the other sciences like psychology.

Reductionism is not very useful. Reduction is useful though.

[Alex]

I don't see an absolute Freewill as being a coherent concept.

However, life, like chess, forces people to make choices, and one can learn to make better ones in both life and chess.

So absolute Freewill - nope.

Degrees of freedom, evolving to the point where some entities can make morally significant choices - yup.


^ This makes sense.

We could distinguish between those events we understand and perhaps control, and those events we do not. In which case, to the extent that the causes of our actions are adequately understood, we are free or responsible in that limited respect. This freedom of choice is a matter of degree.

[Valheru]

Science shows that reality is fundamentally indeterminate.

Not necessarily. AFAIK, the only instance of this is non-determinism at the event horizon of a black hole, and Mr. Hawking decided to retract that. Be that as it may, if reality is nondeterministic, it still expresses itself deterministically (in the sense that on a macroscopic scale, the various random interactions balance themselves out as if they weren't there). If it didn't, then no natural law we could ever come up with, would be valid.

But whether or not there is volition, the mind obviously affects the body.

That's an illusion. "Mind" is an emergent property - it's a side effect. It's not a force. The only forces involved are physical interactions between particles. There's no way that the emergent "illusion" of consciousness works back on the physical matter and energy that caused it. There is merely a temporal cascade of structure and energy in the human brain, and this creates a side effect of "awareness".

"Mental biochemistry"? That doesn't seem to be a legitimate term, I guess you mean the biochemistry that produces mental activity.

That's what I meant.

But anyway, physics is silent about mental activity. That's why there are the other sciences like psychology.

No ways is it silent. Chemistry is just a branch of applied physics. The only arbitrary line of relevance one can draw is the question: "At what level does quantum indeterminism (if it exists) stop expressing itself in tangible ways?".

I am inclined to argue that quantum (in)determinism doesn't express itself in any way where consciousness is concerned. I think a contrary view is a cop-out, because it uses things we're unsure about as fodder to make claims about things we're unsure about.

[Garrett]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?That implies that if everything we do isn't determined, then we can have free will. The problem is that a lack of predictable events or predetermination does nothing to improve the conditions for free will. If something isn't predetermined and/or has no cause, that implies it is basically random--there's no "reason" why it happens. How does events happening for no reason give us freedom? :dunno:
Indetermined (or not predetermined) doesn't imply random; and random doesn't imply uncaused.

This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).

[Garrett]

Science shows that reality is fundamentally indeterminate.

Not necessarily. AFAIK, the only instance of this is non-determinism at the event horizon of a black hole, and Mr. Hawking decided to retract that. Be that as it may, if reality is nondeterministic, it still expresses itself deterministically (in the sense that on a macroscopic scale, the various random interactions balance themselves out as if they weren't there). If it didn't, then no natural law we could ever come up with, would be valid.
Indeterminacy is a fundamental principle in physics, and applies to all matter.

It's pretty close-minded and useless to claim that either reality is deterministic or else no "valid" natural laws are possible.

But whether or not there is volition, the mind obviously affects the body.

That's an illusion. "Mind" is an emergent property - it's a side effect.
Oh, I see now - you believe mind is epiphenomena. That's a strange belief - since the mind is caused by brain activity, there is good reason to think brain activity can be affected by mind. And there is plenty of evidence that mental activity does affect the brain, for example in medicine and psychology. Thoughts affect the brain as surely as drugs do.

It's not a force. The only forces involved are physical interactions between particles. There's no way that the emergent "illusion" of consciousness works back on the physical matter and energy that caused it. There is merely a temporal cascade of structure and energy in the human brain, and this creates a side effect of "awareness".
There are four known forces, yes. The rest is an unscientific view. Ecosystems, for example, work back on the physical matter and energy that cause them.

But anyway, physics is silent about mental activity. That's why there are the other sciences like psychology.

No ways is it silent. Chemistry is just a branch of applied physics. The only arbitrary line of relevance one can draw is the question: "At what level does quantum indeterminism (if it exists) stop expressing itself in tangible ways?".
Biology, however, is not just a branch of applied physics. Chemistry is the only science that perhaps is reducible to physics.

You know about the butterfly effect? Think of quantum butterflies. :D

I am inclined to argue that quantum (in)determinism doesn't express itself in any way where consciousness is concerned. I think a contrary view is a cop-out, because it uses things we're unsure about as fodder to make claims about things we're unsure about.
I don't believe mind depends on quantum effects, though I don't believe they don't either. You should try to understand that not everyone labors under the doctrine of determinism. To them, saying consciousness is illusion is the cop-out, since we definitely have subjective experiences, the fact that the mind is not the brain is no reason to suppose those experiences didn't really happen.

[Valheru]

It simply sounds preposterous to me to say that free will is a latent function of quantum indeterminism.

I'm not saying subjective experiences are an illusion, what I am saying is that it's an illusion to think that those subjective experiences have any power to change out behaviour. They don't.

[David B]

Dennett, in 'Freedom Evolves' makes what to me is a compelling case for seeing indeterminacy as being no friend of freedom.

David

[trendkill]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?That implies that if everything we do isn't determined, then we can have free will. The problem is that a lack of predictable events or predetermination does nothing to improve the conditions for free will. If something isn't predetermined and/or has no cause, that implies it is basically random--there's no "reason" why it happens. How does events happening for no reason give us freedom? :dunno:
Indetermined (or not predetermined) doesn't imply random;
and random doesn't imply uncaused.Depends on your definition of "random". Sometimes randomness is defined as unpredictability or something of that nature, but I think it makes more sense to consider that apparent or pseudo-randomness. Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.

This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).
The way I figure it, if an event is probabilistic, you can just break it down. Even if it's a single event, I see no reason why an event has to be either 100% determined or 100% random. If there's a 60% chance the radioactive atom will decay in the next few minutes, then its decay is partly caused and partly uncaused.

[Ada]

I guess I am determined to post link to article suggesting that free will is leftover from belief in god, just tailored to fit into every human size ;-)
From naturalism.org "Denying Big God and the Little God: The Next Step for Atheists?" (http://http://www.naturalism.org/atheism.htm#littlegod)

:-) Ada

[B.H.]

Are we arguing the existence or nonexistence of freewill in a religious sense or in a cognitive science sense?

[Valheru]

I'm thinking cognitive science. ^^^

[B.H.]

I'm thinking cognitive science. ^^^


I would say then that one does not have free will, simply because we are limited to information available to us and our ability or inability to process facts that conflict with our attitudes as to how the world should work that have been conditioned into us since eary childhood.

You may still have some level of choice, but your will is not absolutely free.

[Garrett]

It simply sounds preposterous to me to say that free will is a latent function of quantum indeterminism.

I'm not saying subjective experiences are an illusion, what I am saying is that it's an illusion to think that those subjective experiences have any power to change out behaviour. They don't.
You must be right, since everyone knows that animals react to danger whether they are aware of the danger or not.

[Garrett]

It simply sounds preposterous to me to say that free will is a latent function of quantum indeterminism.

No one understands volition yet. But some people claim we can't have volition since reality is deterministic. Quantum indeterminism destroys that objection.

That's all! That's the only reason QM becomes involved in the discussion!

[Garrett]

Dennett, in 'Freedom Evolves' makes what to me is a compelling case for seeing indeterminacy as being no friend of freedom.

David
People definitely exhibit volition, the question should be how does it work.

[Garrett]

I don't see an absolute Freewill as being a coherent concept.

However, life, like chess, forces people to make choices, and one can learn to make better ones in both life and chess.

So absolute Freewill - nope.

Degrees of freedom, evolving to the point where some entities can make morally significant choices - yup.


^ This makes sense.

We could distinguish between those events we understand and perhaps control, and those events we do not. In which case, to the extent that the causes of our actions are adequately understood, we are free or responsible in that limited respect. This freedom of choice is a matter of degree.
I fully agree. It's kinda stupid to argue against volition by using the word "absolute". We can't just choose to turn sand into gold or to jump over the moon. It should go without saying that our options are limited to things that are possible.

[Garrett]

I guess I am determined to post link to article suggesting that free will is leftover from belief in god, just tailored to fit into every human size ;-)
From naturalism.org "Denying Big God and the Little God: The Next Step for Atheists?" (http://http://www.naturalism.org/atheism.htm#littlegod)

:-) Ada
Human ability to self-determine has nothing to do with god-belief. Science studies volition, and medicine and politics and psychology etc are built on the acceptance of volition, mkay?

[Garrett]

Are we arguing the existence or nonexistence of freewill in a religious sense or in a cognitive science sense?

I'm thinking cognitive science. ^^^
Of course. This is a secular board and we aren't in the religion fora.

Cognitive science ftw! Multidisciplinary, so trying to reduce the issue to physics is foolish.

[Garrett]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?That implies that if everything we do isn't determined, then we can have free will. The problem is that a lack of predictable events or predetermination does nothing to improve the conditions for free will. If something isn't predetermined and/or has no cause, that implies it is basically random--there's no "reason" why it happens. How does events happening for no reason give us freedom? :dunno:
Indetermined (or not predetermined) doesn't imply random;
and random doesn't imply uncaused.Depends on your definition of "random". Sometimes randomness is defined as unpredictability or something of that nature, but I think it makes more sense to consider that apparent or pseudo-randomness. Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.
Sorry for the shotgun posts everyone, but I love this subject.

Adding the word "truly" raises a red flag. Random events are not uncaused. Even if virtual particles were actually to exist, something caused them! The causes simply are not deterministic. Did you read the link about probabilistic causation?

This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).
The way I figure it, if an event is probabilistic, you can just break it down. Even if it's a single event, I see no reason why an event has to be either 100% determined or 100% random. If there's a 60% chance the radioactive atom will decay in the next few minutes, then its decay is partly caused and partly uncaused.
I see no reason for thinking that way, except confusion caused by a belief in determinism. It's just silly to think your next words were fated at the moment the big bang occurred.

The future is fuzzy, our actions help determine what happens next, and our thoughts help determine our actions.

[Garrett]

From previous discussions I suppose this should be said: there's a difference between an event being determined and an event being deterministic. The latter assumes the event has one and only one possible outcome. The former does not make that assumption.

Everything that happens is determined. Some things that happen are not deterministic.

[trendkill]

Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.
Sorry for the shotgun posts everyone, but I love this subject.

Adding the word "truly" raises a red flag.Actually it gets to the heart of the matter. When you get down to what makes us want to call the watered-down varieties of randomness "random", it's that they resemble uncaused behavior. When we can't see any reason for things, when we are surprised by something or don't see any connection between it and other things we've observed recently, then we call it "random". Maybe it has a cause, but on the face of it, it appears as though it doesn't.

Random events are not uncaused. Even if virtual particles were actually to exist, something caused them! The causes simply are not deterministic. Did you read the link about probabilistic causation?Enough of it, I think. It seems to spend most of its time attacking the regularity theory of causation, which I wouldn't want to defend anyway. Hume's idea of causation sounds too much like my idea of coincidence. My idea of causation is neither events invariably being observed to follow each other nor events raising the probability of other events. It is events being interconnected, events being part of other events. The details of the connections are what I call "causes". If an event (or an aspect of an event) is not connected to other events, then it is not caused.


This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).
The way I figure it, if an event is probabilistic, you can just break it down. Even if it's a single event, I see no reason why an event has to be either 100% determined or 100% random. If there's a 60% chance the radioactive atom will decay in the next few minutes, then its decay is partly caused and partly uncaused.
I see no reason for thinking that way, except confusion caused by a belief in determinism.You see no reason for thinking that something is uncaused except for a belief in determinism? And I'm confused? :P

It's just silly to think your next words were fated at the moment the big bang occurred.I don't find it silly, and in fact I don't know that that they weren't. They may well have been. (That of course wouldn't mean that all events were so fated).

[Garrett]

Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.
Sorry for the shotgun posts everyone, but I love this subject.

Adding the word "truly" raises a red flag.Actually it gets to the heart of the matter. When you get down to what makes us want to call the watered-down varieties of randomness "random", it's that they resemble uncaused behavior. When we can't see any reason for things, when we are surprised by something or don't see any connection between it and other things we've observed recently, then we call it "random". Maybe it has a cause, but on the face of it, it appears as though it doesn't.

Random events are not uncaused. Even if virtual particles were actually to exist, something caused them! The causes simply are not deterministic. Did you read the link about probabilistic causation?Enough of it, I think. It seems to spend most of its time attacking the regularity theory of causation, which I wouldn't want to defend anyway. Hume's idea of causation sounds too much like my idea of coincidence.
Not sure I disagree.

My idea of causation is neither events invariably being observed to follow each other nor events raising the probability of other events. It is events being interconnected, events being part of other events.
And how do we determine that events are interconnected or "part of other events" without detecting that one event invariably is observed to lead to the other event?

The details of the connections are what I call "causes". If an event (or an aspect of an event) is not connected to other events, then it is not caused.
That is so ambiguous. Killing my ex-wife didn't affect world war II - therefore wwII was uncaused?

This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).
The way I figure it, if an event is probabilistic, you can just break it down. Even if it's a single event, I see no reason why an event has to be either 100% determined or 100% random. If there's a 60% chance the radioactive atom will decay in the next few minutes, then its decay is partly caused and partly uncaused.
The day the radioactive decay produces a rabbit is the day I'll believe it's uncaused.

Hell, if you accept that atoms decay with no reason then you have no reason to think gods can't exist.

I see no reason for thinking that way, except confusion caused by a belief in determinism.You see no reason for thinking that something is uncaused except for a belief in determinism? And I'm confused? :P
A belief in determinism would preclude a belief in uncaused events. Yes, you are confused.

It's just silly to think your next words were fated at the moment the big bang occurred.I don't find it silly, and in fact I don't know that that they weren't. They may well have been. (That of course wouldn't mean that all events were so fated).
It is a silly notion whether you see it or not, and there is no relevant difference between determinism and fate.

Btw it's wrong to equate random behavior with uncaused behavior. A tossed die produces a random result but it's hardly an uncaused result!

[rlogan]

Does free will exist

yes.


Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

Even randomness is predetermined, yes.

If you knew all the causes and timings of them,

I do.

could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

yes. But not for free.

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread,


$3.99 intro subscription will answer that question.

or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

Additional dollar gets you this bonus half of the dichotomy too.


Separate sealed envelope for each answer. Some of our clients want to know the second answer first.

[Febble]

I don't see an absolute Freewill as being a coherent concept.

However, life, like chess, forces people to make choices, and one can learn to make better ones in both life and chess.

So absolute Freewill - nope.

Degrees of freedom, evolving to the point where some entities can make morally significant choices - yup.

