I’m probably missing something (and would gladly welcome correction), but this only seems to address a limited form of determinism. I’m not sure how the existence of randomness at the molecular level or the fact that psychological experience can influence human biology challenges determinism at large, much less proves the existence of free will.
I've spent a good deal of time on this subject. In my opinion, this article did little to nothing and the parent here is a very valid critique. The argument it made is basically "We can't accept determinism, but hey, it's not true because there might be quantum randomness."
I think it's important to highlight something here - history is fraught with people on both sides of "this is random" and "this is predictable in this way" being wrong. I would not be surprised to find that further research in physics over centuries ends up showing what we currently see as "randomness" is simply a very complicated system. Even if you are able to rest bigger arguments on top of quantum randomness, it's not exactly a sturdy base coming from the bleeding edge of physics.
It's also very common among in the community of this debate to get bogged down in the theoretical and not look back to the very real applications of free will concepts in the world. Many of the distinctions they make are not really useful for humans, and they haven't realized even the most basic parts of the arguments can have radical societal effects.
Looking at a regression model as an example in equation form:
Y = a + bX + e
Some "proportion" of a phenomenon is understood. However, many things are not immediately understood but only seen to be a factor in explaining a phenomena if looking at things from a very complete, long term perspective.
Something which we are unlikely be able to do.
Many people can feel when an action produces a ripple effect. Now think of tons of ripple effects interacting, some influential, some not, etc.
Anyway, back to the equation - we have +e the error term, which is the uncertainty that any such explanation will fully predict how something plays out.
I think what you're getting at is the error term also has characteristics.
One of those properties could be that certain things advance all, others are bad for all. Just to tie it back to your other comments.
I don’t think it is possible to test the difference. Any situation that looks like free will can also be explained by determinism. The only evidence is the subjective experience of choice, which is invisible to science
I think that this is a good point, and maybe the thesis is stretched a little bit. That said, lack of real determinism does two things at least 1) it possibly changes our almost 'fundamentalist' view of the universe as being deterministic, which is I think our 'default instinct' these days and 2) opens the door to other possibilities. The 'gap' to consciousness/free will and other things, as you point out, remains.
Determinism doesn't guarantee easy intuitive understanding. Many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is deterministic, but even educated people easily fail to understand it, because it's still not intuitive.
I’ve given up on the idea of free will. I think the illusion does more harm than good to society but everyone deeply has been conditioned to think it’s true and things will never change in my lifetime.
The article doesn’t do the necessary job of convincing me that quantum physics has any real impact on people having responsibility over their thoughts & actions. I’ve always wanted to see how a person could somehow not be effected by the system being the universe and where the person is a subsystem. I think that would be the most interesting thing for me. Sadly the belief that a God just made it so isn’t logical and not something I can even begin to see how it would work. Determinism being partially untrue by some outside force making the universe truly random doesn’t allow a person making personal choices they should be responsible over. In fact such an existence would be terrifying. Performing thoughts & actions that just randomly happen with no valid reason. I’m predicting society will eventually throw away the free will illusion when science destroys inequality.
Also, it seems you're getting at an interesting idea: we can understand determinism, and we can understand chance, but free will seems to want to combine the two concepts in some incomprehensible/nonsensical way, which nobyd can understand.
Yes, so easy it doesn't really combine them. Compatibilism gives an explanation that essentially redefines what is meant by "free will". Compatibilism makes compatible a concept of determinism and a specific concept of "free will". Yes, it gives a coherent way of speaking about these two seemingly contradictory things; enabling us to avoid nonsense or self-contradiction. However, the compatibilist notion of "free will" is in fact incompatible with what most people mean (or think they mean) when they say they "have free will".
> However, the compatibilist notion of "free will" is in fact incompatible with what most people mean (or think they mean) when they say they "have free will".
But he has no evidence of either case. I read more about technological fears and the perspective is interesting, but personally I am more optimistic.
If there is no free will there is certainly a mechanism that fools us on that fact for any practical purpose. We also strive for control, at least for or own lives, and there are certain elements in his perspective that shifts the topic to that instead towards the prevalence or absence of free will. The discussion around free will are ancient, so are discussion about ascension (mostly through unpopular topics if we are honest to ourselves) or elevation above others. I am used to it in engineering circles but am still able to see it. Could also be some coping for how often he sees others being manipulated.
Sounds critical now, but I believe he is a nice guy.
Free will is inescapable. Without it, you have no ability to assign moral blame, which means law and order become impossible. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, you are just as responsible for putting your face where his fist was going to be. Thus, there's no justification for your attacker to be rehabilitated rather than you, an innocent victim.
Your issue is not with free will, but with retributive justice, ie. the argument that moral blame deserves punishment.
Why "should" we do anything in the absence of free will. What will happen is what will happen. Everything is inevitable, including the punch to the face.
Why do you feel like a novel has suspense, when the ending is sitting right there in front of you, already written, in the pages that you haven't read yet?
Determinism or not, you have to wait to find out what tomorrow will bring. And tomorrow still depends on what you do today -- even if what you do today is fully determined by yesterday.
If losing the illusion of free will means you'll sit there on your sofa letting time pass, because why make any effort if the future is already written, then you're just misunderstanding determinism. I believe the future is already written, but I'm still going to work as hard as I can to make sure that it turns out to be as good a future as possible. Once you've internalized a deterministic worldview, this is not a contradiction.
Any book has suspense for myself because it might have utility and lessons that enrich my understanding of life. Not simply because it is not-yet-known to myself. This analogy doesn't make sense to me.
Whether you think it is an illusion or not is irrelevant. A deterministic world means you were determined to believe it is an illusion. Just as others may be determined to believe that it isn't an illusion. Thus it is impossible for me to sit on a couch and do nothing, because I would be determined to believe in free will and not sit on a couch and do nothing.
On a personal note, I often feel that things that don't have free will don't deserve moral blame, but this also means they don't deserve anything at all. No punishment, no reward. One can judge such things in the same way one might judge a rock.
Causality there goes in the opposite direction. Fatalism is inspired by existential crisis, not by practical considerations. And trading practicality for existential crisis is unwise: you only lose everything and don't obtain anything.
Imposing the false concept of free will just to be able to morally put someone in jail seems immoral.
Imposing laws that most of society agrees with is a pragmatic necessity.
No. Nobody being responsible doesn't negate rehabilitation for the person that is deranged. The goal of humanity is debatable but generally having everyone functioning in a way that doesn't harm others and including themselves is preferred. So I don't see how it's logical to place the blame on the victim and unless you're just trying to be silly with not really understanding determinism is just from the basis of logic like the foregoing.
> Nobody being responsible doesn't negate rehabilitation for the person that is deranged.
There is no way to justify who is deranged without moral blame. There is no victim and no perpetrator. A person who attacked you without provocation is just responding to the environment established by society. Your expectation that you should not be punched in the face is the same. Why is your expectation to not be punched justified over his desire to punch you?
The approach you’re proposing is illogical that’s why. Although everything is destined, that doesn’t negate the majority desire to treat a person who becomes ill and potentially very sick. Similar as someone that becomes mentally deranged by his/her order of events resulting in being mentally ill.
I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.
> Although everything is destined, that doesn’t negate the majority desire to treat a person who becomes ill and potentially very sick.
So majority desires are all that matters? So you agree with mob rule and think the tyranny of the majority is perfectly ok?
> I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.
I have no problem with determinism as I'm a Compatibilist. I think you've made a few assumptions about what I believe that aren't justified, so if you're actually interested in understanding what I'm saying, you can read my elaboration on free will here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919
I'm not interested in what a compatibilist thinks. You're illogical by being one if you understand determinism.
I'm not implying mob rule and that response makes me think you're a troll. The benefit of treating illnesses outweighs the negatives of not treating illnesses. You're just being illogical or a troll. So no reason for me to continue with you.
I've elaborated elsewhere in this thread on why positions like yours are inadequate and why Compatibilism makes perfect sense. None of the points you've raised so far have any bearing on this. Suffice it to say, Compatibilism is the only sensible conception of free will we currently have, which is why 60% of modern philosophers are Compatibilists.
And no, this isn't an argument from authority, this is a suggestion that if the professionals who devote their lives to studying this topic disagree with you, it might be worth questioning your assumptions and reviewing the subject matter more closely.
Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will. I find it humorous you're attempting to use mob rule now and which is why I decided to comment.
If by any chance you would like to have a discussion by maybe voice? I would very much like to discuss your views vs my own and go over why I'm a hard determinist compared to being a compatibilist such as yourself.
I do like to discuss these topics once in awhile with someone over chat. I try to keep an open mind and hopefully learn something new whenever that may be in my fate. Although if you're a person that's fixated on semantics and or just assumes your 60% of philosophers must be right. There isn't much point.
> Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will.
There is no "common definition" of free will, there are a series of context-specific definitions used in ethics, science, law, theology, etc. and this conflation causes considerable confusion. The notion of a "common definition", often trotted out to dismiss Compatibilism, is simply false.
I don't want to be dismissive myself, but I've said my piece about hard determinism here [1] and in other posts. After participating in literally hundreds of debates on this topic on the philosophy subreddit over the years, I don't think I'll hear anything particularly new, and I think I've spent enough time on this thread at this point.
I only debate this extensively sometimes because while hard determinism enjoys widespread support among scientifically minded people who conflate "free will" in science with its use in ethics, Compatibilism is unfairly dismissed and misunderstood.
An outside force can evaluate me, and decide if I was good or not. It wasn't my choices or anything from myself that led to that
Interesting. You could go a long way with that logic. Since you can go a long way, there is also little that can be disagreed with -- even though the way you go can take you many places, and many of them good (in my non-outside-force opinion)
I would ask:
So there is something that makes some clocks good, and some bad. Something outside of my influence -- so from my reference point it is not determined
Is this just semantics. Can I just redefine human to be human+thing_not_determined?
The outside force at a minimum should be an algorithm deciding whether clocks are good or bad. The force can be fully determined, and the clocks can be fully determined. But what causes variance in clocks? The source of that variance can also be fixed -- a fully deterministic universe
But from the outside force's reference point, is that variance external or internal to the algorithm?
External; then the algorithm has an effectively non-deterministic view of clocks
Internal; then it is no longer evaluating clocks, rather an evaluation of itself+clocks. No longer a good or bad clock; we have a good or bad God
---
Conclusion:
Compatibilism is compatible with a non deterministic universe
Any fully determined system can be seen as non-determined when looking at a subset. Is quantum mechanics fully determined or not? In a sense it doesn't matter -- since our view of the universe will never be full, and so we can never take a fully deterministic view point??
> Free will is inescapable. Without it, you have no ability to assign moral blame, which means law and order become impossible.
Even if that were the case, that doesn't bear on whether or not free will exists. Having reasons to want something to be true doesn't in itself make it true.
You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.
But how do you know this quasi-free will notion isn't exactly what people really mean by free will. In fact, that appears to be the case:
>You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.
If your argument that it is necessary for the public to believe in free will (because of the negative consequences if they don't), regardless of whether or not it actually exists, then that's different. I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences. I apologise and withdraw.
> I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences.
I'm saying that this is exactly what most people really mean by free will [1], and that people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist are making a mistake in assuming free will is something that it isn't. Typically, you're arguing against a theistic conception of free will with "souls" and whatnot, but that's just one (incoherent) conception of free will and not the whole debate.
If you acknowledge that being able to designate who is responsible for some undesirable outcome is a necessary condition for being able to remedy it, then you are acknowledging some notion of moral blame.
If you further accept that people's actions can be described counterfactually by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then that implies some sort of control over those actions.
Therefore we have control + moral responsibility, and that's free will (in Compatibilism).
If this seems kind of familiar, it should! Compatibilism was first formulated from our notions of free will from law. Notice how if you remove the control requirement (say they had a tumour driving some behaviour, or they're insane), a person is no longer acting of their own free will and so are not responsible for their actions.
This is what I meant by free will being inevitable. No society can exist without blame for breaking the law. You might define the terms to avoid terms like "blame" and "free will", as hard determinists try to do, but the ultimate function will be the exact same.
I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things. This is why I think the root question is whether you could have chosen differently. If you could only have ever made one choice, how much control do you really have?
The fact that moral responsibility requires the assumption that people have control doesn't mean people do have control. It just means that people who like moral responsibility (including myself!) have an inconvenient reality to contend with. It means we have to find some way to run a society morally despite the shaky grounding on which we find ourselves.
I would find the compatibilist argument more convincing if it simply said, here are some beliefs that would benefit us if we assumed they were true, rather than saying they are true. We can define free will as 'the assumption that is needed to make moral responsibility work,' and we can even make that assumption in order to have a practical, working framework for moral responsibility, but it still doesn't prove the assumption is true.
> I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things.
That trips most people up, but it goes right back to our first discussion about cars also being "not real". If I say to a coworker, "I got in my car and drove to work", and they reply with, "Well that's impossible, because cars don't exist, nor do day jobs", that's kind of nonsense right, because there I am at work, standing in front of my coworker with my car in my parking spot. It's a category error, and it's the same error made when people say that a choice wasn't really ours because it's dictated by the movements of particles.
The fact that thoughts, feelings and beliefs may be caused by deterministic underlying physics is actually irrelevant, which is why Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. What matters is that thoughts, feelings and beliefs counterfactually dictate your choices, and so, by changing thoughts, feelings and beliefs via moral feedback, you change behaviour.
Moral blame is that feedback. The type of control that's needed is simply not the type of control that you're assuming it must be. This is the mistake incompatibilists make as well: they assume the type of control needed has certain logical properties, but these properties have been shown to be flawed.
Now what consequences follow from blame is a completely separate question (of justice), and I mention this because it trips a lot of people up: they assume blame entails punishment, and given they cannot justify punishment when some things are simply beyond one's control, they want to do away with blame itself. But that's unnecessary, because blame by itself doesn't immediately entail retributive justice with punishment, there are plenty of other forms of justice that would serve equally well.
If I’m understanding you correctly, for purposes of free will and moral responsibility, the details underlying the ‘control’ people have don’t matter—all that matters is that they change their behavior in response to feedback that what they did was wrong. In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?
If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).
I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?
> In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?
"They deliberately did/felt justified doing", but yes that's essentially it, modulo the considerations I discuss below.
> I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).
This is part of what makes the debate so frustrating and confusing for many, because we have religious "free will" with souls and whatnot, we have philosophical "free will" for ethics and moral responsibility, we have scientific "free will" for experimenters (free will theorem), and all of them overlap in some ways, but not in all ways, which leads to considerable confusion.
Incompatibilists think "free will" in all of the above contexts mean exactly the same thing, ie. theistic free will and experimental free will and philosophical free will all mean some sort of freedom from antecedent causes, and that this is necessary for moral responsibility. This is why you'll see scientists and science fans claim we don't have free will, because the nuance between the above contexts is lost.
> Without free will you can still say people did things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?
Because not every choice is freely made, or an expression of their will. Some people are coerced into making choices, some people have cognitive impairments and so are not capable of making free or willed choices (insanity, dementia, etc.), some people are not of sufficient age for them to understand the choice they're making, and so on. How do we package up all these considerations into a term of art that describes when a person of sound mind and body makes choice freely? Free will.
Compatibilism emerged from the notion of free will in law. Consider all the conditions for legal culpability, and I think you'll begin to see how nuanced this is, and how these considerations are deeply entrenched in how people approach moral reasoning.
This is just mumbo jumbo, because you are not providing any alternative medium for exercise of control than deterministic cause and effect, and so what you are describing is just a veneer.
