Compatibilism: What's that About?

[DBT]

Here is Strawson's article on the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.

And here is an An Interview with Galen Strawson which took place 10 years after the paper you cite. In this interview he makes it clear that he accepts the everyday sense of moral responsibility (he's arguing against the kind of responsibility beloved by those who have been seduced by the "freedom from cause and effect" paradox.).

but I just want to stress the word “ultimate” before “moral responsibility.” Because there’s a clear, weaker, everyday sense of “morally responsible” in which you and I and millions of other people are thoroughly morally responsible people.

Reading the interview, it seems that Strawson had become somewhat spiritual in his latter years. It changes nothing as far as the argument goes. The given definition of determinism still does not allow alternate actions, and as the action that is taken is necessitated by information exchange between the environment and brain, freedom of will remains incompatible with determinism.

Why the concept of free will is incoherent;
''The concept of free will is something that evades and ignores, and chooses not to consider, the very fundamental process in nature. When we say we have a free will, what we’re saying is that our will is free of causality. To say we have a free will is to say that what we decide is free of a cause. Since every cause has a cause, the cause of our decision would have a cause, and suddenly we find we have a causal chain stretching back to before we were born. That’s why the concept of free will is incoherent. You can’t have things that happen without a cause. For the sake of discussion and exploration, let’s say that something can actually happen without having been caused. If that something was not caused, there is only one other option. The decision must be random, or indeterministic in their strongest sense of being uncaused. It has no cause at all; it just happens.''

''The concept of free will, when you think about it, is internally inconsistent. It’s not logical. If you define the will as volition, or that part of our mind or self that makes decisions, and you say that volition is free of what it can’t control – free of causality, free of our memories, free of how we’re conditioned. The definition just doesn’t make sense. Essentially, the term free will means that we are doing what we’re doing, and saying what we’re saying, and thinking what we’re thinking, completely of our own accord. By logical extension, that belief leads to the conclusion that we do all of what we do for no reason. As soon as you say “I made this decision of my own free will because, for example, it was the right decision, or because I wanted to be a good person, you’ve introduced a cause. You’ve introduced the chain of cause and effect. Once you say you’ve made a decision because of something – because of anything – then you must acknowledge that that cause has a cause, and that cause has a cause, etc.''

 

[DBT]

Hard determinists believe that volunteers don't really exist. They are just deluded slaves to causal necessity who thought they were free to refuse service.

Who is a hard determinist? Are we not talking about compatibilism, which accepts determinism but claims that freedom of will is compatible with determinism?

Compatibilists don't claim that multiple options can be realized in any given instance.

There are always multiple options, in every second, across every moment in time. Marvin keeps playing with eggs or pancakes, and he simplifies things by creating posts where simple, often binary choices are available to people at most instances of most of the time. But the reality is that there are in fact a literally innumerable amount of choices, all the time.

As pointed out, there are multiple options, but only one realizable for you in any given moment in time. And given the nature of determinism, that option is necessitated by antecedents. It is not freely willed. Information acting upon the brain necessitates that action in that moment in time.

You can call it decision making (computers are able to select options based on sets of criteria) but decision making does not equate to free will for reasons that have been given multiple times.

 

[DBT]

The word 'ultimate' need not be used - it makes no difference to the fact that we are not responsible for the way we are, genetics, environment, culture, life experiences, etc.

I would agree with DBT on this. Responsibility is responsibility.

Well, thank goodness for that much.

When we experience a bad event, like a car hitting a pedestrian at an intersection, we want to know all the causes, so that each can be corrected. To say that the malfunctioning traffic signal was "responsible" for the accident would lead us to ask "who is responsible for assuring that our traffic signals work correctly?" So, responsibility ultimately involves a person, someone who can do something about the problem, someone who perhaps needs to do a better job.

The accident is unique combination of circumstances, the elements of the collision, the pedestrian, the driver, the state of the traffic lights, the driver being distracted, etc, coming together to cause an unavoidable event.

But all responsible causes must each be corrected if we are to achieve our ultimate goal of reducing the risk of future harm. The traffic light, the procedure for detecting the malfunction, and those responsible for the design and maintenance, would all be responsible causes and subject to appropriate correction.

The same would be true for the criminal who robs the bank. A responsible society would seek to correct any problems within the community that might "breed" criminal behavior, like bad schools, racial discrimination, drug trafficking, poverty, lack of employment opportunities, lack of supervised afterschool recreation, etc. But they would also have to correct the responsible offender, the person who thought it was a good idea to commit the robbery and actually did it.

The elements of the collision are analyzed after the fact and corrections can be implemented, thereby helping prevent another accident under those circumstances. Action and reaction. Event and response. Thought processes determined by the information made available to the brains of those involved in road safety. Still nothing to do with free will.

You can phrase it without including 'ultimate'....in 'order to be responsible for what you do, you have to be responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental aspects,' and it's still valid.

Galen Strawson was confusing "ultimate" cause with "first" cause. But the "ultimate" cause would, I believe, be more like Aristotle's "final cause" which refers to the deliberate purpose that is responsible for, and which meaningfully explains why the event happened.

And Strawson's error, espoused by DBT, is the notion that the criminal offender's responsibility should be shifted to his prior causes, as if they, and not he, had planned and committed the robbery.

Yes, I don't agree with everything Strawson said, but I'd say that his original argument was basically sound. I haven't had time to carefully read the interview cited by AntiChris, but it seems he may have shifted his position.

 

[DBT]

So neural processes are interested in continuing an organism’s existence? Does that mean neural processes have a mind or will of their own?

I think that organisms are interested in continuing their own existence and that they evaluate options based on neural inputs to decide the best course of action for survival in any given circumstance.

Has the brain not evolved to process information and respond according to the organism's niche in the environment?

 

[DBT]

'Choice' is not a matter of free will, but brain function and condition. Information condition equals output, thoughts generated actions taken.

You still don't get it. One does not preclude the other. Choosing is a brain function that is easily demonstrated by walking into a restaurant and observing people browsing the menu and placing their order.

Appearances do not explain the means. Which is not free will.

If you recall;
Volition
''To successfully interact with objects in the environment, sensory evidence must be continuously acquired, interpreted, and used to guide appropriate motor responses. For example, when driving, a red light should motivate a motor command to depress the brake pedal.

Single-unit recording studies have established that simple sensorimotor transformations are mediated by the same neurons that ultimately guide the behavioral response. However, it is also possible that these sensorimotor regions are the recipients of a modality-independent decision signal that is computed elsewhere.

Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and human observers to show that the time course of activation in a subregion of the right insula is consistent with a role in accumulating sensory evidence independently from the required motor response modality (saccade vs manual).

Furthermore, a combination of computational modeling and simulations of the blood oxygenation level-dependent response suggests that this region is not simply recruited by general arousal or by the tonic maintenance of attention during the decision process. Our data thus raise the possibility that a modality-independent representation of sensory evidence may guide activity in effector-specific cortical areas before the initiation of a behavioral response.''

No alternate actions possible in any instance in time.

You are staring at a literal menu of alternate possibilities, of which every one of them can be realized.

Not by everyone and never more than one 'option' at any given moment in time. Someone may have the option of mathematics or cosmology for a career, some may become the CEO of a multinational Corp, etc, the options are there for some, but they are not options available for everyone, not for most people.

The option you do take is determined by countless factors that brought you to the state where not only is that option open to you, but given the nature of determinism (which you cannot deny as a compatibilist), the option is necessitated rather than freely chosen.

It is not a free will choice.

So it is at this point that compatibilism fails.


''Self-organization is all over nature. Self-organization is nature. Plants have it, the weather has it, the whole planet has it (Lorenz, 1963). Anyone who wishes to offer a perspective on free will must beware of not explaining too much. If free will (without consciousness) comes cheap in our universe, human exceptionalism goes down the drain again, lost to those who wish to save it and who are anxious to hold humans responsible for their actions – and punish them. The arguments Brembs presents are more aligned with naturalism than he seems to realize.


The self-organization we see everywhere and which defies prediction can be modeled by chaos mathematics (Hofstadter, 1979). From small initial differences and simple recursive formulas, astonishing and unpredicted variation emerges; and it is all so lawful and deterministic. A mind that works like that can’t help but be puzzled when looking at itself. It cannot comprehend how its phenomenal complexity has risen up from the relentless grinding of simple algorithms. In desperation, this mind fancies itself to be free. It accepts the hypothesis of freedom because the alternative is just too darn difficult. The flies have one advantage over us: They don’t worry about it.''

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Setting up neural mechanisms for choice. Think about it. A deterministic world provides stimuli 'directing survival of neural processes responding appropriately', in the statistical evolutionary processes of continuing the organism's existence in given circumstances. Those neural processes cannot become the basis for free will.

So, rather than neural processes, you would propose what, a soul? We know that people make choices, which car to buy, when and where to eat lunch, which tie goes best with a shirt, and so on. We don't know how neural mechanisms do it, but we presume they do it somehow. After all, what are the alternatives? DBT has suggested that the information is making the choices, as if the shirts and ties were doing our choosing for us. The only thing we know for sure is that whatever is making the choices can be coerced or unduly influenced to make choices they would rather not make. So, free will is a choice we make for ourselves without coercion or undue influence. And since choosing must inevitably happen, free will must also inevitably happen. Think about it.

Fortunately, I'm not so confused as to think that choosing, whatever you mean by that, happens. I'm just of the opinion that humans, at least, attempt to retain fitness advantage by supporting various processes magnifying one's own status.
There are many ways one can envision why one chooses to justify such. I know that when I talk myself into being confident when confronted by the threat that I've tended to fare better than when I'm caught unaware of the threat or when I am not prepared to respond to a threat. I'm best when confident and prepared.

I'm a prepared for fight or flight type of gee.

Side thought. I've been confronted by bullies most of my life because I'm slight. I learned early to be as fit as possible because I'm a normally assertive person. I had a child like me. I prepared him some. I didn't assure that he had acquired the heavy training required for boxing and wrestling threats. He got sucker-punched in a parking lot and died.

I survived a similar attack when I was his age because I was prepared. Fitness is not generationally guaranteed. It all comes down to having the proper skill set at the proper time. Another nail in the silly old consciousness/choice notions.

Sounds like you had a rough life and chose to become fit in order to deal with it. I don't buy this notion that choosing doesn't happen. When confronted with a bully it may be the case that there is no time for choosing. Fight or flight may kick in instinctively. My father was a preacher, and I wasn't allowed to fight, even though he wrestled with us frequently. There was a bully who was actually smaller than me, who tried to pick a fight with me twice. I refused to fight him, and just stood there. The first time I was rescued by a group of older kids who told him to go away. The second time it was just the two of us on the playground. I told him that if we fought he would likely beat me, and suggested instead that we compete in another way. We would take turns on the playground equipment, each trying to do something that the other could not do. I could do some pretty cool things. But he was able to do most of them. He left with the satisfaction of knowing that he could beat me in a fight. I left with the satisfaction of having avoided a fight. In any case, that was the only time I was ever confronted with a bully. He was looking for a fight. I was looking to avoid one.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Every time you answer you float a new banana boat. Your latest is adapting creatively to an environment. You don't do anything.

What you are and what you experience are what you have for tools. I don't care how creative you may be. Besides most of what we are finding that kills us is not interspecies. What kills us is within species. All of our species are pretty damn intelligent. If you don't meet force and/or knowledge with sufficient (think better) force and/or knowledge you will not likely survive.

Notice all the probable's I dropped there. Maybe statistics have something to do with it.

Statistics is how we make unpredictable events somewhat predictable. By creativity, I mean like that of the Wright brothers as they created the first flying machine or Thomas Edison and his light bulb experimenting for weeks to find the right filament, or Jonas Salk finding a vaccine for polio. These are the benefits of intelligence.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, just because there is only one option that is the "best" option, does not necessitate that I take it. Or that I have to actually consider that dimension of "best".

Oftentimes when evaluating, I throw some chaos into the mix, or roll the dice and say "nope!" And do something off-model instead.

That's an important phrase: off-model.

