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Incidentally, I never realized the religious implications of free will until now. Suddenly, that scene from A Clockwork Orange makes more sense: the scene where the prison chaplain objects to the Ludovico Technique on the grounds that it obstructs “free will.”
Which is ironic, given that without Fear, pain, suffering and death no one would ever freely chose to worship god, I mean, what would be the point. As evidence I submit to you Adam & Eve.
Context. The idea of freewill is free will i.e. un-coerced purpose driven choice, which randomness isn’t, and why they are mutually exclusive in this context. The problem then for freewill is that if any choice is determined then it can’t be free.
Now I am wondering if many of you (well, GAD, unkown zone, goodgraydrab, and a few others excepted) are thinking that the acceptance of determinism implies that the future is already set forever? Yes, the future WILL be determined by the happenings of the present (notice the word ‘will’ - as in free will? - implies that something has not yet happened). And naturally the configuration of the present is determined by what has happened in the past, but the future has not yet happened and in that sense, it is not yet determined (for all intents and purposes). So, if you are participating (acting) in a present reality and that present reality is causally configured by a myriad of past events, including your own intellectual lived experience, then there still exists a moment where you can escape into the future and contemplate a variety of events that have not yet happened. Through that escape momentum (free!) choices are imagined, you can then return to the present reality and act to determine the configuration of the present by your own will. Naturally, everything up to the present moment has been fully determined in a causal sense (even randomness is a determined outcome, we just are incapable of calculating in all of the variables that would make that event predictable, but even coin tosses are determined by all of the variables that act on the tossing of the coin). Even your escape into the indeterminate future is constrained by your past intellectual experiences and by the present configuration of your brain biochemistry, but YOU are playing the crucial determining role in contemplating the choices that your trip into the future will conjure. And furthermore, it is YOU who WILL then decide what course of action you WILL take in the present. That’s what is so great about existing in a fully determined world (where the future has not yet been determined), because you are able to put yourself into the stream of determined happenings and therefore to direct the unfolding of the present according to your own free will (given the constraints of physics, biology, and your own cognitive limitations).
If you keep reminding yourself that everything is an event, including your own self, and if you understand that the future is always free whenever you imagine it, then determinism is necessarily compatible with free will. This is the point that eudemonia was making in stating that there is essentially no pre-determinism. Pre-determinism is like a belief in fate, or a belief in astrology, or a belief in god. The future has not happened.
Compared with others I’ve seen on the subject of free will, this thread has quite a bit of diversity yet it also lacks overconfidence that typically accompanies posts written by students and practitioners within certain of the behavioral sciences. I wonder how long it will take before someone comes aboard claiming that a human being is incapable of making even the most insignificant decision because the unconscious mind (whatever the hell that term might mean) reacts causatively to the world it encounters and informs our actions without our even being aware of the process. This concept seems faulty if looked at with the idea that our automatic operational processes compare, if mildly, to a bio-version of computer-style background formatting.
That is, while we operate mentally throughout the day, I’d agree that we very often rely on automatic pilot, occasionally breaking through our unconsidered routines to reevaluate an old situation or analyze a new one. But how do these automated routines come about? They arrive in our heads via past training, observation, and decision-making processes of all kinds. Once we get something solidly in our heads, only rarely is it necessary to engage consciously active thought process.
Such decision-making processes operate as though formatted into our user programs. A given decision may involve not a low-level command, but a user command, as I feel free to reconsider the decision at any moment. It lies under the surface of my moment-to-moment activity, informing my behavior, or lack of behavior, and it’s always up for revision as I see fit.
But to return for a moment to word use. As I mentioned to eudemonia, something resembling consensus agreement on the issue of FW seems out of reach even among Christians, so it comes as no surprise to see very long and diversely argued threads on the subject when atheists take it on. For the most part, I’m attempting to approach the question with a Wittgensteinian view of things. (One can at least try, right?) The problem with such an undertaking is that Wittgenstein is just about impossible to nail down on these sorts of matters. He may be quotable, but his words are so metaphorical at times that they can tend to become too slippery even to find. (How could an Index be written for one of his books?) But he is famous for claiming that philosophical problems are really only problems of language use. Or words to that effect.
From Philosophical Investigations:
199. Is what we call “obeying a rule” something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life?—This is of course a note on the grammar of the expression “to obey a rule.”
It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
...it is YOU who WILL then decide what course of action you WILL take in the present.
As I consider this YOU of whom you speak to be the manifestation of a biological system, any decision necessarily emerges from natural processes. It may not be predicable, but it certainly is inevitable (if it wasn’t you would have concluded something else). There is a will, it’s just not free.
————
I will assume we all agree that a rock does not have free will. So what level of sentience would be sufficient for a free will?
o Microbes (the smart ones)
o Insects
o Reptiles (not including that garden snake)
o Lab Mice
o Apes
o Humans with a soul
On the subject of determinism vs pre-determinism. To pre-determine something is to be able to predict it. For something to be determined means that it has causation. These are different things.
ASD said- ‘Do you have an example of something which is “determined but actually happen[s] at random?”’
Yes. Genetic mutation. It is determined. It is caused by physics and chemistry, yet we cannot predict exactly how or when or what type of mutation will happen. Genetic mutation is random and within a deterministic biosphere. Determined by laws of thermodynamics and biochemistry.
So, free will, as produced by the human brain, must be determined, unless one believes that it is spontaneoulsy given to us by a supernatural source, outside of natural law.
To open the discussion further, at the Primatology level,.....don’t other primates also exhibit free will?
Don’t Bonobos choose what to eat and with whom to mate? Whether or not to make tools?Other primate species obviously do not have the human level of consciousness but they also obviously make choices and think abstractly.
Is free will then ‘determined’ by brain size and complexity, or did God just choose to give it to certain types of animals?
On the subject of determinism vs pre-determinism. To pre-determine something is to be able to predict it. For something to be determined means that it has causation. These are different things.
ASD said- ‘Do you have an example of something which is “determined but actually happen[s] at random?”’
Yes. Genetic mutation. It is determined. It is caused by physics and chemistry, yet we cannot predict exactly how or when or what type of mutation will happen. Genetic mutation is random and within a deterministic biosphere. Determined by laws of thermodynamics and biochemistry.
I think what you mean to say is that genetic mutation appears to be random because we can’t predict it. Claiming it is random is tantamount to saying that randomness is in the eye of the beholder. Solar eclipses appear to happen randomly to those who don’t understand astronomy, but I imagine those who don’t understand astronomy would be hard pressed to convince you that solar eclipses are actually random.
I have no problem with claiming that randomness is in the eye of the beholder, which is to say there is no such thing as Absolute Randomness. You might say I’m a “random relativist.” But, just as moral relativity renders the concept of morality meaningless (in my opinion), random relativity renders the concept of randomness meaningless.
I suspect, although I’m still thinking it over, that free will might be similar: free will is in the eye of the beholder. Which renders the concept of free will meaningless.
Context. The idea of freewill is free will i.e. un-coerced purpose driven choice, which randomness isn’t, and why they are mutually exclusive in this context. The problem then for freewill is that if any choice is determined then it can’t be free.
Now I am wondering if many of you (well, GAD, unkown zone, goodgraydrab, and a few others excepted) are thinking that the acceptance of determinism implies that the future is already set forever? Yes, the future WILL be determined by the happenings of the present (notice the word ‘will’ - as in free will? - implies that something has not yet happened). And naturally the configuration of the present is determined by what has happened in the past, but the future has not yet happened and in that sense, it is not yet determined (for all intents and purposes). So, if you are participating (acting) in a present reality and that present reality is causally configured by a myriad of past events, including your own intellectual lived experience, then there still exists a moment where you can escape into the future and contemplate a variety of events that have not yet happened. Through that escape momentum (free!) choices are imagined, you can then return to the present reality and act to determine the configuration of the present by your own will. Naturally, everything up to the present moment has been fully determined in a causal sense (even randomness is a determined outcome, we just are incapable of calculating in all of the variables that would make that event predictable, but even coin tosses are determined by all of the variables that act on the tossing of the coin). Even your escape into the indeterminate future is constrained by your past intellectual experiences and by the present configuration of your brain biochemistry, but YOU are playing the crucial determining role in contemplating the choices that your trip into the future will conjure. And furthermore, it is YOU who WILL then decide what course of action you WILL take in the present. That’s what is so great about existing in a fully determined world (where the future has not yet been determined), because you are able to put yourself into the stream of determined happenings and therefore to direct the unfolding of the present according to your own free will (given the constraints of physics, biology, and your own cognitive limitations).
If you keep reminding yourself that everything is an event, including your own self, and if you understand that the future is always free whenever you imagine it, then determinism is necessarily compatible with free will. This is the point that eudemonia was making in stating that there is essentially no pre-determinism. Pre-determinism is like a belief in fate, or a belief in astrology, or a belief in god. The future has not happened.
Bob
But in a purely deterministic universe, whatever future you imagine isn’t “free.” It’s 100% predicted by your DNA, life experiences, etc. In a purely deterministic universe, any event is repeatable, assuming we know all the starting conditions and can duplicate them. Given the universe as it was yesterday as a starting point, the universe as it is today is the only possible outcome. Rewind the universe to yesterday if you don’t believe me, although I think we’re agreed on this point.
Why doesn’t the same apply for things that haven’t happened yet? Given the universe as it is today as a starting point, how can it have more than one possible outcome tomorrow? Just because we can’t predict what tomorrow will bring doesn’t mean it’s not inevitable, given the starting conditions of today.
I agree with you that “for all intents and purposes,” the future is not predetermined, for the same reasons that “for all intents and purposes” a coin toss is random. If you’re going to take the strict view of determinism, however, I don’t see how you can say the future has more than one possible outcome. But I obviously haven’t thought it through as thoroughly as you.
I contend that our nature (DNA), environment (womb etc.), life experiences and current circumstances DETERMINE UNAMBIGUOUSLY the decisions we take.
I would propose that nature (dna), the personal environment (personal experiences in life) and the cultural environment LIMIT and SHAPE the decisions we make by presenting us with a limited number of choices.
By the way:
601 - 10 October 2009 09:13 PM
Disclaimer: My will to offer this poll was emboldened by “The MACALLAN,” twelve years old. As such, no superior insight is implied.
No such disclaimer is necessary; The Macallan is an elixir which hones thinking like a cerebral strop.
In this regard (free will, not my view of Macallan), I find myself oddly in agreement with GAD concerning his assertion, while no doubt wildly in disagreement about the significance of his assertion:
GAD - 12 October 2009 02:04 PM
Freewill stands on it’s own outside of religion. The vast majority of atheists believe in some version of it, why, what necessity do they see in freewill? I will posit that they are very similar to that of religion, just without god.
Free will, as a concept of unlimited choice in behavior, is a fundamental tenet of religion, without which moral blame for coveting one’s neighbor’s wife could not be assigned. However, the concept can afflict even the atheist, as so much of the underpinnings of religion may. For example, an atheist who eschews the religious significance of free will may nevertheless subscribe to the notion as the basis for a belief in the efficacy of the free market, which relies on its legitimacy for a view of the world in which informed players make rational and unfettered decisions about buying and selling goods and services, including their own labor.
Likewise, free will underlies our entire theory of justice; the person who chooses to commit a crime is morally blameworthy and warrants punishment. Choose to become addicted to drugs. Off to prison with you! Choose to shoot someone 5 times. Off to prison forever with you!
That is why the developing understanding of the way in which our brains work threatens to undermine the entire basis of most religions, the free-market ideologies and our current (and barbaric) penal system.
At the outset, it must be said that we do make decisions. On a very simple level, I am choosing each of the words I type at this moment. And I can choose to type words which are designed to inflame certain people, or which I think will make me look “smart,” or which I think will most clearly convey what I would like to say.
But those choices are limited. I cannot, for example, type Chinese or Italian words, because I don’t know any. So, my nature – the material condition of my brain in this instance – makes available a capacity for language, but my culture has limited my word choices to English, and my upbringing – words my parents used, the schools I attended etc – may further inform the set of choices available to me. And, if I have a stroke right now, and develop aphasia, my choices will be different than they were even 1 minute ago, because my brain no longer functions in the same way.
My point is simply that I have some choices available to me in writing this sentence, but not all possible choices are available to me.
That is why when I get to Shermer’s formulation of the conclusion of Dennett’s theory of free will:
eudemonia - 12 October 2009 08:15 AM
therefore (7) free will emerges out of our deterministic world from the fact that we can weigh the consequences of the many courses of action available to us, that we are aware that we (and others) make these choices, and we hold ourselves and them accountable.
I think the most important part of this is “courses of action available to us…”
So we have this Enlightenment view of a person making choices that most fulfill his or her goals, and hence democracy and the free market fulfill the promise of redemption after Adam and Eve unwisely chose to eat that apple. But this model of human behavior crashes violently into our understanding of neurology, whereby we learn that people aren’t abstractions, but organisms with brains that can be damaged by injury or disease or even long term stresses, and which can thereby have seriously impaired executive function; even in the absence of impairment, people’s brains have a very primitive functioning, which can take over under immediate or sudden stress; our culture can overtake our capacity to reason, so that we reject adequate health care rather than submit to “socialism;” in short, the only choices we have involve those “courses of action available to us,” and those courses of action are limited by both our biology and our culture.
So determinism is a series of sequential events, the next outcome determinant from the prior, which applies to our biologies, including the development of brains of humans and other species ... basically, evolution. The capacity for free will seems to apply in degrees amongst various species, humans having the greatest capacity of all. All we seem to be referring to is the capacity for independent thought, and as can zen points out, within the pervue of the concept of the self or consciousness, which may be exclusive, I think, of any tangible outcomes. My interpretation of free will is the difference in operations, as it pertains to motivation, from the lower brain stem functions including autonomic, and higher brain functions. It seems to me, free will is synonymous with consciousness. Aren’t we just talking about the degree of variation to which species operate primarily from instinct to that of abstract thought? One may exercise free will within the constraints of ones own mind without taking any action at all and without any decernment by an outside observer. Also, not all humans have the ability to exercise free will within certain degrees. These would seem to be aberrations, however, due to various pathologies (eg, mental illness, loss of brain function, coercive stressors, etc.). In this sense, I don’t agree that free will is 100% predicted by dna and that what we can imagine cannot be “free”, or else what explains creative thought and senseless acts.
As I consider this YOU of whom you speak to be the manifestation of a biological system, any decision necessarily emerges from natural processes. It may not be predicable, but it certainly is inevitable (if it wasn’t you would have concluded something else). There is a will, it’s just not free.
These are certainly difficult notions to sort out clearly, 601. You feel that because some action is inevitable that means it is not free, but I did have the freedom not to post anything at all, if I had so decided. I was not forced to write that particular post or those specific contents when I had the option to do so or not to do so. It seems to me that with the emergence of self-awareness comes a new configuration of determinism and while it remains fully dependent on the contraints of the laws of physics, biology, and the limitations of cognition, the fact that we can intellectually contemplate a range of possible futures gives us the capacity to imaginarily escape from those particular real constraints. While this kind of freedom is certainly imaginary, that’s the whole point 601 - freedom IS imagination. Freedom IS an illusion, but it is still effective in the real world (we wouldn’t have invented airplanes if it wasn’t). It is effective because we can act upon those freely imagined scenarios and bring them into existence.
I’m not entirely sure what kind of ‘free’ you are looking for when you say “There is a will, it’s just not free.” Are you looking for a real world freedom that is NOT constrained by the laws of physics and biology, that is NOT determined by a person’s intellectual/emotional properties that emerge from one’s biological being? Are you looking for a variety of ‘free’ that is fully indeterminate and independent of all causal forces AND yet operates in the phenomenal/physical domain? If that’s what qualifies as ‘free’ then it’s really a useless concept, because with that kind of freedom, even the self could not exist as a determinant being and we’d all be powerless to some kind of unknown force. What kind of freedom would that be if it left us powerless?
As far as - which animal qualifies on the free will market? I would answer that any creature with the ability to anticipate a future would have some level of freedom in its cognitive domain. Which animal that would be is probably impossible to determine. Also, your category of “human with a soul” is surely redundant since a free will is as close to a soul as you are going to get, phenomenally speaking.
I don’t think that the future is necessarily predetermined, for instance if probability and randomness are true and can can effect the macro level, i.e. if you rewind the universe it doesn’t necessarily replay the same way.
In the case of probability I don’t see any conflict with causality/determinism since the next state is the summation of the prior. In the case of randomness(uncaused), I think determinism still works, it would then be the sum of the sum of each causal chain prior to the next state.
I’m not arguing for either of the above just posting my thoughts. And in neither case is freewill advocated.
Example:
I am trying to decide how to vote on the upcoming health care reform bill, yes or no, while I am deliberating a random or extreme probability event causes a particle to decay in my brain, which in turn causes a particle cascade that blows out a few brain cells, changing the calculation, resulting in me deciding not to vote for socialism.
Predetermination was avoided, determination was preserved and freewill voided.
I am trying to decide how to vote on the upcoming health care reform bill, yes or no, while I am deliberating a random or extreme probability event causes a particle to decay in my brain, which in turn causes a particle cascade that blows out a few brain cells, changing the calculation, resulting in me deciding not to vote for socialism.
Predetermination was avoided, determination was preserved and freewill voided.
GAD! Who would have guessed you were a socialist mole, pretending to vaunt the free market, while all the while realizing it would take brain damage to vote against a rational national health plan that tossed the frigging insurance companies out on their ears.
I am trying to decide how to vote on the upcoming health care reform bill, yes or no, while I am deliberating a random or extreme probability event causes a particle to decay in my brain, which in turn causes a particle cascade that blows out a few brain cells, changing the calculation, resulting in me deciding not to vote for socialism.
Predetermination was avoided, determination was preserved and freewill voided.
GAD! Who would have guessed you were a socialist mole, pretending to vaunt the free market, while all the while realizing it would take brain damage to vote against a rational national health plan that tossed the frigging insurance companies out on their ears.
Now that you know that I am handicapped by probability and have no choice, you’ll have to be nicer to me
GAD, you’ve got that right, only a person with blown out brain cells would vote against socialism.
One thing you should clear up in your thoughts is the idea that randomness is uncaused. NO event in the universe is uncaused, even those that happen randomly. What it means actually to call something a random event is to admit that we don’t know all of the variables that preceded the event so we cannot predict how it will turn out. Coin tosses are random because we are unable to calculate how the toss will end up, but all of the tossing action is completely determined by causal forces and given all of those forces the coin could only end up in the position that it does eventually end up. Randomness actually refers to our human capacity to be able to predict the outcome of certain happenings and not to the causal features of the event itself.
Actually can zen, it is not necessarily true that everything in the universe has a cause. This is actually a creationist claim, here expressed as a ‘first cause’ but implying the same idea for universal causation.
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