There is no choice in that case, and so no meaningful exercise of will.
Only if you presuppose "will" to mean "non-determinstic choice", in which case you should justify why that's relevant for moral responsibility.
I've asserted that deterministic choice is perfectly compatible with responsibility, and that our moral and legal reasoning is compatible with this conception.
I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.
And what you describe empirically doesn't match my experiences. People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.
'Deterministic choice' is not a choice for the person - it is just cause and effect. There is nothing free about it, and no will involved.
The very idea gets people incredibly worked up when you drill down into it.
> I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.
It serves the purpose of labelling a process of deliberation over a set of choices. Whether that deliberation is deterministic or not is a red herring.
> People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.
So? People struggle to explain how lightning works. The vikings would have gotten quite worked up if you claimed Thor didn't cause thunder. Why does this have any impact on the natural facts of lightning?
It does not imply any sort of control in any meaningful way.
For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.
And those differences needs to not just be purely random, or there again is no control.
There then needs to be some mechanism that makes that choice. If you can not derive that from cause and effect of interactions of the physical aspects of the brain, then that is dualism. But that does not resolve the free-will issue:
That just means that there is an unknown decision mechanism, that needs to be subjected to the same question of how it makes the decision in a way that is not deterministic, and not random, yet produces outcomes that differ when re-run with the same state.
Free will basically would require some third distinct category between determinism and randomness, that infuses some sort of agency into a process (and that is not just a combination of the two, but qualitatively different).
I've yet to see someone come up with a description of this "something" that is not just entirely obfuscation.
> For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.
The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases back in the 60s. An unrestricted ability to do otherwise is simply not relevant to moral responsibility.
I've elaborated on why the control I describe is sufficient below:
I read that comment and it makes no sense unless you accept a compatibilist definition. But to me a compatibilist definition of free will is meaningless - it is just veneer over determinism.
I assume by "determinism", you mean "hard determinism". Here are just two distinctions among many:
1 . Compatibilists don't assert that determinism is true, they assert that determinism doesn't matter. Which means if the world is non-deterministic, Compatibilism still applies. This is not true of hard determinism.
2. Hard determinists have no way to assign blame in a way that disallows morally repugnant conclusions. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, how does a hard determinist argue that the unprovoked attacker is the person requiring rehabilitation? Why shouldn't the law be changed to allow unprovoked face punches? Why shouldn't you be rehabilitated to learn to duck faster? There is no moral blame, so anything is permissible.
If someone provides a viable definition that does not devolve to a veneer over hard determinism, I'd consider it. You haven't and neither have anyone else.
To #2 the reason to continue mostly as before is because it is what we intuitively feel is fair and that minimises harm. The idea you need to blame someone to do this is a typic religious argument against atheists - we do not need blame to have a feeling for what we consider right and wrong. A belief in determinism shifts those feelings.
It's very simple to reconcile - the only change is that punishment for the sake of punishment rather than to minimise harm is not justified if people have no agency.
To a lot of people that is a belief they come to anyway without a belief in determinism, because of the number of moral systems that includes forgiveness as a central concept.
Consider the prison system in Norway vs US for example. Norways prison system was awful up to the 60s where a reform movement won support for a focus on rehabilitation over punishment.
Its all semantics. If there's no free will, then we have no choice over assigning moral blame either. It is what it is.
Arguments also become irrelevant, since we're destined to play out the drama exactly as we have. Like some static 4D statuary in a forgotten temple. There's no point in trying to convince anyone, as they have 'already' been sculpted as they are. So argument can't be said to have any real effect, as its just more posed stone.
Sorry for posting this here, this is from a prior comment chain.
I've just taken quite a while to read and then summon the energy to respond :P.
It takes me a while to write about this topic without: a) seeming like I'm insane, and b) not getting carried away with the amount of topics that come to mind.
> Yes, some things are simply impossible. Not even a traditional concept of God, could have or make free will be real and knowing so is from understanding the logic of cause & effect. Not even true randomness can make us be free agents.
Agreed, and good point.
> Although I think randomness is an impossibility because there's always a cause and that can be passionately debated for the theory of quantum physics in our universe. But randomness doesn't matter in regard to free will being an illusion.
Also agree here, I think 'random' is a human descriptor for when prior events are too numerous, or complicated, or not known. I'm open to change on this though, as the delayed choice / quantum eraser experiment is mind boggling - and we know that our intuitions mean next to nothing for determining the truth :).
As you say, even if we did have 'true randomness' in the mix (if such a thing exists, which we both doubt), that would be evidence against us having any say in what we think or do.
> Furthermore, the idea of free will being an illusion made it simpler for me personally to understand harder concepts than before. How humans created the concept of good & evil, but we simply apply it incorrectly and to what we observe throughout our existence.
That's really cool that it directly informs your view on concepts, e.g. good vs evil.
I guess it probably does for me as well, but I 'feel like' it is far down the chain of reasoning for me - maybe because I came across the concept of free will relatively recently (early twenties, in my late twenties now). I think studies have shown though that our 'reasoning' or explanation of how we arrive at a thought are typically delusions anyway, so maybe it does directly inform my views and I am just not aware :).
> My reflection from a mirror has the same control as I do
I've read this a few times and it halted my brains execution on each attempt, haha.
That sentence is really cool - it sounds vaguely ridiculous but I completely agree with it.
I can't even articulate why it 'seems' ridiculous to me.
I have looked in the mirror before and experienced what is tantamount to an existential crisis - I feel like I'm one entity, when really we are composed from billions of cells / bacteria which are also living.
We just happen to have a stream of chemical and electrical impulses driving our every action making us feel like we're the pilot.
> Providing me with wishful thinking that the universe could repeat and where the same conditions that made our life, could happen repeat again & again; with improvements occurring each iteration depending on the starting variables. Maybe like a brute-forcing algorithm. That's the spiritual part I get out of understanding the concept of cause & effect.
That's an interesting take. I think I view it quite selfishly, and given that my consciousness probably (?) wouldn't be involved in the later iterations removes the wishful quality for me, haha.
It's an interesting point though, if we live in a deterministic universe it means it would in theory be possible to have a giant simulation of which we are unwitting participants. Maybe our brain compute while a tedious resource to create / evolve, is actually good at solving certain types of problems the grand architects are bad at :P? I jest, but I think that's why sci-fi as a genre is so cool - it circles around these profound questions.
Perhaps there are 'n' universe in parallel or sequence with the naturalistic laws mutating across each universe. I've definitely read that notion...
The article is very confused. Just about every paragraph is confused in a different way, but I'll start with one simple point of confusion.
Constraints on physical systems (such as the given example of a string constraining the motion of an apple to a circle) are simplifications that we use to model the system. Nature doesn't notice the constraints -- the string is just a bunch of atoms, the same as the apple, and they're all following the same equations. But to us, it can be easier to model a system with a single degree of freedom and some constraints, rather than 10^23 degrees of freedom and no constraints.
The brain, and a CPU, do not generate constraints that overrule the physics of their base particles. The appearance of constraints is just the dance of many particles following the rules, just like everything else, but arranged in a clever way that matches the useful, more easily modeled behaviour of a constrained system.
In the scientific papers, at least in some areas, it is expected to disclose potential conflicts of interest. In magazine essays one can see just an essay without a context, which could potentially explain where the author comes from. That's why I have searched for the author and have found:
George F. R. Ellis is, not accidentally, "a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion", "an active Quaker", and a winner of Templeton Prize "originally awarded to people working in the field of religion (Mother Teresa was the first winner), but in the 1980s the scope broadened to include people working at the intersection of science and religion."
I don't see the connection between being impossible to predict and being actuated by will instead of the underlying physics.
Even if no being in the universe could possibly predict the behavior of a system that includes an intelligent being and even further suppose that due to true randomness it was in fact not predetermined. I don't see how it would make the entity's actions determined by their own thoughts instead of the smaller scale pieces of the system.
If its truly impossible to predict and we have the perception of having free will and in fact if many things including our own life experience truly are explicable in terms of thoughts, will desires, actions does it really matter if the particles made me do it?
What is the practical differences between free will and not?
Bell's Theorem basically says that there isn't a deterministic system underlying quantum mechanics. Therefore the universe is fundamentally unpredictable. You could take that to mean everything is random, or that everything has "free will" (constrained by the need to coexist with everything else).
Personally, I find the idea that the universe is a living thing that can feel and act all scales of complexity to be delightful, and it certainly has massive ethical ramifications.
Chaos theory (and I mean the real thing, with the real math) also shows that "deterministic" does not imply "predictable", either. Even classical systems can be fundamentally unpredictable.
I think one of the problems with this question is that the experiments are fundamentally impossible. You can't put an identical person in identical situations 100 times and see what they do. That wouldn't necessarily even solve the problem since exactly what any given result would even mean would still be up for debate, but you can't even get that far. You can deny free will all you like and you'll never be able to prove it by predicting everything in advance. You can claim it all you like and you'll never be able to show the existence of the counterfactual world where you freely chose differently. Doesn't matter how much word chopping you do.
Bell's Theorem doesn't say that at all. It just puts constraints on what such a deterministic system would have to be. For example a non-local deterministic system could well be compatible with Bell's Theorem.
Thanks for mentioning this. To be fair, locality of information is a pretty common assumption but I should definitely qualify this a bit more in the future.
The article had a lot of great individual points, but it doesn't seem to make one coherent point.
Personally, I've begun to cautiously subscribe to a form of panpsychism, where what we call free will (and perhaps even consciousness), is the same thing as quantum fluctuations, but at scale.
I unfortunately don't think it makes any good points -- just about every one of its arguments is fatally flawed, sadly.
With respect to consciousness being tied to quantum physics --
There doesn't appear to be any shape that matter can be sculpted into that allows that matter to "freely choose" the outcome of a quantum experiment. (Change the distribution yes, but not select particular outcomes from a wide distribution). Free will doesn't emerge from quantum randomness -- if it did, it would be analogous to setting up a two-slit experiment where the photon is capable of freely choosing to go through the left slit every time, under the power of a conscious spirit and in defiance of the predictions of quantum probabilities. Our brains do not have this power either. Whatever the quantum field fluctuations are occurring inside our brains, our rational thought is at best recording it, most likely is robust to it, most likely not formed by it, and certainly not consciously selecting particular favoured quantum outcomes.
> it would be analogous to setting up a two-slit experiment where the photon is capable of freely choosing to go through the left slit every time
Not what I meant though. What I meant was that free will / consciousness (not sure if they're two separate things or aspects of the same thing) is an emergent property of quantum fluctuations, similar to wetness being an emergent property of the H2O molecule. It's a bit hand-wavy yes (if it weren't, I'd be publishing a paper right now).
The hypothesis (and it's just a hypothesis) is that if quantum fluctuations are all entirely independent, then there is no chance of any emergent properties. But if fluctuations do interact (i.e. proximity in space and/or time affects each other's probabilities), then properties can emerge. Perhaps what we perceive as consciousness / free will is just one such property.
Hmm... If consciousness is caused by interacting quantum fluctuations, I'd think a watermelon has just as much chance of being conscious as a human brain does. The level of complexity and interaction across many scales is no different in a brain than in a watermelon.
But if you think a brain is more likely to be conscious than a watermelon, then it's most likely the consciousness comes from one of the properties specific to the brain -- like its computational structure that couples sensory inputs, prediction, world modeling, hypotheticals, and modeling itself and other agents. These are probably software-like things that are classical in nature.
I would suggest both -- simplify quantum fluctuations to a random num generator -- if that just sits by itself spewing out numbers (like a watermelon), I agree with you
But add his suggestion to yours -- a random source + the ability to reason -- think of a robot you give a gun + reasoning partially based on a source outside your control -- here randomness
Does that robot careen through NY, or hold reasoned debate on human rights & free will. Such a robot, I think, would be considered a free agent, and have free will (for most definitions of free will). I suppose we'd maybe want to add the rule the robot is consistent -- it doesn't flip randomly through extremes, even though its total path is fully random -- reasoning+randomness
Personally I would apply that to humanity -- some source gives us agency (decision making separate to the source that originated us). Quantum mechanics is interesting, because it suggests maybe this separation is randomness due to lack of definition -- i.e. our source can fully define everything, and yet our separation of independent decision making makes our interactions meaningful. Which has some really beautiful conclusions -- notably life and decisions have worth, etc, etc
So do you critics of the article adhere to the belief that the current state of the universe is predictable from the initial state and the laws of physics?
Does that prediction take time? If it doesn't, if it is instantaneous, it's just a hand-waving god. If the prediction for any given instant takes trillions of years, it's meaningless.
How am I supposed to see it as anything other than an obstinate adherence to a principle, an unfalsifiable dogma?
In my view, that's a straw man. I don't think physicists believe that. I think that most physicists are comfortable treating some phenomena such as nuclear decay and shot noise as truly random. Whether that's a useful model or a fundamental truth is actually something that's not of practical interest outside of perhaps a very small cadre of theoreticians.
But one of my physics professors had an amusing comment: We can't calculate the energy levels of the hydrogen atom in years of CPU time, but the hydrogen atom can compute its own wavefunction in a femtosecond. Aside from microscopic phenomena, at least macroscopic systems can compute their own future just fine.
My own view is that free will is a theological / philosophical solution in search of a scientific problem.
I agree that nuclear decay is random, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily an example of non-determinism in the universe. As a subscriber to multiverse theory, I'd say that the appearance of random outcomes is just the way it feels to be a human in a quantum superposition.
Of course it takes an understanding of the entire universe, which we don't have.
> If it doesn't, if it is instantaneous, it's just a hand-waving god. If the prediction for any given instant takes trillions of years, it's meaningless.
The lack of ability to predict does not change the facts of determinism one way or the other, and that concept alone changes many things about the world, which is why we should care about it 100%.
Since I think it will be most helpful to your line of questioning, here's a simplistic but concrete example:
Without formal free will, responsibility takes a very different form, and that alone can be used in arguments such as punishment vs rehabilitation, levels of societal equality, and human rights arguments.
When you ask if the current state of the universe is "predictable", I'd say not by any machine or device that could ever be made, even in principle, that is a part of the system it's predicting. Almost anything you put together from atoms will have less memory and predicting power than would be required to predict the future state of that system, let alone the rest of the universe (else we could solve the halting problem, among many other things). No "devs project".
That's not really what we tend to mean when we say deterministic or predictable, which is more like, could the future of the system be predicted by some unbounded machine that lives outside of the system, but is magically supplied with information about the system. As such, the "time" taken to make the prediction is also kind of irrelevant, because if that system even has a notion of time, it's on a different axis than our time. It would be like a piece on a checkerboard asking its neighbour how many turns it takes for a human to decide its opening move... human time just can't be observed by the checkers pieces who count the passage of time in checkers-turns.
Nobody expects to see such a prediction made, but it's not a meaningless property.
It's meaningful in the same way that the illusion of free will is meaningful. It provides a lense through which to view the world.
For instance, take a heinous crime and assess it first through the lense of free will, and then swap in a deterministic universe and watch the criminals become victims.
Universe is deterministic because the known laws of nature are deterministic to our best knowledge. If you disprove our knowledge of the laws of nature, you will disprove determinism.
The author has a couple arguments, some stronger than others.
The argument that changing constraints dramatically change system function, and thus enable top down control, is good. It is why we can program computers without being quantum physicists. Additionally, the point that if determinism is true then all texts were encoded in the initial conditions is also good. And finally, his point that determinism undermines the rationality of morality is also good. The book "Life at the Bottom" maked this point vividly, where criminals seem to be unanimous that their actions are out of their control.
