Just how "free" is freewill?

[Tod]

Freewill is a central concept in Christianity. Indeed, freewill is the ONLY answer Christians give to answer the argument from evil. Suffering, they argue, is necessary because humans have to have both the capacity to choose both good and evil in order to freely choose to worship and serve God. Nevermind that this argument doesn’t address natural suffering humans don’t control (natural disasters, disease, genetic deformity, general human frailty, etc.); it doesn’t even address human “evil”!

Too many people, believers and nonbelievers alike, oversimplify morality as simple choice: some choose to do good, some choose to do bad. Such is the nature of “freewill”: one can freely choose to do one or the other. However, my time in the field of psychology has taught me that morality is anything but that simple.

Take heinous crimes such as murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, etc. as clear cut examples. Why do most people not do these things? Is it simply because they choose not to, or does it have anything to do with conscience, empathy, and general “programming” since birth through a complex combination and interaction of genes and developmental conditioning (from here on out “programming” refers to this interplay specifically) to find causing major suffering in others abhorrent? I fall into the latter category, and my life’s experience has shown me that most people share my aversion to committing heinous crimes that result in serious suffering in others. But wait, it gets better.

Using rape as an example: I have never once in 36 years chosen NOT to rape somebody, yet I have never raped anybody. Why have I never chosen either to rape or to not rape? One most glaring reason is my aforementioned conscience and empathy. However, even if I was a sociopath (somebody with a poorly developed or completely lack of conscience, synonymous with “psychopath”), I still wouldn’t rape, just like most sociopaths don’t rape people! 1 in 25 people is a sociopath, yet only a small percentage of sociopaths will commit rape or murder: most will be content with conning, cheating, lying, and manipulating others to get what they want. And that is the key: what they want.

The main reason I would never rape a woman, EVEN WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE, is because, like most men, I’ve been “programmed” to tie sex with the idea of mutual desirability. I want to be desired and I want to be the “stud” that can please a woman in bed, just like most men. A woman screaming, kicking, hitting, crying, and begging me “please no” is showing clear signs of a lack of desire for me, at the very least. It would be a blow to my ego to experience such utter rejection, so strip away my conscience and my empathy, and I still won’t want to rape. Same with the other heinous crimes: murder, torture, kidnapping, etc. just don’t do it for me. Not only do I have no desire to do them, but they actual repulse me. Fortunately, most people are the same way.

Now turn away from the average, basically moral citizen to those who frequently commit heinous crimes. To stay with rape as an example: the serial rapist reports that he CANNOT “get off” unless his “partner” is displaying terror and he is feeling powerful and dominating. One of his strongest drives of all, the sex drive, has been warped and twisted through his faulty programming so that it is tied with the aforementioned sense of power and control instead of mutual desirability. Where as screams turn me off, they turn him on! So while I NEVER face the choice to rape or not to rape, he faces that choice every single day because he feels a powerful urge to do these things. The same with the serial killer.

The Christian says both I and the serial rapist have freewill, and I simply choose not to rape while he chooses to do so. However, since I have programming that makes committing rape or other heinous acts revolting, it is very easy for me to avoid this harm to others. The rapist, on the other hand, has an equal desire to do what I have a strong desire to avoid. It’s like asking a smoker and nonsmoker not to smoke anymore: you’re asking the nonsmoker to avoid what he hates and the smoker to avoid what he’s driven to do as if it were an instinct! Clearly, they are not equally “free” to choose to either smoke or not. Granted, they are ULTIMATELY able to make a choice, but for the smoker it will require feeling horrible and driven each second, while for the nonsmoker it will be a cakewalk to avoid what he hates, as he is simply going with his drives instead of against them like the smoker.

The same is true of the serial rapist. Ultimately, he can choose not to rape, but he has to fight powerful urges on a regular basis for decades of his life. I can choose not to rape too, but since I despise the concept and the act, I have a drive to avoid what he has a drive to do, and hence never have to choose not to rape.