David (has views on this subject largely informed by reading and contemplating Dennett and Hofstadter)

As does Lizzie, having been introduced to Dennett and Hofstadter by David.

[Febble]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?That implies that if everything we do isn't determined, then we can have free will. The problem is that a lack of predictable events or predetermination does nothing to improve the conditions for free will. If something isn't predetermined and/or has no cause, that implies it is basically random--there's no "reason" why it happens. How does events happening for no reason give us freedom? :dunno:
Indetermined (or not predetermined) doesn't imply random;
and random doesn't imply uncaused.Depends on your definition of "random". Sometimes randomness is defined as unpredictability or something of that nature, but I think it makes more sense to consider that apparent or pseudo-randomness. Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.
Sorry for the shotgun posts everyone, but I love this subject.

Adding the word "truly" raises a red flag. Random events are not uncaused. Even if virtual particles were actually to exist, something caused them! The causes simply are not deterministic. Did you read the link about probabilistic causation?

This is interesting, and a much better and more realistic approach than determinism : probabilistic causation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/).
The way I figure it, if an event is probabilistic, you can just break it down. Even if it's a single event, I see no reason why an event has to be either 100% determined or 100% random. If there's a 60% chance the radioactive atom will decay in the next few minutes, then its decay is partly caused and partly uncaused.
I see no reason for thinking that way, except confusion caused by a belief in determinism. It's just silly to think your next words were fated at the moment the big bang occurred.

The future is fuzzy, our actions help determine what happens next, and our thoughts help determine our actions.

Indeed, not least because thoughts are unexecuted actions.

[BigEvil]

I don't see an absolute Freewill as being a coherent concept.

However, life, like chess, forces people to make choices, and one can learn to make better ones in both life and chess.

So absolute Freewill - nope.

Degrees of freedom, evolving to the point where some entities can make morally significant choices - yup.

David (has views on this subject largely informed by reading and contemplating Dennett and Hofstadter)

As does Lizzie, having been introduced to Dennett and Hofstadter by David.


I third this, although I haven't read Hofstadter. I did see "I am a Strange Loop" in the bookstore the last time I was there. It is my next "to be read" book after I finish my current two.

I had the opinion that freewill was a very convincing illusion until I read Dennett's Freedom Evolves. It was a tough but worthwhile read for me. Dennett made a very convincing case (or it was to me) that degrees of free will have evolved and that it is quite possible to evolve further degrees of it.

The implications of Dennett's argument (for me at least) is that morality is objective, has evolved and will continue evolving.

[Barbarian]

<snip>

David (has views on this subject largely informed by reading and contemplating Dennett and Hofstadter)

As does Lizzie, having been introduced to Dennett and Hofstadter by David.Read thee some Daniel "the illusion of conscious will" Wegner and be truly informed. (Although I expect you are familiar with his work already.)

[David B]

<snip>

David (has views on this subject largely informed by reading and contemplating Dennett and Hofstadter)

As does Lizzie, having been introduced to Dennett and Hofstadter by David.Read thee some Daniel "the illusion of conscious will" Wegner and be truly informed. (Although I expect you are familiar with his work already.)

I hadn't come across him, so looked at his home page. Looks interesting!

David

[Barbarian]

determinism ... raises the moral question of what we should do about wrongdoers. Let them off, because they would've done it anyway?In a free-will-less paradigm, people evaluate the consequences of their actions by consulting their mental models of the world. If those models include the threat of punishment for certain actions, those actions will be more likely avoided than not. Carrying out the punishment is not directed at the culprit but at the rest of the society, sending the signal that we mean business. Punishing wrongdoers in a free-will-less world is done in order to preserve the credibility of the threat of punishment (and to a lesser extent to satisfy the bloodlust of the victim's relatives, keeping them from personally avenging crimes and thus tearing apart the fabric of society through family feuds).

So the wrongdoer has to be punished under the assumption of no free will, mainly because doing so intimidates others and thus reduces the extent of wrongdoing.

In b4 "it's immoral to avoid wrongdoing solely on fear of punishment". Sure it is immoral, but so what? Most of our unwillingness to commit crimes is rooted in neuroses of some sort, in the deeply masked and denied fear of some untold sort of punishment like disapproval of a generic parent figure or rejection by a peer group, abstracted and tucked away so that we aren't usually aware of them, and handwave away the need for an explanation by "it's just Not Done". That's likewise immoral in my book.

As for evolutionary origins of (some of the) morality, I think it is an interesting idea but not very useable. The history of mankind shows that those evolutionary fixes aren't strong enough to really matter; centuries of unspeakable cruelty exhibited by humans demonstrate a convincing superiority of cultural conditioning over evolutionary heritage.

[Barbarian]

I hadn't come across him, so looked at his home page. Looks interesting!

DavidI kinda just stumbled upon his book a week ago, so haven't even finished reading it, but so far this is the one writing on the topic of free will I both fully understand and totally agree with.

Interesting how Wegner's work never came up in the many forum discussions about free will up to now, although his ideas were in circulation since 1999. Perhaps he is in some sort of minority, actually daring to research these matters.

Conspiracy theory: scientists aren't exactly willing to investigate such a controversial subject; it's enough if we think of the many pro-free-willers furiously howling on old IIDB. I never understood those who took offense at the assertion that they had no free will: I find the assumption nothing short of fantastic, a potential glimpse into the very heart of how the world really works, offering new avenues to investigate, and then I encounter people who are offended by it. :dunno:

[David B]

determinism ... raises the moral question of what we should do about wrongdoers. Let them off, because they would've done it anyway?In a free-will-less paradigm, people evaluate the consequences of their actions by consulting their mental models of the world. If those models include the threat of punishment for certain actions, those actions will be more likely avoided than not. Carrying out the punishment is not directed at the culprit but at the rest of the society, sending the signal that we mean business. Punishing wrongdoers in a free-will-less world is done in order to preserve the credibility of the threat of punishment (and to a lesser extent to satisfy the bloodlust of the victim's relatives, keeping them from personally avenging crimes and thus tearing apart the fabric of society through family feuds).

So the wrongdoer has to be punished under the assumption of no free will, mainly because doing so intimidates others and thus reduces the extent of wrongdoing.

In b4 "it's immoral to avoid wrongdoing solely on fear of punishment". Sure it is immoral, but so what? Most of our unwillingness to commit crimes is rooted in neuroses of some sort, in the deeply masked and denied fear of some untold sort of punishment like disapproval of a generic parent figure or rejection by a peer group, abstracted and tucked away so that we aren't usually aware of them, and handwave away the need for an explanation by "it's just Not Done". That's likewise immoral in my book.

As for evolutionary origins of (some of the) morality, I think it is an interesting idea but not very useable. The history of mankind shows that those evolutionary fixes aren't strong enough to really matter; centuries of unspeakable cruelty exhibited by humans demonstrate a convincing superiority of cultural conditioning over evolutionary heritage.

My bold.

My view is that no clear differentiation between cultural conditioning and evolutionary heritage can be made, believing as I do that there are reasons within our evolutionary heritage that make humans susceptible to the sort of pressure that led to the behaviours illustrated in, say, the Stamford Prison Experiment, which in turn has something about the centuries of unspeakable cruelty of which you speak.

Further, I'd suggest that there is a cultural input into the many centuries of human behaviour that exhibit kindness and empathy, but that there is an evolutionary input not only into our susceptibility to such pressures, but also to a degree of empathy with our fellows.

I wouldn't like to say that our evolutionary heritage trumps social factors regarding our thoughts and behaviours, nor vice versa, but rather that our thoughts and behaviours have input from a dynamic interplay between the two, with scope for input from personal reflection and contemplation - which is in turn influenced by an evolutionary and social interplay.

David

[MrFungus420]

As far as I can tell, free will does exist.

I live my life as if it does. It seems to conform well to what I seem to perceive.

So, I'm willing to accept it as a working hypothesis to answer an ultimately meaningless question.

[Preno]

In b4 "it's immoral to avoid wrongdoing solely on fear of punishment". Sure it is immoral, but so what? Most of our unwillingness to commit crimes is rooted in neuroses of some sort, in the deeply masked and denied fear of some untold sort of punishment like disapproval of a generic parent figure or rejection by a peer group, abstracted and tucked away so that we aren't usually aware of them, and handwave away the need for an explanation by "it's just Not Done". That's likewise immoral in my book.Evidence? I'm pretty sure it's propensity towards crime that correlates with "neuroses" and all sorts of psychological issues.

[Barbarian]

Evidence? I'm pretty sure it's propensity towards crime that correlates with "neuroses" and all sorts of psychological issues.I don"t see much difference between the unwillingness of the average citizen to kill or indeed do or do not do anything outside his comfort zone and the various prohibitive phobias and OCDs usually listed under the heading "neurosis". If you check the list of neurosis varieties, you'll see that they are in fact those things we think, feel, do or don't do, but whose root causes we cannot readily access. The only difference is that neuroses cause distress while not killing my neighbor shouldn't doesn't.

[Barbarian]

As far as I can tell, free will does exist.How would you know if it didn't? What would lack of free will feel like?

The often erected strawman-with-a-false-dichotomy is that we would know if we had no free will; moreover, knowing it would somehow be a bad feeling. This is the perennial retort of the theist: "God gave you free will and you should be thankful for it. How would you like not having one, eh?". But, of course, we might not have enough freedom to even discover that we aren't free (which is the case IMO).

[Preno]

The only difference is that neuroses cause distress while not killing my neighbor shouldn't doesn't.That's sort of a defining characteristic of a neurosis, though.

[Barbarian]

The only difference is that neuroses cause distress while not killing my neighbor shouldn't doesn't.That's sort of a defining characteristic of a neurosis, though.Sure, but the joke with the strikethrough was a sneak preview of my position that acting / having to act civilized does cause distress. People rationalize away their unwillingness to enter confrontations all the time, and those few rationalizations I was let in on sounded always hollow to me; classic cases of resolving cognitive dissonances. There are, therefore stresses in the system between one's self-image and one's smart but subconsciously determined actions or non-action, and these stresses do cause discomfort, which is then explained away. Interestingly, this kind of discomfort itself becomes the component of a setup leading to cognitive dissonance (it is not done to feel bad about acting civilized, innit? just like the true christian is always happy, even if he's not) therefore it is covered in yet another layer or denial. But it is there all right.

[Barbarian]

I am not ignoring your post, David, but it will take longer than the others ...

[Rilx]

What would lack of free will feel like?

The often erected strawman-with-a-false-dichotomy is that we would know if we had no free will; moreover, knowing it would somehow be a bad feeling.
We know it, definitely. We have free will, and in cases we cannot act freely, we know it, shame it and try to hide, rationalize or explain it away. Think of obsessions and addictions when people act deeply knowing they don't will it but can't act differently. Everyone - you included - knows how the lack of free will feel like.

[dancer_rnb]

What would lack of free will feel like?

The often erected strawman-with-a-false-dichotomy is that we would know if we had no free will; moreover, knowing it would somehow be a bad feeling.
We know it, definitely. We have free will, and in cases we cannot act freely, we know it, shame it and try to hide, rationalize or explain it away. Think of obsessions and addictions when people act deeply knowing they don't will it but can't act differently. Everyone - you included - knows how the lack of free will feel like.

Is it actually a lack of the ability to act freely, or is it the fact that we have become aware of it, that causes discomfort?

[Barbarian]

We know it, definitely. We have free will, and in cases we cannot act freely, we know it, shame it and try to hide, rationalize or explain it away. Think of obsessions and addictions when people act deeply knowing they don't will it but can't act differently. Everyone - you included - knows how the lack of free will feel like.I don't get the examples. Are you referring to (1) the hypothetical when someone wants to do something else than he finds himself doing or to (2) when someone generally knows that e.g. smoking is bad but sometimes smokes without being bothered by it or (3) when someone is writhing between two mutually exclusive feelings and cannot decide in a satisfactory way?

If (1): he is still "free" to want to do something else i.e. he is not aware of any limitation on his will. Physical limitations in general aren't considered to limit one's free will.
If (2): the two events are separated by some time, and you can think A this moment and not-A the next moment.
If (3): this scenario could just as well occur if - and while - we had free will, i.e. the guy was free to choose either alternative, it is just that he cannot come to a conclusion.

[Rilx]

Is it actually a lack of the ability to act freely, or is it the fact that we have become aware of it, that causes discomfort?Both and, it depends. But awareness of the conflict between will and ability to act manifests their non-deterministic relation. And that's sufficient to define "free will", IMO. What we will doesn't determine what we do, and whatever we do doesn't demolish what we will.

[Rilx]

I don't get the examples. Are you referring to (1) the hypothetical when someone wants to do something else than he finds himself doing or to (2) when someone generally knows that e.g. smoking is bad but sometimes smokes without being bothered by it or (3) when someone is writhing between two mutually exclusive feelings and cannot decide in a satisfactory way?

If (1): he is still "free" to want to do something else i.e. he is not aware of any limitation on his will. Physical limitations in general aren't considered to limit one's free will.
If I must choose one of those options, (1) would be the nearest. But I'd include something from (2) and (3) noticing that "physical and psychological limitations in general aren't considered to limit one's free will". If one is addicted to smoke, it doesn't prevent him willing not to smoke.

Generally, free will works only for future. Limitations of today are not necessarily limitations of tomorrow. But in momentary situations you are not free to consider new options, you have only the ones thought earlier. In a momentary situation you choose very deterministically one of the options you have. So you are not even "determined to freedom".

[MrFungus420]

As far as I can tell, free will does exist.How would you know if it didn't? What would lack of free will feel like?

I couldn't tell you. And I don't care.

Questions like this are little more than mental masturbation. They accomplish nothing, and the answer is completely meaningless.

Like I said, free-will seems to exist. I live my life according to that assumption. Thus far, it seems to be a workable hypothesis that has not been contradicted. Thus far, it seems to be in accordance with reality.

For a meaningless question, that is more than sufficient for me.

[muidiri]

I'm jumping into this kind of late... and fairly uninformed. So if I'm behind the curve, be patient, and I'll eventually catch up.

Truly random events don't have causes, and truly causeless events are random.

I don't see how this is valid. Consider the oh so cliched example of a stream of photons passing through two small slits to create a wave pattern. Any particular photon randomly passes through one of the slits... right? But which one it passes through is random - and IIRC, Heisenberg pretty well established that we can never completely know which slit it actually goes through. It will always be a probabilistic expression. It's random. But I don't see that it's in any way uncaused. There is a cause, and a well documented one at that - the wave function of the photon.

[Preno]

Except it passes through both. The point of the experiment is that the notion of "the slit it actually went through" is meaningless, not that it went through one or the other, but we simply cannot tell which it was.