Where his argument falls apart is explaining the source of top down causation. The author makes the supervenience fallacy, conclusively demonstrated by Jaegwon Kim. There is no logical possibility of top down causation within materialism.
Thanks for the summary, this makes it easier to address his other points.
You already see the issue with constraints -- which is why our reality is a bottom-up one, but with the appearance of top-down rules.
The point that if determinism is true all texts are encoded, also applies to any other organized information, e.g. human DNA. If books can only be thought of as the product of human free will, and not just natural law, then equally, DNA must be credited to something's free will. But what? Does evolution have free will?
No, I think they're both the outcomes of natural processes. We can still build legal systems of copyright on top of that though, and claim credit for those works.
(As for where the data comes from if not the Schrodinger equation -- that problem also has a simple solution, which is that we're on the leaf of a widely branching tree, and the data is seeded by the index of our branching history).
If books can only be created by human free will, and evolution does not have free will, then that implies DNA must have been generated by something like a human. Aliens?
> If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings.
> The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.
First, this is one of the few useful things said here. Responsibility, poof. I agree. And I think that radically changes how we should approach so many things. As a hard determinist who is writing arguments, ethics, and moral frameworks around said determinism, I think there is a big issue with a lot of discussions about free will - definition.
When most humans say "free will", they don't mean randomness, not even close. While philosophers in this argument have spent a good deal of time on randomness, I think that focus misses the point entirely. Even if there is molecular randomness, how does that give any more meaning to humans? At the end of the day, the human idea of control gains nothing from it.
When humans say "free will", they are referring IMO in actuality to a real thing - a combination of many things, but basically agency + lack of prediction powers. At the end of the day, those are not going away anytime soon, if ever. This is where ethical, moral, and social questions are based, not in free will formally.
The lack of formal free will is crucial for underpinning all of this, but it in no way makes ethics and the like impossible. We still exist and experience the world, and it is in all of our best interests to go towards a "better" one. Whether we were always going to do that or not doesn't change that, nor does it change the human experience.
I will say this - determinism must be approached carefully precisely because of articles like this - it is easy for the worst effect of determinism on humans to actually be the idea itself and how it makes people defeatist about morality. I hope to spend my time making a good case for how to approach it safely and in a way that makes the world better, and I wish more people were looking at that instead of arguing about quantum randomness.
I think this gives ethicists the task of accepting deterministic reality the way it's always been, and developing a moral framework that is in harmony with that reality. Morals can still exist without the principle of free will, just like they can exist without God dictating a list of 10 commandments. Murder can still be wrong without free will, just like it can still be wrong without God saying so.
Completely agreed, and there's a ton of low hanging fruit from simply applying determinism to ethics and really following it. I think it becomes an incredibly powerful tool in moral philosophy that really clears a path of progress that I think the field has been struggling to move on. It kills some ideas dead in the water and makes very strong cases for others, unsticking so many fundamental debates that often came down to "agree to disagree" for so many philosophers that didn't have the formal argumentation tools to properly refute big ideas.
This is only true if you ground morality in objectivism and objective meaning, and require all useful conceptions of morality to fit that. What you have highlighted is that the meta-ethical view of objectivism is not compatible with determinism.
Subjectivisms (both individualist and things like cultural relativism) and error theory are perfectly compatible with determinism. I personally ascribe to and argue for error theory which essentially leads to moral psychology actually dictating what ethics are. Based on that, it's quite easy to get to "murder is bad" via human traits like empathy and our social nature.
Ethics are already predetermined, though. There is no need for error theory or any moral or ethical theory in a predetermined world - none of it matters. Arguments for determinism always have these "answers" to morality, but the only convincing one is moral nihilism.
No argument here, but knowing them still seems useful to humans. So in relation to humans, those terms and ideas are 100% needed. You're taking moral nihilism and jumping straight to general nihilism without any steps.
> Arguments for determinism always have these "answers" to morality, but the only convincing one is moral nihilism.
Error theory is a form of moral nihilism - what are you exactly disagreeing with here?
The bigger question is where you go from that moral nihilism. There is nothing that says just because our formal definitions of morality are false that the entire world doesn't matter. I still care for my happiness and life. So do many others. We need both this idea and these further terms and ideas in order to be able to answer the questions we were originally attempting to answer with objective morality because those problems did not magically go away.
Thanks for your clear distinctions. But still I don't understand
Caring about happiness and life, to the point they have value is objective
Do you have any other way to distinguish between moral and general nihilism? -- surely such a thing would need to be objective
But you make a good point in that if there is no objective morality, there may still be some other way to make a value statement. But how could such a thing give value to moral nihilism, and still maintain the nihilism??
To be honest, I don't understand these HN comments any better than the original article -- but I do greatly appreciate them for their importance
For me I think that value arises in a nihilistic world when regardless of what individuals actually do, over time we move further into chaotic outcomes, or that things gradually get more harmonious (less conflict and negative externalities).
The latter comes from the realization that some things (ie actions based only on gaining money/power/fame, knowingly taking advantage of people, needlessly killing, laziness, cheating for gain, not helping the poor, not forgiving people).
This arises from nihilism because some believe that it can't be possible that nothing matters when these values are "beyond our earthly realm" in that it often requires seeing things on a more spiritual level, and thinking beyond immediate gratification.
It is then that one may see nihilistic people as those feeding their temptations as these are often the easiest things to do (running vs. sitting and getting fat).
So while one can think nothing matters, some may then see that indeed some actions "retard" not just ourselves but all, and others are a net benefit for society.
Though believing that such actions are actually a net benefit may be considered "faith" because I can't know for sure.
Yeah, to accept nihilism seems very destructive. Ultimately, to me, like you; it seems to equate to accepting zero value for others and ourselves
Yet life burns to exist. We are desperate to live and to have meaning. It is no proof, but every fiber of our being cries out for a value beyond zero
> Though believing that such actions are actually a net benefit may be considered "faith" because I can't know for sure.
Nice. Personally, and from personal experience, I would base "faith" on concrete facts, and this provides a safe foundation for logic, etc -- I think you can know for sure
> Caring about happiness and life, to the point they have value is objective
This comes down to philosophical definitions. We are both using the word "objective" differently here. In the philosophical world, this is what moral objectivism means:
> The view that what is right or wrong doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right or wrong. That is, the view that the 'moral facts' are like 'physical' facts in that what the facts are does not depend on what anyone thinks they are. [1]
What you appear to be using objective as here as to mean "it's the physical state of the world, no matter who sees it". And that's true, but it doesn't have inherent moral usefulness as a statement, we have to show that it means something, which is where my argument from determinism leads.
> But you make a good point in that if there is no objective morality, there may still be some other way to make a value statement. But how could such a thing give value to moral nihilism, and still maintain the nihilism??
The "how" comes from a phrase I've used in other posts, but essentially, moral psychology and psychology generally.
Think of it this way: Nothing has inherent moral meaning. Really technically meaning generally, things just are. So does anything have more value than anything else, inherently? Not really. It's an interestingly odd base of equality in fact. So we all still exist and have desires and wants and needs, but none are any more worthy than others. We also have the notable traits of empathy and social desire. There's much more nuance and detail there, but essentially, if I or you as a single individual want to satisfy my desires, my makeup as a creature that cares about others dictates that I balance all of our desires together into what we would generally refer to as "ethics", even if no such objective truth exists. Indeed, if you change what a human is, you change morality itself.
> [objectivity] doesn't have inherent moral usefulness
Agreed. But I take it as a required pre-cursor, and that was implicit, so you are right to check definitions. I go something like
Nihilism: an absence. A zero
Objective: a difference beyond zero. A value
These are simplifications, but useful to me
So "physical state", and "facts not depending on what anyone thinks" both have value -- they are objective realities. Yes some people say physical state and facts are meaningless and so nihilistically ascribe them zero value. But you have not done that
I think you are saying the universe definitively exists -- it has value. Morality does not exist (in that it has no predefined value, it is a zero). And from there, you take emergent properties of life, the mind, and psychology, to create a new morality -- one which does have value, but as defined in an emergent property of humanity
> even if no such objective truth exists
Now I understand you (I think). You are after a different objectivity
By my personal definition, your second morality must be objective -- you've given it a value, and said it is different to the previous morality -- a fact
As far as I understand things, to have any meaning, there must be objectivity -- otherwise everything is an effective zero, and there is no valid way to say any one thing is better than another. For instance to say something is good rather than bad
So what you have done... Please correct me... is say there is no morality, but there is humanity, psychology, physics, desires, etc. You are saying these are objective facts people agree on, and from there you will build an objective morality that people can also agree on
If so, three comments:
1) Emergent properties and psychology are fascinating, you can build an objectively interesting morality on these. I appreciate your work and your clarity so far. Sorry, your link didn't open for me
2) How would this morality differ from the current morality -- or, to what extent is the current morality not based on emergent properties of psychology and human behavior?
3) Ah, you are cutting God out of the loop. I don't think this objectively (pun) succeeds...
> By my personal definition, your second morality must be objective -- you've given it a value, and said it is different to the previous morality -- a fact
At this point we're talking definitions, yes. IMO this is a subjective morality because it is only valid when you value what humans value - it comes from our perspective. Without looking at it through our perspective and values, it has no meaning. Repeat for every individual human and combine to get that more or less "objective/existant" rule set.
> You are saying these are objective facts people agree on
Yes, but stronger. Agreement is not needed. I don't personally find use diving into metaphysical brain in vat scenarios, so I choose to philosophically work under that we can observe the universe, and either it's real or its fake and still matters, for similar reasons of "we still exist and feel" invoked before.
> you will build an objective morality that people can also agree on
Theoretically, but good luck getting that agreement, lol. As to "objective" see above. I think the distinction of "shared subjective" is important here.
> How would this morality differ from the current morality -- or, to what extent is the current morality not based on emergent properties of psychology and human behavior?
It really depends on what morality you ascribe to. This view for example is highly supportive of consequentialism in my experience, while pretty clearly kills deontology where it stands. Generally I think the end results in full won't be all that different, though I will say, politically in the US, lack of responsibility via determinism makes strong arguments for things like socialist and egalitarian policies. Of course, psychological factors can offset those, which is why things like full equality a la communism get so much pushback. I think Rawls and the veil of ignorance become pretty useful ideas as a starting point to figure out the details. [1] Our imperfect knowledge will always make this stuff an estimation at best in practicality though.
> Ah, you are cutting God out of the loop. I don't think this objectively (pun) succeeds...
I've heard enough god arguments that I effectively cut that out of the equation, yes. Similar logic to brain in vat - either its false and we move on, or its true and we can't do anything about it anyways. At the end of the day, there is no god proof that I have seen that justifies a meta-ethical underpinning having to do with god or DCT [2] or the like. Basically, evidence strongly points one direction, and we will never have proof one way or the other, so we do our best, make a choice, and move on.
> Theoretically, but good luck getting that agreement, lol
Ha, yes :)
> As to "objective" see above. I think the distinction of "shared subjective" is important here
So my objective is the "facts irrespective of opinion", but your objective is a subjectivity summed together from many points of view
I suggest my 'objectivity' agrees with what you quoted from the dictionary, but your objectivity (more importantly :o) agrees with the zeitgeist -- in that easily the majority of comments here take your view
-- a rejection of objectivity
I agree this universe is not objective, and I agree shared subjectives exist. So how to make that jump? -- from no fixed point from which to measure true/false -- to a world we can at least have a shared fixed point from which to measure
From an external stand point X varies around zero (or there is no zero). From an internal stand point, everyone can measure from X
So externally we can make no meaningful statement, but internally we can generate a whole microcosm. So shared subjectivity is the internal view?
So is the external an effective zero from a meaning standpoint. Then internal+0 = internal. What meaningfully separates the internal from the external?
Is the external meaningfully non zero. Then internal+external > internal. Good. But then we have external meaning. I think you are also saying shared_subjective > external. So internal > external
I realize you solve this. You say the universe contains something, but not meaning. From electricity, behold, I create light -- a shared subjectivity
If I join you -- I agree, the external world makes no moral sense. I step inside and look from your perspective -- a shared subjectivity. So now I see and make statements about morality based on X -- so to agree with you means to take the perspective that I have objectivity?
I think your answer is yes -- I want you to base your life on X
> I think Rawls and the veil of ignorance become pretty useful ideas as a starting point to figure out the details
So this X is a point from which you can measure decisions and the details of morality? What is the quantitative difference between that and the gods of DCT (thanks for the links) -- haven't you recreated god by a different name?
I suppose you might say: Yes, but my God is from electricity. Theirs is from the unknown
I think we can prove such a statement as partly right, and partly wrong
----
I think:
Either nothing is knowable as true or false, and we move on
Or, we know something is true, and then we have a foundation to build on
Maybe this is shared subjective. But we are not able to fully prove it. For instance mathematical proof is based on axioms. Axioms are unproven assumptions. So even the most basic things are unproven in anything beyond the subjective. We are like finite beings trying to reach outside the realm of finite observations. How can we we make categorical statements when we will never be able to fully check them?
Famously: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
But I would like to suggest a way, and the only way I can imagine
We need evidence that
1) Makes categorical statements
2) Makes them within our observation
3) Gives proof not derivable from observation
4) Does that as a unified package
Some kind of object from beyond our finite realm, stepping in, acting in a finite way (so we can understand it), and also acting in a non-finite way (otherwise ignore it); and doing this as a unified package, so we can connect the two together (finite and non-finite, inside and outside observation)
Notes:
Proof would have to be things we consider impossible -- outside of anything we have observed, and not baseable on anything we have observed
Categorical statements should be things we don't agree with, otherwise (If we already agree with them, then they're probably not based on evidence we don't already have)
I suppose we'd also need reason to trust. Aliens can step onto our...
I didn't know Rawl, or really DCT -- so definitely both useful links
Someone sent me a link just now -- two subjective realities meeting for a shared experience. Sorry not philosophy in the dry sense. But still asking a good existential question, and disagreeing
Personally I think evidence is a necessity. A summation of all, or enough POVs, we must hope contains this evidence, or an indication of
Do you have any collection of your thinking online? I also noticed that beyond nihilism is where I began to think about these ideas. The problem for me is the thoughts are so hard to condense. One benefit of this stuff you're talking about (determinism right?) Is I have gotten immense peace in my day to day actions by clearly being able to distinguish things which are good and bad for me to do, and accepting that I will be fine or not based on what I am doing. I can also forgive people easier and see that they were "just trying"
Nothing published yet but I have many smaller academic writings that are building the pieces of this, and currently have a master outline that basically looks like this:
(1) Hard Determinism
(2) Ethics/Morality under (1)
(3) Social/Political Organization under (2)
(4) Personal/Useful/Practical/Life Philosophy under (1)/(2)/(3)
I started (1) when I was 18 and have many different forms at this point. Recently I have spent a good deal of time on (2) in the past couple years. (3) I have worked on independent of these ideas and am still linking up once I sure up and reflect on (2) more. (4) I'd argue is basically a WIP experiment of my own life since I was 17/18 and will be the last to be completed, probably not for a good deal of time.
Basically if this is a checklist representative of how developed/ready these ideas are, (1) is done, (2) is 75% of the way there and my main focus currently, (3) is up next, and 4 requires all the others and of course much lived experience.
As to when/how I want to publish, right now my plan is to have three forms for each - an accessible article (think 10-30 minute read), a short accessible book form that elaborates, and the formal philosophy for the academic/formal community to pick apart. Right now I essentially am working on the articles and planning to expand out. I'm not sure if I want to publish the articles without the books though, so it could be a long time.
However, given that philosophy benefits from discussion and debate, I think there seems to be a good case for publishing the articles. I might try to stand up my website/blog I've been putting off forever once I finish two and start making progress on three. I'd really love to have all four articles published at the same time as a set though, so I might have to figure out a compromise there.
Those ideas are not needed, they don't exist. Morality is just a chemical reaction in your brain, which differs from human to human - if the ideas are useful, that implies they can be changed by agency of choice, which in a predetermined world, doesn't exist.
> Error theory is a form of moral nihilism - what are you exactly disagreeing with here?
More the relativistic morality and psychological morality.
> There is nothing that says just because our formal definitions of morality are false that the entire world doesn't matter. I still care for my happiness and life.
Moral nihilism doesn't mean that they're false - it means moral truths don't exist, there is no right and wrong. You were predetermined to care for your happiness - but your happiness is already determined. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease it, it will be what it will be based on the initial conditions.
It seems, in general, that you need to cling to ethics as a way to convince your belief in determinism - to cover up for its deficiencies, you have to find a way to convince people that ethics still matter, despite continual argument that it doesn't.
> Moral nihilism doesn't mean that they're false - it means moral truths don't exist, there is no right and wrong. You were predetermined to care for your happiness
I agree 100%. However, you are mismatching objective moral truth with subjective moral truth. I am saying that once you realize the lack of objective moral truth/existence, all that is left is the subjective. Human nature then essentially requires it to become a collective subjective. Subjective preferences of all being essentially become the practical "morality". That's what I am referring to here, not the objective morality that does not and cannot logically exist.
Morality is derived not from the physical world but from our own moral psychology. If we change humans in any way, we change morality. And thus morality is also different for every human. Traits like our social nature, empathy, and equal lack of inherent meaning then morph the problem into a collective/intertwined singular subjective morality based on the world state itself.
> - but your happiness is already determined. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease it, it will be what it will be based on the initial conditions.
This is where you conflate determinism / free will with agency / choice, which are not the same thing. We do not have the ability to see our future choices and path, so we still have to "function" through it, even if it's a set path. And the questions we have to answer along the way are the reason we looked into morality in the first place, and are no less important or worth of time and effort.
> It seems, in general, that you need to cling to ethics as a way to convince your belief in determinism - to cover up for its deficiencies, you have to find a way to convince people that ethics still matter, despite continual argument that it doesn't.
You've got the wrong direction of how philosophy works - I started with determinism at the base, I'm simply asking what it leads to. You're only disagreeing with what comes after moral nihilism, but you've made no actual argument other than "no it's not that way". I'd truly love to understand more what your critique of my steps after is.
Yes, hard determinism is very problematic, and this thread covers some of the reasons. I'm not sure every conception of moral realism is incompatible with hard determinism, but I haven't given it much thought as I don't see much redeeming value in hard determinism.
As a hard determinist, you'll have to re-invent concepts of pseudo-moral blame in order to justify rehabilitation for those who break the law rather than simply changing the law itself to accomodate rule breakers, at which point you've just reinvented free will and called it something else.
Moral error theory has problems of its own, so I don't think these all hang together very nicely.
First, to answer your definitions ask in the other thread.
"Practical" free will, as described by both of us:
> When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions
> When humans say "free will", they are referring IMO in actuality to a real thing - a combination of many things, but basically agency + lack of prediction powers
You added a very specific phrase outside of the definition though, with no justification: "that grounds moral responsibility". That both implicitly implies moral responsibility, and also claims that it is grounded by this particular definition of free will. I'd be interested in how you got to those conclusions.
The "stricter/formal/whatever label you add here" version, that some try to argue for, including some compatibilists, goes more or less like this:
> Humans have the power to change the state/future of the universe and the universe is not "set" in any way
This feels a bit logically impossible to me, and it may also be something you don't agree with either, but it is still a definition that people use to mean free will, I have seen it way too often. However, the lack of this type of thing still has meaning is what I am trying to say. It is what leads to error theory for me, and then effectively what leads away from it. I wonder if that "away from" part might also solve some of your qualms with error theory.
In terms of hard determinism, it seems to me you only listed off reasons that hard determinism doesn't sound easy, but made no argument against it itself. Just because an idea invalidates many ones that were previously popular does not make it any less true/false, nor does it prevent it from establishing new and helpful ideas on top of it, even if they do not really exist currently.
> you'll have to re-invent concepts of pseudo-moral blame
This is exactly where I think hard determinism has its value. There is no moral blame - hard determinism requires a morality without it, and that's okay. It simply is new because people have focused so hard on blame, but I think that "formal" definition of free will is useful to show precisely that blame is not in play.
> at which point you've just reinvented free will and called it something else
I do think much of this will happen, but the distinction between the definitions has consequences. I already argued about for blame, but I think there is much more to explore there.
> Moral error theory has problems of its own, so I don't think these all hang together very nicely.
Again, I'd love to hear the argument rather than a simple refutation, truly, in a non attacking or confrontational way. At this point I think the HN format is hurting more than it's helping, so if you're interested in talking more feel free to shoot me an email, @gmail.com. You seem well versed in this area and I've love to hear more details on your perspective and reasoning/principles.
> You added a very specific phrase outside of the definition though, with no justification: "that grounds moral responsibility". That both implicitly implies moral responsibility, and also claims that it is grounded by this particular definition of free will. I'd be interested in how you got to those conclusions.
I always qualify my use of free will as being specific to the philosophical use in ethics because there's so much conflation around the term [1]. I hold that the term "free will" as used in various contexts are not necessarily the same, and that conflating them or trying to define a more general notion of free will that encompasses them all obscures more than it helps.
Per [2], I then conceive of free will in this context as "moral responsibility as accountability". I am not referring to free will as used in any other context, and I hope I've been strict about preserving that distinction.
> > Humans have the power to change the state/future of the universe and the universe is not "set" in any way
This definition compounds exactly the conflation that I think hurts progress in this debate. People often want more general abstractions to think about entire classes of problems rather than specific instances, but in this context, I think it obscures more than it clarifies.
> This feels a bit logically impossible to me, and it may also be something you don't agree with either, but it is still a definition that people use to mean free will, I have seen it way too often.
Compatibilism is necessarily compatible with determinism in which the universe is "set" in a specific way, that's the whole point. So I disagree with the definition. That said, just because it's "set" doesn't make it predictable, in which case it's outcome is not "set" in a way that can be known in advance.
So I would revise the clause "the universe is not 'set' in any way" to read, "the universe is not 'set' in a way that's relevant to responsibility", or something along those lines. But again, maybe you're thinking along more general lines that conflate the ethical properties with properties needed for other purposes (like an experimenters' freedom in science).
> Just because an idea invalidates many ones that were previously popular does not make it any less true/false, nor does it prevent it from establishing new and helpful ideas on top of it, even if they do not really exist currently.
I agree. I don't see anything in hard determinism which doesn't already have a satisfactory answer in Compatibilism though. The only quality which people seem to find appealing is a lack of blame, but as you later say, pseudo-blame will also likely be a feature of hard determinism in order to make it workable.
In the hundreds of debates I've had on this topic, pretty much the only reason people have used to justify hard determinism is that they don't think punishment is justified, and they see eliminating blame as a way to avoid punishment. This conflates justice with the simpler question of moral responsibility, and as a result, they erroneously believe that free will and Compatibilism necessarily entail punishment.
> Again, I'd love to hear the argument [refuting error theory] rather than a simple refutation, truly, in a non attacking or confrontational way.
Here's a rough summary of my thoughts when I first read it:
1. The Argument from Relativity: we're apparently not troubled at all by disagreement over natural facts (see: flat earthers), but disagreement over moral facts is somehow more problematic? We distinguish "fact" from "belief" for exactly this reason. I don't see any motivation for error theory here.
2. The Argument from Metaphysical Queerness, aka, moral properties are "qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the u...
A think we're getting to a stuck point here, but to wrap up some of my main qualms:
1. I feel like we keep talking in circles on the definitional aspect. I'm with you on the many definitions causing confusion and I would love to see expanded vocabulary around this. But you haven't said anything to convince me against the idea that all three have moral relevancy in various ways.
2. To be clear, I do not believe hard determinism needs any sort of pseudo-blame to be workable, at least how I understand you are using that term. The only thing needed is causality in order in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.
3. I actually agree with you on the lack of convincing of 1 and 3 for error theory (slightly different reasons but details not needed), but the argument from queerness seems to fit quite well. I'm not sure what part you're claiming is misunderstood.
4. The mentioned "justifications" on hard determinism are going the wrong way logically - you don't decide if something is true by if you need it to make morals that look nice, you follow what is true and see the results, and only then can you "check your work" with a sanity test. You've seem to cut off your thoughts on determinism before ever getting to a point where it actually produced a full set of moral ideas to check in favor of compatabilism simply because it produced something that passed said check, but if the underlying principle is false that's simply a coincidental state. Obviously you've also personally eliminated error theory, which is the core of our disagreement.
As to justice, I fully agree on that being way oversimplified. For context, looking ahead, my theories on morality out of error theory basically lead to a consequentialist version of Rawls, so that's about where I stand re justice, with some nuance.
> I think there are reasons to think we already know some moral facts.
Can you give examples? Single or multiple, whatever you think is more useful in this context. I don't see how we get to moral facts without them being tied back subjectively to humans, which either invalidates the objectivism tract (now we're back at arguing metaethics fully) or you'd have to get there from the error theory route I've been talking about.
To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.
All of this reasoning is still useful to an error theorist, but it is laid on the groundwork that morality is subjective to the state of humans/beings. If you mean to say that this is objective, then there is basically infinite moral facts in existence, we just debate them because humans and society are complex. That is to me the precise meaning of that "optimal organization" I reference, which is essentially that collection of all true moral facts, which I would argue are always subjective to the deterministic state of the world. Change anything about the world, and you likely change ethics itself. The argument from queerness highlights that
without our perspective and values, objective morality wouldn't exist at all.
I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective? To me, that is subjective and then the combinations of subjectiveness along with the lack of inherent meaning or value produces a single objective level practical morality. I can understand the argument to classify that set of things itself as objective morality, but I think that weakens the base of the argument needlessly.
> But you haven't said anything to convince me against the idea that all three have moral relevancy in various ways.
Because I think only one has moral relevancy, not all three. I've been saying it's a mistake to conflate the others with the one specific to moral responsibility.
> The only thing needed [in hard determinism] is causality in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.
The "ideal organization" necessarily designate faulty parts which don't conform to the ideal, and so the parts that require rehabilitation. That's blame however you want to spin it.
> To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees by mistaking an existential claim for a universal claim. Suppose we swap out the human child with an alien that doesn't feel pain as we do, but has an adverse reaction to some other stimulus. The same argument applies by parity of reasoning. You're focused on the specifics of the human case, but the moral fact in that case is just an instance of a more general principle from which this fact derives.
It's like I'm pointing out 1+2=3, that's a fact, an instance of the general rule of addition. You then agree that 1+2=3, but gotcha, 1+3!=3, therefore 1+2=3 is not a general fact applicable to all numbers. No argument there, but it was never suggested as such.
> I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective?
"Objective" means "mind independent", which is to say, that any form of intelligence will reach the same conclusions given the same understanding.
Any intelligence will reach the same conclusion that a human child undergoing a painful surgery ought to be given anesthetic, all else being equal, assuming they fully understand the meaning of every word in that sentence.
> Because I think only one has moral relevancy, not all three. I've been saying it's a mistake to conflate the others with the one specific to moral responsibility.
And that's exactly where we're stuck, which is all I'm saying. I think all three affect moral responsibility.
> 1+2=3, etc
> Any intelligence will reach the same conclusion that a human child undergoing a painful surgery ought to be given anesthetic, all else being equal, assuming they fully understand the meaning of every word in that sentence.
There's another assumed aspect though that you have not separated, which is that the judging intelligence has empathy if it agrees. You're claiming only using pure logic, but you're using aspects of that subjective human perspective to imply that the reduction of pain/whatever stimuli. Without the human perspective, the example fails to be a "moral" fact. It's just a configuration that raises x, lowers some y maybe, and the beings prefer more x and less y. But without value being projected on x and y, it is not inherently "good". We require the human perspective to create human morality. What if the intelligence viewing this entire scenario loves to see pain/y? Would it not rationally conclude the anesthesia is bad? Only if it assumes or judges based on the values of a human does it get the same conclusion. Yes, within that, it's objective.
I find that distinction is key in how we approach the derivation later. A lack of such distinction can, for one example, enable using the idea of objectivity here to assign value to the entities (more ideal = more value), which then can shift practical effects possibly. And maybe you disagree with this specific example on deriving value from objective nature, but that is one of the many doors the lack of distinction opens. I'm sure if we went far enough down the road, there is likely an argument that you do agree with that comes from the lack of distinction.
You say I'm missing the forest, but I think you are minimizing the importance of the trees through all of this and disagreeing that the trees can be important, even if you zoom out and the forest is the same. You're saying that the rule in play here is "addition", but I'm saying I think you're missing some rules/definition/workings of the "operator" in this metaphor that lead to different results later down the line, even if it works in this case.
> The "ideal organization" necessarily designate faulty parts which don't conform to the ideal, and so the parts that require rehabilitation. That's blame however you want to spin it.
I typed up a longer distinction here, but again this seems to come down to distinguishing between two definitions and if that distinction means something. See importance of trees. In this case, blame being the tree.
If, say, a boulder is rolling down a hill towards my home, I don't need to assign any sense of will or blame to the boulder to know that it's dangerous or to want to stop it.
As social animals, we have an intrinsic interest in preserving social harmony, in as much as the reproductive success of any individual is contingent on the success of the group as a whole. Morality is just the game theory element of this being played out.
I could make reasoned moral arguments on behalf of the well being of chickens or why we shouldn't destroy the planet, and you may nod and agree, but without a strong emotional impulse to attach to these moral causes, it's hard to get people to take these things very seriously. It's too much of an abstraction.
> As social animals, we have an intrinsic interest in preserving social harmony, in as much as the reproductive success of any individual is contingent on the success of the group as a whole. Morality is just the game theory element of this being played out.
In other words, you acknowledge that you have no moral justification for assigning blame, you simply do it out of convenience. That's weak sauce IMO.
Giving up cognitivism and moral realism is very problematic on multiple levels, and your response hand waves away these other problems IMO [1]. You just end up reinventing free will and calling it something different.
For people that accept that moral propositions actually have truth values (most people), assigning blame requires free will, and ultimately, we end up in the same place anyway, just with a bunch more people being confused about why we have new jargon that serves the exact same function as the old jargon.
[1] Edit: for instance, life no longer has any intrinsic value, so you can justify all sorts of morally repugnant conclusions, like that totalitarian regimes are justifiable, or that a government should only care about the death rate of its citizens in order to keep it low enough to prevent widespread revolt.
Assigning blame requires only the impulse to assign blame, which is derived from a very primitive impulse to neutralize a threat, be it a tiger, or a thief, or whatever.
The whole notion of free will is a cultural construct. There are societies that have no perception of it, they believe that their actions are guided by spirits.
Western concepts of justice are founded on the idea of free will, so of course you need it for western rationalizations of how to apply justice, but arguing that we need free will for justice to work is putting the cart before the horse. We just need it for our version of justice. My cat doesn't need it to take a swipe at the dog when it goes for the cat's food.
It is in my interest to argue that life has intrinsic value because if I don't I risk being considered a threat by people who happen to value their own lives quite a bit. It's just simple game theory. I don't see how free will, either real or imagined, is necessary to value the lives of others.
And of course, there are no consequences for killing a chicken, so there are no strong moral impulses against it. By our own rationalizations, life doesn't have any intrinsic value unless it is a life that serves us, or has power over us, and the value of a chicken's life extends only as far as it is tasty to us.
> Assigning blame requires only the impulse to assign blame
Causally, sure. Morally, I disagree. You've just justified mob rule and the tyranny of the majority.
> there are societies that have no perception of it, they believe that their actions are guided by spirits.
Sure, and what do those societies do when someone kills their neighbour and claims the spirits said their neighbour had to die?
> Western concepts of justice are founded on the idea of free will, so of course you need it for western rationalizations of how to apply justice, but arguing that we need free will for justice to work is putting the cart before the horse.
Western justice is founded on free will because it's a logical necessity for coherently assigning blame.
> It is in my interest to argue that life has intrinsic value because if I don't I risk being considered a threat by people who happen to value their own lives quite a bit.
No, it's actually in your interest to argue that your life has intrinsic value, and that anyone else's life is of lesser value.
So here we arrive at the morally repugnant conclusions I mentioned: if you can effectively argue this point, as they did with the divine right of kings, there is no logical basis upon which you can dispute this conclusion.
Moral progress has been marked by eliminating such artificial distinctions, not justifying them.
> By our own rationalizations, life doesn't have any intrinsic value unless it is a life that serves us, or has power over us, and the value of a chicken's life extends only as far as it is tasty to us.
Please explain how this follows from anything I've said in this thread.
> If there can be no moral blame, then the moral classification of actions has no meaning.
At the risk of mirroring Fricken's reply, this isn't so. Suppose a brain tumour drives someone to commit murder, as may have been the case with Charles Whitman. The act remains morally atrocious even if the individual's culpability is doubtful.
Same goes for a killer animal, or natural disaster, or even disease.
Moral blame is discounted entirely in pure utilitarianism (which is of course deeply flawed, but I think it's still illustrative here).
I don't see how a lack of free will changes anything with respect to moral responsibility. Morality does not care about the the initial conditions that would cause a methodical serial killer to enjoy torturing and murdering innocents, knowing that they kill for pleasure is sufficient to judge them as immoral. This isn't to say that such killers deserve "an eye for an eye", but you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of criminals.
I suspect we are in agreement, but I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.
You skipped the more relevant application in this case though - not the treatment of criminals, but, to get a bit minority report here, the treatment of pre-criminals. Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly? What is fair? How much effort does morality dictate we owe to their happiness?
The lack of moral responsibility doesn't change the real world effects or causal responsibility, you're right there. However, these questions get very different answers based on if the world has formalized free will or not.
Essentially, if you accept determinism, society becomes a configuration optimization game. The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
> you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of criminals.
There are absolutely many ways to get here, I'm simply pointing out determinism also leads to it as a data point that determinism can lead to moralities that pass the sanity check. Many, including the author if this piece, write off or get very worried about that issue.
Your mention of Minority Report evoked an image in my mind. A sort of thought experiment.
Imagine you run the government along with law enforcement. Say that one day someone on Hacker News announced that they figured out how to predict a person’s future behavior with a resolution of about one day, simply by running some terminal command along with that person’s social media profiles.
As the authority, it becomes imperative for you to use this information. The choice becomes: are people still at fault for their future crimes even if they never commit them? If they are morally bad, then you are justified in executing some people for future crimes, if you believe that they are not responsible for crimes uncommitted, then you might take a more humane approach.
A person, P, will commit crime X at place Y at time Z. So you pour resources into changing Y and Z for future crimes, because you realize that outcomes are a product of P, X, Y and Z. In this equation, it makes no sense to speak of “punishing” the environment, of a time on the clock being “bad”. In exactly the same way, it no longer makes sense that a person is “bad”. What makes sense is: change, influence, separate, nudge the variables to get the outcome you want.
This is an exaggerated version of what happens to an individual once they accept hard determinism. They realize that people can’t be morally at fault because they are simply a small part of the equation, an equation that includes all moments that preceded it.
Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.
I hope this thought makes some sense to you considering your deeper dives into determinism. I would love to read your writing!
> This is an exaggerated version of what happens to an individual once they accept hard determinism. They realize that people can’t be morally at fault because they are simply a small part of the equation, an equation that includes all moments that preceded it.
Well said, and this is exactly the underpinning of how I approach the world frankly.
Here's something to think on. Say you accept all this. Now consider anger. Is it ever justified to be angry at someone given all this, ever? I think when you stop and begin to understand and at least imagine all the things that happened to them to lead them to this moment to do the thing that is frustrating you, it becomes clear you can only be frustrated, but never angry. The next question becomes then how do you approach any sort of conflict that would arise from that anger.
People don't believe me when I say this without knowing me in person for a good deal of time, but I can't remember being angry since I started down this path of ideas around my junior year of high school. Anger more or less becomes existential frustration followed by a desire to figure out the causes and solutions to the situation.
> Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.
+1 here too. As I said in some other threads, a configuration optimization problem.
> I would love to read your writing!
Wow, thank you! I have some academic stuff and have been formulating it into some more article/short book style stuff privately but had no intention of publishing. You're not the first person to say this now though, so I might just reconsider how/when I publish!
> I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.
Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g. favored a retributive system of justice.
> Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly
Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.
To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't choose to want to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.
>The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
Criminal court doesn't really use the concept of responsibility, it assigns punishment based solely on who did the crime. And the concept of crime itself is provided by lawmaker, not by human's judgement.
> Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.
You've just made another coincidental compatibility here, so I'm curious - how did you arrive at only valuing material circumstances? For me, that is explicitly derived from following determinism into meta-ethics which then follows into a consequentialist physicalist view.
> To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
That's a different argument. Something else has to underpin that, and I would again be curious what that is, and if that also shares compatibility.
> The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
> How so?
I'm still formulating this fully, but essentially it follows from determinism that objective ethics essentially don't exist (I go with error theory here), which then passes off all of practical ethical meaning to the physical state of the universe in relation to what all beings care about, which I suspect is the step that ends up causing much of the coincidence. So for morality, things that humans (and other beings, but we'll set them aside for now) care about are ethics. I tend to focus on happiness, empathy, and fairness, but there's of course a lot more there. Generally, it means moral psychology actually informs ethics quite a bit.
Since I suspect this isn't going to change anything you specifically believe given the compatibility seen elsewhere, let me highlight some specific ethical views that immediately come under intense pressure from those conclusions:
- basically all deontology (Immanuel Kant and others)
- virtue ethics are then limited to admitting to being a practical compromise at best (originally Aristotle but virtue ethics has been on the rise in many modern debates, and this could 100% shape those)
- even many forms of consequentialism make arguments to optimize for a singular thing or one somewhat removed from humans. This highlights the optimization function is not on a single or even a few variables given that humans don't have a single psychological focus. Or maybe we do and we should be spending more of our time in ethics doing psychological research. But all of this derives originally from that conclusion on determinism.
Basically, even a small difference in underpinning can still lead to different focuses and conclusions down the chain of course.
Determinism is not something that just happens to other people. If a criminal acts deteministically in committing a crime, then you also act deterministically in judging them.
>When most humans say "free will", they don't mean randomness, not even close.
They don't mean anything. Although indeterminism of choice originally had meaning, today it's a meme in itself without meaning and propagates by mere memetic infection and is seen as an axiom, the argument about responsibility is a rationalization of this axiom, not a justification.
I think you're being too harsh on people. It is of course used at a surface level, but most people at least mean something when they say it. Everyone can of course mean something different too, but I think the definition I gave fits a vast majority of uses.
I have thought similar thoughts for a while to what I think you're getting at. That certain behaviors are harmonious (a net benefit) for all, while others produce negative externalities and are therefore "sinful" for lack of a better term. In terms of religion this would be similar to a concept of man being fallen from the perfect harmony, where they do not always choose the net benefit option. Hence it takes some effort to not "give in to your demons" ie make decisions which are easier but move things away from that harmonious equilibrium
“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me bonkers.
Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever?
The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all abstractions do).
So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will.
So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car?
If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will".
Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.
The way you are using the object and the name can also apply to humans within a deterministic world though along with the parent argument.
When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world.
The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.
> what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses
There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will.
So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".
> When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility.
My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree.
However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications.
You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.
Most philosophers are actually Compatibilists [1], along similiar lines to what I've been writing. I have no issue with determinism as it's compatible with free will in my view.
I'm familiar with compatibilism of course. By your definition of free will I would also be considered a compatibilist to you. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that the different definition of free will (the more stringent / nearly logically impossible one you are writing) still has value in discussion because philosophers argue for it (including some of those compatibilists I'm sure) and that definition has meaning in relation to determinism and the resulting ethics of how we use agency/choice/your definition of free will. You can't erase other conceptions of free will because you believe in one, and I've tried to capture that with the "formal" and "practical" labels, admittedly needing work.
I think we're both on the same page on the definitional problem of free will, but I don't see how/why you are minimizing all other definitions.
This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief.
Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.
Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble.
Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.
> Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will.
The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm.
When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will.
Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.
> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.
I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!
As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.
I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.
I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.
> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.
Sure, it's frustrating knowing something intuitively without being able to articulate why it makes sense!
If you want to make sense of free will and see evidence that lay people actually accept Compatibilism in which free will is compatible with determinism, I suggest my post elsewhere in this thread:
> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.
Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency.
And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views, such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all kinds of things.
A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame.
So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person chooses to act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate everything.
I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking people who believe in it to define it in ways that does not just boil down to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again, because it remains just as relevant.
Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with logical flaw after logical flaw over this.
There is no underlying concept of "free will" just as there is no underlying concept of "a car". They are just names we give to things that appear to be.
Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.
That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc.
If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.
People may have compatibilist intuitions, but start digging into what they they think past their initial intuitions and you tend to get completely different responses. Most people never think about what free will implies, and so their intuitions are fairly uncorrelated with what they'll insist on if you start questioning them about details in my experience.
Their roomba doesn't have thoughts, beliefs, intentions or the ability to learn in any meaningful way.
Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
What's a thought and why should it matter for free will?
What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do?
When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it?
In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans.
We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition.
> Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all.
Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.
> The only reason people add these conditions is to be able to continue living in an illusion of free will and of being something more than algorithm :)
Not at all. A sorting algorithm can't learn to not sort. A learning algorithm can learn to choose between right and wrong. That's why it has free will.
Totally agree that "you" is an emergent phenomenon rather than some atomic entity. Is this where we start debating the meaning of 'free will'? Because most discussions usually miss that step, rendering the rest of the conversation kinda pointless.
Yeah that argument, that chaos = free will is usually made by people, who never studied any philosophy or read much about determinism (which one exactly?). I read that aaall the time and it's also annoying to me.
chaos = free will is a bit of a strawman. Physics being non-deterministic does open the door to the universe exerting "will" though, and choice is just as good an explanation for the variance as randomness.
Note here that you're using the word random, when in science the phenomena are unpredictable.
"You" as a stable, persistent entity does not exist, but you as a momentary observer, with the ability to exert will to guide the evolution of the universe sure seems to.
Which hypothesis fits Occam's Razor better: that the same pattern of observation and response occurs at all scales in the universe, with the only variable being the complexity, or that there are two different processes, one of which takes over only at one very specific scale? If we don't have free will, if we're just dumb machines, why would we even be conscious in the first place? IMO it's far too big a thing to just be a random side effect.
What do you mean it's 'too big of a thing' to be explicable within the framework of the physical universe? That does not sound like a sensible intuition to fix on. For most of history life was thought of as too big of a thing to be explicable in terms of the physical universe, and philosophers appealed to the divine and extra-physical vitalism, but we now know that life really is susceptible to physical explanation.
As for your question as to why humans or other sentient beings would be conscious if they belonged to the physical universe, the answer is obvious: for the same reason that we and other animals possess all other attributes, because of its functional value in enhancing our survival fitness as a species. Perhaps high level information-processing requires consciousness, or consciousness is a byproduct of some or all high level information-processing with organic matter.
I should say I'm agnostic about consciousness because I think we know next to nothing about it.
> “Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ...
I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken.
> The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.
I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either.
I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery.
I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness".
I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example.
So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.
I am very suspicious of the ordinary formulation of the 'hard problem of consciousness'.
What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? Usually when people distinguish the two in order to suggest that the first is 'easy' and the second 'hard', they beg the question and build their conclusion into their premise.
If you assume from the beginning that the first is subject to the normal canons of empirical investigation as to how the physical world operates, and the second isn't, then of course they will appear as 'easy' and 'hard'. But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.
Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.
I agree that the qualifier of hard and easy is arbitrary, but think there are at least as much premises build into qualifiers like free or will for that matter.
If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer.
> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device
Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed.
But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion?
> subjective experience
Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.
> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.
What I don’t understand here is how consciousness can both 1) have survival value and thus be passed on through evolution and 2) be an epiphenomenon that has no influence whatsoever on the physical world.
I suppose both statements could be true, but only if a very non-intuitive definition of consciousness is used, and that seems to me to be also begging the question.
I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one. If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.
All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question. It is obviously the case that a converse statement could beg the question in the opposite direction. I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.
> I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one.
Reading what I wrote again, I agree that it could have been expressed better. Sorry about that.
> If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.
Ok. If I try to look at it from the physicalist's point of view, I have trouble understanding how the subjective side of consciousness is explained. It seems to me to be just ignored or waved away.
Why couldn't the functions of consciousness in influencing the world exist without subjectively experienced consciousness? What evolutionary value does this subjectively experienced consciousness have (as seen from a physicalist point of view)?
> All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question.
You're not necessarily wrong, it depends on what exactly is meant by begging the question.
What you wrote was:
> What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? <
Intuitively it seems to me that there is a difference of quality, even if I'm incapable of describing exactly what that difference is. I can't even imagine how one would go about explaining the difference in quality to the satisfaction of everyone.
This doesn't bother me too much though, because, put perhaps too briefly, philosophy is not science and logical arguments are not mathematical logic.
However, I can also see how someone could see not answering your question as begging the question.
> I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.
My way of thinking is perhaps not so different.
I think of philosophy as being constrained by science, in that you don't want philosophy to contradict well established scientific facts, but as being otherwise freer than science to explore how the world might work.
I also think of philosophy as having a role in dealing with questions that are largely outside the domain of science (beauty, ethics, etc.), but which can still sometimes be informed by science.
> Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.
I disagree on this point. When we think of matter, in terms of physics or chemistry, we think of matter as having certain qualities, such as mass, volume, velocity, etc. However subjective experience doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to share those qualities.
Can the existence of subjective experience be explained using only the qualities currently associated with matter, as understood in today’s physics? It doesn’t seem so.
So it seems to me that the fact that subjective experience exists is a hint that our current models are incomplete and need revising.
How exactly do they need revising? No idea whatsoever.
The problem I have with relating consciousness to free will is that consciousness seems to me to be about experiencing your thoughts, not controlling or exerting them. Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power. Imagine a machine that could control your neurons and manipulate your thoughts. I imagine you’d still experience those thoughts as a conscious person, and even experience the feeling of ‘having’ those thoughts, even though the thoughts are being selected for you.
My view is that the universe is a big movie. Consciousness is just a lens through which you get to watch the movie. But the movie script is already written, or being generated by mechanisms out of your control. You just get the immersive experience of the “feeling” of being one of the characters, including the feeling of making each decision—which are being/have been made for you.
> Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power.
As I said, I don’t know. I agree it’s not clear.
