One of those things is not like the others. The ball, the planets, and the moons, do not experience constraint. The dog experiences his chain as a constraint. For the dog, freedom is a meaningful concept, because the chain prevents him from chasing the squirrel, something that he really wants to do.
The common element is unimpeded action. Unimpeded action necessarily follows from necessitated will.
Again, you bury the meaningful distinction with a generalization. The notion of freedom requires the notion of constraint. The meaning of a specific freedom derives from the specific constraint.
For example:
1. We set the bird free (constraint: its cage).
2. We enjoy freedom of speech (constraint: censorship).
3. A woman was offering free samples in the grocery store (constraint: cost).
4. I participated in Libet's experiment of my own free will (constraint: undue influence).
Note that each of these freedoms have meaningful constraints, specifically related to that type of freedom.
Note that each of those constraints can be either present or absent, such that the freedom is gone when the constraint is present and the freedom returns when the constraint is removed.
A. Reliable causation, being necessary for every freedom we have, is not in itself a meaningful constraint. What we will inevitably do is exactly identical to us just being us, choosing what we choose, and doing what we do.
B. Causal necessity, being always present in the case of every event, is not in itself a relevant constraint. It is not something that we can be free of.
Therefore, to define free will as "freedom from causal necessity" is nonsense.
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Wanting to do X is fully determined by these prior causes. Now that the desire to do X is being felt, there are no other constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, namely X. At this point, we should ascribe free will to all animals capable of experiencing desires (e.g., to eat, sleep, or mate). Yet, we don’t; and we tend not to judge non-human animals in moral terms.''
What we want to do may be determined by prior causes, but what we will do is determined by our own choice. Joachim Krueger may have a PhD, but he does not seem to understand the notions of responsibility or justice. In this quote, he links desire directly to action, without the mediation of rational judgment. This is a serious error.
Please be a bit more careful in who you choose to quote. Or, be prepared to defend his words with your own.
Desire is not the element of freedom. Desire itself is necessitated by processes that are not subject to conscious or free will regulation.
Exactly! And that is why desires are constrained by reason and judgment.
The action that results is no more subject to free will change or regulation than orbits and objects falling, the action is necessarily performed with no alternate action possible in that instance in time.
That would be the case if we were acting instinctively, without reason or judgment. Fortunately, with intelligence, we get both. We can estimate the likely consequences of our actions, and can choose the actions with the best consequences.
We of course have far greater repertoire of actions than planets, yet if determinism is true, every action we make is equally determined, yet unimpeded.
All events are always equally deterministic. That's why causal necessity is a logical fact, but not a particularly meaningful or relevant fact.
Freedom, by definition, requires alternate possibilities and freedom from necessity;
Freedom:
1: the quality or state of being free: such as
a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action - Merrium Webster.
Causal necessity is different from ordinary necessity.
Ordinary necessity refers to something that you must do, even if you don't want to.
But with causal necessity, you are always doing what you yourself have chosen to do.
Do you see the difference?
And, of course, whenever it is causally necessary that we will make a choice, it will also be causally necessary that there will be at least two alternate possibilities to choose from. It's built into the causal mechanism that necessitates the choice.
Necessity has absolute implications for freedom, if your thought processes and the actions that follow -however unimpeded - are necessitated, they are not free;
Ironically, "causal necessity" is essential to freedom. Without reliable cause and effect, we could never reliably cause any effect, and would have no freedom to do anything at all.
We exist as a collaborative collection of reliable causal mechanisms that keep our hearts beating and our thoughts flowing. When these mechanisms break down, our ability to function diminishes, our freedom to do the things we want becomes more constrained.
So, "Hooray!" for causal necessity, the source of all our freedoms.
We make thing happen because thing make us happen.
Yep. There are causes behind us, and then there's us, causing things ahead of us.
We take actions in specific ways. Ways that are determined, not by our will or our desire, but by information interactions between the environment and the brain.
Yes. And remember that one of those "information interactions between the environment and the brain" happens to be choosing what we will do next.
Rather than it being a matter of free will, our abilities, features, attributes, strengths and weaknesses, how we think and what we think is a matter of neural architecture.
It's not an "either/or". When it is us, as we are, with all "our abilities, features, attributes, strengths and weakness" deciding for ourselves what we will do, we call it free will.
Not because it is free from causal necessity.
Not because it is free from all those attributes that make us who and what we are.
But simply because we made the choice while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
We don't choose our condition, yet our condition forms our being, our mind, character, thoughts and actions.
Well, we actually do have some say in our condition. A person may choose to drop out of high school. That choice will change his future condition and thus impact other choices he makes down the road. We have each been active participants in all of the events that have affected us over the years. All of these choices, just like all other events, were causally necessary, of course. But this does not change the fact that we did in fact do the choosing. Nor does it prevent us from learning from our experience to make better decisions in the future.
Again, you could dispense with the overworked "neural network" metaphor, and your argument would still be an irrelevant genetic fallacy.