How is that fair? If stacking the deck in favor of a person (like me and most others) still counts as “freewill,” why on earth would a loving, omnimax God create a genetic code/internal system of conditioning that would allow people to have the deck stacked against them? If you can have inclinations to avoid harming others and still be a freewill agent, any decent being creating life with expectations that that life will avoid harming others would incline ALL of them to avoid harm. The way things are is horribly cruel. The serial rapist could have been a good, productive member of society like me if only he had been programmed to despise rape instead of long for it as I do instead of how he does. My make him have to face a choice most will not have to face?

Here’s the key point: YOU DO NOT CHOOSE EITHER YOUR GENES OR YOUR UPBRING. You as an individual have no control over the formation of your conscience. You don’t choose what drives you and your “taste” in things. Yes, once you’re programmed, you can choose to fight or go with your programming, but certainly the most relevant factor in morality is DRIVE and INCLINATION and not choice! You don’t even have to make a choice if you are programmed correctly, as you’ll never face the choice to do grievous harm since you are so inclined to avoid it. So how could a just God create a world where some people will be driven to do harm, some will be driven to be good, but ALL will be held to the same standard?

Disclaimer: I’m not arguing at all that we shouldn’t lock up killers and rapists because they can’t help their programming. The sad reality is that we have to protect society from these people, so we have little choice but to deal with them. I am arguing, however, that if a God made humans so that they could be corrupted beyond their ability to choose that corruption and then expect them to equally control themselves as those who aren’t corrupted is cruel, and clearly not an Omnimax God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

Completely on the same page with you Tod.

Free, by definition, means unconstrained and unrestrained. Neither compelled nor restricted. This word does not apply to the faculty of human volition by any stretch of the imagination. The faculty we call volition exists as a black box containing a plethora of determining factors far beyond our capacity to comprehend and catalog either completely or even effectively. As you have pointed out, none of us get a choice about our genetic heritage or our upbringing or even the way, as adults, peer society "programs" us by its consensus-driven patterned responses to who it finds us to be. Negative and positive reinforcement doesn't end with childhood, it continues throughout our lives whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, and whether it ultimately works toward our welfare or our harm. Those of us unfortunate enough to find ourselves in the latter category there often end up feeling trapped and hopeless about even the changes we might make, ordinarily, to improve ourselves and our lives, and this feeling gives off its own signal which seems to make the "herd" even more hungry for blood, sad to say. The "herd" seems to NEED failures and scapegoats and will forcibly MAKE those selected for this role fit the role in their consensus judgment through malice, creative spin, mythmaking and story telling, even in cases where everything those people do as individuals actually violates the constraints of said role. The "person X can do no good" phenomenon, which counterbalances the "person Y can do no wrong" phenomenon; both would be absolute bullshit, but there you have it -- herd behavior.

But that would be neither here nor there... point being, people generally invoke free will as a basis for slanderous speculation on why others cannot be more like themselves or more like they would want to see them being. A peculiar flavor of malice attends the specific and particular attribution of deliberateness to the very things individuals simply cannot help about themselves or about being themselves. To say "you do that on purpose" adds a layer of damnableness to the core of their being which they don't need and which can only be counterproductive in their lives, but it satisfies the asshole who seeks to cloak his own desperate gawing NEED to try to punish and control his peers behind some pathetic facade of "righteousness" in his crusade.

Yep, totally with you -- "free will" does not exist, and constitutes a myth as harmful to human society as that of all-powerful deity who claims to be "love" but has no problem resorting to "might makes right" when it suits him.

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

Along those lines comes the imbalanced obsession with "personal/individual responsibility/accountability (hereinafter, "PIRA")

Does PIRA exist? Absolutely. Does it exist in the form most believe it to? Absolutely not.

We could fold this discussion in with your "free" will one here Tod, or another thread could be started for it. Whichever you prefer as you started this thread, so holler back when you get a chance please.

[David B]

This thread reminds me that I must get back to discussing compatibalism with Eudaimonist and others, that I started in another thread on another board.

In short, though, while I would argue that any concept of freedom of will must be rooted in naturalism, I would also argue that it is possible to make choices, including moral choices, even in a deterministic universe (leaving open the question of whether the universe we inhabit is deterministic).

Following arguments presented in Dennett's 'Freedom Evolves' principally.

David B

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

Making choices happens no matter what, though. The real crux of the question on the table would be what's making those choices. Volition in a hermetically sealed vacuum? Or a black box full of pre-existing factors so numerous and complex that it seems easier to refer to the "box" (volition) itself rather than fuss about with what it might contain?

Not arguing for "pure" determinism here, but rather for something akin to an unconscious determinism which would be so complex it defies efforts to fully deconstruct or "step outside of" while in motion. Kind of akin to the limitation of the inherent subjectivity within any system to comprehend itself while functioning inside itself, such as the human brain experiences. At a certain point we all enter the "militant agnostic" zone where, as the saying goes, "I don't know and you don't, either," purely due to the inherent subjectivity of there being a "Knower" at all.

Yuck, this sounds so PoMo, and that would NOT be the intention here. Will try to clarify with an example.

All people have their "good" days and "bad" days, in general those being terms to describe a spectrum of functioning at our best versus functioning not so well. In the area of executing volitional operations, a "good" day may be described as one where the individual experiences the capacity not only to select a course which seems, feels, and/or demonstrates an improvement over their usual default but to do so and have that "work" for him -- have it bring the results such a selection had been intended to bring about. A "bad" day might be where attempts to do this fail over and over again either at the point of exercising volition itself or at the point of what results that brings.

However, no one can "step outside themselves" so as to determine, through volitional processes or exercise, whether today will be a "good" day or a "bad" one in that regard. At least, the one writing this cannot do so and suspects despite occasional pretenses to the contrary, neither can anyone else. Just throw them a "bad" day when they'd rather not have one and it would swiftly disabuse that notion if they happen to be paying attention and being real with themselves, anyway.

So we can have "good" days where volition seems more free, versus "bad" days where it may seem to be non-existent or utterly futile in terms of results, but we do not get to simply pick which we will have at any given time.

Likewise, with the choices we perceive, themselves. We might have "a choice" about any given Thing X, but we do not get to choose what choices we have let alone which ones make themselves apparent to our perception in the situation. To do so we would have to be able to step outside ourselves and (a) know what we don't know; (b) perceive what we cannot or have not perceived; (c) control what all of that consists of.

IMO without those capacities, volition cannot be said to be "neither controlled nor restricted", as the word "free" would imply in the term "free will".

Some, for this reason, take to defining "free" as being simply "not determined by anyone else other than oneself". However, considering that inside that "black box" resides a number of factors from the moment of our birth which others have had a greater hand in putting there than we had ourselves, even that definition would be highly debatable. We might perceive ourselves to be "freely" making a choice which, in reality, has been pre-determined for us by pre-existing programming from parents, teachers, peers, or even just life experiences positive or negative. In some cases, in fact, good choices (seen as good in ethical terms or even just terms of basic mental health) can bring severely poor or problematic outcomes.

This does not mean volition does not exist at all and we never make choices. It just means these things cannot in any sense of the word be said to be "free". Recognition of this would not be for purposes of excusing individual responsibility, but of resurrecting the unpopular notion of corporate responsibility, and examining its power, and determining how it can be applied to increase the likelihood of individuals not only perceiving a broader range of choices but having incentive to make better ones overall -- as well as moving the definition of "better" away from notions of herd-conformity and pleasing someone else's whims at one's own expense and into a realistic realm of what actually increases the experiential health and freedom of both the individual and the group overall.

[Tod]

Along those lines comes the imbalanced obsession with "personal/individual responsibility/accountability (hereinafter, "PIRA")

Does PIRA exist? Absolutely. Does it exist in the form most believe it to? Absolutely not.

We could fold this discussion in with your "free" will one here Tod, or another thread could be started for it. Whichever you prefer as you started this thread, so holler back when you get a chance please.

Seems appropriately related to me; I have no problems melding the two together.

[Tod]

This thread reminds me that I must get back to discussing compatibalism with Eudaimonist and others, that I started in another thread on another board.

In short, though, while I would argue that any concept of freedom of will must be rooted in naturalism, I would also argue that it is possible to make choices, including moral choices, even in a deterministic universe (leaving open the question of whether the universe we inhabit is deterministic).

Following arguments presented in Dennett's 'Freedom Evolves' principally.

David B

Please don't misunderstand me. I do think that ULTIMATELY we make a choice, but I simply argue that there is a lot going on besides JUST the choice, and, more importantly, that choice is the least important element because of the fact that what drives and repels you determines what choices you will face. You don't have to make a choice until you are faced with it, and our drives and repulsions determine what kinds of moral dilemmas we will or will not face.

As I pointed out, I'll NEVER face the choice to rape or to not rape (assuming some far-fetched scenario forces me to; e.g. somebody has a gun to my daughter's head; even then I'm not sure if my penis would "work" under such terrifying and anxiety provoking conditions), because I have no drive for such a thing and a revulsion for it on top of that.

I believe every smoker out there, for instance, CAN choose not to smoke; I just think it takes such varying degrees of extreme will because of the physiological addiction; certainly the nonsmoker can more easily choose not to smoke. Similarly, I believe that ultimately all serial rapists CAN choose not to rape, but just like smoking, I think they are fighting against their drives (ranging from mild to overwhelming) to do so, so it isn't surprising that most probably don't make it through life without sexually assaulting somebody in some way. As before, it certainly is easier for somebody like me to avoid raping somebody than it is for a serial rapist.

Choice is in the equation, but moral/immoral action has to go first through drive/revulsion and conscience before it comes down to choice. If you have it easy in the first two steps, you probably won't have to make the choice at all.

[The Barefoot Bum]

After studying philosophy for 10 years, I've never come across a definition of "free will" that wasn't either trivial or incoherent.

[Tod]

After studying philosophy for 10 years, I've never come across a definition of "free will" that wasn't either trivial or incoherent.

It is a slippery concept to pin down, there is little doubt you're correct about that. It certainly was poorly named. After all "free"will implies people are equally "free" to choose one thing or the other, but considering, as I was pointing out in my essay, that people have different "wiring" that makes certain choices easier or more difficult, that clearly isn't the case. Free implies "unbounded," and certainly, if you're "programmed" to behave one way you aren't equally free to behave the opposite way. At best you're free to fight your will, but I'd hardly call that "freewill."

This would be a bit like me putting you in a windowless shed and nailing boards across the only door, and then telling you that "you're free to leave whenever you want." Sure, if you spend enough time kicking, body slamming, etc the boards you can probably eventually free yourself from my crude containment cell, but it would sure strike you as odd that I said "you're free to leave whenever you want" considering you have to put a lot more time and energy into leaving than staying (which requires no effort).

I'm not even sure we have "ultimate will" as I put it. I live my life as if we do, and certainly I have to "believe" this to some degree to practice psychotherapy (otherwise, why am I wasting time trying to help somebody change), but for all I know it is pure determinism. I don't like that idea, but I can't refute it either. : )

I used to think that the mere fact that we can rise above our programming and fight it as evidence of some degree of "freewill," but then it dawned on me one day that for all I knew a person's "programming" was such that they were destined to want eventually, with the right life stimulus, to change something in their "programming" they previously did not, and it was only the illusion of epiphany and will to change. It's even more confusing when you consider the contradictory urges and demands of our brain: the so-called "reptilian" level wants one thing, the "mammalian" level wants another, and the "primate" level thinks what the first two want is a bad idea! : )

[The Barefoot Bum]

I've never seen a definition of free will such that I could determine even introspectively that I myself had free will. If it's not determined, and it's not random, what else is there?

It's like the zombie problem: how do I know I'm not a zombie? Maybe I don't have "real" consciousness. How could I tell? By definition, I would say and do all the same things that a conscious person says and does.

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

Seems appropriately related to me; I have no problems melding the two together.
Cool, thanks. Prepare for incoming! :D

Now we just gotta remember what we wanted to say.... :o

[Barbarian]

After studying philosophy for 10 years, I've never come across a definition of "free will" that wasn't either trivial or incoherent.That's certainly a better take than mine: Aided by no study of philosophy whatsoever ... <the rest is the same as yours>.

Actually, I haven't ever come across a non-circular definition of free will. There are all kinds of qualified free will definitions (compatibilist free will, libertarian free will etc.) that are non-circular, which sound to me like attempts to define free will into existence, but none for plain free will that I know of.

Funny part, I once discussed free will with a dude on another board and proposed a definition that said, essentially "free will is our ability to contribute first causes to the complete set of causes forcing us to act in a certain way". He said that I am trying to define free will in a way to ensure it could not exist. Why is it okay to do it the other way around? When I define rational numbers the way I do, do I intend to ensure that sqrt(2) cannot be rational under the rules I propose?

* posting in a free will thread, there goes the solemn vow *

[Tod]

I've never seen a definition of free will such that I could determine even introspectively that I myself had free will. If it's not determined, and it's not random, what else is there?

It's like the zombie problem: how do I know I'm not a zombie? Maybe I don't have "real" consciousness. How could I tell? By definition, I would say and do all the same things that a conscious person says and does.

Yeah, I tend to wonder about the same thing. In my field, it is taken almost as a given by most that freewill exist, but I think your "zombie problem" illustrates how it could be an illusion. What if the conscious mind is simply the part of our unconscious mind we're aware of, and rather than our conscious mind being an "executive controller," it is merely a spectator watching the programmed reactions ("choices") to stimulus unfold in the unconscious mind? In short: what if consciousness is only awareness of action and thought and not choice of action and thought?

[The Barefoot Bum]

One of the things we know from both mathematics and physics is that even if the behavior of a system is deterministic, we cannot therefore conclude that it is predictable.

We also assume we know what we're talking about when we talk about "choices". But most intuitive notions of choice presume counterfactual determinism definiteness, that there's a matter of truth to statements of the form "X might have happened, even though it didn't actually happen." But there's really no scientific basis for presuming counterfactual determinism definiteness, except in the sense that the universal laws of physics -- at least the ones we understand presently -- are not sufficient in and of themselves to completely describe our observations. That's a pretty weak reed on which to hang a theory of consciousness or mentation.

[The Barefoot Bum]

I prefer to approach theories of consciousness in a scientific manner. What are the observations? What is the simplest theory to account for those observations? In short: what do we actually do when we're thinking? How can we describe that process rigorously and compactly?

[David B]

Could you please explain what you mean by counterfactual determinism?

[The Barefoot Bum]

Could you please explain what you mean by counterfactual determinism?

Sorry... Brain fart. The term is be counterfactual definiteness, that there is a definite truth in some sense to counterfactual (i.e. subjunctive) statements.

[David B]

Sorry... Brain fart. The term is be counterfactual definiteness, that there is a definite truth in some sense to counterfactual (i.e. subjunctive) statements.

You mean like 'If I were to smack that guy on the nose, he would probably beat the crap out of me'?

[The Barefoot Bum]

You mean like 'If I were to smack that guy on the nose, he would probably beat the crap out of me'?

If I had smacked that guy on the nose (which I did not, to make it truly counterfactual), he definitely would have beat the crap out of me.

The conflict is that counterfactual, subjunctive thinking is enormously useful, far too useful to be discarded just because of metaphysical issues. On the other hand, the metaphysical issues really are severe: it's really hard to talk directly about truth values of counterfactual conditionals.

[Copernicus]

There are basically two ways to look at choice. Either it is determined, or it is random. If choice were random, then it would be unpredictable. Nevertheless, we live our lives as if the motivations of others and ourselves were largely predictable. That is, we do believe that choice is fundamentally determined and predictable within the limits of our knowledge.

Although we know that robots cannot step outside the limitations of their programming, it is fairly easy to program a robot to make choices based on the contingencies it encounters. It will always choose to execute actions determined by its highest priority (or "desire"). Now consider a robot that can learn from past experience and modify its set of priorities--i.e. a robot that can "learn". In that case, it would really be indistinguishable from the automatons that we humans are. Its behavior would be largely, but not totally, predictable even to those who had programmed it. In other words, it would be capable of overcoming the limitations of its original programmed set of behaviors, depending on what kinds of experiences it had in the world.

[DMB]

<Mod note: Would anyone object if I moved this thread to Philosophy? It's always hard to know where to draw the line, but this discussion doesn't seem to me to be specifically related to religion, although the topic does enter into religious discourse.>

[Asha'man]

Free will has always seemed to me to be nothing but a transparent excuse for the lack of action by God. It's only invoked to defend a god that reasonably should have taken some action, but failed to. Of course, the more obvious reason for god failing to act is that god simply doesn't exist.

Even worse, the concept of free will is explicitly contradicted by the Bible itself. Not only does god routinely appear to take actions that would seem to revoke the possibility of free will, he explicitly uses mind-control powers to change the Pharaoh's mind when it came to allowing Moses to depart Egypt. Any claim of god respecting people's right to make their own decision is utterly destroyed by those few verses.

[Tod]

<Mod note: Would anyone object if I moved this thread to Philosophy? It's always hard to know where to draw the line, but this discussion doesn't seem to me to be specifically related to religion, although the topic does enter into religious discourse.>

I suppose I don't mind; I simply want it where ever it is most likely to elicit a Christian response, because I genuinely want to see what a Christian has to say about this.

It doesn't look like I'm going to get any responses from that population, however, so I guess it doesn't matter where it is.

[Jobar]

Free will discussions do tend to walk the line where philosophy meets theology.

The trouble is that freedom implies no limits; and under no circumstances is a human being's will truly limitless.

We may be free within certain bounds. But those bounds are often blurry, and may or may not be perceived as limitations. It could be said that a buffalo roaming the Great Plains in the time before humans came to North America was 'free'- but in fact the very oceans limited that freedom, not to speak of the great rivers and mountains which surround those plains.

For any physical and temporal being, unlimited freedom is a chimera, an illusion produced by our (limited) senses. We may find ourselves in situations where our choice of action seems unconstrained, but in fact the constraints are there even when we don't see them.

[Ray Moscow]

Re the OP: some forms of Christianity don't endorse "free will" at all, although the usual take on "sin" implies some degree of it anyway.

[Jobar]

Tod, I know you want to get some Christian input here, but Christians are still pretty sparse on the ground in the Cafe right now. We're working on that.

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

I suppose I don't mind; I simply want it where ever it is most likely to elicit a Christian response, because I genuinely want to see what a Christian has to say about this.

It doesn't look like I'm going to get any responses from that population, however, so I guess it doesn't matter where it is.

Tod, Moriah wore their chains at one time, many years ago. It could answer any questions you might have about their standard take on the question (meaning the one that seems fairly ubiquitous regardless of denomination, etc.)

[Free Thinkr]

I don't see how the argument can be made that we really have much of a will at all. We have accumulated knowledge and circumstances in which we find ourselves, and our own individual nature; these conspire to produces given results. We are conscious beings, and thus we can look back on things we did and say we should have done something else instead, but at the time and place and with the knowledge we had at that time, the decision we made was the only decision we were capable of making, because our nature is what it is.

[Jobar]

I would say that we are often in situations where we appear to have free will- have a range of viable choices from which we can consciously pick one discrete path.

Even then, there are limitations on our choices of which we may be unaware.

As I said on the previous page, the problem in talking about "free" will is that "freedom" is one of those absolute concepts- no limits. But we're always limited in both space and in time.

[Moriah Conquering Wind]

Generally by "free" will people seem to mean having individual agency not directly, perceptibly, or appreciably constrained or otherwise manipulated by any external agency or the influence thereof.

But ultimately this just begs the question, due to the subjective nature of "directly, perceptibly or appreciably" which leave room for constraint, manipulation and/or influence to be active indirectly, imperceptibly, and unnoticed by said agency. Which inevitably, they will be.

[dancer_rnb]

Unnoticed is the big one, I think.

[Ray Moscow]

Tod, I know you want to get some Christian input here, but Christians are still pretty sparse on the ground in the Cafe right now. We're working on that.

Jobar's had me in Bible study for weeks now and has invited me to The Alpha Course.

[Jobar]

:D

I keep trying to fake people out, but they keep telling me that my fakes aren't true Christians. :dunno: