In Free Will, What Makes it "Free"

[Juma]

There is never any need for a LFW to be a special case or need a special mechanism. You don't need a special mechanism to overcome determination in a special case, because you're assuming determinism is false in the first place.
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But I am not talking about determinism. What happens is either caused by something else or is random. This what we see laba everywhere.
You have the burden of proof to show that there is any other type of causation.

 

[Togo]

There is never any need for a LFW to be a special case or need a special mechanism. You don't need a special mechanism to overcome determination in a special case, because you're assuming determinism is false in the first place.
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But I am not talking about determinism. What happens is either caused by something else or is random.

What do you mean by cause in this context?

I can light a match, causing my house to burn down. But while it's true to say that the match caused the house to be destroyed, it's also true that the flammability of the wood caused it to be destroyed, that the chemical release of heat caused it to be destroyed, that the failure of the automatic sprinkler system caused it to be destroyed, that the failure of my neighbour to call the fire brigade caused it to be destroyed, and that I caused it to be destroyed.

This kind of cause and effect is entirely compatible with incompatibalist free will.

What you want is something more, that every event is the product of either prior events or random chance. Or to put it more formally:

that every event or state of affairs, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs.

Which is the definition of determinism.

You have the burden of proof to show that there is any other type of causation.

No, I really don't. You're the one making a claim about the nature of the universe, a claim that all actions must be determined or random. The burden is entirely yours to show that it's accurate. Or to agree that it's an assumption.

 

[Juma]

But I am not talking about determinism. What happens is either caused by something else or is random.

What do you mean by cause in this context?

I can light a match, causing my house to burn down. But while it's true to say that the match caused the house to be destroyed, it's also true that the flammability of the wood caused it to be destroyed, that the chemical release of heat caused it to be destroyed, that the failure of the automatic sprinkler system caused it to be destroyed, that the failure of my neighbour to call the fire brigade caused it to be destroyed, and that I caused it to be destroyed.

Wtf. You bloody well know what I mean: Physical causation. Stop this charade.

 

[DBT]

Dont fall into the togo trap: determinism isnt really the issue. The real issue is special pleading: for libertarian free will to work there must some sort of "free will mechanism" since cause/effect + randomsness doest support it.

The idea that all events are either determined or random is the soft determinist position. LFW is still incompatible with it.

No, it's not.

Determinism means that events are shaped and formed regardless of ''will'', including conscious deliberation (conscious deliberation being the brain's information representation/display in the form of perception/experience, and not the decision maker itself), and random events allow nothing in terms of decision making, only glitches, gaps and errors. But maybe you mean quantum probability, which does not allow conscious manipulation of particle position. So that is no help in establishing the poorly defined proposed attribute of 'free will' - which cannot be defined as decision making (whether conscious or unconscious), or as an act of conscious will because articles of 'will' are formed prior to conscious representation.

The idea of free will is an antequated notion that offers nothing useful in terms of understanding human nature and behaviour. It's an ideology.

 

[Togo]

Wtf. You bloody well know what I mean: Physical causation. Stop this charade.

Physical causation is also known as 'causal determinism'. Since this directly contradicts your statement that you're not invoking determinism, I'm trying to work out what you mean.

The idea that all events are either determined or random is the soft determinist position. LFW is still incompatible with it.

No, it's not.

Determinism means that events are shaped and formed regardless of ''will'', including conscious deliberation (conscious deliberation being the brain's information representation/display in the form of perception/experience, and not the decision maker itself), and random events allow nothing in terms of decision making, only glitches, gaps and errors.

Which means they're incompatible with each other. Did you misread what I said?

 

[Speakpigeon]

1. A person must have an awareness of the choices available.

This seems to suggest some sort of objective choices, existing somehow beyond your mind. If so then it would help to make that clear.

In this case, however, you would have the prior issue of deciding whether the universe offers actual alternative possibilities for us to choose from.

You could have a purely subjective concept of the choices available but this would lead further down the argument to the question of what a person would be able to achieve objectively in the world through Free Will as opposed to merely dreaming about doing things.

2. A person must have some sense of the value inherent in the choices that exist.

I'm not sure why that would be necessary if choices correspond to objective things. I would say that Free Will merely requires the agent to make or be able to make a distinction between two or more alternative choices. This distinction could be regarded as a value but not necessarily as an objective one.

3. A person must be able to rationally choose this or that.

Why would rationality be required? Sounds like a narrowing of the notion of Free Will. Or is rationality limited to the ability to make a distinction between to alternative choices, in which case this criterion is redundant.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Free will and omniscience can't coexist. If you know every single input which goes into someone's decision making process and can therefore know with 100% certainty what he's going to do then there's no free will involved in his choice and it's simply the output which resulted from those inputs. If you can't know this with 100% certainty then there's a limit to your knowledge and you are therefore not omniscient.

For purposes of this discussion, we are dealing with a person who has omniscience and is able to make decisions. In this case, omniscience would not encompass the decisions he makes but only the information that he uses to make decisions. Can such a person be said to have "free" will?

You may want to say that omniscience is restricted to the current state of the universe, i.e. the omniscient being would not know the future and therefore would not know the consequences of his actions, only the potential consequences dependent on what decision is eventually taken.

We would still need a universe with actual alternative futures dependent on the decision taken, which may be fanciful.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Would free will be a misnomer if the person were omniscient?

Free will and omniscience can't coexist. If you know every single input which goes into someone's decision making process and can therefore know with 100% certainty what he's going to do then there's no free will involved in his choice and it's simply the output which resulted from those inputs.

Free Will would require at least actually possible alternative futures as a porperty of the universe. A Free Will being who would know these alternative futures would have to choose between them, much like one arriving at a fork in the road decides to go left or right. This is still Free Will even if you already know what's there on the left and what's there on the right.

So the only necessary limitation to the knowledge permissible to a Free Will omniscient being would have to be what decision he will eventually make. If he knows his own decision in advance then there's no choice left when the time comes to make the decision.

I think it's a reasonable limitation which preserves the idea of Free Will as well as that of Omniscience, whether they exist or not.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'm still not sure what free will definition you're trying to corner here. Are we talking about compatibilist free will or libertarian free will? A lot will depend from the answer to this question

I'm trying to nail down what "free" means with regard to the will for either the compatibilist or the libertarian.

The most I ever see is that libertarian free will requires the ability to choose otherwise often referred to as contra-causal freedom. I started thinking about that and figured that an ability to choose otherwise requires that one know what is otherwise. Then to choose otherwise seems to require a sense of the relative costs and benefits of the choice and then the ability to make rational decisions. Now, if a person makes a "bad" decision, was he "free" in making that decision? If someone lies to you leading you to make a decision that was other than that you would have chosen if you knew the truth, was your freedom negated by the lie?

A choice is rational relative to what the agent believes. It is rational to go upstairs to eat your cake if you believe your cake is upstairs even though maybe it isn't. So, lies and falsehoods cannot preclude rationality.

But Free Will may require that you can still choose not to go upstair because you should be free to do so even if it's irrational.

Ultimately, you would need to decide which entity is want to deem free, between the person (social being), the organism (biological being), the mind (psychological being), the brain (neurobiological being), or even something else. That would clear the clutter of possible interpretations of what you say and it seems to me that you can't keep this option open without contradictions.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

People have wills. They will to do this or that. To say that the will is "free" to do this or that - contra-causal freedom - requires, I propose, three things, at least.

1. A person must have an awareness of the choices available.
2. A person must have some sense of the value inherent in the choices that exist.
3. A person must be able to rationally choose this or that.

1.A person must feel different about focussing on different imaginings
2.A person must prefer focusing on some things as opposed to others
3.A person must be able to focus on one imagining more than another

This sounds like an essentially subjective view of Free Will, which seems Ok to me as long as it's made clear.

I'm not sure how "focusing" adds any sharpness to the definition since it's not really clear what it means.

Let's try without the word "focusing" and make it works for an objective view as well as a subjective one:

1. The person must feel different about different things
2. The person must prefer some things as opposed to others
3. The person must be able to choose one thing among others​

Yeah, I think it's better!
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Hm.. A few points:

1) Again, it's really a good idea to add to your definition some kind of position as to whether you expect conscious decision making to have an effect. The problem with the definition at the moment is that you could have the sensation of making a decision, that is not in any way connected to either further thought or further action, and which has absolutely no effect on either, and still call that free will. That's not what most people tend to mean by the term.

I think this depends on what is the agent considered. If it's a person (social being) then the term Free Will will imply some action.

If the agent is the mind (or the brain, soul etc.) then Free Will is preserved even without freedom of action, i.e. the person still want to do it and is free to want it even if prevented to act it out and one could argue that free will is really the freedom to choose what you want.
EB

 

[Juma]

Physical causation is also known as 'causal determinism'. Since this directly contradicts your statement that you're not invoking determinism, I'm trying to work out what you mean.

Are you willfully trolling? You introduced a lot of bogus casuality as in the neglect of the neighbour etc. That why I answered physical causality. Physical causality is not determinism. Physical causality allows for random results.

 

[Speakpigeon]

A decision is a physiological event.

Only when we discover exactly what this event is can we ever begin to try to understand how a concept like "free" could apply to it.

Is there any other physiological event that is "free"?

In the gut? In the spleen? The kidney?

Are these so-called "free" physiological events only taking place in brains?

How peculiar.

No, it's just that as you know guts, spleens and kidneys still haven't evolved the ability to speak English so of course scientists don't know if they have Free Will or not.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Compatibalism is a dead duck. If determinism is true, freedom of any sort is out of the question. Freedom is not compatible with determinism, where every thought and action is shaped and formed by the process of determinism.

Dont fall into the togo trap: determinism isnt really the issue. The real issue is special pleading: for libertarian free will to work there must some sort of "free will mechanism" since cause/effect + randomsness doest support it.

Why a mechanism? Do we need a mechanism for energy to exist? Maybe there is (or was) one but do we actually know that such a mechanism is necessary? Somehow, something in reality never needed any mechanism to come into existence. It seems to me logically acceptable to conceive of libertarian Free Will as existing of its own free determination.

I don't believe that of course but that's because I have never thought about it before. I'll sleep on it.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Take a more abstract example to make the problem clearer - Say I'm holding in my hands a 'Godelbox', a device with two buttons that light up, one red and one green. The device scans my brain, and then lights up the button I am going to press. In an entirely determined universe, I am going to press the button that lights up - it can be no other way. Yet if I'm sitting there with the box in my hands, looking at the buttons, it seems obvious that I can press either one. What would stop you from pressing the other button?

I notice on occasions that once a decision is made and the corresponding action is somehow sufficiently initiated I can't stop myself even if I suddenly realise I really want to perform a different action. If the button I have decided to press lights up long enough before I actually start pressing it then I guess I will be able to stop myself but if the device waits to light the button until the last moment just before the initiating of the action then it'll be too late. But this is where I think some scientists may have their interpretation wrong.
EB

 

[Togo]

Take a more abstract example to make the problem clearer - Say I'm holding in my hands a 'Godelbox', a device with two buttons that light up, one red and one green. The device scans my brain, and then lights up the button I am going to press. In an entirely determined universe, I am going to press the button that lights up - it can be no other way. Yet if I'm sitting there with the box in my hands, looking at the buttons, it seems obvious that I can press either one. What would stop you from pressing the other button?

I notice on occasions that once a decision is made and the corresponding action is somehow sufficiently initiated I can't stop myself even if I suddenly realise I really want to perform a different action. If the button I have decided to press lights up long enough before I actually start pressing it then I guess I will be able to stop myself but if the device waits to light the button until the last moment just before the initiating of the action then it'll be too late. But this is where I think some scientists may have their interpretation wrong.
EB

Why would the device wait? If the result is determined by prior factors such as brain state, environmental conditions, and so on, then it will know what you're going to do well before you do it, in plenty of time for you to press either button. Indeed, if your decision to press is determined, that decision must come before your action to press, with enough time for you to initiate either action.

 

[fromderinside]

I notice on occasions that once a decision is made and the corresponding action is somehow sufficiently initiated I can't stop myself even if I suddenly realise I really want to perform a different action. If the button I have decided to press lights up long enough before I actually start pressing it then I guess I will be able to stop myself but if the device waits to light the button until the last moment just before the initiating of the action then it'll be too late. But this is where I think some scientists may have their interpretation wrong.
EB

Why would the device wait? If the result is determined by prior factors such as brain state, environmental conditions, and so on, then it will know what you're going to do well before you do it, in plenty of time for you to press either button. Indeed, if your decision to press is determined, that decision must come before your action to press, with enough time for you to initiate either action.

Like you wrote. Its a determined world. The box light won't be different from your response. You don't have free will.

 

[DBT]

Which means they're incompatible with each other. Did you misread what I said?

I misread it. Brain on holidays. Which illustrates my case that it is the state of the brain in the instance of perception and decision making that determines the decision that is made and the action that is taken. In this instance an erroneous perception of your remark.. A perception that is subsequently altered by new information and new decisions/corrections being made (but not always possible), time/events and inputs altering neural information states, rather than an act of free will or conscious control or orchestration.

 

[Togo]

Like you wrote. Its a determined world. The box light won't be different from your response. You don't have free will.

Ok so let's change the scenario slightly. You have the Godelbox in your hand, the light comes on to predict which button you will push. But there's also a machine with a gun pointed at your head, that will shoot you if you push the button that the box indicates.

So here we have a paradox. If the universe is determined as you say, then nothing can prevent you from pressing the lit button, and getting shot. But this is totally contrary to our observations of human behaviour.

(NB this also violates compatibilist free will)

I misread it. Brain on holidays.

Fair enough.

Which illustrates my case that it is the state of the brain in the instance of perception and decision making that determines the decision that is made and the action that is taken.

But that's a different claim. If you're talking about the comparison between the decision made and the brain process as the decision is made, then all you're saying is that the decision process is a brain process. Which is relatively uncontroversial. The bit where determinism comes in is the idea that that decision process/brain process is determined by prior states (or random chance).

And that's also where the apparent paradox of the Godelbox comes in - because you end up with a conflict with the principle of determinism and the observation of how people make decisions.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I notice on occasions that once a decision is made and the corresponding action is somehow sufficiently initiated I can't stop myself even if I suddenly realise I really want to perform a different action. If the button I have decided to press lights up long enough before I actually start pressing it then I guess I will be able to stop myself but if the device waits to light the button until the last moment just before the initiating of the action then it'll be too late. But this is where I think some scientists may have their interpretation wrong.
EB

Why would the device wait? If the result is determined by prior factors such as brain state, environmental conditions, and so on, then it will know what you're going to do well before you do it, in plenty of time for you to press either button. Indeed, if your decision to press is determined, that decision must come before your action to press, with enough time for you to initiate either action.

It's not clear to me that what this kind of experiment does is test decisions. It certainly tests something, which may be what I would call the neurological precursor of action. I don't think decisions are always reduced to that. I may take the decision to attend a meeting two months in advance of it and then change my mind and take a different decision one week before the meeting and change again at the last moment. Does this device tests that?
EB