[muidiri]

Carrying out the punishment is not directed at the culprit but at the rest of the society, sending the signal that we mean business. Punishing wrongdoers in a free-will-less world is done in order to preserve the credibility of the threat of punishment (and to a lesser extent to satisfy the bloodlust of the victim's relatives, keeping them from personally avenging crimes and thus tearing apart the fabric of society through family feuds).

This is inconsistent.

You say that punishment is not intended for the effect it has on the choice of the wrongdoer (because his actions are determined, and therefore could not have been otherwise), but for the effect that it has on the choices of other potential wrongdoers. But the actions of those other potential wrongdoers are determined and cannot be otherwise, whether you punish the wrongdoer or not.

You have given an explanation for why punishment is valid in a deterministic world... which relies on the existence of some degree of free will to be effective.

[muidiri]

Evidence? I'm pretty sure it's propensity towards crime that correlates with "neuroses" and all sorts of psychological issues.I don"t see much difference between the unwillingness of the average citizen to kill or indeed do or do not do anything outside his comfort zone and the various prohibitive phobias and OCDs usually listed under the heading "neurosis". If you check the list of neurosis varieties, you'll see that they are in fact those things we think, feel, do or don't do, but whose root causes we cannot readily access. The only difference is that neuroses cause distress while not killing my neighbor shouldn't doesn't.

:confused: I thought that the development of empathy was a natural part of our cognitive development... and that the majority of violence out there is a result of either a) malformed or nonformed empathy (as in the case of sociopaths) or b) situations in which a competing factor overrides that empathy (including situations where the actor convinces themselves of the lesser humanity of the victim, as in war)

You seem to be saying that empathy is NOT a driver for behavior, and that only threat of punishment is a driver. Perhaps I've misunderstood you?

[muidiri]

What would lack of free will feel like?

The often erected strawman-with-a-false-dichotomy is that we would know if we had no free will; moreover, knowing it would somehow be a bad feeling.
We know it, definitely. We have free will, and in cases we cannot act freely, we know it, shame it and try to hide, rationalize or explain it away. Think of obsessions and addictions when people act deeply knowing they don't will it but can't act differently. Everyone - you included - knows how the lack of free will feel like.

Is it actually a lack of the ability to act freely, or is it the fact that we have become aware of it, that causes discomfort?

:D Okay... I've got to be misunderstanding your argument here. You seem to be saying that the obsessive or addicted person is not experiencing a lack of ability to act freely, but has actually become aware of a pre-existing lack of ability... and that it is the awareness of their lack of free will that causes them discomfort. Is that right?

Wouldn't that imply that addicted and OCD people are more evolved than those of us who are less aware of the "reality" of our situation?

[muidiri]

Except it passes through both. The point of the experiment is that the notion of "the slit it actually went through" is meaningless, not that it went through one or the other, but we simply cannot tell which it was.

Been a while since I took physics. Maybe I've got a bad example.

Isn't the heisenberg uncertainty principle pretty well validated? Doesn't it imply a certain level of innate probabilistic characteristics... but likewise provide plenty of situations where we should see things that are random but also caused?

[Preno]

The Heisenberg principle simply says (quantitatively) that states with a well-defined position and momentum don't exist. In and of itself it says nothing about probabilities.

However, it's true that (at least according to virtually all interpretations) the microworld behaves probabilistically. You just, as you said, picked a bad example.

[muidiri]

I've never really understood arguments for a deterministic existence. They seem silly to me, and the existence of free will (within limits) has always seemed clear and evident to me. Don't get me wrong - I understand the approach of "Effects have Causes". I don't even argue with that. It's that next leap that causes me confusion - the one where choice is transformed into random, and random is transformed into "uncaused" as an argument against free will.

As has already been mentioned, we obviously don't have absolute free will, and using that as a straw man for the argument is trivial. I can't think a pot-pie into existence. It's silly to even suggest that those who champion free will could believe such a thing. I can, however, make choices - I can evaluate alternatives. And I don't see how those choices are illusory.

There are causes for the choice that I end up making... but having causes doesn't necessarily imply that only one "choice" can possibly be made, and that the alternatives are illusions dreamed up by our poor deluded minds.

Several years ago, I was weighing the option between a job in San Francisco and a job in Seattle. There were lists of pros and cons for each. It was a close call between the two. I ended up choosing Seattle. There was a cause for my choice... but that in no way implies that I could NOT have chosen San Francisco. Having reasons for a choice, even when those reasons are based on prior experiences does NOT invalidate the other alternatives.

Heck - even when I go to the grocery store and can't decide on a flavor of jelly, there's still a cause when I flip a coin. I chose to use a random device - I caused the random event to occur by flipping the coin. It was random... but it was still caused.

Honestly, I'm kind of baffled by the fact that this argument is so perennial and eternal.

[muidiri]

The Heisenberg principle simply says (quantitatively) that states with a well-defined position and momentum don't exist. In and of itself it says nothing about probabilities.

However, it's true that (at least according to virtually all interpretations) the microworld behaves probabilistically. You just, as you said, picked a bad example.

Works for me. I was pretty sure that examples exist... and that the reasoning is fairly sound. Nice to know my brain is functioning as I expect it to :)

[EricK]

Carrying out the punishment is not directed at the culprit but at the rest of the society, sending the signal that we mean business. Punishing wrongdoers in a free-will-less world is done in order to preserve the credibility of the threat of punishment (and to a lesser extent to satisfy the bloodlust of the victim's relatives, keeping them from personally avenging crimes and thus tearing apart the fabric of society through family feuds).

This is inconsistent.

You say that punishment is not intended for the effect it has on the choice of the wrongdoer (because his actions are determined, and therefore could not have been otherwise), but for the effect that it has on the choices of other potential wrongdoers. But the actions of those other potential wrongdoers are determined and cannot be otherwise, whether you punish the wrongdoer or not.

You have given an explanation for why punishment is valid in a deterministic world... which relies on the existence of some degree of free will to be effective.
It is always difficult to frame arguments on this topic because the language is loaded. We do appear to have free will (whether we do or not), and everyday language fits in with that paradigm. So to make the argument appear non-contradictory you have to expand it to ridiculous lengths.

Life evolves. Creatures which avoid bad things and seek out good things do better than those that don't. So that sort of behaviour evolves. Some creatures evolve a lifestyle which favours living socially. In certain cases, social groups consisting of individuals which evolve the ability to punish, outperform other social groups. The reason this behaviour outperforms other behaviours, is that it takes advantage of the already exisiting trait of avoiding bad things. But the group (or the individuals therein) did not make a free choice (whatever that is) to start punishing offenders.

So punishment exists as a deterrent. People in a society with punishments behave differently to people in a society without. And none of this requires people choosing to punish or choosing whether to commit crimes.

There I am using choose in a free will sort of sense. Obviously people do choose what to do in some sense, but then chess programs will choose which move to make, and people don't tend to attribute free will to them. This is an example of the language problem I mentioned. "Choose" might be the correct word for what we do, but it has a whole load of baggage with it which is tied in to a belief in free will.

I've never really understood arguments for a deterministic existence. They seem silly to me, and the existence of free will (within limits) has always seemed clear and evident to me. Don't get me wrong - I understand the approach of "Effects have Causes". I don't even argue with that. It's that next leap that causes me confusion - the one where choice is transformed into random, and random is transformed into "uncaused" as an argument against free will.

This isn't the argument that is used though.

As has already been mentioned, we obviously don't have absolute free will, and using that as a straw man for the argument is trivial. I can't think a pot-pie into existence. It's silly to even suggest that those who champion free will could believe such a thing. I can, however, make choices - I can evaluate alternatives. And I don't see how those choices are illusory.
They are not illusory. But why do you think they are qualitatively different from the choices made by, say, a computer chess program?

There are causes for the choice that I end up making... but having causes doesn't necessarily imply that only one "choice" can possibly be made, and that the alternatives are illusions dreamed up by our poor deluded minds.
That also is not the argument made. One way of looking at it is to view the list of choices we have as an expression of our ignorance of how our brain works. If I could build an exact simulation of your brain but one which works twice as fast, then I could know what you would choose before you chose it. Just like if I have the same chess program running as you, but my computer is twice as fast, I can know what your program is going to choose. But until the "program" is run (whether in your brain or in the simulation), nobody knows what you are going to do. And so you naturally view yourself as having the freedom to choose from these choices, And if my brain is functioning properly, and it has to make a decision which depends on your choice, then it, too, will naturally view you as having the freedom to make that choice.

[muidiri]

So punishment exists as a deterrent. People in a society with punishments behave differently to people in a society without. And none of this requires people choosing to punish or choosing whether to commit crimes.
I suppose that holding a vote regarding whether or not a state will allow capital punishment is an illusory choice... it's guaranteed to have exactly the outcome that it has, right? ;). Because I'd say that's a pretty clear case of choosing whether or not to punish. I'd also say that a jury making a decision is choosing whether to punish or not.

There I am using choose in a free will sort of sense. Obviously people do choose what to do in some sense, but then chess programs will choose which move to make, and people don't tend to attribute free will to them. This is an example of the language problem I mentioned. "Choose" might be the correct word for what we do, but it has a whole load of baggage with it which is tied in to a belief in free will.
As I've previously mentioned, I think the distinction lies in cognition. A computer is programed with a limited set of options - and those are the only options that exist. No new options can be introduced by the computer itself - it is not cognizant. A chess program has a fixed set of options for each possible move. Granted there are a lot of possibilities... but it's still a fixed set. The computer, for instance, can't decide to throw a fit and knock the chess board over. It can't decide that this is no fun and just refuse to play with you. It can't decide to cheat when your back is turned.

Humans, however, aren't working from a fixed program. Not only do we need to make decisions, but we need to consider what alternatives exist in the first place. For a human, the set of alternatives available to them is virtually limitless, and is bound only by imagination, time, and reason. A human playing chess can decide to attempt to distract you by humming show tunes while you think. They can decide to bump the board "accidentally" in order to throw you off your game. They can decide they'd rather play checkers. They can decide to shove a pawn up your nose. Humans are cognizant.

As soon as a computer can envision it's own alternatives, and use it's imagination to solve a problem independently, then I'll likely say that computers do have free will.

Free will doesn't mean you get to make up whatever you want, and somehow the power of your mind makes it real. Free will means that you have the ability to consider the alternatives (including the less probable and more creative ones) and make a choice about what you do.

Free will implies responsibility for our actions. Determinism is the great forgiveness of confession without the need of a confessor.

[dug_down_deep]

This philosophical debate in general, I think beyond almost any other, highlights how absolutely ignorant we are as a species, and how in love we are with shadow-boxing. It's so full of strawmen, so infected with rhetorical goals, and so entirely hubris-swollen that it makes me literally nauseous when people start discussing it.

[muidiri]

This philosophical debate in general, I think beyond almost any other, highlights how absolutely ignorant we are as a species, and how in love we are with shadow-boxing. It's so full of strawmen, so infected with rhetorical goals, and so entirely hubris-swollen that it makes me literally nauseous when people start discussing it.

So why bother to read it and comment? Is it just an opportunity to "rub our noses in it" and scoff at those who are interested in discussing it?

[dug_down_deep]

shut up

jesus christ

[muidiri]

shut up

jesus christ

Right back at you. I'm not the one coming in condescending to all the people involved in the discussion, proceeding to tell them how "hubris-swollen" they all are for being part of the discussion that you're too good for... and yet are posting in :hmm:

[dug_down_deep]

Here's a clue, muidiri. When someone says people are stupid, you don't have to take it personally.

Also, please stop telling me to stop posting. kthx

[muidiri]

Here's a clue, muidiri. When someone says people are stupid, you don't have to take it personally.

Also, please stop telling me to stop posting. kthx

I didn't take it personally. I just found it generally offensive and rude. Nobody's forcing you to read the thread. You say it's a topic you detest, and you scoff at everyone interested in it. Fine.

But it's not like we're in your living room, are we? You don't have to read it. You know what it is from the title... so why not just avoid it? Why take the time to go into a thread on a topic you dislike... just so you can tell everyone how much you dislike it and how dumb they all are for enjoying it? It's rudeness for the sake of being rude.

[EricK]

So punishment exists as a deterrent. People in a society with punishments behave differently to people in a society without. And none of this requires people choosing to punish or choosing whether to commit crimes.
I suppose that holding a vote regarding whether or not a state will allow capital punishment is an illusory choice... it's guaranteed to have exactly the outcome that it has, right? ;). Because I'd say that's a pretty clear case of choosing whether or not to punish. I'd also say that a jury making a decision is choosing whether to punish or not.
I don't really know what you mean by "illusory choice". I'm not even sure I know what you mean by "choice"!

Let's say it's time for breakfast. You go to the kitchen cupboard and there is a box of Cornflakes and a box of Rice Krispies. You choose to have cornflakes. Now lets suppose we repeatedly set up the entire universe in exactly the same state it was at the time you made the decision. Do you believe you would make the same decision each and every time? If not, do you believe that when you made a different decision it was down to more than just quantum randomness?

If it is the case that you would make the same decision each time, is that what you mean by it being an "illusory choice"?

There I am using choose in a free will sort of sense. Obviously people do choose what to do in some sense, but then chess programs will choose which move to make, and people don't tend to attribute free will to them. This is an example of the language problem I mentioned. "Choose" might be the correct word for what we do, but it has a whole load of baggage with it which is tied in to a belief in free will.
As I've previously mentioned, I think the distinction lies in cognition. A computer is programed with a limited set of options - and those are the only options that exist. No new options can be introduced by the computer itself - it is not cognizant. A chess program has a fixed set of options for each possible move. Granted there are a lot of possibilities... but it's still a fixed set. The computer, for instance, can't decide to throw a fit and knock the chess board over. It can't decide that this is no fun and just refuse to play with you. It can't decide to cheat when your back is turned.

Humans, however, aren't working from a fixed program. Not only do we need to make decisions, but we need to consider what alternatives exist in the first place. For a human, the set of alternatives available to them is virtually limitless, and is bound only by imagination, time, and reason. A human playing chess can decide to attempt to distract you by humming show tunes while you think. They can decide to bump the board "accidentally" in order to throw you off your game. They can decide they'd rather play checkers. They can decide to shove a pawn up your nose. Humans are cognizant.

As soon as a computer can envision it's own alternatives, and use it's imagination to solve a problem independently, then I'll likely say that computers do have free will.

Free will doesn't mean you get to make up whatever you want, and somehow the power of your mind makes it real. Free will means that you have the ability to consider the alternatives (including the less probable and more creative ones) and make a choice about what you do.

Free will implies responsibility for our actions. Determinism is the great forgiveness of confession without the need of a confessor.

If responsibility exists due to the reasons you give, then it would imply that different people have different levels of responsibility from each other for their actions, and even different levels of responsibility for different actions they perform - because people will have different levels of cognizance from each other, and their cognizance of themselves will also vary from time to time. But in another thread, I seem to remember you shied away from accepting this.

You want responsibility to be an all or nothing thing, either present or absent. And you want it to be present all the time in everyone. But merely wanting it doesn't make it so.

As a part qualified actuary, you must surely accept that you are more intelligent than a lot of other people. But you won't accept that you are more responsible for your actions than a lot of other people. Whereas to me, if responsibility exists in the way you describe, those two things - being more intelligent and being more responsible for one's action - would be highly correlated, if not quite identical.

[muidiri]

So punishment exists as a deterrent. People in a society with punishments behave differently to people in a society without. And none of this requires people choosing to punish or choosing whether to commit crimes.
I suppose that holding a vote regarding whether or not a state will allow capital punishment is an illusory choice... it's guaranteed to have exactly the outcome that it has, right? ;). Because I'd say that's a pretty clear case of choosing whether or not to punish. I'd also say that a jury making a decision is choosing whether to punish or not.
I don't really know what you mean by "illusory choice". I'm not even sure I know what you mean by "choice"!

Let's say it's time for breakfast. You go to the kitchen cupboard and there is a box of Cornflakes and a box of Rice Krispies. You choose to have cornflakes. Now lets suppose we repeatedly set up the entire universe in exactly the same state it was at the time you made the decision. Do you believe you would make the same decision each and every time? If not, do you believe that when you made a different decision it was down to more than just quantum randomness?

If it is the case that you would make the same decision each time, is that what you mean by it being an "illusory choice"?
I need a "scratching my head" smiley.

I see what you're saying. If you could completely and exactly duplicate the entire universe, I assume I'd be in exactly the same mood at that point in time, and would pick the same cereal. If not, then the difference might be due to quantum randomness.

But it's kind of irrelevant, don't you think? Because quantum randomness does exist, you cannot duplicate the exact state of the universe. So it's a non-question. You're trying to prove determinism by assuming something that is known to be false. I don't see how this helps your case, nor can I see that it weakens mine.

By "illusory", I mean that the alternatives that I see as part of the decision making process don't actually exist under your deterministic view. there's no possible way I could have chosen the Rice Krispies. The deterministic view seems to me to imply that everything goes along a determined path, and cannot waver from it - because it is all caused by external atoms and neutrinos bouncing around. It seems to be indistinguishable from the belief that everything is fated to turn out a certain way. It implies that even though I might think I have the option of choosing the Rice Krispies, I don't - at that exact moment in time, I can ONLY choose the Corn Flakes. In other words, the choice of cereals doesn't actually exist - it is only an illusion.

There I am using choose in a free will sort of sense. Obviously people do choose what to do in some sense, but then chess programs will choose which move to make, and people don't tend to attribute free will to them. This is an example of the language problem I mentioned. "Choose" might be the correct word for what we do, but it has a whole load of baggage with it which is tied in to a belief in free will.
As I've previously mentioned, I think the distinction lies in cognition. A computer is programed with a limited set of options - and those are the only options that exist. No new options can be introduced by the computer itself - it is not cognizant. A chess program has a fixed set of options for each possible move. Granted there are a lot of possibilities... but it's still a fixed set. The computer, for instance, can't decide to throw a fit and knock the chess board over. It can't decide that this is no fun and just refuse to play with you. It can't decide to cheat when your back is turned.

Humans, however, aren't working from a fixed program. Not only do we need to make decisions, but we need to consider what alternatives exist in the first place. For a human, the set of alternatives available to them is virtually limitless, and is bound only by imagination, time, and reason. A human playing chess can decide to attempt to distract you by humming show tunes while you think. They can decide to bump the board "accidentally" in order to throw you off your game. They can decide they'd rather play checkers. They can decide to shove a pawn up your nose. Humans are cognizant.

As soon as a computer can envision it's own alternatives, and use it's imagination to solve a problem independently, then I'll likely say that computers do have free will.

Free will doesn't mean you get to make up whatever you want, and somehow the power of your mind makes it real. Free will means that you have the ability to consider the alternatives (including the less probable and more creative ones) and make a choice about what you do.

Free will implies responsibility for our actions. Determinism is the great forgiveness of confession without the need of a confessor.

If responsibility exists due to the reasons you give, then it would imply that different people have different levels of responsibility from each other for their actions, and even different levels of responsibility for different actions they perform - because people will have different levels of cognizance from each other, and their cognizance of themselves will also vary from time to time. But in another thread, I seem to remember you shied away from accepting this.

You want responsibility to be an all or nothing thing, either present or absent. And you want it to be present all the time in everyone. But merely wanting it doesn't make it so.

As a part qualified actuary, you must surely accept that you are more intelligent than a lot of other people. But you won't accept that you are more responsible for your actions than a lot of other people. Whereas to me, if responsibility exists in the way you describe, those two things - being more intelligent and being more responsible for one's action - would be highly correlated, if not quite identical.

This is one of those words that has degrees of meaning, based on each person's perception. Cognizance, as defined by dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognizance), is "awareness, realization, or knowledge". There are other definitions, but they aren't appropriate for our discussion, I don't think. If you agree that this is the sense of cognizance and cognition that we're using, then we're golden. Otherwise, we get to have a semantic argument until we reach an agreement :p!

Now here's where we get to share some thoughts. When I talk about cognition being the differentiator, I'm not talking about knowledge in the sense of what I've learned. I'm talking about the ability to determine and to think, and to consider various possibilities and their consequences. Maybe there's a better word for it?

There are going to be variances from person to person, but for the most part, the differences in ability to consider will be vanishingly small. by and large we all have about the same ability to consider our actions. Therefore, we all have effectively the same level of cognizance. Obviously, as we discussed previously, there are some notable exceptions - brain trauma that inhibits the ability to cognate. Children below that stage of cognitive development. Aside from that, the differences are minimal. Kind of like language - yes, some differences in the ability to speak a language exist from person to person, but taken as a whole, the difference is virtually meaningless. People with physical deformities or damage to the language center of their brain, and children below that stage of development are the only practical exceptions to the statement that humans have the ability to speak language. The variations in the ability to speak language are vanishingly small when you look at the aggregate.

For this reason, I do think that in general, we all have the same degree of responsibility for our decisions. This isn't exactly the same as saying that we're all equally responsible for the outcomes of our decisions - that's where actual knowledge comes into play. If you have never learned that acid is corrosive, then you had no way to anticipate that spilling it on the floor would damage the hardwood. You aren't responsible for that functionally unforseeable outcome. You are, however, responsible for the fact that you decided to carry a beaker of an unknown liquid that you found sealed up out of reach in the shed around the house without a lid.

Consider - the architects who designed the twin towers did not consider the effect that a full tank of jet fuel would have on the steel supports. That was something that they could not have reasonably foreseen, and thus wasn't part of their considerations. They aren't responsible for the outcome of their lack of knowledge. They did consider the effect of an electrical fire - it was reasonable for them to do so, and was well within their knowledge. If they had designed the building without a sprinkler system, and the building had caught fire and burned down, they would certainly have been responsible for that - they made the decision to not include sprinklers, even though they were aware that a fire might occur. For the new building that they're putting up, we can expect that the architect will consider the effects of jet fuel. If he builds the tower without safeguards for that situation, and another plane runs into it... then he would be responsible for that decision.

We aren't responsible for every single thing that occurs - to suggest we are would be silly. But we are responsible for giving consideration to the potential outcomes. We may not all have the same amount of knowledge, but we all have the same ability to consider what knowledge we do have.

Having the ability to consider to the best of your knowledge is what imparts responsibility. If you fail to consider, and negative outcomes occur, you are responsible for your failure. If you do consider, and decide on a course that produces a negative outcome, you are responsible for the effects of your decision. If you consider to the best of your ability, and something that is reasonably unforseeable occurs and produces a negative outcome, you are not responsible for that outcome - this is where the term "accident" comes into play ;). But the next time you're faced with a similar decision, you better consider the possibility of that event - because it is now part of your knowledge base.

Being an actuary isn't necessarily a sufficient condition for intelligence. I consider myself intelligent, and I consider myself to also be very knowledgeable about my field. If you and I are both trying to make a decision regarding what price an insurance product should be set at, you could reasonably expect that I might be held more responsible for my decision than you... but at the same time, knowing that premium-setting takes specialized knowledge that you lack, you could reasonably be held responsible for acting when you knew full well that your lack of knowledge was a hindrance. From an objective viewpoint, we would both be responsible for our decisions.

I don't know how to do open heart surgery. If I decide to go ahead and operate on my spouse, I should certainly be held responsible for any harm I do to him. My lack of knowledge doesn't exonerate me - I know that specialized knowledge is required, and I decided to act without that knowledge.

To summarize: It's the ability to cognate that imparts responsibility for one's decisions, not the knowledge that one has. That said, it is NOT 100% all the time - reasonably unforseeable events do occur. For obvious reasons, we shouldn't expect that people would consider something that they had no reasonable expectation of knowing about ;).

[EricK]

So punishment exists as a deterrent. People in a society with punishments behave differently to people in a society without. And none of this requires people choosing to punish or choosing whether to commit crimes.
I suppose that holding a vote regarding whether or not a state will allow capital punishment is an illusory choice... it's guaranteed to have exactly the outcome that it has, right? ;). Because I'd say that's a pretty clear case of choosing whether or not to punish. I'd also say that a jury making a decision is choosing whether to punish or not.
I don't really know what you mean by "illusory choice". I'm not even sure I know what you mean by "choice"!

Let's say it's time for breakfast. You go to the kitchen cupboard and there is a box of Cornflakes and a box of Rice Krispies. You choose to have cornflakes. Now lets suppose we repeatedly set up the entire universe in exactly the same state it was at the time you made the decision. Do you believe you would make the same decision each and every time? If not, do you believe that when you made a different decision it was down to more than just quantum randomness?

If it is the case that you would make the same decision each time, is that what you mean by it being an "illusory choice"?
I need a "scratching my head" smiley.

I see what you're saying. If you could completely and exactly duplicate the entire universe, I assume I'd be in exactly the same mood at that point in time, and would pick the same cereal. If not, then the difference might be due to quantum randomness.

But it's kind of irrelevant, don't you think? Because quantum randomness does exist, you cannot duplicate the exact state of the universe. So it's a non-question. You're trying to prove determinism by assuming something that is known to be false. I don't see how this helps your case, nor can I see that it weakens mine.
I probably wasn't clear. There are three possibilities:
1. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you always make the same choice
2. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you sometimes make a different choice - but that is due to quantum fluctuations outside of your control
3. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you sometimes make a different choice and that is due to something else - presumably free will

To hold your view, I think you have to accept number 3. But perhaps I am wrong.

By "illusory", I mean that the alternatives that I see as part of the decision making process don't actually exist under your deterministic view. there's no possible way I could have chosen the Rice Krispies. The deterministic view seems to me to imply that everything goes along a determined path, and cannot waver from it - because it is all caused by external atoms and neutrinos bouncing around. It seems to be indistinguishable from the belief that everything is fated to turn out a certain way. It implies that even though I might think I have the option of choosing the Rice Krispies, I don't - at that exact moment in time, I can ONLY choose the Corn Flakes. In other words, the choice of cereals doesn't actually exist - it is only an illusion.

But for you, while making the decision, there is literally no way to tell this situation from the one in which the choices are non-illusory. So I think you need a very good reason - more than just "that's the way it feels" - to introduce something other than this is just due to particles, albeit particles arranged in a very complex fashion, obeying the laws of physics.

There I am using choose in a free will sort of sense. Obviously people do choose what to do in some sense, but then chess programs will choose which move to make, and people don't tend to attribute free will to them. This is an example of the language problem I mentioned. "Choose" might be the correct word for what we do, but it has a whole load of baggage with it which is tied in to a belief in free will.
As I've previously mentioned, I think the distinction lies in cognition. A computer is programed with a limited set of options - and those are the only options that exist. No new options can be introduced by the computer itself - it is not cognizant. A chess program has a fixed set of options for each possible move. Granted there are a lot of possibilities... but it's still a fixed set. The computer, for instance, can't decide to throw a fit and knock the chess board over. It can't decide that this is no fun and just refuse to play with you. It can't decide to cheat when your back is turned.

Humans, however, aren't working from a fixed program. Not only do we need to make decisions, but we need to consider what alternatives exist in the first place. For a human, the set of alternatives available to them is virtually limitless, and is bound only by imagination, time, and reason. A human playing chess can decide to attempt to distract you by humming show tunes while you think. They can decide to bump the board "accidentally" in order to throw you off your game. They can decide they'd rather play checkers. They can decide to shove a pawn up your nose. Humans are cognizant.

As soon as a computer can envision it's own alternatives, and use it's imagination to solve a problem independently, then I'll likely say that computers do have free will.

Free will doesn't mean you get to make up whatever you want, and somehow the power of your mind makes it real. Free will means that you have the ability to consider the alternatives (including the less probable and more creative ones) and make a choice about what you do.

Free will implies responsibility for our actions. Determinism is the great forgiveness of confession without the need of a confessor.

If responsibility exists due to the reasons you give, then it would imply that different people have different levels of responsibility from each other for their actions, and even different levels of responsibility for different actions they perform - because people will have different levels of cognizance from each other, and their cognizance of themselves will also vary from time to time. But in another thread, I seem to remember you shied away from accepting this.

You want responsibility to be an all or nothing thing, either present or absent. And you want it to be present all the time in everyone. But merely wanting it doesn't make it so.

As a part qualified actuary, you must surely accept that you are more intelligent than a lot of other people. But you won't accept that you are more responsible for your actions than a lot of other people. Whereas to me, if responsibility exists in the way you describe, those two things - being more intelligent and being more responsible for one's action - would be highly correlated, if not quite identical.

This is one of those words that has degrees of meaning, based on each person's perception. Cognizance, as defined by dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognizance), is "awareness, realization, or knowledge". There are other definitions, but they aren't appropriate for our discussion, I don't think. If you agree that this is the sense of cognizance and cognition that we're using, then we're golden. Otherwise, we get to have a semantic argument until we reach an agreement :p!

Now here's where we get to share some thoughts. When I talk about cognition being the differentiator, I'm not talking about knowledge in the sense of what I've learned. I'm talking about the ability to determine and to think, and to consider various possibilities and their consequences. Maybe there's a better word for it?

There are going to be variances from person to person, but for the most part, the differences in ability to consider will be vanishingly small. by and large we all have about the same ability to consider our actions. Therefore, we all have effectively the same level of cognizance. Obviously, as we discussed previously, there are some notable exceptions - brain trauma that inhibits the ability to cognate. Children below that stage of cognitive development. Aside from that, the differences are minimal. Kind of like language - yes, some differences in the ability to speak a language exist from person to person, but taken as a whole, the difference is virtually meaningless. People with physical deformities or damage to the language center of their brain, and children below that stage of development are the only practical exceptions to the statement that humans have the ability to speak language. The variations in the ability to speak language are vanishingly small when you look at the aggregate.

For this reason, I do think that in general, we all have the same degree of responsibility for our decisions. This isn't exactly the same as saying that we're all equally responsible for the outcomes of our decisions - that's where actual knowledge comes into play. If you have never learned that acid is corrosive, then you had no way to anticipate that spilling it on the floor would damage the hardwood. You aren't responsible for that functionally unforseeable outcome. You are, however, responsible for the fact that you decided to carry a beaker of an unknown liquid that you found sealed up out of reach in the shed around the house without a lid.

Consider - the architects who designed the twin towers did not consider the effect that a full tank of jet fuel would have on the steel supports. That was something that they could not have reasonably foreseen, and thus wasn't part of their considerations. They aren't responsible for the outcome of their lack of knowledge. They did consider the effect of an electrical fire - it was reasonable for them to do so, and was well within their knowledge. If they had designed the building without a sprinkler system, and the building had caught fire and burned down, they would certainly have been responsible for that - they made the decision to not include sprinklers, even though they were aware that a fire might occur. For the new building that they're putting up, we can expect that the architect will consider the effects of jet fuel. If he builds the tower without safeguards for that situation, and another plane runs into it... then he would be responsible for that decision.

We aren't responsible for every single thing that occurs - to suggest we are would be silly. But we are responsible for giving consideration to the potential outcomes. We may not all have the same amount of knowledge, but we all have the same ability to consider what knowledge we do have.

Having the ability to consider to the best of your knowledge is what imparts responsibility. If you fail to consider, and negative outcomes occur, you are responsible for your failure. If you do consider, and decide on a course that produces a negative outcome, you are responsible for the effects of your decision. If you consider to the best of your ability, and something that is reasonably unforseeable occurs and produces a negative outcome, you are not responsible for that outcome - this is where the term "accident" comes into play ;). But the next time you're faced with a similar decision, you better consider the possibility of that event - because it is now part of your knowledge base.

Being an actuary isn't necessarily a sufficient condition for intelligence. I consider myself intelligent, and I consider myself to also be very knowledgeable about my field. If you and I are both trying to make a decision regarding what price an insurance product should be set at, you could reasonably expect that I might be held more responsible for my decision than you... but at the same time, knowing that premium-setting takes specialized knowledge that you lack, you could reasonably be held responsible for acting when you knew full well that your lack of knowledge was a hindrance. From an objective viewpoint, we would both be responsible for our decisions.

I don't know how to do open heart surgery. If I decide to go ahead and operate on my spouse, I should certainly be held responsible for any harm I do to him. My lack of knowledge doesn't exonerate me - I know that specialized knowledge is required, and I decided to act without that knowledge.

To summarize: It's the ability to cognate that imparts responsibility for one's decisions, not the knowledge that one has. That said, it is NOT 100% all the time - reasonably unforseeable events do occur. For obvious reasons, we shouldn't expect that people would consider something that they had no reasonable expectation of knowing about ;).
I can't decide which of us has the more optimistic view of other people.

On the one hand you seem to grant everyone fairly similar abilities, but from what I have seen, people vary enormously in most everything - including their self-awareness. Is that you with an optimtistic view of other people?

But on the other hand, I tend to think that when people make bad choices it is not in general because they don't want to analyze the choices, but because they are literally unable to do so to a sufficient level, or are literally unable to see why it would be a good idea to make the analysis. But presumably you believe that they are consciously choosing not to make the analysis, out of laziness or whatever. So perhaps it is you who has the more pessisimistic view of others.

[muidiri]

I probably wasn't clear. There are three possibilities:
1. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you always make the same choice
2. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you sometimes make a different choice - but that is due to quantum fluctuations outside of your control
3. Resetting the universe to the previous situation means you sometimes make a different choice and that is due to something else - presumably free will

To hold your view, I think you have to accept number 3. But perhaps I am wrong.
Actually, I'm kind of stuck somewhere between these options. Maybe there's another option that you haven't considered.

Chances are that if you really could completely and exactly reset the entire universe, I would make the same choice that I did the first time - my reasons for choosing corn flakes wouldn't have changed. But I could choose Rice Krispies - but the reason for the change would be something neither of us would be in a position to determine. It could be due to random fluctuations resulting in a change. I think it would depend somewhat on how close the choice was in the first place. If I were pretty equally torn between the two choices, and effectively chose Corn Flakes at random, then the probability of me choosing Rice Krispies the second time would be higher. If however, my mood and thoughts at the time made me definitely more predisposed to Corn Flakes, then that choice would likely be repeated.

Honestly, I think we have a disconnect in our view here. It puts me in mind of some of my statistics classes. In actuality, only one path is followed. But that by no means implies that that path was the only one available.

Consider yourself holding a pair of dice. Prior to the toss, what is the outcome going to be? You don't know - there are many possible outcomes. Prior to the toss those outcomes all exist and are all valid to varying probabilistic degrees. After the toss, however, there can be only one actual outcome. But the reality of what actually occurred doesn't invalidate the probabilities that existed prior to the toss.

The problem with using this sort of an example, however, is that we're using a completely physical scenario, in which physics is nearly fully deterministic. The dice, once they leave your hand must follow the laws of physics. I understand that physics is an important part of your argument here. I admit to having difficulty getting my thoughts out clearly as I try to explain my position on this one.

It comes down to a matter of predictability. You seem to hold the view that if we had enough knowledge, then we would be able to predict with 100% accuracy the actions of every object in the universe - this is the basis of the deterministic view, correct?

From a physics point of view, that assumption is incorrect. Ignoring any complications due to minds, you cannot predict the actions of every object, no matter how much information and knowledge you have. At a very fundamental level, there is a degree of uncertainty that cannot be overcome. (It's been a long time since I looked at any of the chaos theory stuff... so excuse the simplistic description here.) There do exist uncertainties at a quantum level - we know this to be true, correct? But the impact of those uncertainties doesn't necessarily need to be large, and my understanding is that the effect is generally pretty small. I remember studying some of the chaos theory stuff, and there was a very interesting property to it - there was no way to predict the actual outcome with specificity... but in many cases it could be bounded. This is pretty important, as far as I understand it. You may not ever be able to determine exactly where a given particle will end up... but you can determine that it will be somewhere between x and y. A lot of the difficulty comes in defining the proper perspective for that range. We've all heard of the butterfly effect (enriching science fiction for decades). That butterfly's wings might impact the weather on the other side of the globe... but there are boundaries placed on the effect - Coriolis effect, temperature gradients, ocean currents, etc. So the butterfly might set in motion the conditions for clouds instead of sun in Tibet... but it's extremely unlikely that it would cause a tropical hurricane in Tibet ;) It's bounded by other forces that limit the impact. And taken from a global perspective, the weather is necessarily bound to our planet - that butterfly can have no effect on the weather on Jupiter. If you have enough information, you can predict the weather in Tibet with a high degree of accuracy - the boundaries placed on weather systems allow us to be pretty accurate. But we cannot predict it with 100% accuracy - no matter how much information you have, the exact amount of cloud or sun is not deterministic. Once the weather has actually occurred, however, it will always be one or the other - rain or clouds. And there will have occurred a specific combination that can be determined in retrospect.

You can look back at the actions any individual has taken and say "They did xxx" with 100% accuracy. You cannot, however, look forward and say what they will do - you can only make a probabilistic assumption about what they might do.

But for you, while making the decision, there is literally no way to tell this situation from the one in which the choices are non-illusory. So I think you need a very good reason - more than just "that's the way it feels" - to introduce something other than this is just due to particles, albeit particles arranged in a very complex fashion, obeying the laws of physics.
Again, I think this is a problem with perspective. In hindsight, there is only one choice that was actually made. You, however, are essentially suggesting that only one decision can be made. Whether my brain cells are simply following the laws of physics or not, the probabilities of alternative paths in the future do exist. Once you've thrown the dice, there is only one actual outcome - the dice cannot simultaneously show (1,3) and (2,6). But prior to the toss, they can have any legitimate combination - the probabilities associated with the potential outcomes are real probabilities. Maybe it's due to quantum fluctuations - it doesn't matter. Those alternative possibilities exist prior to the event. The deterministic viewpoint, however, seems to say that those possibilities do NOT exist - that prior to the toss there is only one possible outcome, and that is it a lack of knowledge about the specific conditions that creates the illusion of probabilities. This is where I disagree.

Free will doesn't imply that physics doesn't work. Just like the butterfly effect, there are boundaries. We can't will unicorns into existence. Free will simply means that decision points exist, and that we have the ability to consider the outcomes and make choices. Determinism takes an opposing view - that decision points do not exist - and that there is only one possible path forward, and if we had enough information we would be able to determine it exactly ahead of time.

I can't decide which of us has the more optimistic view of other people.

On the one hand you seem to grant everyone fairly similar abilities, but from what I have seen, people vary enormously in most everything - including their self-awareness. Is that you with an optimtistic view of other people?

But on the other hand, I tend to think that when people make bad choices it is not in general because they don't want to analyze the choices, but because they are literally unable to do so to a sufficient level, or are literally unable to see why it would be a good idea to make the analysis. But presumably you believe that they are consciously choosing not to make the analysis, out of laziness or whatever. So perhaps it is you who has the more pessisimistic view of others.
I don't think it's a matter of optimism or pessimism, so much as a differing view of the nature of existence.

For one thing, you see great variation in people... but I propose that you only see the variations as great because of your perspective. Let's go back to that butterfly :). If you live in Tibet, you'll see great variation in the weather from day to day - in Tibet. You'll see great variation from season to season, year to year, and so on. But if you step back, and look at the global perspective, then the variation that you witness from inside the system begins to disappear - it smooths out significantly relative to the weather patterns of the planet as a whole. When I look at claims for physical therapy, I see great variation in the claim amount and the number of claims within that service type. But when I step back and look at physical therapy claims relative to all medical claims, the variations in PT become very small. The same holds true with cognition. If you look at 10 other people relative to yourself, you'll witness variations - they are undeniably there. But if you step back and look at the aggregate, at all 3 billion of us, then the variance that you witnessed in your small sample becomes very small. It's a problem of sample size ;). Language is a more intuitive comparator. If you look around at the people that you interact with, you'll see great variation in their ability to communicate verbally - but this is only because you have such a small sample. If you look at all humans in aggregate, however, the differences in the ability to communicate verbally begin to disappear - the individual variations are dwarfed by the average, and the standard deviation becomes very small. It puts us in a position to say that all humans have the ability to communicate verbally, and that statement is essentially true.

the same is true of cognition. There might be differences from person to person, but when taken relative to the whole, those differences are minor. We all have a roughly equal ability to think.

I don't think it's optimism to recognize that the ability is pretty much they same across the board. I also don't think it's pessimism to associate the consequences of a decision with the decision maker. I don't expect that people will always make the optimal decision. In truth, the vast majority of our decisions have very little impact. If strawberry jam would have been the optimal choice for you, but you chose grape instead... it really doesn't matter. But if breakfast time rolls around and you're unhappy with the grape jam on your toast... that's the result of the choice you made.

Free will simply says that at each decision point, we are faced with possibilities, and that we have the ability to make choices. Determinism pretty much says that no decision points exist. Would you agree that this is the essence of the debate?

Free will says that when you were at the grocery, and you picked up grape jam, you could have picked strawberry instead - that option existed. Determinism says that when you were at the grocery, grape was the only option available to you.

[dug_down_deep]

Here's a clue, muidiri. When someone says people are stupid, you don't have to take it personally.

Also, please stop telling me to stop posting. kthx

I didn't take it personally. I just found it generally offensive and rude. Nobody's forcing you to read the thread. You say it's a topic you detest, and you scoff at everyone interested in it. Fine.
And the fact that I find it to be a generally repulsive topic is every bit as relevant a commentary on the topic as anything you've posted here. Newsflash - I actually think you're pretty much on target with this one. If you weren't so busy trying to teach me how not to offend you, you might have found that out.

But it's not like we're in your living room, are we? You don't have to read it. You know what it is from the title... so why not just avoid it? Why take the time to go into a thread on a topic you dislike... just so you can tell everyone how much you dislike it and how dumb they all are for enjoying it? It's rudeness for the sake of being rude.
And again, saying that the topic is repulsive is a commentary on the topic. I didn't say any individual was dumb. Where the fuck did you get that? I said the entire species was ignorant. We are, and in my opinion that fact is highlighted whenever this topic is discussed.

Get over yourself.

[muidiri]

And again, saying that the topic is repulsive is a commentary on the topic. I didn't say any individual was dumb. Where the fuck did you get that? I said the entire species was ignorant. We are, and in my opinion that fact is highlighted whenever this topic is discussed.


My apologies if I misunderstood your initial post. In all honesty, it looked like nothing more than an opportunistic swipe at everyone in the thread aside from yourself. Kind of like sitting in the lunch room overhearing people at another table discussing the economy, then jumping in to say that the topic of the economy is a stupid thing to discuss. It came across as rudeness for the sake of rudeness. :dunno:

As far as the entire species being ignorant - yes, we are. There's no realistic way to tell whether one side or the other is correct. But that doesn't mean it's not interesting to discuss. This is actually the first of these discussions I've ever engaged in. I've always found the topic somewhat pointless. I'm not here to find a solution. I'm here to attempt to stretch my own ability to explain myself. It's mental exercise and a chance to learn something about other people.

It's been my experience that discussions of other topics often devolve to this fundamental difference - are we, or are we not , responsible for our decisions? The degree of control that we believe we have over our futures and our own lives is a pretty fundamental one. I've lost count of the number of times that a discussion about some ideology, some philosophy, or some moral stance has turned into a discussion of free will. I suspect that it is one of the bedrock memes. As such, I figured I ought to learn a little more about why some people believe the deterministic view.

[Alethias]

I think the topic is confusing because oftentimes people speak over each others heads; they use words in different ways to mean different things.

So, in light of that, here goes: I freely of my own accord with no specific environmental influences of which i'm directly aware choose to believe, in a completely voluntary and unforced-by-anyone manner, that the universe in which I abide and am aware is deterministic.

:fishslap:

[dug_down_deep]

So you're a compatibilist, iow. :D

[Sidhe747]

I am God and I say yes it does exist, now shut up! :bang:

[EricK]

Consider yourself holding a pair of dice. Prior to the toss, what is the outcome going to be? You don't know - there are many possible outcomes. Prior to the toss those outcomes all exist and are all valid to varying probabilistic degrees. After the toss, however, there can be only one actual outcome. But the reality of what actually occurred doesn't invalidate the probabilities that existed prior to the toss.

The problem with using this sort of an example, however, is that we're using a completely physical scenario, in which physics is nearly fully deterministic. The dice, once they leave your hand must follow the laws of physics. I understand that physics is an important part of your argument here. I admit to having difficulty getting my thoughts out clearly as I try to explain my position on this one.

It comes down to a matter of predictability. You seem to hold the view that if we had enough knowledge, then we would be able to predict with 100% accuracy the actions of every object in the universe - this is the basis of the deterministic view, correct?

Determinism is a red herring here. Non-determinism does not automatically give you free will. Unpredicatability does not give you free will either.

My argument comes down to knowledge v. ignorance. Our ignorance is what forces us to assign propabilities to dice outcome. However our knowledge does allow us calculate those probabilities accurately.

Imagine a dice before it has been rolled. We say that the probability of a six is 1/6. Now just after a dice is rolled, we can measure its velocity rate of spin, the coefficient of friction of the table etc and use that knowledge to revise our estimates of the probabilities. We still won't be able to predict exactly what the dice will land on because of "butterfly effects" but the probabilities we calculate for that roll will be more accurate than the 1/6. If we continue to monitor the dice as it rolls, and slows down, we will be able to get closer and closer to knowing for certain which side it will land on.

You can look back at the actions any individual has taken and say "They did xxx" with 100% accuracy. You cannot, however, look forward and say what they will do - you can only make a probabilistic assumption about what they might do.

But isn't this just a measure of our ignorance of their brain state and how the brain works?

Free will doesn't imply that physics doesn't work. Just like the butterfly effect, there are boundaries. We can't will unicorns into existence. Free will simply means that decision points exist, and that we have the ability to consider the outcomes and make choices. Determinism takes an opposing view - that decision points do not exist - and that there is only one possible path forward, and if we had enough information we would be able to determine it exactly ahead of time.

But our inability to do this doesn't give us free will! We can say that a decision point exists for the dice in the example in that before a certain point various options are open, but after a certain point we could know for certain what it will land on. But that doesn't give the dice any measure of free will.

And I would say that the difference between us and the dice is a matter of cognizance. But not because of the reasons you think. What our cognizance gives us is not free will, but the feeling that we have free will. It exposes us to part of our own decision making process, so we are a witness to the transition between not knowing what choice we are going to make and knowing it.

Free will simply says that at each decision point, we are faced with possibilities, and that we have the ability to make choices. Determinism pretty much says that no decision points exist. Would you agree that this is the essence of the debate?

I don't know. Your view sounds mystical to me. Or perhaps dualist. It sounds like it posits an "I" which sits above or outside of the brain and does something or is in control. I grant that this is what it feels like, but I don't believe that this is actually true.

Do you make choices or does your brain make the choices for you? And does the "for you" add anything of significance to the latter option?

Free will says that when you were at the grocery, and you picked up grape jam, you could have picked strawberry instead - that option existed. Determinism says that when you were at the grocery, grape was the only option available to you.
I say that when I go the grocery store and stand in front of the jam shelf a stream of photons enters my eye and triggers electrical signals in my optic nerve which trigger a whole cascade of other electrical and chemical changes in my brain some of which I am aware of and classify as "triggering memories" or "thinking what do I have at home" or "comparing prices" etc but most of which I am completely unaware of. And eventually something happens within my brain which I classify as making a decision and a signal gets sent to my hand to pick up a particular jar.

I also say that when a non-cognizant robot goes shopping, exactly the same sort of process occurs except he is not aware of any of those thought processes.

So I end up with the feeling of having made a decision and he doesn't.

So "free will" is not something which allows you to make a decision, it is the feeling you get when you make a decision.

[muidiri]

I smipped a bunch for length ;). Let's back up - what exactly do you thin the term "free will" means, and what do you think it implies?


I say that when I go the grocery store and stand in front of the jam shelf a stream of photons enters my eye and triggers electrical signals in my optic nerve which trigger a whole cascade of other electrical and chemical changes in my brain some of which I am aware of and classify as "triggering memories" or "thinking what do I have at home" or "comparing prices" etc but most of which I am completely unaware of. And eventually something happens within my brain which I classify as making a decision and a signal gets sent to my hand to pick up a particular jar.

I also say that when a non-cognizant robot goes shopping, exactly the same sort of process occurs except he is not aware of any of those thought processes.

So I end up with the feeling of having made a decision and he doesn't.

So "free will" is not something which allows you to make a decision, it is the feeling you get when you make a decision.

I'm going to disagree with you here. When a non-cognizant robot is sent to the store, he enters a process for jelly picking. The process includes only those possibilities that the designer has programmed into him. He goes through a list of "If-Then" statements, and "chooses" accordingly. He will always come to the optimal conclusion based on the parameters of his programming.

Key points here:
1) The robot will always "choose" optimally and rationally
2) The robot will only choose from the predetermined set of options programmed into him

A human, however, who is cognizant, has the ability to make a non-optimal choice, as well as an irrational choice. I'm assuming that we can agree that humans are often irrational, right? Additionally, the set of options available to a human is NOT predetermined - they can imagine and create choices that don't exist to the robot. The robot is programmed to go pick a jelly. The human could decide NOT to choose any jelly at all because they don't have what they want. The human can decide to try a new flavor that they didn't previously know existed. The human could decide to throw a tantrum and knock over the jelly shelf.

Humans have intuition, and we think creatively - we can think beyond what has previously been taught to us. We can create new ideas.

Free will isn't just a "feeling". Free will might very well engender a feeling, but the sense in which most of us view free will is in the sense of being aware that options exist, and in recognizing that a choice is being made. Furthermore, it is free will that confers responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. Without free will, there's no rational way for you to expect anyone to take responsibility for their actions - they had no choice in the matter and could not have done otherwise, so they are not responsible for the outcomes in any way.

What I find interesting, is that I view determinism as a substitute for god and religion. Instead of "It's god's will" or "That is how god made me", you say it's determined. You, however, seem to find free-will as a substitute for god... but I don't fully understand why. In truth, both of these concepts are the result of religious inquiry. If I recall correctly, the debate between free-will and determinism was a large part of the underlying schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, with Catholicism coming down on the side of free-will, and Protestantism coming down on the side of determinism. I'm sure the argument is older than that... but this is the first case of which I'm aware of it being well documented.

[EricK]

I smipped a bunch for length ;). Let's back up - what exactly do you thin the term "free will" means, and what do you think it implies?


I say that when I go the grocery store and stand in front of the jam shelf a stream of photons enters my eye and triggers electrical signals in my optic nerve which trigger a whole cascade of other electrical and chemical changes in my brain some of which I am aware of and classify as "triggering memories" or "thinking what do I have at home" or "comparing prices" etc but most of which I am completely unaware of. And eventually something happens within my brain which I classify as making a decision and a signal gets sent to my hand to pick up a particular jar.

I also say that when a non-cognizant robot goes shopping, exactly the same sort of process occurs except he is not aware of any of those thought processes.

So I end up with the feeling of having made a decision and he doesn't.

So "free will" is not something which allows you to make a decision, it is the feeling you get when you make a decision.

I'm going to disagree with you here. When a non-cognizant robot is sent to the store, he enters a process for jelly picking. The process includes only those possibilities that the designer has programmed into him. He goes through a list of "If-Then" statements, and "chooses" accordingly. He will always come to the optimal conclusion based on the parameters of his programming.

Key points here:
1) The robot will always "choose" optimally and rationally
2) The robot will only choose from the predetermined set of options programmed into him

A human, however, who is cognizant, has the ability to make a non-optimal choice, as well as an irrational choice. I'm assuming that we can agree that humans are often irrational, right? Additionally, the set of options available to a human is NOT predetermined - they can imagine and create choices that don't exist to the robot. The robot is programmed to go pick a jelly. The human could decide NOT to choose any jelly at all because they don't have what they want. The human can decide to try a new flavor that they didn't previously know existed. The human could decide to throw a tantrum and knock over the jelly shelf.

Humans have intuition, and we think creatively - we can think beyond what has previously been taught to us. We can create new ideas.
You seem to have a failure of imagination here. Current robots may be as you claim - to use an analogy, they are at the evolutionary level of single-celled organisms, or at best insects. Robots are like this both because of our limitations as programmers and the incredibly short time we have been able to build and program robots. But imagine a robot of the future, a robot which can go shopping entirely by itself. This would have to be of similar intelligence and complexity as a human. Now I don't see any particular reason why a robot can't be that intelligent. I also don't see any particular reason why such a robot needs to be self-aware in the same way we are. It would have to be aware of itself in the sense of avoiding obstacles, and in general keeping away from harm, but I don't think that necessarily implies being aware of its own thought processes. But from the outside it would appear to act in the same way we do - responding to the environment, extracting what appear to be the most relevant bits of information from among the billion bits which bombard it (and us) at every moment, and making choices as best it can etc.

Now if I am right, then either you accept that a complicated enough robot, even though it is following its programming, does have free will, or you accept that free will is the feeling which we get, and this imagined robot doesn't - but even then, it doesn't appear to help or hinder the robot in its interactions with the world.

Or I am wrong. But if I am wrong that such a robot could be built, I'd like to know why you think that is.

In some ways there is something rather Star Trekky about your beliefs. Of the many things which have never rung true to me, perhaps the most jarring are the storylines about Data (from Star Trek TNG) or the Doctor (from Voyager) trying to be more human and to surpass their programming etc. It has always struck me that the writers have profound misunderstandings about what it means to be human, what it would mean to be an intelligent computer program, and what the difference between the two would be, and how they would manifest themselves.

Free will isn't just a "feeling". Free will might very well engender a feeling, but the sense in which most of us view free will is in the sense of being aware that options exist, and in recognizing that a choice is being made. Furthermore, it is free will that confers responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. Without free will, there's no rational way for you to expect anyone to take responsibility for their actions - they had no choice in the matter and could not have done otherwise, so they are not responsible for the outcomes in any way.

This is just wishful thinking though. It's identical to the argument that without God and an afterlife, this life is meaningless. Well even if that is true, then that doesn't mean that God and the afterlife exists. It doesn't even mean you are better off believing in God and an afterlife, just to give some sort of meaning to your life! And your having a need to confer responsibility on other people doesn't magically mean the world conforms to that.

What I find interesting, is that I view determinism as a substitute for god and religion. Instead of "It's god's will" or "That is how god made me", you say it's determined. You, however, seem to find free-will as a substitute for god... but I don't fully understand why. In truth, both of these concepts are the result of religious inquiry. If I recall correctly, the debate between free-will and determinism was a large part of the underlying schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, with Catholicism coming down on the side of free-will, and Protestantism coming down on the side of determinism. I'm sure the argument is older than that... but this is the first case of which I'm aware of it being well documented.
It's not that I view free will as a substitute for God. I see similarities between belief in free will and belief in God. There's the wishful thining aspect of it, as just described. There's also an "explanation which doesn't really explain anything" sort of vibe to both beliefs. Both seem to be mysterious entities which are inserted at arbitrary points to put an end to infinite regresses - uncaused causers, if you like. They're both used as ways to make us feel special.

[muidiri]

You seem to have a failure of imagination here. Current robots may be as you claim - to use an analogy, they are at the evolutionary level of single-celled organisms, or at best insects. Robots are like this both because of our limitations as programmers and the incredibly short time we have been able to build and program robots. But imagine a robot of the future, a robot which can go shopping entirely by itself. This would have to be of similar intelligence and complexity as a human. Now I don't see any particular reason why a robot can't be that intelligent. I also don't see any particular reason why such a robot needs to be self-aware in the same way we are. It would have to be aware of itself in the sense of avoiding obstacles, and in general keeping away from harm, but I don't think that necessarily implies being aware of its own thought processes. But from the outside it would appear to act in the same way we do - responding to the environment, extracting what appear to be the most relevant bits of information from among the billion bits which bombard it (and us) at every moment, and making choices as best it can etc.

Now if I am right, then either you accept that a complicated enough robot, even though it is following its programming, does have free will, or you accept that free will is the feeling which we get, and this imagined robot doesn't - but even then, it doesn't appear to help or hinder the robot in its interactions with the world.

Or I am wrong. But if I am wrong that such a robot could be built, I'd like to know why you think that is.
When a robot can be programmed such that it has the ability to think creatively, to weigh options based on all the outcomes that it can imagine for a given scenario, and has the ability to react in an irrational fashion, I'll happily say that it has free will. That's what free will is. Whether it's programmed or whether it evolved naturally, the ability to think creatively and to consider the options on their own merits, and to envision potential courses of action outside of a limited list hardcoded into your brain... then you have free will. I don't care if the entity in question was built by human hands in a factor, or if it was built by DNA in a womb. It's the type of thought involved that makes it free will.

In some ways there is something rather Star Trekky about your beliefs. Of the many things which have never rung true to me, perhaps the most jarring are the storylines about Data (from Star Trek TNG) or the Doctor (from Voyager) trying to be more human and to surpass their programming etc. It has always struck me that the writers have profound misunderstandings about what it means to be human, what it would mean to be an intelligent computer program, and what the difference between the two would be, and how they would manifest themselves.
Sounds like maybe it's your imagination that's limited here. Maybe you didn't read enough Asimov as a wean ;).


It's not that I view free will as a substitute for God. I see similarities between belief in free will and belief in God. There's the wishful thining aspect of it, as just described. There's also an "explanation which doesn't really explain anything" sort of vibe to both beliefs. Both seem to be mysterious entities which are inserted at arbitrary points to put an end to infinite regresses - uncaused causers, if you like. They're both used as ways to make us feel special.
He he he... I told you so. You see free will as a reflection of a belief in god. I see determinism as a reflection of a belief in god.

What infinite regression do you see in free will? Because I see far more of an end to that regression in saying "I chose X", whereas determinism seems to be one never ending regression that ends at the big-bang... so you never get a cause at all.

[EricK]

It's not that I view free will as a substitute for God. I see similarities between belief in free will and belief in God. There's the wishful thining aspect of it, as just described. There's also an "explanation which doesn't really explain anything" sort of vibe to both beliefs. Both seem to be mysterious entities which are inserted at arbitrary points to put an end to infinite regresses - uncaused causers, if you like. They're both used as ways to make us feel special.
He he he... I told you so. You see free will as a reflection of a belief in god. I see determinism as a reflection of a belief in god.
I thought you said free will and determinism were substitutes for god. I am pointing out that just as all believers in conspiracy theories use exactly the same type of arguments as each other, so all believers in the supernatural and mystical use exactly the same type of arguments as each other.

But I don't think that believers in free will are substituting for a lost belief in god - they are just using similar apologetics.

What infinite regression do you see in free will? Because I see far more of an end to that regression in saying "I chose X", whereas determinism seems to be one never ending regression that ends at the big-bang... so you never get a cause at all.
My point was that free will is used in an attempt to stop an infintie regress - just like God is. There is an obvious potential infinite regress when you consider causation within our universe. Both God believers and Free-will believers attribute to their object of belief the ability to cause things without themselves being caused.

[muidiri]

My point was that free will is used in an attempt to stop an infintie regress - just like God is. There is an obvious potential infinite regress when you consider causation within our universe. Both God believers and Free-will believers attribute to their object of belief the ability to cause things without themselves being caused.
So do determinists. Your causes are regressive and end with the uncaused big bang. So what?

For all realistic purposes, we don't need the initial cause. We only need the pertinent cause. And when we're discussing a course of action that I took, you need look no further than the reasons I give for the choice I made. Taking it back to the dust from the last supernova as the cause of the course I ended up on is pointless and does nothing except to ensure that nobody takes responsibility for their actions.

Are you a parent?

BTW - no comment on my robot potentially having free will?

[Sidhe747]

Do compatibilists exist?

[muidiri]

Do compatibilists exist?

I will politely reiterate what I wrote in another thread...

Sidhe747... PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE for the love of all that nice in the world, put some thought into your posts!

Right now you're coming across as very adolescent and attention-seeking. Most of what you've posted seems to have virtually nothing to do with the topic under discussion. It may not be your intent, but it comes across kind of trollish. If you take the time to read through the thread and post well thought out comments that are germane to the discussion, you're far less likely to irritate us all.

Thanks,
mui

Your comment here seems to have no thought behind it, and isn't really contributing to the discussion at hand. Humorous one-liners are fine on occassion, but when they make up the bulk of your posts, they get very frustrating for the rest of us. At best, it appears that you are simply post-whoring. At worst, it appears you are trolling. Please try to elaborate more and put some thought into how your posts can contribute to (rather than distract from) the discussion at hand.

[EricK]

When a robot can be programmed such that it has the ability to think creatively, to weigh options based on all the outcomes that it can imagine for a given scenario, and has the ability to react in an irrational fashion, I'll happily say that it has free will. That's what free will is. Whether it's programmed or whether it evolved naturally, the ability to think creatively and to consider the options on their own merits, and to envision potential courses of action outside of a limited list hardcoded into your brain... then you have free will. I don't care if the entity in question was built by human hands in a factor, or if it was built by DNA in a womb. It's the type of thought involved that makes it free will.
Here again, I think your thoughts are clouded by a simplistic picture you have of robots, and an exaggerated picture you have of humans.

I can't envision potential courses of action outside a limited list of hardcoded options. The only difference is that my limited list is longer than that of current robots. I use "hardcoded" to mean fixed at a certain time. No doubt my list can expand or contract over time, but that happens in ways either outside of my control, or based on other hardcoded processes.

Naturally, the more complicated the program a machine/human runs, the more complicated and unpredictable they will be. And what differentiates the complex programs from the simple ones is that the more complicated the program, the more the output depends on the processing and the less it depends just on the external inputs.

And if you want to make the claim that as the output starts to depend more and more on the internal processing and less, percentagewise, on just the external inputs, the more the machine demonstrates free will, then I would probably agree with you.

But I don't think free will in that sense is anti-deterministic. So I don't think you'd be happy with it.

[muidiri]

I can't envision potential courses of action outside a limited list of hardcoded options.
This is the crux of it, IMO.

Humans CAN envision potential courses of action outside of a limited list of hardcoded options, and indeed we have.

Remember the story of archimedes in the bathtub? "Eureka" moments do occur - we come up with solutions that did not previously exist. We make connections where none previously existed. We create new ideas, new concepts, and new knowledge.

We create new potential courses of action that are NOT hardcoded.

[EricK]

My point was that free will is used in an attempt to stop an infintie regress - just like God is. There is an obvious potential infinite regress when you consider causation within our universe. Both God believers and Free-will believers attribute to their object of belief the ability to cause things without themselves being caused.
So do determinists. Your causes are regressive and end with the uncaused big bang. So what?

For all realistic purposes, we don't need the initial cause. We only need the pertinent cause. And when we're discussing a course of action that I took, you need look no further than the reasons I give for the choice I made. Taking it back to the dust from the last supernova as the cause of the course I ended up on is pointless and does nothing except to ensure that nobody takes responsibility for their actions.
But why stop at the reasons you give for the choice you made? Why not go back just one more step for the reason you gave the reasons you did?

As experiments with split-brain patients show, the brain is excellent at confabulating. Sometimes it makes up reasons for what it perceives itself to have done. And when this happens, you, the owner of that brain would be none the wiser.

In fact, it is by looking at what happens when the brain goes wrong, that makes me certain that the brain is nothing more than a complicated machine.

When experiments on such people can show that they have exactly the same feeling of having freely chosen something when they actually haven't, I become very suspicious of relying on that feeling as a judge of what is actually happening.

Are you a parent?

No. But I am an uncle.

But isn't it clear that free will (or the appearance of it) is something that develops over the course of a human life? And even if it is there in some small measure when the baby is born, it is certainly completely absent at some level of embryonic development. So if an embryo has no free will, then it is not making any choices for which it is responsible, so any changes which happen to it are not its responsibility, so the sort of person it is at the time when it actually has some amount of free will (in your sense) is not something it is at all responsible for. And surely that will have a huge impact on the sort of person it will be when it has total free will. But at that point, you wish to claim it is totally responsible for all its actions, whereas those actions are surely hugely correlated with the sort of life it has had to that point. And that seems to me to be dangerously close to blaming someone for their own upbringing.

[muidiri]

But why stop at the reasons you give for the choice you made? Why not go back just one more step for the reason you gave the reasons you did?
This is a pointless part of this argument Erick - BOTH of our approaches are infinitely regressive if you keep asking questions. Since both fail on this one, why not just drop this line of reasoning altogether? Causality has nothing to do with whether or not real options exist, and whether decisions get made.

Are you a parent?

No. But I am an uncle.

But isn't it clear that free will (or the appearance of it) is something that develops over the course of a human life? And even if it is there in some small measure when the baby is born, it is certainly completely absent at some level of embryonic development. So if an embryo has no free will, then it is not making any choices for which it is responsible, so any changes which happen to it are not its responsibility, so the sort of person it is at the time when it actually has some amount of free will (in your sense) is not something it is at all responsible for. And surely that will have a huge impact on the sort of person it will be when it has total free will. But at that point, you wish to claim it is totally responsible for all its actions, whereas those actions are surely hugely correlated with the sort of life it has had to that point. And that seems to me to be dangerously close to blaming someone for their own upbringing.[/QUOTE]

Ahem. Now we're back to one of my earliest posts. Cognitive development is a well-documented part of growth. Cognition develops as the infant grows to childhood. IIRC, this sort of cognition develops somewhere between 2 and 4 years of age.

If someone fails to develop cognitively at that point, then they are broken (insert your choice of more PC terms here). They do NOT have the ability to weigh decisions and to consider consequences. As I've already said, that sort of disability is an exception to responsibility - they are unable to cognate. For the remaining 99.9% of the human population, however, the ability to weigh and consider the potential outcomes of our decisions does exist, to a fairly regular degree.

[EricK]

I can't envision potential courses of action outside a limited list of hardcoded options.
This is the crux of it, IMO.

Humans CAN envision potential courses of action outside of a limited list of hardcoded options, and indeed we have.

Remember the story of archimedes in the bathtub? "Eureka" moments do occur - we come up with solutions that did not previously exist. We make connections where none previously existed. We create new ideas, new concepts, and new knowledge.

We create new potential courses of action that are NOT hardcoded.

When you put it explicitly like this it I became even more confused as to what your point is. This sort of thing seems totally unrelated to free will to me! For one thing, most people never have a Eureka moment. For another, you would, I assume, ascribe free will to every voluntary action. But almost all of these just involve choosing from a very limited range of hardcoded actions.

Yes, if I were in a supermarket and trying to choose between strawberry jam and grape jam, I could instead decide to smash all the jars and leg it out of there. But so what? Surely if I instead do just choose a flavour, I am exercising my free will just as much, despite having chosen from a very limited list.

[EricK]

But why stop at the reasons you give for the choice you made? Why not go back just one more step for the reason you gave the reasons you did?
This is a pointless part of this argument Erick - BOTH of our approaches are infinitely regressive if you keep asking questions. Since both fail on this one, why not just drop this line of reasoning altogether? Causality has nothing to do with whether or not real options exist, and whether decisions get made.
I agree. But to me a computer chess program has real options, and makes real choices. It has just as many options within the confines if the game as a human player, and makes its choices via a vaguely similar process. I grant that it has fewer if any options outside its limited realm, but this is just a reflection of its relative simplicity. It doesn't seem to me to point to a fundamental difference in what it means for it to make a decision compared to me.

Are you a parent?

No. But I am an uncle.

But isn't it clear that free will (or the appearance of it) is something that develops over the course of a human life? And even if it is there in some small measure when the baby is born, it is certainly completely absent at some level of embryonic development. So if an embryo has no free will, then it is not making any choices for which it is responsible, so any changes which happen to it are not its responsibility, so the sort of person it is at the time when it actually has some amount of free will (in your sense) is not something it is at all responsible for. And surely that will have a huge impact on the sort of person it will be when it has total free will. But at that point, you wish to claim it is totally responsible for all its actions, whereas those actions are surely hugely correlated with the sort of life it has had to that point. And that seems to me to be dangerously close to blaming someone for their own upbringing.

Ahem. Now we're back to one of my earliest posts. Cognitive development is a well-documented part of growth. Cognition develops as the infant grows to childhood. IIRC, this sort of cognition develops somewhere between 2 and 4 years of age.

If someone fails to develop cognitively at that point, then they are broken (insert your choice of more PC terms here). They do NOT have the ability to weigh decisions and to consider consequences. As I've already said, that sort of disability is an exception to responsibility - they are unable to cognate. For the remaining 99.9% of the human population, however, the ability to weigh and consider the potential outcomes of our decisions does exist, to a fairly regular degree.
Imagine this experiment:
There are four groups of 2,500 people:
Group 1 - people born and brought up in Slumsville
Group 2 - people born and brought up in Poshtown
Group 3 - people born in Slumsville, adopted by a family in Poshtown
Group 4 - people born in Poshtown, adopted by a family in Slumsville
I believe that if you examined each of these groups, you would find certain correlations between the groups based and the types of choices they tended to make.

Now this, to me, seems very pertinent. If members of one group consistently made better choices, on average, than members of another group, then it seems perverse to say anything other than the different upbringings had a causal effect on the choices they have made.

To say that the people themselves are totally responsible for the choices they make seems to be just a justification for not doing anything to help them out of whatever mess they are in.

[muidiri]

I can't envision potential courses of action outside a limited list of hardcoded options.
This is the crux of it, IMO.

Humans CAN envision potential courses of action outside of a limited list of hardcoded options, and indeed we have.

Remember the story of archimedes in the bathtub? "Eureka" moments do occur - we come up with solutions that did not previously exist. We make connections where none previously existed. We create new ideas, new concepts, and new knowledge.

We create new potential courses of action that are NOT hardcoded.

When you put it explicitly like this it I became even more confused as to what your point is. This sort of thing seems totally unrelated to free will to me! For one thing, most people never have a Eureka moment. For another, you would, I assume, ascribe free will to every voluntary action. But almost all of these just involve choosing from a very limited range of hardcoded actions.

Yes, if I were in a supermarket and trying to choose between strawberry jam and grape jam, I could instead decide to smash all the jars and leg it out of there. But so what? Surely if I instead do just choose a flavour, I am exercising my free will just as much, despite having chosen from a very limited list.

My point is that your list is NOT hardcoded. There's nothing within you that says "Here's your list of options for the jelly store". You can, and do, think creatively. No, we don't all have "Eureka" moments. That was simply an example as evidence of creative thought processes - they exist, and they do occur, therefore it's NOT hardcoded.

[muidiri]

I agree. But to me a computer chess program has real options, and makes real choices. It has just as many options within the confines if the game as a human player, and makes its choices via a vaguely similar process. I grant that it has fewer if any options outside its limited realm, but this is just a reflection of its relative simplicity. It doesn't seem to me to point to a fundamental difference in what it means for it to make a decision compared to me.
No, the computer doesn't have as many options within the confines of the game as you do - specifically because you are NOT confined to the rules of the game. You can cheat, for example. This option is not, and is never available to the computer (at this stage of its development). Here's one for you to ponder, but give me some slack if it's vague, as I don't play chess. When you play, there are various strategies that get used, right - a set of conditional moves that are expected to result in some particular outcome, or which can limit the other player's options if done right, correct? The computer has available to it only those strategies programmed into it. You, on the other hand (assuming you're a very good player) have the ability to invent new strategies. They aren't hardcoded into your limited set of options - you can invent them.


Ahem. Now we're back to one of my earliest posts. Cognitive development is a well-documented part of growth. Cognition develops as the infant grows to childhood. IIRC, this sort of cognition develops somewhere between 2 and 4 years of age.

If someone fails to develop cognitively at that point, then they are broken (insert your choice of more PC terms here). They do NOT have the ability to weigh decisions and to consider consequences. As I've already said, that sort of disability is an exception to responsibility - they are unable to cognate. For the remaining 99.9% of the human population, however, the ability to weigh and consider the potential outcomes of our decisions does exist, to a fairly regular degree.
Imagine this experiment:
There are four groups of 2,500 people:
Group 1 - people born and brought up in Slumsville
Group 2 - people born and brought up in Poshtown
Group 3 - people born in Slumsville, adopted by a family in Poshtown
Group 4 - people born in Poshtown, adopted by a family in Slumsville
I believe that if you examined each of these groups, you would find certain correlations between the groups based and the types of choices they tended to make.

Now this, to me, seems very pertinent. If members of one group consistently made better choices, on average, than members of another group, then it seems perverse to say anything other than the different upbringings had a causal effect on the choices they have made.

To say that the people themselves are totally responsible for the choices they make seems to be just a justification for not doing anything to help them out of whatever mess they are in.[/QUOTE]

You're confusing the actuality with the probability (or in this case the ability). Just because a less-than-optimal decision is made doesn't mean that the person was unable to make a better decision. It's the difference between someone who can and does use proper grammar and someone who is not capable of using proper grammar. I know lots of people who use crappy grammar... but they are fully capable of using it properly - if they chose to do so. There is no reason for you to assume they are incapable of using grammar appropriately.

Same idea - I know lots of people who make crappy decisions. They are, however capable of making better decisions.

What funny here is that you're arguing that background affects a person's ability to make good decisions. I'll give you that... if you'll just concede that they have the ability to make decisions in the first place - they have free will ;).

[EricK]

What funny here is that you're arguing that background affects a person's ability to make good decisions. I'll give you that... if you'll just concede that they have the ability to make decisions in the first place - they have free will ;).
Really there are two arguments going on here. One is a semantic one - what does it mean to have free will? I'm not actually that bothered about this one. If you want free will to be just the ability to make decisions then that is fine with me. It obviously exists.

The more important argument to me is what are the consequences of having free will?

Look at this argument (which is just as suited to your thread in miscellaneous discussions):
A person makes choices,therefore
he is responsible for those choices, therefore
he is responsible for the outcome of those choices, therefore
he is to blame for the outcome of his choices, therefore
he is to blame for the situation he finds himself in, therefore
why should we care about the situation he finds himself in.

Now whether this represents your actual thought process, I think you'll agree that it does seem to represent the thought processes of many "internet libertarians". And if it doesn't represent your thought processes (and I hope it doesn't!), at which link in the chain do your thought processes differ?

[muidiri]

What funny here is that you're arguing that background affects a person's ability to make good decisions. I'll give you that... if you'll just concede that they have the ability to make decisions in the first place - they have free will ;).
Really there are two arguments going on here. One is a semantic one - what does it mean to have free will? I'm not actually that bothered about this one. If you want free will to be just the ability to make decisions then that is fine with me. It obviously exists.

The more important argument to me is what are the consequences of having free will?

Look at this argument (which is just as suited to your thread in miscellaneous discussions):
A person makes choices,therefore
he is responsible for those choices, therefore
he is responsible for the outcome of those choices, therefore
he is to blame for the outcome of his choices, therefore
he is to blame for the situation he finds himself in, therefore
why should we care about the situation he finds himself in.

Now whether this represents your actual thought process, I think you'll agree that it does seem to represent the thought processes of many "internet libertarians". And if it doesn't represent your thought processes (and I hope it doesn't!), at which link in the chain do your thought processes differ?

That's a horribly linear and simplistic approach there.

Try again:

A person makes choices,
Therefore a person is responsible for those choices,
Meaning that, to the extent that the outcome is reasonably foreseeable given the person's knowledge, they are responsible for those consequences.

Asking that a person be responsible for their choices in no way whatsoever implies that we shouldn't care. Not even close - and not for any of the "internet libertarians" I've met.

One can offer assistance and compassion while simultaneously expecting the recipient to acknowledge their own hand in their situation. Kind of like hugging your nephew and giving him a cup of cocoa to ease the hurt of an injury, but still telling him he ought to have known better than to jump off the roof, and telling him that his injury is nobody's fault but his own ;).

Let me expand... just because I feel voluble. I have a friend who is quite young. At 19 she found herself pregnant, nearly homeless, and unemployed, with no family. In a fit of emotion, she said "Why do these things happen to me?" So we told her: she had sex without a condom, and after having declined our offer to pay for birth control pills; she had the poor judgment to call a customer a bitch before ensuring that the line was actually on hold; she had made the decision to move away from her foster parents because she didn't like the small town they lived in. These things happened to her because of the choices she made. She is responsible for the consequences of her actions. We expected her to take responsibility and ownership of her choices.

We paid for her termination of pregnancy. We offered her a room in our house, and when she declined, we helped her with the first two months of rent while she was looking for a job. We helped her brush up her resume, and gave her guidance on how to find a job, and what not to say in an interview. We gave her a shoulder to cry on, and held her hand through the whole thing.

Requiring acceptance of responsibility is a far cry from not caring and being compassionate. They aren't mutually exclusive.

When she got a good job that paid well, and found a roommate that she really liked, and got a job on the side doing promotions work, and bought her first brand new car that she owns all by herself... we were also there for her - to tell her that it wasn't "luck" that she got these things - they were the result of her work and her effort. She saved up for the down payment for her car, and paid off her outstanding debt so she would qualify. She saw the opportunity for the promo work, and she went in of her own volition, interviewed, and made the effort to learn about the company she would be representing. These things didn't just fall out of the sky and land in her lap.

It goes both ways: you are responsible for both the negative and the positive consequences of your choices.

[EricK]

What funny here is that you're arguing that background affects a person's ability to make good decisions. I'll give you that... if you'll just concede that they have the ability to make decisions in the first place - they have free will ;).
Really there are two arguments going on here. One is a semantic one - what does it mean to have free will? I'm not actually that bothered about this one. If you want free will to be just the ability to make decisions then that is fine with me. It obviously exists.

The more important argument to me is what are the consequences of having free will?

Look at this argument (which is just as suited to your thread in miscellaneous discussions):
A person makes choices,therefore
he is responsible for those choices, therefore
he is responsible for the outcome of those choices, therefore
he is to blame for the outcome of his choices, therefore
he is to blame for the situation he finds himself in, therefore
why should we care about the situation he finds himself in.

Now whether this represents your actual thought process, I think you'll agree that it does seem to represent the thought processes of many "internet libertarians". And if it doesn't represent your thought processes (and I hope it doesn't!), at which link in the chain do your thought processes differ?

That's a horribly linear and simplistic approach there.

Try again:

A person makes choices,
Therefore a person is responsible for those choices,
Meaning that, to the extent that the outcome is reasonably foreseeable given the person's knowledge, they are responsible for those consequences.

Asking that a person be responsible for their choices in no way whatsoever implies that we shouldn't care. Not even close - and not for any of the "internet libertarians" I've met.

Well it's not clear where I got that idea form then, as being in the UK, the only exposure to (self-described) libertarians I get is from the internet; and the only conclusions I draw about them come from reading their own posts. I could name names (they are pretty much all on FRDB so you'd know them), but what's the point? Mention people in a desperate situation and they fall over themselves and each other in their frantic rush to blame the victims and explain why they don't deserve help. I can't believe you've not noticed this!

[muidiri]

Well it's not clear where I got that idea form then, as being in the UK, the only exposure to (self-described) libertarians I get is from the internet; and the only conclusions I draw about them come from reading their own posts. I could name names (they are pretty much all on FRDB so you'd know them), but what's the point? Mention people in a desperate situation and they fall over themselves and each other in their frantic rush to blame the victims and explain why they don't deserve help. I can't believe you've not noticed this!

There are a few - and I've seen some pretty odd arguments here and there. But the handful that I know and respect aren't on the looney end of things... just like with the progressives and liberals and conservatives that I respect ;).

Honestly, I think there's a pretty good chance that you're reading your own stereotype into the posts, rather than asking for reasons and getting to the heart of the issue.

There are lots of cases where I will argue against intervention in the name of compassion. In some cases it's because the cost to do so is higher than the benefit that I perceive to accrue. Sometimes it's because I don't think the situation merits help. And often it's because the people calling for aid to be given are so insistent that it's "not the fault" of whoever needs the help.

More often, I suspect that what you see is an argument against a particular method of giving help. I'm very critical of national welfare... but I'm a huge proponent of local charity. I don't support the abuse of any minority for the benefit of the majority - and I use the dictionary definition of "minority" and apply it equally to everyone - including the extremely small minority of the wealthy. I have extremely low tolerance for rapists, and would just as soon see them all removed permanently from society - I don't believe they have the right to exist in our society, and I'm unwilling to allow them to beg off their responsibility for their actions.

perhaps you should consider whether the libertarian arguing with you is arguing against compassion or against a method of providing that compassion.

I don't see what this has to do with this discussion though... libertarians are hardly the only free-will proponents out there.

BTW - is the k in Erick an initial for a last name or is it how you spell your first name? I keep trying to accidentally drop it when I type, but I'm not sure if that would be acceptable.

[muidiri]

Also... I asked you previously what the term "free will" implies to you... but I don't recall a response on that one. Care to share your understanding so we can potentially get past the semantic divide?

[EricK]

BTW - is the k in Erick an initial for a last name or is it how you spell your first name? I keep trying to accidentally drop it when I type, but I'm not sure if that would be acceptable.

It's an initial. Which is why I spell it with a capital letter :).

[EricK]

Also... I asked you previously what the term "free will" implies to you... but I don't recall a response on that one. Care to share your understanding so we can potentially get past the semantic divide?
I've been sitting here for a long while trying to answer this, and I'm finding it hard. Not because I don't have an answer, but because my answer can't help but explode in size from a few sentences to many paragraphs. And when I try to condense it to pithy form, I don't feel it captures what I want to say. I'd either need to write a book, or perhaps draw a mind-map.

I'm going to sleep on it and see what my brain comes up with when my free will doesn't get in the way :)

[muidiri]

BTW - is the k in Erick an initial for a last name or is it how you spell your first name? I keep trying to accidentally drop it when I type, but I'm not sure if that would be acceptable.

It's an initial. Which is why I spell it with a capital letter :).

Duh. It is a capital, isn't it? -1 for observation skills :p

[muidiri]

Also... I asked you previously what the term "free will" implies to you... but I don't recall a response on that one. Care to share your understanding so we can potentially get past the semantic divide?
I've been sitting here for a long while trying to answer this, and I'm finding it hard. Not because I don't have an answer, but because my answer can't help but explode in size from a few sentences to many paragraphs. And when I try to condense it to pithy form, I don't feel it captures what I want to say. I'd either need to write a book, or perhaps draw a mind-map.

I'm going to sleep on it and see what my brain comes up with when my free will doesn't get in the way :)

I don't mind a long explanation. If it were easy to explain what we meant, we'd have concluded this discussion on page one, wouldn't we?

[Rie]

:cool: OI!!! Who pulls your strings? You do, and you are free to do so. So was Hitler. which gets to the point.. as someone else said, You run a choice of action thru central computer and depending on who built the basics of your computer..(your parents?).. you either rebel against dictates that seem wrong for the planet and all people or you go all insane and walk around with a bomb attached to your precious (and I mean this sincerely, precious) body. Amen

[The Barefoot Bum]

[Determinism] raises the moral question of what we should do about wrongdoers. Let them off, because they would've done it anyway? I don't think so.

No, it doesn't. If determinism were true, then we would have no more "choice" about how to respond to objectionable behavior than the original actor would have about doing it in the first place.

Your first point is better. Indeed both philosophical determinism and "free will" are not only unfalsifiable, they are formally undefinable, trading on vague intuitive definitions that evaporate on close scrutiny.

[Febble]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

Missed most of this thread, so apologies if I'm repeating other posts:

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

Pre-destined by whom?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

What would "knowing" mean in that context?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

How are you defining "I"?

[David B]

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

Missed most of this thread, so apologies if I'm repeating other posts:

Or is everything we do pre-destined through a cause of chain and effect going back to the beginning of time?

Pre-destined by whom?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

What would "knowing" mean in that context?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

If you knew all the causes and timings of them, could you predict exactly what would happen in every respect due to the way these things would interact?

Do I have any actual choice in whether or not to post this thread, or am I always going to do so as a result of a combination of circumstances which predictably put me in front of the computer typing this at this point?

How are you defining "I"?

My bold.

If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything

David (gets in before Lizzie)

[Febble]

David, you were in way before Lizzie in the first place :)

[Febble]

From a very excellent book, The Music of Life (http://www.musicoflife.co.uk/), which I've just finished:


Words like 'high' and 'low', 'in' and 'out', 'up' and 'down', are frequently used in language in such metaphorical ways. We can't do without them. Such metaphors have been in our languages so long, dead and buried like fossils in the rock, that we have ceased to think of them as metaphors. Therein lie many of the philosophical traps that our languages have in store for us. precisely because we are unaware of the way they predispose our thinking, we find it more difficult to escape from it.

The self is also such a hidden metaphor. It is a very useful and important one, too. We might say that it is 'as though' a self, as a virtual object, is doing all the things that 'I' do. We need such a metaphor for many other aspects of our culture to fall into place. For example, we need for legal reasons to attribute responsibility to people.

But none of these cultural needs require that a physical object, rather than a coherent integrated process carrying the characteristics of an agent, should have evolved. We have no difficulty in assigning legal responsibility to other things, such as governments and companies, that are not physical objects, but which are clearly agents. In relation to a self, it is the coherence and rationality that matter, not whether there is a bunch of neurons with which the 'I' can be identified. The reason we can naturally think of the self as an object is that it is always associated with a particular body.


Agents are called agents because they are a unit we can regard as free. "Free will" is an tautological formulation really - willed action is, by definition, free, otherwise we would not call it willed.

So the non-tautological question is not, IMO, "does free will exist?" but "does it make sense to talk about willed action?".

And clearly it does. Whose will we ascribe action to simply depends on the unit of analysis we are interested in, and a very natural unit-of-analysis is the person - the "self...associated with a particular body".

[The Barefoot Bum]

Agents are called agents because they are a unit we can regard as free. "Free will" is an tautological formulation really - willed action is, by definition, free, otherwise we would not call it willed.

So the non-tautological question is not, IMO, "does free will exist?" but "does it make sense to talk about willed action?".

And clearly it does. Whose will we ascribe action to simply depends on the unit of analysis we are interested in, and a very natural unit-of-analysis is the person - the "self...associated with a particular body".

Indeed. The kind of ordinary, intuitive meaning of "free will" -- that a people can act (or be prevented from acting) according to the desires and needs (regardless of their causal history) of our minds, and that our behavior is (usually) not "spexish" but flexible and responsive to the environment -- is not really in doubt.

The specifically philosophical conception of free will -- that our desires and needs, our flexibility and responsiveness, are neither random nor have a causal history, at least not a causal history in the material world -- is bullshit of a different flavor, and its discussion nothing but a history of fallacies of ambiguity, equivocation, and covert premises.

[Febble]

What does "spexish" mean?

[The AntiChris]

What does "spexish" mean?Digger_waspSome writers in the philosophy of mind, most notably Daniel Dennett, have cited the behavior of this animal for their arguments about human and animal free will.

Chris

[Febble]

What does "spexish" mean?Digger_waspSome writers in the philosophy of mind, most notably Daniel Dennett, have cited the behavior of this animal for their arguments about human and animal free will.

Chris

Ah. Thanks.

[The Barefoot Bum]

It probably would have helped if I'd spelled "sphexish" correctly in the first place. :whistle: