Compatibilism: What's that About?

[rousseau]

... I believe all of this speaks to why religion was so ubiquitous throughout the world before the scientific revolution. In lieu of a material understanding human experience feels immaterial, supernatural, and normalized.

Big category lots of caveats, conditions, presumptions, attached to religion meme. If you want to compare that, whatever it is, to material understanding you need shift to material as objective and to religious as subjective. Otherwise there is no comparison.

Of course much more complicated / nuanced, but the basic point is that an understanding of natural science down to the atomic level is a post-hoc conceptualization of the world. It has no relevance to the conditions that gave rise to our cognitive function and experience, and how that cognitive function exists now. It's basically just a data point, granted a data point that can be disconcerting, but a data point nonetheless.

And when you look at early societies we don't see much perception of materialism, we largely see spirituality across the board. To me this is a good pointer to how most of us actually experience the world. And even today, despite greater material understanding, I'm not sure this has actually changed much.

That's not to say that we have free will by any means, but despite a bit of generalization I think my last few posts answer the why we feel free question.

Whoa. Cause and effect, determinism, were subjective topics back to the Greeks at least. That mankind evolved the ability to disassociate belief from evidence is due to that journey. The beauty of empiricism is that it uses much of what has been thought and considered in it's construction and execution. We now know we are evolved beings who can manipulate material world to our benefit which has been the underlying purpose of our evolution all along. Our view of our story should likewise evolve.

Consequence should be the scale for evaluating the value of particular modes of thought. Through that lens material thought consumes most of what we are today. Fairly spiritual thought will remain forever in our behavior, probably as central to our every day experiences even though that behavior will be driven by clearly material means.

What I was criticizing was characterizing the centrality of religious belief to our individual and social makeup. That will fade over time. We should organize our constructions around that sort of thinking.

You seem to be a nostalgic kind of gee. Being so needn't cloud your perceptions. I'm still partial to the Hardy Boys over Nordic Murders. Not a problem.

I don't know that it's religious belief per se, but the perception that we are more than the sum of our parts. This would make religion predominate in early societies but doesn't make it a necessity in the future.

A small minority of us have always been / are always going to be interested in the mechanics of it all, but I think even they can rarely escape the perception of 'something more', however untrue that perception is.

Today, I think if you asked almost anyone how people work physically you would get a lot of vague and non-sensical answers, minimal talk of freedom or free will, and likely a tendency toward biological and cultural ideas like mating, marriage, love, and the like.

Broad generalizations abound but that's how I roll.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

I have to assume “sage” is talking about “god.” “Quantum quacks” is nicely alliterative, though. I don‘t guess Sage knows that QM explains how his computer works, the device he uses to post on the internet “quantum quacks.”

Noli hypotheses fingere

As usual, New Age conformists aren't logical in their desperate defense of their weirdness religion. Using quantum facts to create things doesn't imply they know how to explain what makes it work. An auto mechanic could know nothing about the physics of internal combustion, etc., but still fix your car.

 

[Bomb#20]

... For in polishing Glass with Sand, Putty or Tripoly, it is not to be imagined that those substances can by grating and fretting the Glass bring all its least particles to an accurate polish; so that all their surfaces shall be truly plain or truly spherical, and look all the same way, so as together to compose one even surface. The smaller the particles of those substances are, the smaller will be the scratches by which they continually fret and wear away the Glass until it be polished, but be they never so small they can wear away the Glass no otherwise than by grating and scratching it, and breaking the protuberances, and therefore polish it no otherwise than by bringing its roughness to a very fine Grain, so that the scratches and frettings of the surface become too small to be visible. And therefore if Light were reflected by impinging upon the solid parts of the Glass, it would be scattered as much by the most polished Glass as by the roughest. ...​

​

- Isaac Newton​

Our reflection in a still pond is clear until the surface is disturbed by a tossed pebble and light is reflected out in different directions, rather than in a consistent pattern. The polished glass is like the still pond, after its waves have been settled by polishing.

I think you must not have understood Newton's argument.