I can choose to look at my model and the not apply it! Shift to other models for whatever reason I care about. Perhaps this is also through a model, but one that specifically shifts to random or chaotic paradigms.

I can DECIDE to make "a mistake" merely because some part of me wishes to in that moment.

The decision is entirely reliant on MY internal state, not the external one.

 

[fromderinside]

Every time you answer you float a new banana boat. Your latest is adapting creatively to an environment. You don't do anything.

What you are and what you experience are what you have for tools. I don't care how creative you may be. Besides most of what we are finding that kills us is not interspecies. What kills us is within species. All of our species are pretty damn intelligent. If you don't meet force and/or knowledge with sufficient (think better) force and/or knowledge you will not likely survive.

Notice all the probable's I dropped there. Maybe statistics have something to do with it.

Statistics is how we make unpredictable events somewhat predictable. By creativity, I mean like that of the Wright brothers as they created the first flying machine or Thomas Edison and his light bulb experimenting for weeks to find the right filament, or Jonas Salk finding a vaccine for polio. These are the benefits of intelligence.

So here is where I'll respond to your obvious attempts to co-opt both self-organization and chance into the volition camp.

 Self-organization

Self-organization relies on four basic ingredients:[6]

1. strong dynamical non-linearity, often (though not necessarily) involving positive and negative feedback
2. balance of exploitation and exploration
3. multiple interactions
4. availability of energy (to overcome the natural tendency toward entropy, or loss of free energy)

The cybernetician William Ross Ashby formulated the original principle of self-organization in 1947.[7][8] It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.[7]

The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster formulated the principle of "order from noise" in 1960.[9] It notes that self-organization is facilitated by random perturbations ("noise") that let the system explore a variety of states in its state space. This increases the chance that the system will arrive into the basin of a "strong" or "deep" attractor, from which it then quickly enters the attractor itself. The biophysicist Henri Atlan developed this concept by proposing the principle of "complexity from noise"[10][11] (French: le principe de complexité par le bruit)[12] first in the 1972 book L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information and then in the 1979 book Entre le cristal et la fumée. The physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine formulated a similar principle as "order through fluctuations"[13] or "order out of chaos".[14] It is applied in the method of simulated annealing for problem solving and machine learning.[15]

Please note that self-organization depends on local properties being thus and so, not on local conditions organizing themselves.

No magic here, nothing mystical or internally motivated. just ordinary physics, chemistry, and biology.

Oh, and Jarhyn you should bow down to the physical Gods as well.

There is no reason neural systems, being complex physical systems, don't also incorporate such as repeating and organizing functions into their normal designs.

 

[The AntiChris]

Why the concept of free will is incoherent;
''.....When we say we have a free will, what we’re saying is that our will is free of causality. To say we have a free will is to say that what we decide is free of a cause.

This simply isn't true.

Of course some people may use the term 'free will' in this nonsensical way but you must be aware that many (most?) do not.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The accident is unique combination of circumstances, the elements of the collision, the pedestrian, the driver, the state of the traffic lights, the driver being distracted, etc, coming together to cause an unavoidable event.

The elements of the collision are analyzed after the fact and corrections can be implemented, thereby helping prevent another accident under those circumstances. Action and reaction. Event and response. Thought processes determined by the information made available to the brains of those involved in road safety. Still nothing to do with free will.

Those involved in road safety? Hang on a moment, where does that come from? How does it come to be that we have designated people responsible for road safety?

It is all about choosing. By the choice of individuals we agreed to constitute a nation and each of its states, in order to address matters of public concern. One of these matters we chose to address was building roads and bridges, especially after someone imagined the possibility of an alternative to horse drawn carriages, and made all the choices as to how an automobile should be designed. Then people made their individual choices as to when to replace their horse-drawn carriage with an automobile. And then there were automobile accidents. And then state legislatures considered the causes of these accidents, and discussed many possible ways to reduce this harm. They chose the specific rules they would enforce.

Do you get the picture? There was a whole lot of choosing going on. Not just "action and reaction", but thoughtful choosing. Not just "event and response", but deliberate planning.

And what is free will? Free will is a choice we make for ourselves while free of coercion and undue influence. So, there was a whole lot of freely chosen "I will's" going on all over the place. And that's how we ended up with specific people being assigned responsibility for traffic rules and enforcement.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Every time you answer you float a new banana boat. Your latest is adapting creatively to an environment. You don't do anything.

What you are and what you experience are what you have for tools. I don't care how creative you may be. Besides most of what we are finding that kills us is not interspecies. What kills us is within species. All of our species are pretty damn intelligent. If you don't meet force and/or knowledge with sufficient (think better) force and/or knowledge you will not likely survive.

Notice all the probable's I dropped there. Maybe statistics have something to do with it.

Statistics is how we make unpredictable events somewhat predictable. By creativity, I mean like that of the Wright brothers as they created the first flying machine or Thomas Edison and his light bulb experimenting for weeks to find the right filament, or Jonas Salk finding a vaccine for polio. These are the benefits of intelligence.

So here is where I'll respond to your obvious attempts to co-opt both self-organization and chance into the volition camp.

 Self-organization

Self-organization relies on four basic ingredients:[6]

1. strong dynamical non-linearity, often (though not necessarily) involving positive and negative feedback
2. balance of exploitation and exploration
3. multiple interactions
4. availability of energy (to overcome the natural tendency toward entropy, or loss of free energy)

The cybernetician William Ross Ashby formulated the original principle of self-organization in 1947.[7][8] It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.[7]

The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster formulated the principle of "order from noise" in 1960.[9] It notes that self-organization is facilitated by random perturbations ("noise") that let the system explore a variety of states in its state space. This increases the chance that the system will arrive into the basin of a "strong" or "deep" attractor, from which it then quickly enters the attractor itself. The biophysicist Henri Atlan developed this concept by proposing the principle of "complexity from noise"[10][11] (French: le principe de complexité par le bruit)[12] first in the 1972 book L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information and then in the 1979 book Entre le cristal et la fumée. The physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine formulated a similar principle as "order through fluctuations"[13] or "order out of chaos".[14] It is applied in the method of simulated annealing for problem solving and machine learning.[15]

Please note that self-organization depends on local properties being thus and so, not on local conditions organizing themselves.

No magic here, nothing mystical or internally motivated. just ordinary physics, chemistry, and biology.

Oh, and Jarhyn you should bow down to the physical Gods as well.

There is no reason neural systems, being complex physical systems, don't also incorporate such as repeating and organizing functions into their normal designs.

I'm very happy for you that you seem to have lots of information about self-organization and what-not. But choosing is a simple empirical operation that we both saw happening in the restaurant. How it came about that we choose things is less important to me than the fact that we actually do choose what we will do. If you cannot agree to the simple fact that people choose things, then whether they choose things of their own free will or not is a pointless discussion.

 

[pood]

Why the concept of free will is incoherent;
''.....When we say we have a free will, what we’re saying is that our will is free of causality. To say we have a free will is to say that what we decide is free of a cause.

This simply isn't true.

Of course some people may use the term 'free will' in this nonsensical way but you must be aware that many (most?) do not.

The bit that DBT quotes here is of course a rebuttal of libertarian free will and not compatibilist free will (soft determinism). Since no one here is arguing for libertarian (contra-causal) free will, it has no relevance to the discussion.

 

[The AntiChris]

Why the concept of free will is incoherent;
''.....When we say we have a free will, what we’re saying is that our will is free of causality. To say we have a free will is to say that what we decide is free of a cause.

This simply isn't true.

Of course some people may use the term 'free will' in this nonsensical way but you must be aware that many (most?) do not.

The bit that DBT quotes here is of course a rebuttal of libertarian free will and not compatibilist free will (soft determinism). Since no one here is arguing for libertarian (contra-causal) free will, it has no relevance to the discussion.

I'm not convinced. My reading was that the authors were arguing, just as DBT does, against any and all uses of the term 'free will'. In his responses, DBT rarely if ever makes any distinction between libertarian and compatibilist free will (he routinely attempts to rebut compatibilist arguments with objections that only target libertarian free will).

 

[pood]

Why the concept of free will is incoherent;
''.....When we say we have a free will, what we’re saying is that our will is free of causality. To say we have a free will is to say that what we decide is free of a cause.

This simply isn't true.

Of course some people may use the term 'free will' in this nonsensical way but you must be aware that many (most?) do not.

The bit that DBT quotes here is of course a rebuttal of libertarian free will and not compatibilist free will (soft determinism). Since no one here is arguing for libertarian (contra-causal) free will, it has no relevance to the discussion.

I'm not convinced. My reading was that the authors were arguing, just as DBT does, against any and all uses of the term 'free will'. In his responses, DBT rarely if ever makes any distinction between libertarian and compatibilist free will (he routinely attempts to rebut compatibilist arguments with objections that only target libertarian free will).

Well, yes, I don’t think DBT is really tending to these distinctions. He didn’t even seem to be familiar with the term “hard determinist,” conflating it with straight determinism, for example. But as I noted, determinism is simply the empirically observed thesis that the macro world we are familiar with (as opposed to the quantum world) exhibits reliable cause and effect. HARD determinism is the thesis that antecedent events, in concert with the so-called laws of nature, ENTAIL all future events, including human actions. These are very different ideas. Determinism alone is agnostic about human freedom.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

'Choice' is not a matter of free will, but brain function and condition. Information condition equals output, thoughts generated actions taken.

You still don't get it. One does not preclude the other. Choosing is a brain function that is easily demonstrated by walking into a restaurant and observing people browsing the menu and placing their order.

Appearances do not explain the means. Which is not free will.

If you recall;
Volition
''To successfully interact with objects in the environment, sensory evidence must be continuously acquired, interpreted, and used to guide appropriate motor responses. For example, when driving, a red light should motivate a motor command to depress the brake pedal.

Single-unit recording studies have established that simple sensorimotor transformations are mediated by the same neurons that ultimately guide the behavioral response. However, it is also possible that these sensorimotor regions are the recipients of a modality-independent decision signal that is computed elsewhere.

Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and human observers to show that the time course of activation in a subregion of the right insula is consistent with a role in accumulating sensory evidence independently from the required motor response modality (saccade vs manual).

Furthermore, a combination of computational modeling and simulations of the blood oxygenation level-dependent response suggests that this region is not simply recruited by general arousal or by the tonic maintenance of attention during the decision process. Our data thus raise the possibility that a modality-independent representation of sensory evidence may guide activity in effector-specific cortical areas before the initiation of a behavioral response.''

Your example is inappropriate. Driving is a skill, like playing the piano. While developing a skill there is initially a lot of conscious attention involved at the outset. But after the skill is acquired, your attention is often elsewhere. People can drive to work without thinking about driving. They play the radio. They may even talk on the phone. People can drive with their minds elsewhere and be surprised at how far they've travelled. Your attention to driving only wakes up to handle something unpredictable.

So driving is not about choosing, and has nothing to do with free will, other than the fact that you did initially choose to go somewhere.

And this is typical of the selective use of neuroscience evidence in arguments about free will. Usually we get all the exceptional cases where a person's brain is injured in some way, and it is suggested to us that the brain injured is the same as the brain normal. But in this case you have given us the neuroscience of motor skills, assuming perhaps that choosing what we will order for dinner is using the same motor neurons used while driving.

Please. Let's stick to the relevant neuroscience and not presume that every example of not-choosing is evidence that choosing never happens. It's an invalid argument. This is the second time (at least) that you've posted that same material, and it is still irrelevant to this discussion.

No alternate actions possible in any instance in time.

You are staring at a literal menu of alternate possibilities, of which every one of them can be realized.

Not by everyone ... Someone may have the option of mathematics or cosmology for a career, some may become the CEO of a multinational Corp, etc, the options are there for some, but they are not options available for everyone, not for most people.

Yes and no. A person's competency limits what they can do, but it does not prevent them from choosing to attempt to do something beyond their competency. It's that free will thing, you know, like when Trump chose to run for president.

The option you do take is determined by countless factors that brought you to the state where not only is that option open to you, but given the nature of determinism (which you cannot deny as a compatibilist), the option is necessitated rather than freely chosen.

Whenever my action is necessitated by my own choosing, while free of coercion and undue influence, both causal necessity and free will are fully satisfied. Free will does not claim to be free of prior causes. It simply asserts that the most meaningful and relevant cause of my deliberate act is my own act of deliberation, in which I chose what I would do.

No prior causes of me can participate in that choosing without first becoming an integral part of who and what I am. I am that which chooses what I will do, and they are not.

The notion that my prior causes are actually doing the choosing is an illusion. The hard determinist argument is based upon figurative thinking. The correct form of their statement is that "It is AS IF causal necessity made the choice, and not you". And, like all figurative statements, it is literally (actually, empirically, truthfully) false.

...and never more than one 'option' at any given moment in time...

I pulled this out because I wasn't sure what you meant here. The choosing operation is a series of mental events, where options are identified, then each is evaluated in turn, then the result is calculated and the choice is output. But perhaps you had something else in mind?

Note: I've omitted the literary piece you added at the end as it seems to have nothing to do with the discussion. If you wish to insert it again with an explanation of how it might relate to the discussion of free will, then I'll consider responding.

 

[fromderinside]

Every time you answer you float a new banana boat. Your latest is adapting creatively to an environment. You don't do anything.

What you are and what you experience are what you have for tools. I don't care how creative you may be. Besides most of what we are finding that kills us is not interspecies. What kills us is within species. All of our species are pretty damn intelligent. If you don't meet force and/or knowledge with sufficient (think better) force and/or knowledge you will not likely survive.

Notice all the probable's I dropped there. Maybe statistics have something to do with it.

Statistics is how we make unpredictable events somewhat predictable. By creativity, I mean like that of the Wright brothers as they created the first flying machine or Thomas Edison and his light bulb experimenting for weeks to find the right filament, or Jonas Salk finding a vaccine for polio. These are the benefits of intelligence.

So here is where I'll respond to your obvious attempts to co-opt both self-organization and chance into the volition camp.

 Self-organization

Self-organization relies on four basic ingredients:[6]

1. strong dynamical non-linearity, often (though not necessarily) involving positive and negative feedback
2. balance of exploitation and exploration
3. multiple interactions
4. availability of energy (to overcome the natural tendency toward entropy, or loss of free energy)

The cybernetician William Ross Ashby formulated the original principle of self-organization in 1947.[7][8] It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.[7]

The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster formulated the principle of "order from noise" in 1960.[9] It notes that self-organization is facilitated by random perturbations ("noise") that let the system explore a variety of states in its state space. This increases the chance that the system will arrive into the basin of a "strong" or "deep" attractor, from which it then quickly enters the attractor itself. The biophysicist Henri Atlan developed this concept by proposing the principle of "complexity from noise"[10][11] (French: le principe de complexité par le bruit)[12] first in the 1972 book L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information and then in the 1979 book Entre le cristal et la fumée. The physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine formulated a similar principle as "order through fluctuations"[13] or "order out of chaos".[14] It is applied in the method of simulated annealing for problem solving and machine learning.[15]

Please note that self-organization depends on local properties being thus and so, not on local conditions organizing themselves.

No magic here, nothing mystical or internally motivated. just ordinary physics, chemistry, and biology.

Oh, and Jarhyn you should bow down to the physical Gods as well.

There is no reason neural systems, being complex physical systems, don't also incorporate such as repeating and organizing functions into their normal designs.

I'm very happy for you that you seem to have lots of information about self-organization and what-not. But choosing is a simple empirical operation that we both saw happening in the restaurant. How it came about that we choose things is less important to me than the fact that we actually do choose what we will do. If you cannot agree to the simple fact that people choose things, then whether they choose things of their own free will or not is a pointless discussion.

How can you call choosing is a simple empirical operation? You don't know the basis your observation has on the process beyond your claim you saw A took X. Your use of empirical relies on self-evidence and rational reasoning so much it barely qualifies as empirical even in theory.

You made assumptions based on fictitious place, transaction, and outcome not even actually observed by you or me. It's best seen as a hypothetical. Hypotheticals are a priori, empirical is your characterization, and inclusion is an invalid attempt of coercive confirmation.

Here is an empirical example. Study it.

You hear about a new drug called atenolol that slows down the heart and reduces blood pressure.

You use a priori reasoning to create a hypothesis that this drug might reduce the risk of a heart attack because it lowers blood pressure.

But in this scenario you don’t just rely on a priori reasoning. You want to obtain empirical evidence for your hypothesis.

So you run a large randomized drug trial. You give a sugar-pill placebo to some people and atenolol to the others. It turns out that the drug indeed reduces the blood pressure of people who take it.

Now you have empirical evidence that atenolol reduces blood pressure, but what about the risk of a heart attack?

When you analyze the dataset, you see that it doesn’t reduce mortality by as much as other drugs that have a similar effect on blood pressure.

So your a priori reasoning that this drug would reduce the risk of a heart attack by lowering blood pressure was invalidated by a posteriori empirical evidence.

 

[Copernicus]

Hard determinists believe that volunteers don't really exist. They are just deluded slaves to causal necessity who thought they were free to refuse service.

Who is a hard determinist? Are we not talking about compatibilism, which accepts determinism but claims that freedom of will is compatible with determinism?

Compatibilists don't claim that multiple options can be realized in any given instance.

There are always multiple options, in every second, across every moment in time. Marvin keeps playing with eggs or pancakes, and he simplifies things by creating posts where simple, often binary choices are available to people at most instances of most of the time. But the reality is that there are in fact a literally innumerable amount of choices, all the time.

As pointed out, there are multiple options, but only one realizable for you in any given moment in time. And given the nature of determinism, that option is necessitated by antecedents. It is not freely willed. Information acting upon the brain necessitates that action in that moment in time.

You can call it decision making (computers are able to select options based on sets of criteria) but decision making does not equate to free will for reasons that have been given multiple times.

Although there may only be one "realizable" option for a choice maker, the choice maker, being ignorant of which one that is, is still faced with multiple options. What you keep failing to understand is that the free selection is done in the choice maker's imagination. It is a calculation that determines an action. Imagination is different from physical reality, as there are actually multiple outcomes. There is only one realizable option, because that is determined by weighted priorities in the mind of the individual making the choice. Nothing about free will is free of actual causal necessity, only of imagined causal necessity.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

How can you call choosing is a simple empirical operation?

The same way I know that a "cat" is a cat. I observe an animal wandering around, scratching and purring and leaping on things. I ask someone, "Hey, what the heck is that?". "That is a 'cat'!", they say. Now I know that when I see one of those animals that it is a "cat".

In the same fashion, I watch people in a restaurant browsing a menu, and then telling the waiter, "I will have this, please" or "I will have that, please". And I ask someone, "What are they doing?". Someone says, "They are choosing what they will order for dinner". "Oh, I say." Then, the next time I see people browsing a menu in a restaurant and placing their orders, I know that they are "choosing" for themselves what they will have for dinner.

Empiricism is really simple.

You made assumptions based on fictitious place, transaction, and outcome not even actually observed by you or me.

But I have observed it, because I have eaten in a restaurant. If my presumption that you have also eaten in a restaurant is incorrect, I apologize.

It's best seen as a hypothetical. Hypotheticals are a priori, empirical is your characterization, and inclusion is an invalid attempt of coercive confirmation.

A priori is what we get when we have agreed upon definitions of things like "cats" and "choosing". That thing is a "cat" (assuming I am pointing at a cat) is an a priori because that's what the name "cat" means. What they are doing is "choosing" is a priori because that event is what "choosing" means.

Here is an empirical example. Study it.

I'm sorry, but I don't accept homework assignments. If you already understand it, then feel free to explain it to me and be sure to explain how it relates to our discussion. If you do not understand it, then it's unfair of you to ask me to study it so that I can explain it to you. So, do your own homework, please.

One more thing. Merry Christmas! I hope your Christmas is fun and that you enjoy the company of friends and family.

 

[steve_bank]

On the 527th post I'd say it is unimaginable. So far no one has imagined it dep[ite lengthy discourse.