Still pond:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rough glass:
  /\    /\    /\
 /  \  /  \  /  \
/    \/    \/    \

Polished glass:
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

The smoothing mechanism of the pond is gravity: the higher up parts fall to the average level under the force of their own weight. Newton is arguing that no matter how much you polish glass its surface will never become flat like a still pond because glass polishing provides no analogous mechanism for eliminating tilt from the surface. The only thing a particle of abrasive used in a polishing operation does is gouge a new scratch into the surface of the glass, albeit a thinner scratch than the ones it's helping polish away. So as the scratches become smaller and smaller, their sides remain sloped the same as ever. If light particles were bouncing off the point on the glass where they hit then they'd still bounce in lots of different directions depending on which microscopic scratches they hit the sides of. The glass surface would never match the pond surface so you'd always get a matte finish no matter how much you polish.

His conclusion was that the reflection of a light particle is a collective effect of a great many glass particles packed into a spread-out area. Consequently there can be no question of some of the light particles simply missing the atoms that would otherwise have reflected them.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Internet Indeterminacy

Apparent random uncorrelated posts with unknown causalities. Do posts s come from nothing? Are posts real?

Sheepskins Impress the Sheep

Netwits tell what they've been told, imagining that makes them share in the prestige. But the prestige of designated experts is itself imaginary.

 

[bilby]

... For in polishing Glass with Sand, Putty or Tripoly, it is not to be imagined that those substances can by grating and fretting the Glass bring all its least particles to an accurate polish; so that all their surfaces shall be truly plain or truly spherical, and look all the same way, so as together to compose one even surface. The smaller the particles of those substances are, the smaller will be the scratches by which they continually fret and wear away the Glass until it be polished, but be they never so small they can wear away the Glass no otherwise than by grating and scratching it, and breaking the protuberances, and therefore polish it no otherwise than by bringing its roughness to a very fine Grain, so that the scratches and frettings of the surface become too small to be visible. And therefore if Light were reflected by impinging upon the solid parts of the Glass, it would be scattered as much by the most polished Glass as by the roughest. ...​

​

- Isaac Newton​

Our reflection in a still pond is clear until the surface is disturbed by a tossed pebble and light is reflected out in different directions, rather than in a consistent pattern. The polished glass is like the still pond, after its waves have been settled by polishing.

I think you must not have understood Newton's argument.

Still pond:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rough glass:
  /\    /\    /\
 /  \  /  \  /  \
/    \/    \/    \

Polished glass:
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

The smoothing mechanism of the pond is gravity: the higher up parts fall to the average level under the force of their own weight. Newton is arguing that no matter how much you polish glass its surface will never become flat like a still pond because glass polishing provides no analogous mechanism for eliminating tilt from the surface. The only thing a particle of abrasive used in a polishing operation does is gouge a new scratch into the surface of the glass, albeit a thinner scratch than the ones it's helping polish away. So as the scratches become smaller and smaller, their sides remain sloped the same as ever. If light particles were bouncing off the point on the glass where they hit then they'd still bounce in lots of different directions depending on which microscopic scratches they hit the sides of. The glass surface would never match the pond surface so you'd always get a matte finish no matter how much you polish.

His conclusion was that the reflection of a light particle is a collective effect of a great many glass particles packed into a spread-out area. Consequently there can be no question of some of the light particles simply missing the atoms that would otherwise have reflected them.

Feynman talks about the behaviour of diffraction gratings to make much the same point in his book 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter'.

If you remove parts of a mirror, you can cause it to reflect photons at an angle that depends on their frequency. That can't be explained by a classical model of the interaction between photons and the material from which the mirror is made.

 

[steve_bank]

Internet Indeterminacy

Apparent random uncorrelated posts with unknown causalities. Do posts s come from nothing? Are posts real?

Sheepskins Impress the Sheep

Netwits tell what they've been told, imagining that makes them share in the prestige. But the prestige of designated experts is itself imaginary.

Sheepdip impresses me not. Apparently the context of my post was above your head.

Statistical uncertainty appears in our macro scale Earth surface reality as it does at the quantum scale.

Sit in front of a store door and record when someone leaves and enters. A statistical model can be be developed to estimate a probability of occurrence without understanding the causality of why someone enters or leaves the store.

We assume people do not come from or go to nothing when entering or leaving the store, we assume causality of some king. We assume an unknown causality when a partcale is emitted form a radioactive material.

Markov chains and queuing theory.

 

[Bomb#20]

Feynman talks about the behaviour of diffraction gratings to make much the same point in his book 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter'.

If you remove parts of a mirror, you can cause it to reflect photons at an angle that depends on their frequency. That can't be explained by a classical model of the interaction between photons and the material from which the mirror is made.

Yes, exactly. There are all sorts of optical phenomena that are very hard to account for with a deterministic theory of what's happening at a microscopic scale. For instance, the rule that 4 out of 100 photons are reflected at the front of the glass has a partner rule: another 4 are reflected at the back surface of the glass, so a window will reflect 8 out of 100 -- the pale reflection you see is actually two reflections slightly offset from each other. If partial reflection were a matter of light slipping between the molecules, then it would be slipping between molecules of glass when it passes through the front surface, but slipping between molecules of air when it passes through the back surface. There's no reason to expect air molecules and glass molecules to affect light in the same way; we know in general that they don't. So the fact that the reflection percentage is the same for entering the glass and leaving the glass would just be a remarkable inexplicable coincidence. But the theory that partial reflection results from an interference pattern in the probability waves predicts that the same amount of light must be diverted whether it's entering or leaving, on account of symmetrical geometry.

Quantum mechanics is weird, so people have come up with all manner of reasonable-sounding intuitively sensible explanations for specific quantum effects in order to banish the weirdness and restore their confidence in a reasonable universe; the trouble is that when you plug in numbers and work out the consequences, these explanations always end up implying results that turn out to be different from observation. Physicists don't accept quantum craziness because it's emotionally appealing to their Kierkegaard-reading mushheaded hippy minds; they accept it because they've been dragged kicking and screaming to the asylum bed and strapped down by the crazy results of a lot of very carefully performed experiments.

 

[DBT]

...
Origination Argument

Seems to me I've heard this song before. But let's take it apart to see what works and what doesn't.

I'm sure you have. It has yet to be refuted.

1. An agent acts with free will only if she is the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.

It's lunch time, and she feels hungry. She walks into the restaurant, sits down, browses the menu, chooses what she will have for lunch, and places her order: "I will have the chef salad please".

The hunger is her own. The decision to eat at the restaurant was made by her. So, she is the ultimate source of her action of going into the restaurant. Now, she is not the origin of her hunger, that was a product of evolution. Nevertheless, this hunger is an integral part of who and what she is now. Evolution did not decide that she would eat now rather than later. She did that herself. Evolution did not choose the restaurant and evolution did not choose the chef salad. That was all her.

Nobody denies that the hunger is her own, everything has properties, a lamppost has its own changing state, rust due to rain, warping due heat and cold....everything that has a brain has sets of drives and their related actions, all their own. What determinism does is make her hunger and her related actions inevitable, inevitable as in necessitated.
.
None of what is her own, or our own - hunger, thirst, pain thoughts, emotions - is willed or subject to change, because all states, conditions and actions are Fixed as a matter of natural law.

2. If determinism is true, then everything any agent does is ultimately caused by events and circumstances outside her control.

No. If determinism is true, then the agent will be the ultimate cause of what the agent does, in response to circumstances inside (her hunger) and circumstances outside (the restaurant and the menu). There is nothing about determinism that excludes her and her choices from being an essential part of the overall scheme of causation.

3. If everything an agent does is ultimately caused by events and circumstances beyond her control, then the agent is not the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, everything the agent does is NOT "ultimately cause by events and circumstance beyond her control". Her own choices ARE her exercising control. We cannot pretend that she is not choosing what she will do. We saw her sit at the table, browse the menu, and place the order. The only things external to her were the restaurant, the menu, and the table. None of these external items chose what she would eat. She did.

And it has been repeatedly pointed out that is chosen was determined unconsciously through the actions of neural networks that within a determined system are necessitated therefore not subject to will;

Free Will and Determinism / Structure and Agency
The metaphysical problem of free will and determinism arises from the difficulty of reconciling two seemingly unavoidable, but mutually contradictory, core beliefs about ourselves as human beings and the wider world of which we are a part. The first is that it is free will that distinguishes human beings from all others; the second is that human beings are wholly natural creatures, embedded in the ongoing causal order of the universe. - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0048393118814952

 

[DBT]

Origination Argument;

1. An agent acts with free will only if she is the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.
2. If determinism is true, then everything any agent does is ultimately caused by events and circumstances outside her control.
3. If everything an agent does is ultimately caused by events and circumstances beyond her control, then the agent is not the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.
4. Therefore, if determinism is true, then no agent is the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.
5. Therefore, if determinism is true, no agent has free will.

Item 1 is question-begging. It assumes as true the very thing that is under discussion.

No, it's not begging the question.

1- If determinism allows multiple options to be realized by an agent, as a matter of choice, why call it determinism?

I don't understand your response (it doesn't appear to address my criticism).

Marvin has not suggested (or implied) that "determinism allows multiple options to be realized by an agent".

Marvin is expressing philosophical compatibilism. I am arguing for incompatibility. Giving the reasons why compatibilism fails. It fails because it tries to define free will into reality by ignoring the implications of determinism, that simply calling something free will does not make will free, which makes it a word game.

 

[DBT]

More on the problems with compatibilism and the free will illusion; Quote;


PHILOSOPHICAL COMPATIBILISM IN A NUTSHELL


''As I said, philosophical compatibilists agree that someone could not have, of their own accord, done otherwise, but they don’t define free will in this way. Compatibilist can define free will in a number of different ways, but they all have one thing in common – they are defined in a way that is compatible with the natural universe.


For example, a compatibilist definition might be as simple as defining free will as the “ability to make decisions or choices” or “the ability to deliberate”.


Daniel Dennett calls free will “the power to be active agents, biological devices that respond to our environment with rational, desirable courses of action”. Roy Baumeister similarly calls “the ability to be aware of alternates and make the choice that is best for you evolutionarily” as free will. Most compatibilists have similar semantics or impressions about the term “free will”, basically concluding that certain “decision-making” abilities should be labeled “free will”


They might even suggest that we should move away from those incoherent definitions of free will and into those more coherent ones. Definitions that Dennett calls a “free will worth wanting“.

Free will is simply a person choosing for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
Determinism is the belief (-ism) that every event is reliably caused by prior events.
Compatibilism is the belief that there is nothing incompatible between the notion that a choice is reliably caused (determinism) and the notion that it is reliably caused by us (free will).
Case closed.

A person is choosing for themselves? True as a trivial observation but does not account for the means of decision making or the elements that necessitate it. The world acts upon the brain, that within a determined system produces an inevitable result, a result that was neither consciously decided or freely willed. The brain is constrained by its own architecture and the information that acts upon it.

''Of course, the sun isn’t an illusion, but geocentrism is. Our native sense that the sun revolves around a stationary Earth is simply mistaken. And any “project of sympathetic reconstruction” (your compatibilism) with regard to this illusion would be just a failure to speak plainly about the facts.'' - Sam Harris.

 

[Bomb#20]

Exactly. But what we observe to happen reliably is not an event -- it's a statistical correlation between two or more events. If X happens on this side of the lab then there's an elevated probability of Y happening on that side of the lab. So the statement of probabilities qualifies as a common law of physics. But X and Y individually are unreliable.

This poses a big problem to anybody trying to come up with a deterministic model of the phenomenon. If we assume there's some prior event W that's a cause of X, then W becomes a potential point for intervention by the experimenter. If she can do something to make W happen or not happen, that will change the odds of X happening. But there's a reliable correlation between X and Y, so changing the odds of X will change the odds of Y. And when the odds of Y happening are changed, that will be observable on that side of the lab, simply by measuring the frequency of Y. So an observer on that side of the lab can tell whether the experimenter on this side of the lab is making W happen. I.e., if there's some prior event W that's a cause of X, then it seems this will make it possible to send a message from this side of the lab to that side of the lab, faster than the speed of light. But according to Relativity, you can't send a message any faster than light. This is why it's so difficult mathematically to reconcile Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and Determinism. "Pick any two."

Well, if it turns out that pushing X moves Y, then that is the law of nature. "Pushing X causes Y to move". We don't know why pushing X causes Y to move, we just know that it does. The same applies to gravity. We do not know why the masses are attracted to each other, we just know that they are. And, we can calculate the amount of acceleration toward each other using the "law of gravity". But we do not really know why such an attraction exists, we only know that it does. The same would apply to the entanglement of particles at a distance. I assume physics has calculated this effect, but does not know why it works as it does.

The determinism is in the reliability of the cause and the effect. Moving X causes Y to move. That's the cause and that's the effect. The behavior is deterministic.

But you're not describing entanglement. I didn't say pushing X moves Y. We have no evidence that pushing X moves Y; what we've observed is that when we don't push X, and X just goes this way or that on its own for no reason we can see, and we also don't push Y and Y just goes this way or that on its own for no reason we can see, in that situation what X and Y do are somewhat synchronized. But if we try to use this synchronization to send a message, by pushing X, we fail because the synchronization goes away -- the two particles' movements are correlated only when we refrain from pushing on them. If we choose to think of this phenomenon in terms of one particle moving the other, we have no evidence as to whether it's X moving Y or it's Y moving X. Which one moves first doesn't tell us which movement is cause and which is effect -- the correlation remains even when the time difference is so little that which one moves first depends on the frame of reference of the observer. And if we assume that this is just a matter of our ignorance, and cause and effect took place, and there is a fact of the matter that one particle moved the other, then that would imply that for observers moving at some speeds relative to the laboratory, the effect happened before the cause.

... For philosophizing about determinism, you use it to mean "metaphysical certainty". But for testing your hypothesis, you're using it to mean "able to be relied on". But we rely on uncertain things all the time. ... Whether the 0.01% chance of falling results from true randomness or merely chaotic cause and effect makes no difference to our ability to rely on our feet.

A random event is one where the behavior is difficult to predict due to incomplete information, and a chaotic event is one where the behavior is difficult to predict because the behavior begins to vary soon after the initial conditions, so it is difficult to reset those conditions accurately enough to get the same result a second time.

An event that's difficult to predict due to there not yet being any state information in the universe that determines whether the event will happen is also a random event. The state information that implies P will happen and Q will not happen starts to exist at some specific time, regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is correct -- it's just a matter of when. According to determinism, all of that random information started to exist in one Noah's-Flood-like catastrophe which set the initial conditions of the universe. According to indeterminism, that same state information started to exist one bit at a time in an ongoing Uniformitarian process. It's not clear why an unobservable moment of wholesale arbitrary true-random selection from an infinite space of unrealized possibilities, amplified by eons of pseudo-random chaos, is supposed to be so much more "rational" than eons of observable retail arbitrary true-random selection from finite spaces of unrealized possibilities, likewise amplified by pseudo-random chaos.

We cannot "determine" (as in "to know") whether the coin will land heads up or tails. But we know the vectors involved, so that we could, with sufficient measurement of those vectors, theoretically predict how the coin would land with 100% accuracy.

You keep saying that; but you don't have a theory that implies it. First construct a deterministic theory that explains entanglement, then tell us what we could theoretically do.

Oh, and I do not know how "metaphysical" certainty differs from plain ol' certainty. If you're going to use that adjective, it would be nice to see what its semantic content is (I am skeptical, and currently believe it has no true meaning).

Sorry, "metaphysical certainty" is a term of art; it's used to distinguish what we're talking about from "psychological certainty". People tend to be certain of lots of things they have no good reason to be certain of. "Metaphysical certainty" refers to events that are in fact 100% probable, irrespective of whether anyone knows or believes they are.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

I'm sure you have. It has yet to be refuted.

Actually, I've refuted it multiple times now, right in front of you. Universal causal necessity/inevitability is certainly a logical fact, but it is not a meaningful nor a relevant fact. It has none of the implications that the incompatibilists claim.

In order for them to claim that it contradicts free will, they create a strawman version of free will, a version that is paradoxical. And, like Zeno's paradoxes, this paradox is a self-induced hoax, one created by a series of false, but believable, suggestions. I go into the paradox in some detail here: https://marvinedwards.me/2019/03/08/free-will-whats-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/

We've covered much of it already in this discussion. I like to think that my explanations to you have been fairly clear and simple. I do not see the paradox, of determinism "versus" free will, to be especially complex.

When I ran into the problem reading philosophy in the public library, I was at first worried by the notion that everything I did was inevitable. So, I came up with a plan to defeat inevitability. The next time I had a decision to make, and felt myself leaning heavily toward option A, I would select option B instead. I patted myself on the back for having escaped inevitability. But then I realized that my own desire to escape inevitability had simply made option B inevitable! So, to defeat inevitability, I would have to switch back to option A. But now that line of thought had simply made option A inevitable again. Arrgh! No matter which option I chose, the reasons for my choice would make that option inevitable!

Then it hit me. The only thing making my choice inevitable was my own reasoning process. Inevitability was not some external entity controlling me, but rather the result of my own thinking. And, I imagined that, if inevitability were such an entity, that it would be sitting there in the library laughing at me, for all the disturbance it had caused, simply by me thinking about it.

So, my choice, of my own free will, was the inevitable result of my own reasoning. Free will was a deterministic event, an event controlled by my own line of thinking. My choices would always be both inevitable, and my own. So, inevitability ceased to be a problem for me.

Universal causal necessity/inevitability is a logical fact, but it is not a meaningful nor a relevant fact. None of the implications that have been assigned to it can be supported, without distorting the meaning of "causal necessity" or the meaning of "free will". So, I've been attempting to clean up all the delusional ideas that have arisen from this silly paradox.

It's lunch time, and she feels hungry. She walks into the restaurant, sits down, browses the menu, chooses what she will have for lunch, and places her order: "I will have the chef salad please".

The hunger is her own. The decision to eat at the restaurant was made by her. So, she is the ultimate source of her action of going into the restaurant. Now, she is not the origin of her hunger, that was a product of evolution. Nevertheless, this hunger is an integral part of who and what she is now. Evolution did not decide that she would eat now rather than later. She did that herself. Evolution did not choose the restaurant and evolution did not choose the chef salad. That was all her.

Nobody denies that the hunger is her own, everything has properties, a lamppost has its own changing state, rust due to rain, warping due heat and cold....everything that has a brain has sets of drives and their related actions, all their own. What determinism does is make her hunger and her related actions inevitable, inevitable as in necessitated.
.
None of what is her own, or our own - hunger, thirst, pain thoughts, emotions - is willed or subject to change, because all states, conditions and actions are Fixed as a matter of natural law.

Walking into the restaurant was willed. Sitting at the table was willed. Browsing the menu was will. Ordering the chef salad was willed. Each of these events was causally necessary/inevitable from the beginning of time. But, guess what else was causally necessary and inevitable: the fact that they would be willed, and the fact that they would be willed by no other object in the physical universe than the woman herself.

(Oh, and by the way, she says she doesn't like being compared to a lamppost.)

Even if universal causal necessity/inevitability is true (and I presume it is), the woman will be the ultimate cause of what she choose to do, in response to circumstances inside (her hunger) and circumstances outside (the restaurant and the menu). There is nothing about determinism that excludes her and her choices from being an essential part of the overall scheme of causation.

And it has been repeatedly pointed out that is chosen was determined unconsciously through the actions of neural networks that within a determined system are necessitated therefore not subject to will;

The unconscious neural activity need not be subject to will in order to produce will. However, I would find the claim that the woman was unconscious as she was walking into the restaurant, sitting at the table, reading the menu, or placing her order, unbelievable.

Free Will and Determinism / Structure and Agency
The metaphysical problem of free will and determinism arises from the difficulty of reconciling two seemingly unavoidable, but mutually contradictory, core beliefs about ourselves as human beings and the wider world of which we are a part. The first is that it is free will that distinguishes human beings from all others; the second is that human beings are wholly natural creatures, embedded in the ongoing causal order of the universe. - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0048393118814952

There are no "metaphysical" problems. If it is purely metaphysical, then it is probably not a real problem. The first chapter in A. J. Ayers' "Language, Truth, and Logic" is titled: "The Elimination of Metaphysics". So, I'm skeptical of anyone swinging that word around as if it meant something.

The real world problem is the attack upon the moral notions of free will and responsibility, and the fatalism that arises from being told repeatedly by the hard determinist that we have no control.

After all, our control over our actions is causally necessary/inevitable from any prior point in time.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Marvin is expressing philosophical compatibilism. I am arguing for incompatibility. Giving the reasons why compatibilism fails. It fails because it tries to define free will into reality by ignoring the implications of determinism, that simply calling something free will does not make will free, which makes it a word game.

Frankly, I did not discover compatibilism by reading philosophy. Back when I was about 15 or so, when I first saw through the problem, I don't think "compatibilism" was even a word. What I realized back then was that free will was a causally necessary/inevitable event, just like every other event. And it remains my own reasoning that produces my choices. Necessity is not an entity that exercises any control, and it is a delusion to imagine that it is.

But I have since studied the philosophical notion of compatibilism. And I find it wanting. I posted a critical review of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here: https://marvinedwards.me/2018/10/20/compatibilism-whats-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/

 

[Marvin Edwards]

A person is choosing for themselves? True as a trivial observation but does not account for the means of decision making or the elements that necessitate it. The world acts upon the brain, that within a determined system produces an inevitable result, a result that was neither consciously decided or freely willed. The brain is constrained by its own architecture and the information that acts upon it.

Ironically, it is causal necessity that turns out to be the triviality. It is always true of every event. What I will inevitably do is exactly identical to me just being me, choosing what I choose, and doing what I do. And that is not a meaningful constraint. It is not something that anyone can, or needs to be, free of.

As to the "means of decision making or the elements that necessitate it", that turns out to be me. My brain is the means of my decision making. My own thoughts and feelings, beliefs and values, and all those other things that make me who and what I am, are "the elements that necessitate" my choice. So, however you slice it up, the causal determinant remains "me" all the way down.

As to my brain being "constrained by its own architecture", well, that's a very perverse and delusional way of looking at it. Isn't it rather the case that my brain's architecture is not that which "constrains", but rather that which "enables" my imagination, my evaluation, my choosing, and all of my deliberate actions?

 

[Copernicus]

It seems to me that the endless struggle over free will in this thread has been over how to frame the concept of "free will". If you frame it from the perspective of a deterministic system, then there appears to be no freedom of choice. If you frame it from the perspective of partially deterministic environment that human beings interact with, then there is considerable freedom of choice. Compatibilism is just the position that both perspectives are valid, depending on the discourse context. For example, it doesn't make any sense to talk about free will in the context of an omniscient observer--a godlike being--because there is never any doubt as to outcomes in what it is observing. So the characters or "agents" in a novel don't have free will except in an imagined storyline where they don't know their future. One can shift back and forth between the perspective of the author and the imaginary characters with no trouble at all. We can read that novel knowing that the characters don't really have free will but still imagine them to have it. This is about the perspective we use to frame the argument, and both perspectives can be useful ones under different circumstances. The "godlike" author has to keep shifting perspectives in order to write the novel. The reader has to keep shifting in order to remain interested in the storyline while not losing touch with the reality in which he or she is reading a novel.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

It seems to me that the endless struggle over free will in this thread has been over how to frame the concept of "free will". If you frame it from the perspective of a deterministic system, then there appears to be no freedom of choice. If you frame it from the perspective of partially deterministic environment that human beings interact with, then there is considerable freedom of choice. Compatibilism is just the position that both perspectives are valid, depending on the discourse context. For example, it doesn't make any sense to talk about free will in the context of an omniscient observer--a godlike being--because there is never any doubt as to outcomes in what it is observing. So the characters or "agents" in a novel don't have free will except in an imagined storyline where they don't know their future. One can shift back and forth between the perspective of the author and the imaginary characters with no trouble at all. We can read that novel knowing that the characters don't really have free will but still imagine them to have it. This is about the perspective we use to frame the argument, and both perspectives can be useful ones under different circumstances. The "godlike" author has to keep shifting perspectives in order to write the novel. The reader has to keep shifting in order to remain interested in the storyline while not losing touch with the reality in which he or she is reading a novel.

Well, I was hoping to have overcome that problem, by demonstrating that free will is just another deterministic event. That becomes a simple matter if we presume universal causal necessity. But it gets befuddled if we allow indeterminism to creep in. You see, if we live in a world of perfectly reliable cause and effect, then causal necessity becomes an irrelevant triviality. But with indeterminism, it once again becomes a relevant constraint, because it can be present or it can be absent. But if it is always present, then it becomes an irrelevant background constant. So, my argument is never helped by the introduction of indeterministic events.

Free will and freedom of choice are both present in a deterministic system. We can look right at them, and they cannot be denied, because choosing is an event that actually occurs within our deterministic universe.

 

[steve_bank]

I understand 'free' will is part of the Biden spending bill.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

I understand 'free' will is part of the Biden spending bill.

But he can't get Manchin to vote for it.

 

[DBT]

I'm sure you have. It has yet to be refuted.

Actually, I've refuted it multiple times now, right in front of you. Universal causal necessity/inevitability is certainly a logical fact, but it is not a meaningful nor a relevant fact. It has none of the implications that the incompatibilists claim.

You believe that you have refuted it multiple times. Simply believing something is true doesn't make it true.

If you you really could refute incompatibilism and establish free will as reality, the debate would over. Harris, Pereboom, Hallet, et al, would concede and nobody would argue anymore.

But, however much you'd like to think so, no such thing has happened.

The debate goes on because compatibilists stubbornly cling to their semantic construct of free will, declaring that humans have free will when they can act unrestrained according to their own nature....never mind that nobody has control of their own nature or that within a determined system all things are fixed as a matter of law and all things happen according to their own makeup and nature.


''For compatibilism, “freedom” most often addresses a condition of action rather than an agent’s will itself. In fact, even some compatibilists think that “freedom of the will” should be abandoned for “freedom of action” (though they’d remove the “freedom of the will” term in doing so – which incorrectly assumes there is no need to address the will’s constraints). For the compatibilist “freedom” often means the “unencumbered freedom for one to do what they want”.


Of course this type of freedom has various shortcomings and is only “unencumbered” in a very limited sense. For example, someone with a constraining mental illness could be seen as having such “freedom” to do what they want, yet not be seen as having “free will”. By not focusing on the constraint of the will itself, the term freedom becomes loose and able to refer to things we wouldn’t grant free will for – such as someone with a brain tumor pressing on a part of their brain making them desire and have a compulsive drive to do something, to a person who is brainwashed to want or desire to do something, to someone with a mental illness in which they want to do something due to a “non-normal” brain function, to a brain microchip interacting with the brain in a way that makes them want or desire to do something. These types of configurations, per many compatibilist definitions, would equally have the same types of “freedoms to act in a way the person wants”.

 

[DBT]

Marvin is expressing philosophical compatibilism. I am arguing for incompatibility. Giving the reasons why compatibilism fails. It fails because it tries to define free will into reality by ignoring the implications of determinism, that simply calling something free will does not make will free, which makes it a word game.

Frankly, I did not discover compatibilism by reading philosophy. Back when I was about 15 or so, when I first saw through the problem, I don't think "compatibilism" was even a word. What I realized back then was that free will was a causally necessary/inevitable event, just like every other event. And it remains my own reasoning that produces my choices. Necessity is not an entity that exercises any control, and it is a delusion to imagine that it is.

But I have since studied the philosophical notion of compatibilism. And I find it wanting. I posted a critical review of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here: https://marvinedwards.me/2018/10/20/compatibilism-whats-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/

You thought you saw through the problem.You believe that you see through the problem. Other people disagree. Who is right depends not on who thinks they have seen through the problem but how well their model is supported by evidence.

Unfortunately evidence from neuroscience shows that unconscious brain processing precedes conscious experience and forms it on the basis of information processing. Will playing no part until readiness potential and conscious report.

And that just declaring 'acting uncoerced, according to one's own nature' to be free will does not establish the reality of free will.