The first book I read on the subject, many years ago, was “Body and Mind”, by Keith Campbell. The book outlines various positions taken on the mind problem. I still have the book. Your position appears to be a version of epiphenominalism.
I found the book helpful as a short overview of the subject. For example, in chapter two the book describes the mind-body problem as four propositions that form an inconsistent tetrad. Any three are mutually consistent and can all be true. But any three together imply that the fourth is false.
The four propositions are:
(1) The human body is a material thing.
(2) The human mind is a spiritual thing.
(3) Mind and body interact.
(4) Spirit and matter do not interact.
The author describes a “spiritual object” as “one that does not have all the qualities of matter; it lacks at least some of: mass, volume, velocity, solidity”. (Some qualities of matter are allowed, just not all.)
Nowadays many people are referencing quantum mechanics when they try to explain some elusive and fuzzy notions like free will, consciousness, afterlife, mysticism, religious beliefs etc.
This is such a bullshit.
In fact, quantum mechanics is so bizarre, it can't even explain what is objective reality from the macroscopic point of view. The only thing it explains for us, classical creatures, is that our world is much more "complex" than we could imagine. Pun intended.
They also, uniformly, think that a quantum observer is someone in a lab coat with a clipboard, and that Schrodinger's mind experiment was intended as a demonstration rather than the objection that it was.
Gladly would take the school of Stoicism position on free-will: we are like a dog tied to a running cart, we have some sort of freedom where to run but we all have one destiny.
It's always the same. A lengthy verbose article arguing about free will, and (at this time) 53 comments about free will. But was ever a rigorous definition of "free will" given? Not at all.
But what do you class as an external influence? Do social norms, including widely held moral codes, count? What about laws, and the threat of punishment for breaking them? What about environmental conditions that provoke emotional states (fear, anger, joy)?
The first introductory lecture on politics starts with "laws are written by current political elite to enforce their interests". There are many social norms many people don't share like smoking, snobism, virtue signaling, fake smiles, it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any coherent system.
>The first introductory lecture on politics starts with "laws are written by current political elite to enforce their interests".
That doesn't make them any less real in their potential effects. Say I want to steal a stockbrocker's Bentley, but I don't because I fear the legal consequences. Is my will free from external influences?
> There are many social norms many people don't share
But there are few people who don't share any social norms.
> it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any coherent system
I don't see that they have to. Hypocrisy has never been a bar to such norms: for example, not that long ago (and to some extent still today), men with illegitimate children were commonly excused or even lionised, while women with illegitimate children were stigmatised.
I can choose to have beer for breakfast, or I can restrain myself and eat some eggs & toast instead. I have faced this choice numerous times, and I do not choose the same way every time. I can feel that choice dangling in front of me, and know I have the ability to do either one. Sometimes I can't decide, and I flip a coin.
The idea that free will doesn't exist is not a concept most humans beings are ready to even try to think about-- I like to think I possess at least average intelligence, and despite trying for years I cannot make sense of the world while trying to hold that thought in my mind.
There is a lot of stuff we do 'automatically', but a world where my choices are all deterministic simply does not make sense to me and is not useful.
I can relate. I have been a informal student of this topic for the last five years or so.
In my case, my study of the topic has helped me to manifest more compassion for myself and for others. That change, in turn, improved all my relationships.
I guess I should amend the last part of what I said with, "[is not useful] ...when considering my own behavior."
With regard to evaluating others, I agree that this mindset can definitely help foster increased kindness, which in many circumstances is one of the most useful outcomes you can hope for. For example, it does seem fairly clear at this point that the retribution/punishment model of treating lawbreakers causes more problems than it solves.
For me it is the idea of what it would mean to actually have free will that makes my mind hurts, because it is such an bizarre idea. Maybe it is because of decades of software development hammering in causality.
Because free will implies that cause and effect breaks down, but in a way that is not random but governed by some agency that is not following the cause and effect of the physical structure of the brain.
Where would that agency come from? How would it enable a decision that is not then just deterministic one step removed, or randomness one step removed, or agency one step removed?
And so we have infinite regression: For each additional step of agency you add to sidestep the problem, the same questions arises of how the decision can be made without being a combination of determinism and randomness or involve some external agency...
Conversely, the idea that we do not have free will is easy to resolve for me: Consider yourself a character in a movie. Conceptually your character has free will within the movie universe. Your character could have chosen differently if it had been written differently. But in the movie they will always make the same choice, no matter how many times you rewind, because the choice is already locked in.
And that doesn't get into the weeds even! If we follow that computer model style of thinking, I think it's quite interesting that we still have no real randomness in computing, only computing seemingly random signals from the outside world.
If there's no free will as you're positing, what logically follows is that we should not have a legal system. Why punish someone because they stole for example? It was all pre-determined. This is where this line of reasoning breaks apart quickly. Just because our minds can't rationalize the vast unknowns of the universe, doesn't mean that we should jump to simplistic conclusions based on our experiences.
> If there's no free will as you're positing, what logically follows is that we should not have a legal system.
That does not follow. In fact, the idea that we “should” or “should not” is irrelevant unless you assume free will. Because what we should do only matters if we have a choice.
So as you're putting it, it doesn't matter, it's all the same either way whether we or don't have a legal system. So why punish people if they don't have free will?
You would have an interest in doing what minimises harm to society rather than for punishment. That means focusing on rehabilitation rather than vengeance.
Consider that eg the US legal system has absolutely awful reoffending rates compared to eg Norway - it is geared for punishment rather than minimising harm.
> So as you're putting it, it doesn't matter, it's all the same either way whether we or don't have a legal system.
No, I'm saying if we don't have free will, having a legal system or not isn't a choice either. If the actions a legal system might regulate are predetermined, so is whether or not we have a legal system, and what the nature of that system is.
> So why punish people if they don't have free will?
If we don't have free will, what does the question “Why?” even mean, other than asking for an explanation of the mechanical forces producing an outcome? Questions of purpose behind actions presuppose free will directing actions for a purpose.
No, it follows that we should model the legal system on the basis of what protects society with the least damage to the people we lock up, on the basis that they had no choice. We still have a reason to protect others.
And arguing that it 'breaks' apart because you don't like the consequences is ludicrous.
Give me a definition of free will that doesn't suffer the problems I described, and we can talk.
You seem to be arguing from an agnostic or atheist point of view (correct me if I'm wrong). If that's the case, then there is no incentive whatsoever to limit the "damage" to the people who do get locked up, because it's meaningless. Whether they get locked up for 1 year, 10, or just straight out executed, it's all the same. Rape isn't inherently bad anymore, it just is. Same with murder, theft, etc.
I'm not authoritarian by any means, and I think defunding a bunch of police departments in the U.S. might be a good idea, but when people start acting like everything is deterministic society falls apart. You have different outcomes than you would otherwise have. I know this from having given up on life a few times.
> A religious view makes no difference - it just pushes the question back one step.
I disagree. You have well-known atheist figures that have expressed views similar to what I was describing. That rape isn't inherently bad, it's just something that exists in the world. That incest is ok if it's between "consenting adults". Or Dawkins defending pedophilia. There literally isn't a gauge to determine whether something is moral or not anymore. It may sound absurd or over-exaggerating, but that is the logical conclusion of a purely materialistic view. We've seen its effects throughout history.
> No, it follows that we should model the legal system on the basis of what protects society with the least damage to the people we lock up, on the basis that they had no choice.
How does this follow "logically"? This is just an opinion.
In the end of the day if _everyone_ had no free will, legal systems are besides the question - we would busy ourselves in figuring out whether someone is going to commit a crime before it is committed, and would be capable of doing so highly reliably with enough technological advancement. Some war criminals today think they can already do that, killing innocent children by familial association to terrorists.
> How does this follow "logically"? This is just an opinion.
On the basis that there is no justification for "punishment" or "vengeance" based on responsibility if there was no choice. We still need a legal system because events still happen that causes harm and that needs to be resolved, but if we acknowledge people have no agency, then there is no justification for assigning blame, but still a need to e.g. prevent reoccurrence. But when we take steps to protect society against people we recognize are blameless or without agency today, such as e.g. mentally ill people or children, we aim to pick the least invasive means possible, because we recognize it is not meant to be a punishment.
> In the end of the day if _everyone_ had no free will, legal systems are besides the question - we would busy ourselves in figuring out whether someone is going to commit a crime before it is committed, and would be capable of doing so highly reliably with enough technological advancement. Some war criminals today think they can already do that, killing innocent children by familial association to terrorists.
No, this does not follow for two reasons: 1) Sheer systems complexity. E.g. we still can't reliably predict the weather, and the weather is far simpler to predict because of 2: 2) it devolves trivially to the halting problem, in that actions can and would change depending on our actions to try to prevent crime, because people, deterministic or not, act on input from the environment in extremely complex manners.
As such it is wildly unreasonable to think that we can remove crime. Reduce it, sure. We know many ways of doing that: Redistribution for example; poverty is a massive driver of crime. Education; low education is a massive driver of crime. And so on. But nothing we do will remove the need for a legal system at any point in the near future.
Your war criminal example is an example of #2 above: how response feeds back into actions, and part of why trying to resolve this issue will remain largely as difficult.
But it would be easier, as harsh punishment-focused legal systems are a massive driver of high reoffending rates.
FTA: "So what determines which messages are conveyed to your synapses by signalling molecules? They are signals determined by thinking processes that can’t be described at any lower level because they involve concepts, cognition and emotions in an essential way. Psychological experiences drive what happens. Your thoughts and feelings reach ‘down’ to shape lower-level processes in the brain by altering the constraints on ion and electron flows in a way that changes with time."
I think what the author is trying to say is that our psychological experience is influencing the molecular forces. But the psychological experience is just an abstraction, a collection of patterns that exist in the 'data' of the brain's connectivity and charge states. The brain's circuitry "runs" the software and its rules. Just because those rules flip a few electrical switches here and there doesn't mean those switches don't follow logic.
This is a hopelessly confused mess of an article by someone who clearly doesn't understand computation.
Determinism is meaningless if there is no way to exploit that determinism. So it is with the universe: It may well be deterministic, but there is no way to build a computer that could 'look ahead' and make predictions (because of chaos theory, sensistive dependence on initial conditions etc, and because any computer that could model the universe would be bigger than - or become part of - that universe). So determinism is kindof irrelevant. And hence free will is also irrelevant. Its just an incoherent concept. If a given scene was re-run twice with everything exactly the same, then you _might_ choose differently? But in a way that is somehow different from randomness? Its just meaningless.
What people mean by free will is more like 'what happens next is influenced by things inside my skull, rather than solely from outside of it'. Which is fine.
Think of the universe as a determinstic computer that is calculating its own future microsecond by microsecond. There is no way to jump ahead in the calculations, even though it may be determistic.
I've replied to a good deal of posts you can find in this thread so to keep this short - I would argue that you can derive conclusions from the idea/existence of determinism alone, even without exploiting its "predictive" power since that is basically impossible for us.
What about a (very) small deterministic part of the universe, and a very large machine to compute its outcomes? At some scale differential the machine could compute faster, or that small part of the universe could be frozen at zero kelvin, to give the machine a head start
That could be a useful exploit of determinism. Even if the machine never computes faster, it could be used as a test to see if it always gave the same result as that part of the universe
----
But I agree your suggestion is enough to give value to a deterministic universe -- if there's no other way to get an outcome from the universe, than to run it. Then enough complexity by itself gives value to our lives, even within a deterministic system
I don't think this is enough for free will though, or giving us intrinsic value, beyond being part of a computation. Especially since the computation result is unknowable at this present time -- let us hope it is useful
A non-deterministic system however gives us free will; our decisions have an effect beyond initial conditions; our lives can then have a value more commensurate to the extent we feel for them. We are worthwhile, valuable. It also makes interesting conclusions about God
Quantum mechanics argues strongly for non-determinism, and I don't have a reason to argue otherwise
I suppose a good/bad value system though would require more... I don't know where @adjkant gets his/hers from? For any decision to be more than hitting a target with a blindfold on... We need some information surely. Some kind of source that indicates good/bad. This could be the outcome of your computation, or something else...
I suppose without that source, from our perspective, there is no real value difference between determinism, and free will -- our personal input would be zero, or random
For that source... there is an easy 5 letter answer accepted by about 33%
205 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 94.8 ms ] threadI think it's important to highlight something here - history is fraught with people on both sides of "this is random" and "this is predictable in this way" being wrong. I would not be surprised to find that further research in physics over centuries ends up showing what we currently see as "randomness" is simply a very complicated system. Even if you are able to rest bigger arguments on top of quantum randomness, it's not exactly a sturdy base coming from the bleeding edge of physics.
It's also very common among in the community of this debate to get bogged down in the theoretical and not look back to the very real applications of free will concepts in the world. Many of the distinctions they make are not really useful for humans, and they haven't realized even the most basic parts of the arguments can have radical societal effects.
Looking at a regression model as an example in equation form:
Y = a + bX + e
Some "proportion" of a phenomenon is understood. However, many things are not immediately understood but only seen to be a factor in explaining a phenomena if looking at things from a very complete, long term perspective.
Something which we are unlikely be able to do.
Many people can feel when an action produces a ripple effect. Now think of tons of ripple effects interacting, some influential, some not, etc.
Anyway, back to the equation - we have +e the error term, which is the uncertainty that any such explanation will fully predict how something plays out.
I think what you're getting at is the error term also has characteristics.
One of those properties could be that certain things advance all, others are bad for all. Just to tie it back to your other comments.
What do non-determinists think would be the testable or observable difference between a universe with and without free will?
The article doesn’t do the necessary job of convincing me that quantum physics has any real impact on people having responsibility over their thoughts & actions. I’ve always wanted to see how a person could somehow not be effected by the system being the universe and where the person is a subsystem. I think that would be the most interesting thing for me. Sadly the belief that a God just made it so isn’t logical and not something I can even begin to see how it would work. Determinism being partially untrue by some outside force making the universe truly random doesn’t allow a person making personal choices they should be responsible over. In fact such an existence would be terrifying. Performing thoughts & actions that just randomly happen with no valid reason. I’m predicting society will eventually throw away the free will illusion when science destroys inequality.
Also, it seems you're getting at an interesting idea: we can understand determinism, and we can understand chance, but free will seems to want to combine the two concepts in some incomprehensible/nonsensical way, which nobyd can understand.
I disagree, and the data seems to disagree as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
If there is no free will there is certainly a mechanism that fools us on that fact for any practical purpose. We also strive for control, at least for or own lives, and there are certain elements in his perspective that shifts the topic to that instead towards the prevalence or absence of free will. The discussion around free will are ancient, so are discussion about ascension (mostly through unpopular topics if we are honest to ourselves) or elevation above others. I am used to it in engineering circles but am still able to see it. Could also be some coping for how often he sees others being manipulated.
Sounds critical now, but I believe he is a nice guy.
Your issue is not with free will, but with retributive justice, ie. the argument that moral blame deserves punishment.
Free will or not, it's pretty easy to see which party we should confine to reduce the frequency of future face injuries.
Determinism or not, you have to wait to find out what tomorrow will bring. And tomorrow still depends on what you do today -- even if what you do today is fully determined by yesterday.
If losing the illusion of free will means you'll sit there on your sofa letting time pass, because why make any effort if the future is already written, then you're just misunderstanding determinism. I believe the future is already written, but I'm still going to work as hard as I can to make sure that it turns out to be as good a future as possible. Once you've internalized a deterministic worldview, this is not a contradiction.
(If you're familiar with Newcomb's problem, I'd choose one box). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox
Whether you think it is an illusion or not is irrelevant. A deterministic world means you were determined to believe it is an illusion. Just as others may be determined to believe that it isn't an illusion. Thus it is impossible for me to sit on a couch and do nothing, because I would be determined to believe in free will and not sit on a couch and do nothing.
On a personal note, I often feel that things that don't have free will don't deserve moral blame, but this also means they don't deserve anything at all. No punishment, no reward. One can judge such things in the same way one might judge a rock.
Who said that? In fact, I said that this exact argument is a mistake, conflating free will with retributive justice.
There is no way to justify who is deranged without moral blame. There is no victim and no perpetrator. A person who attacked you without provocation is just responding to the environment established by society. Your expectation that you should not be punched in the face is the same. Why is your expectation to not be punched justified over his desire to punch you?
I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.
So majority desires are all that matters? So you agree with mob rule and think the tyranny of the majority is perfectly ok?
> I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.
I have no problem with determinism as I'm a Compatibilist. I think you've made a few assumptions about what I believe that aren't justified, so if you're actually interested in understanding what I'm saying, you can read my elaboration on free will here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919
I'm not implying mob rule and that response makes me think you're a troll. The benefit of treating illnesses outweighs the negatives of not treating illnesses. You're just being illogical or a troll. So no reason for me to continue with you.
And no, this isn't an argument from authority, this is a suggestion that if the professionals who devote their lives to studying this topic disagree with you, it might be worth questioning your assumptions and reviewing the subject matter more closely.
Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will. I find it humorous you're attempting to use mob rule now and which is why I decided to comment.
If by any chance you would like to have a discussion by maybe voice? I would very much like to discuss your views vs my own and go over why I'm a hard determinist compared to being a compatibilist such as yourself.
I do like to discuss these topics once in awhile with someone over chat. I try to keep an open mind and hopefully learn something new whenever that may be in my fate. Although if you're a person that's fixated on semantics and or just assumes your 60% of philosophers must be right. There isn't much point.
There is no "common definition" of free will, there are a series of context-specific definitions used in ethics, science, law, theology, etc. and this conflation causes considerable confusion. The notion of a "common definition", often trotted out to dismiss Compatibilism, is simply false.
I don't want to be dismissive myself, but I've said my piece about hard determinism here [1] and in other posts. After participating in literally hundreds of debates on this topic on the philosophy subreddit over the years, I don't think I'll hear anything particularly new, and I think I've spent enough time on this thread at this point.
I only debate this extensively sometimes because while hard determinism enjoys widespread support among scientifically minded people who conflate "free will" in science with its use in ethics, Compatibilism is unfairly dismissed and misunderstood.
Cheers!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482205
An outside force can evaluate me, and decide if I was good or not. It wasn't my choices or anything from myself that led to that
Interesting. You could go a long way with that logic. Since you can go a long way, there is also little that can be disagreed with -- even though the way you go can take you many places, and many of them good (in my non-outside-force opinion)
I would ask:
So there is something that makes some clocks good, and some bad. Something outside of my influence -- so from my reference point it is not determined
Is this just semantics. Can I just redefine human to be human+thing_not_determined?
The outside force at a minimum should be an algorithm deciding whether clocks are good or bad. The force can be fully determined, and the clocks can be fully determined. But what causes variance in clocks? The source of that variance can also be fixed -- a fully deterministic universe
But from the outside force's reference point, is that variance external or internal to the algorithm?
External; then the algorithm has an effectively non-deterministic view of clocks
Internal; then it is no longer evaluating clocks, rather an evaluation of itself+clocks. No longer a good or bad clock; we have a good or bad God
---
Conclusion:
Compatibilism is compatible with a non deterministic universe
Any fully determined system can be seen as non-determined when looking at a subset. Is quantum mechanics fully determined or not? In a sense it doesn't matter -- since our view of the universe will never be full, and so we can never take a fully deterministic view point??
Even if that were the case, that doesn't bear on whether or not free will exists. Having reasons to want something to be true doesn't in itself make it true.
But how do you know this quasi-free will notion isn't exactly what people really mean by free will. In fact, that appears to be the case:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
If your argument that it is necessary for the public to believe in free will (because of the negative consequences if they don't), regardless of whether or not it actually exists, then that's different. I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences. I apologise and withdraw.
I'm saying that this is exactly what most people really mean by free will [1], and that people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist are making a mistake in assuming free will is something that it isn't. Typically, you're arguing against a theistic conception of free will with "souls" and whatnot, but that's just one (incoherent) conception of free will and not the whole debate.
"Free will" is ultimately some notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
If you acknowledge that being able to designate who is responsible for some undesirable outcome is a necessary condition for being able to remedy it, then you are acknowledging some notion of moral blame.
If you further accept that people's actions can be described counterfactually by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then that implies some sort of control over those actions.
Therefore we have control + moral responsibility, and that's free will (in Compatibilism).
If this seems kind of familiar, it should! Compatibilism was first formulated from our notions of free will from law. Notice how if you remove the control requirement (say they had a tumour driving some behaviour, or they're insane), a person is no longer acting of their own free will and so are not responsible for their actions.
This is what I meant by free will being inevitable. No society can exist without blame for breaking the law. You might define the terms to avoid terms like "blame" and "free will", as hard determinists try to do, but the ultimate function will be the exact same.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
Where did I claim that free will doesn't exist?
The fact that moral responsibility requires the assumption that people have control doesn't mean people do have control. It just means that people who like moral responsibility (including myself!) have an inconvenient reality to contend with. It means we have to find some way to run a society morally despite the shaky grounding on which we find ourselves.
I would find the compatibilist argument more convincing if it simply said, here are some beliefs that would benefit us if we assumed they were true, rather than saying they are true. We can define free will as 'the assumption that is needed to make moral responsibility work,' and we can even make that assumption in order to have a practical, working framework for moral responsibility, but it still doesn't prove the assumption is true.
That trips most people up, but it goes right back to our first discussion about cars also being "not real". If I say to a coworker, "I got in my car and drove to work", and they reply with, "Well that's impossible, because cars don't exist, nor do day jobs", that's kind of nonsense right, because there I am at work, standing in front of my coworker with my car in my parking spot. It's a category error, and it's the same error made when people say that a choice wasn't really ours because it's dictated by the movements of particles.
The fact that thoughts, feelings and beliefs may be caused by deterministic underlying physics is actually irrelevant, which is why Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. What matters is that thoughts, feelings and beliefs counterfactually dictate your choices, and so, by changing thoughts, feelings and beliefs via moral feedback, you change behaviour.
Moral blame is that feedback. The type of control that's needed is simply not the type of control that you're assuming it must be. This is the mistake incompatibilists make as well: they assume the type of control needed has certain logical properties, but these properties have been shown to be flawed.
Now what consequences follow from blame is a completely separate question (of justice), and I mention this because it trips a lot of people up: they assume blame entails punishment, and given they cannot justify punishment when some things are simply beyond one's control, they want to do away with blame itself. But that's unnecessary, because blame by itself doesn't immediately entail retributive justice with punishment, there are plenty of other forms of justice that would serve equally well.
If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).
I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?
"They deliberately did/felt justified doing", but yes that's essentially it, modulo the considerations I discuss below.
> I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).
This is part of what makes the debate so frustrating and confusing for many, because we have religious "free will" with souls and whatnot, we have philosophical "free will" for ethics and moral responsibility, we have scientific "free will" for experimenters (free will theorem), and all of them overlap in some ways, but not in all ways, which leads to considerable confusion.
Incompatibilists think "free will" in all of the above contexts mean exactly the same thing, ie. theistic free will and experimental free will and philosophical free will all mean some sort of freedom from antecedent causes, and that this is necessary for moral responsibility. This is why you'll see scientists and science fans claim we don't have free will, because the nuance between the above contexts is lost.
> Without free will you can still say people did things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?
Because not every choice is freely made, or an expression of their will. Some people are coerced into making choices, some people have cognitive impairments and so are not capable of making free or willed choices (insanity, dementia, etc.), some people are not of sufficient age for them to understand the choice they're making, and so on. How do we package up all these considerations into a term of art that describes when a person of sound mind and body makes choice freely? Free will.
Compatibilism emerged from the notion of free will in law. Consider all the conditions for legal culpability, and I think you'll begin to see how nuanced this is, and how these considerations are deeply entrenched in how people approach moral reasoning.
There is no choice in that case, and so no meaningful exercise of will.
I've asserted that deterministic choice is perfectly compatible with responsibility, and that our moral and legal reasoning is compatible with this conception.
And what you describe empirically doesn't match my experiences. People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.
'Deterministic choice' is not a choice for the person - it is just cause and effect. There is nothing free about it, and no will involved.
The very idea gets people incredibly worked up when you drill down into it.
It serves the purpose of labelling a process of deliberation over a set of choices. Whether that deliberation is deterministic or not is a red herring.
> People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.
So? People struggle to explain how lightning works. The vikings would have gotten quite worked up if you claimed Thor didn't cause thunder. Why does this have any impact on the natural facts of lightning?
For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.
And those differences needs to not just be purely random, or there again is no control.
There then needs to be some mechanism that makes that choice. If you can not derive that from cause and effect of interactions of the physical aspects of the brain, then that is dualism. But that does not resolve the free-will issue:
That just means that there is an unknown decision mechanism, that needs to be subjected to the same question of how it makes the decision in a way that is not deterministic, and not random, yet produces outcomes that differ when re-run with the same state.
Free will basically would require some third distinct category between determinism and randomness, that infuses some sort of agency into a process (and that is not just a combination of the two, but qualitatively different).
I've yet to see someone come up with a description of this "something" that is not just entirely obfuscation.
The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases back in the 60s. An unrestricted ability to do otherwise is simply not relevant to moral responsibility.
I've elaborated on why the control I describe is sufficient below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478747
1 . Compatibilists don't assert that determinism is true, they assert that determinism doesn't matter. Which means if the world is non-deterministic, Compatibilism still applies. This is not true of hard determinism.
2. Hard determinists have no way to assign blame in a way that disallows morally repugnant conclusions. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, how does a hard determinist argue that the unprovoked attacker is the person requiring rehabilitation? Why shouldn't the law be changed to allow unprovoked face punches? Why shouldn't you be rehabilitated to learn to duck faster? There is no moral blame, so anything is permissible.
To #2 the reason to continue mostly as before is because it is what we intuitively feel is fair and that minimises harm. The idea you need to blame someone to do this is a typic religious argument against atheists - we do not need blame to have a feeling for what we consider right and wrong. A belief in determinism shifts those feelings.
It's very simple to reconcile - the only change is that punishment for the sake of punishment rather than to minimise harm is not justified if people have no agency.
To a lot of people that is a belief they come to anyway without a belief in determinism, because of the number of moral systems that includes forgiveness as a central concept.
Consider the prison system in Norway vs US for example. Norways prison system was awful up to the 60s where a reform movement won support for a focus on rehabilitation over punishment.
Arguments also become irrelevant, since we're destined to play out the drama exactly as we have. Like some static 4D statuary in a forgotten temple. There's no point in trying to convince anyone, as they have 'already' been sculpted as they are. So argument can't be said to have any real effect, as its just more posed stone.
> Yes, some things are simply impossible. Not even a traditional concept of God, could have or make free will be real and knowing so is from understanding the logic of cause & effect. Not even true randomness can make us be free agents.
Agreed, and good point.
> Although I think randomness is an impossibility because there's always a cause and that can be passionately debated for the theory of quantum physics in our universe. But randomness doesn't matter in regard to free will being an illusion.
Also agree here, I think 'random' is a human descriptor for when prior events are too numerous, or complicated, or not known. I'm open to change on this though, as the delayed choice / quantum eraser experiment is mind boggling - and we know that our intuitions mean next to nothing for determining the truth :).
As you say, even if we did have 'true randomness' in the mix (if such a thing exists, which we both doubt), that would be evidence against us having any say in what we think or do.
> Furthermore, the idea of free will being an illusion made it simpler for me personally to understand harder concepts than before. How humans created the concept of good & evil, but we simply apply it incorrectly and to what we observe throughout our existence.
That's really cool that it directly informs your view on concepts, e.g. good vs evil. I guess it probably does for me as well, but I 'feel like' it is far down the chain of reasoning for me - maybe because I came across the concept of free will relatively recently (early twenties, in my late twenties now). I think studies have shown though that our 'reasoning' or explanation of how we arrive at a thought are typically delusions anyway, so maybe it does directly inform my views and I am just not aware :).
> My reflection from a mirror has the same control as I do
I've read this a few times and it halted my brains execution on each attempt, haha. That sentence is really cool - it sounds vaguely ridiculous but I completely agree with it. I can't even articulate why it 'seems' ridiculous to me. I have looked in the mirror before and experienced what is tantamount to an existential crisis - I feel like I'm one entity, when really we are composed from billions of cells / bacteria which are also living. We just happen to have a stream of chemical and electrical impulses driving our every action making us feel like we're the pilot.
> Providing me with wishful thinking that the universe could repeat and where the same conditions that made our life, could happen repeat again & again; with improvements occurring each iteration depending on the starting variables. Maybe like a brute-forcing algorithm. That's the spiritual part I get out of understanding the concept of cause & effect.
That's an interesting take. I think I view it quite selfishly, and given that my consciousness probably (?) wouldn't be involved in the later iterations removes the wishful quality for me, haha.
It's an interesting point though, if we live in a deterministic universe it means it would in theory be possible to have a giant simulation of which we are unwitting participants. Maybe our brain compute while a tedious resource to create / evolve, is actually good at solving certain types of problems the grand architects are bad at :P? I jest, but I think that's why sci-fi as a genre is so cool - it circles around these profound questions.
Perhaps there are 'n' universe in parallel or sequence with the naturalistic laws mutating across each universe. I've definitely read that notion...
Constraints on physical systems (such as the given example of a string constraining the motion of an apple to a circle) are simplifications that we use to model the system. Nature doesn't notice the constraints -- the string is just a bunch of atoms, the same as the apple, and they're all following the same equations. But to us, it can be easier to model a system with a single degree of freedom and some constraints, rather than 10^23 degrees of freedom and no constraints.
The brain, and a CPU, do not generate constraints that overrule the physics of their base particles. The appearance of constraints is just the dance of many particles following the rules, just like everything else, but arranged in a clever way that matches the useful, more easily modeled behaviour of a constrained system.
In the scientific papers, at least in some areas, it is expected to disclose potential conflicts of interest. In magazine essays one can see just an essay without a context, which could potentially explain where the author comes from. That's why I have searched for the author and have found:
George F. R. Ellis is, not accidentally, "a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion", "an active Quaker", and a winner of Templeton Prize "originally awarded to people working in the field of religion (Mother Teresa was the first winner), but in the 1980s the scope broadened to include people working at the intersection of science and religion."
Even if no being in the universe could possibly predict the behavior of a system that includes an intelligent being and even further suppose that due to true randomness it was in fact not predetermined. I don't see how it would make the entity's actions determined by their own thoughts instead of the smaller scale pieces of the system.
If its truly impossible to predict and we have the perception of having free will and in fact if many things including our own life experience truly are explicable in terms of thoughts, will desires, actions does it really matter if the particles made me do it?
What is the practical differences between free will and not?
Personally, I find the idea that the universe is a living thing that can feel and act all scales of complexity to be delightful, and it certainly has massive ethical ramifications.
I think one of the problems with this question is that the experiments are fundamentally impossible. You can't put an identical person in identical situations 100 times and see what they do. That wouldn't necessarily even solve the problem since exactly what any given result would even mean would still be up for debate, but you can't even get that far. You can deny free will all you like and you'll never be able to prove it by predicting everything in advance. You can claim it all you like and you'll never be able to show the existence of the counterfactual world where you freely chose differently. Doesn't matter how much word chopping you do.
Personally, I've begun to cautiously subscribe to a form of panpsychism, where what we call free will (and perhaps even consciousness), is the same thing as quantum fluctuations, but at scale.
:)
With respect to consciousness being tied to quantum physics --
There doesn't appear to be any shape that matter can be sculpted into that allows that matter to "freely choose" the outcome of a quantum experiment. (Change the distribution yes, but not select particular outcomes from a wide distribution). Free will doesn't emerge from quantum randomness -- if it did, it would be analogous to setting up a two-slit experiment where the photon is capable of freely choosing to go through the left slit every time, under the power of a conscious spirit and in defiance of the predictions of quantum probabilities. Our brains do not have this power either. Whatever the quantum field fluctuations are occurring inside our brains, our rational thought is at best recording it, most likely is robust to it, most likely not formed by it, and certainly not consciously selecting particular favoured quantum outcomes.
Not what I meant though. What I meant was that free will / consciousness (not sure if they're two separate things or aspects of the same thing) is an emergent property of quantum fluctuations, similar to wetness being an emergent property of the H2O molecule. It's a bit hand-wavy yes (if it weren't, I'd be publishing a paper right now).
The hypothesis (and it's just a hypothesis) is that if quantum fluctuations are all entirely independent, then there is no chance of any emergent properties. But if fluctuations do interact (i.e. proximity in space and/or time affects each other's probabilities), then properties can emerge. Perhaps what we perceive as consciousness / free will is just one such property.
But if you think a brain is more likely to be conscious than a watermelon, then it's most likely the consciousness comes from one of the properties specific to the brain -- like its computational structure that couples sensory inputs, prediction, world modeling, hypotheticals, and modeling itself and other agents. These are probably software-like things that are classical in nature.
But add his suggestion to yours -- a random source + the ability to reason -- think of a robot you give a gun + reasoning partially based on a source outside your control -- here randomness
Does that robot careen through NY, or hold reasoned debate on human rights & free will. Such a robot, I think, would be considered a free agent, and have free will (for most definitions of free will). I suppose we'd maybe want to add the rule the robot is consistent -- it doesn't flip randomly through extremes, even though its total path is fully random -- reasoning+randomness
Personally I would apply that to humanity -- some source gives us agency (decision making separate to the source that originated us). Quantum mechanics is interesting, because it suggests maybe this separation is randomness due to lack of definition -- i.e. our source can fully define everything, and yet our separation of independent decision making makes our interactions meaningful. Which has some really beautiful conclusions -- notably life and decisions have worth, etc, etc
------
Loads more to say. But this is not the place
Does that prediction take time? If it doesn't, if it is instantaneous, it's just a hand-waving god. If the prediction for any given instant takes trillions of years, it's meaningless.
How am I supposed to see it as anything other than an obstinate adherence to a principle, an unfalsifiable dogma?
But one of my physics professors had an amusing comment: We can't calculate the energy levels of the hydrogen atom in years of CPU time, but the hydrogen atom can compute its own wavefunction in a femtosecond. Aside from microscopic phenomena, at least macroscopic systems can compute their own future just fine.
My own view is that free will is a theological / philosophical solution in search of a scientific problem.
> Does that prediction take time?
Of course it takes an understanding of the entire universe, which we don't have.
> If it doesn't, if it is instantaneous, it's just a hand-waving god. If the prediction for any given instant takes trillions of years, it's meaningless.
The lack of ability to predict does not change the facts of determinism one way or the other, and that concept alone changes many things about the world, which is why we should care about it 100%.
Since I think it will be most helpful to your line of questioning, here's a simplistic but concrete example:
Without formal free will, responsibility takes a very different form, and that alone can be used in arguments such as punishment vs rehabilitation, levels of societal equality, and human rights arguments.
When you ask if the current state of the universe is "predictable", I'd say not by any machine or device that could ever be made, even in principle, that is a part of the system it's predicting. Almost anything you put together from atoms will have less memory and predicting power than would be required to predict the future state of that system, let alone the rest of the universe (else we could solve the halting problem, among many other things). No "devs project".
That's not really what we tend to mean when we say deterministic or predictable, which is more like, could the future of the system be predicted by some unbounded machine that lives outside of the system, but is magically supplied with information about the system. As such, the "time" taken to make the prediction is also kind of irrelevant, because if that system even has a notion of time, it's on a different axis than our time. It would be like a piece on a checkerboard asking its neighbour how many turns it takes for a human to decide its opening move... human time just can't be observed by the checkers pieces who count the passage of time in checkers-turns.
Nobody expects to see such a prediction made, but it's not a meaningless property.
For instance, take a heinous crime and assess it first through the lense of free will, and then swap in a deterministic universe and watch the criminals become victims.
The argument that changing constraints dramatically change system function, and thus enable top down control, is good. It is why we can program computers without being quantum physicists. Additionally, the point that if determinism is true then all texts were encoded in the initial conditions is also good. And finally, his point that determinism undermines the rationality of morality is also good. The book "Life at the Bottom" maked this point vividly, where criminals seem to be unanimous that their actions are out of their control.
Where his argument falls apart is explaining the source of top down causation. The author makes the supervenience fallacy, conclusively demonstrated by Jaegwon Kim. There is no logical possibility of top down causation within materialism.
You already see the issue with constraints -- which is why our reality is a bottom-up one, but with the appearance of top-down rules.
The point that if determinism is true all texts are encoded, also applies to any other organized information, e.g. human DNA. If books can only be thought of as the product of human free will, and not just natural law, then equally, DNA must be credited to something's free will. But what? Does evolution have free will?
No, I think they're both the outcomes of natural processes. We can still build legal systems of copyright on top of that though, and claim credit for those works.
(As for where the data comes from if not the Schrodinger equation -- that problem also has a simple solution, which is that we're on the leaf of a widely branching tree, and the data is seeded by the index of our branching history).
So I think it's clear that the author's argument here is pretty weak.
Depends on specifically what you mean by top down causation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3262299/
> The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.
First, this is one of the few useful things said here. Responsibility, poof. I agree. And I think that radically changes how we should approach so many things. As a hard determinist who is writing arguments, ethics, and moral frameworks around said determinism, I think there is a big issue with a lot of discussions about free will - definition.
When most humans say "free will", they don't mean randomness, not even close. While philosophers in this argument have spent a good deal of time on randomness, I think that focus misses the point entirely. Even if there is molecular randomness, how does that give any more meaning to humans? At the end of the day, the human idea of control gains nothing from it.
When humans say "free will", they are referring IMO in actuality to a real thing - a combination of many things, but basically agency + lack of prediction powers. At the end of the day, those are not going away anytime soon, if ever. This is where ethical, moral, and social questions are based, not in free will formally.
The lack of formal free will is crucial for underpinning all of this, but it in no way makes ethics and the like impossible. We still exist and experience the world, and it is in all of our best interests to go towards a "better" one. Whether we were always going to do that or not doesn't change that, nor does it change the human experience.
I will say this - determinism must be approached carefully precisely because of articles like this - it is easy for the worst effect of determinism on humans to actually be the idea itself and how it makes people defeatist about morality. I hope to spend my time making a good case for how to approach it safely and in a way that makes the world better, and I wish more people were looking at that instead of arguing about quantum randomness.
I think this gives ethicists the task of accepting deterministic reality the way it's always been, and developing a moral framework that is in harmony with that reality. Morals can still exist without the principle of free will, just like they can exist without God dictating a list of 10 commandments. Murder can still be wrong without free will, just like it can still be wrong without God saying so.
Not really, because you've just done away with moral blame. If there can be no moral blame, then the moral classification of actions has no meaning.
Subjectivisms (both individualist and things like cultural relativism) and error theory are perfectly compatible with determinism. I personally ascribe to and argue for error theory which essentially leads to moral psychology actually dictating what ethics are. Based on that, it's quite easy to get to "murder is bad" via human traits like empathy and our social nature.
No argument here, but knowing them still seems useful to humans. So in relation to humans, those terms and ideas are 100% needed. You're taking moral nihilism and jumping straight to general nihilism without any steps.
> Arguments for determinism always have these "answers" to morality, but the only convincing one is moral nihilism.
Error theory is a form of moral nihilism - what are you exactly disagreeing with here?
------------------------------------------------------
The bigger question is where you go from that moral nihilism. There is nothing that says just because our formal definitions of morality are false that the entire world doesn't matter. I still care for my happiness and life. So do many others. We need both this idea and these further terms and ideas in order to be able to answer the questions we were originally attempting to answer with objective morality because those problems did not magically go away.
Caring about happiness and life, to the point they have value is objective
Do you have any other way to distinguish between moral and general nihilism? -- surely such a thing would need to be objective
But you make a good point in that if there is no objective morality, there may still be some other way to make a value statement. But how could such a thing give value to moral nihilism, and still maintain the nihilism??
To be honest, I don't understand these HN comments any better than the original article -- but I do greatly appreciate them for their importance
The latter comes from the realization that some things (ie actions based only on gaining money/power/fame, knowingly taking advantage of people, needlessly killing, laziness, cheating for gain, not helping the poor, not forgiving people).
This arises from nihilism because some believe that it can't be possible that nothing matters when these values are "beyond our earthly realm" in that it often requires seeing things on a more spiritual level, and thinking beyond immediate gratification.
It is then that one may see nihilistic people as those feeding their temptations as these are often the easiest things to do (running vs. sitting and getting fat).
So while one can think nothing matters, some may then see that indeed some actions "retard" not just ourselves but all, and others are a net benefit for society.
Though believing that such actions are actually a net benefit may be considered "faith" because I can't know for sure.
Just my thoughts.
Yeah, to accept nihilism seems very destructive. Ultimately, to me, like you; it seems to equate to accepting zero value for others and ourselves
Yet life burns to exist. We are desperate to live and to have meaning. It is no proof, but every fiber of our being cries out for a value beyond zero
> Though believing that such actions are actually a net benefit may be considered "faith" because I can't know for sure.
Nice. Personally, and from personal experience, I would base "faith" on concrete facts, and this provides a safe foundation for logic, etc -- I think you can know for sure
Thanks for sharing
This comes down to philosophical definitions. We are both using the word "objective" differently here. In the philosophical world, this is what moral objectivism means:
> The view that what is right or wrong doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right or wrong. That is, the view that the 'moral facts' are like 'physical' facts in that what the facts are does not depend on what anyone thinks they are. [1]
What you appear to be using objective as here as to mean "it's the physical state of the world, no matter who sees it". And that's true, but it doesn't have inherent moral usefulness as a statement, we have to show that it means something, which is where my argument from determinism leads.
> But you make a good point in that if there is no objective morality, there may still be some other way to make a value statement. But how could such a thing give value to moral nihilism, and still maintain the nihilism??
The "how" comes from a phrase I've used in other posts, but essentially, moral psychology and psychology generally.
Think of it this way: Nothing has inherent moral meaning. Really technically meaning generally, things just are. So does anything have more value than anything else, inherently? Not really. It's an interestingly odd base of equality in fact. So we all still exist and have desires and wants and needs, but none are any more worthy than others. We also have the notable traits of empathy and social desire. There's much more nuance and detail there, but essentially, if I or you as a single individual want to satisfy my desires, my makeup as a creature that cares about others dictates that I balance all of our desires together into what we would generally refer to as "ethics", even if no such objective truth exists. Indeed, if you change what a human is, you change morality itself.
[1] http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~alatus/phil1200/RelativismObjectivism...
> [objectivity] doesn't have inherent moral usefulness
Agreed. But I take it as a required pre-cursor, and that was implicit, so you are right to check definitions. I go something like
These are simplifications, but useful to meSo "physical state", and "facts not depending on what anyone thinks" both have value -- they are objective realities. Yes some people say physical state and facts are meaningless and so nihilistically ascribe them zero value. But you have not done that
I think you are saying the universe definitively exists -- it has value. Morality does not exist (in that it has no predefined value, it is a zero). And from there, you take emergent properties of life, the mind, and psychology, to create a new morality -- one which does have value, but as defined in an emergent property of humanity
> even if no such objective truth exists
Now I understand you (I think). You are after a different objectivity
By my personal definition, your second morality must be objective -- you've given it a value, and said it is different to the previous morality -- a fact
As far as I understand things, to have any meaning, there must be objectivity -- otherwise everything is an effective zero, and there is no valid way to say any one thing is better than another. For instance to say something is good rather than bad
So what you have done... Please correct me... is say there is no morality, but there is humanity, psychology, physics, desires, etc. You are saying these are objective facts people agree on, and from there you will build an objective morality that people can also agree on
If so, three comments:
1) Emergent properties and psychology are fascinating, you can build an objectively interesting morality on these. I appreciate your work and your clarity so far. Sorry, your link didn't open for me
2) How would this morality differ from the current morality -- or, to what extent is the current morality not based on emergent properties of psychology and human behavior?
3) Ah, you are cutting God out of the loop. I don't think this objectively (pun) succeeds...
But would love to hear more and any corrections
At this point we're talking definitions, yes. IMO this is a subjective morality because it is only valid when you value what humans value - it comes from our perspective. Without looking at it through our perspective and values, it has no meaning. Repeat for every individual human and combine to get that more or less "objective/existant" rule set.
> You are saying these are objective facts people agree on
Yes, but stronger. Agreement is not needed. I don't personally find use diving into metaphysical brain in vat scenarios, so I choose to philosophically work under that we can observe the universe, and either it's real or its fake and still matters, for similar reasons of "we still exist and feel" invoked before.
> you will build an objective morality that people can also agree on
Theoretically, but good luck getting that agreement, lol. As to "objective" see above. I think the distinction of "shared subjective" is important here.
> How would this morality differ from the current morality -- or, to what extent is the current morality not based on emergent properties of psychology and human behavior?
It really depends on what morality you ascribe to. This view for example is highly supportive of consequentialism in my experience, while pretty clearly kills deontology where it stands. Generally I think the end results in full won't be all that different, though I will say, politically in the US, lack of responsibility via determinism makes strong arguments for things like socialist and egalitarian policies. Of course, psychological factors can offset those, which is why things like full equality a la communism get so much pushback. I think Rawls and the veil of ignorance become pretty useful ideas as a starting point to figure out the details. [1] Our imperfect knowledge will always make this stuff an estimation at best in practicality though.
> Ah, you are cutting God out of the loop. I don't think this objectively (pun) succeeds...
I've heard enough god arguments that I effectively cut that out of the equation, yes. Similar logic to brain in vat - either its false and we move on, or its true and we can't do anything about it anyways. At the end of the day, there is no god proof that I have seen that justifies a meta-ethical underpinning having to do with god or DCT [2] or the like. Basically, evidence strongly points one direction, and we will never have proof one way or the other, so we do our best, make a choice, and move on.
[1] https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignoranc... [2] https://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/
Ha, yes :)
> As to "objective" see above. I think the distinction of "shared subjective" is important here
So my objective is the "facts irrespective of opinion", but your objective is a subjectivity summed together from many points of view
I suggest my 'objectivity' agrees with what you quoted from the dictionary, but your objectivity (more importantly :o) agrees with the zeitgeist -- in that easily the majority of comments here take your view
-- a rejection of objectivity
I agree this universe is not objective, and I agree shared subjectives exist. So how to make that jump? -- from no fixed point from which to measure true/false -- to a world we can at least have a shared fixed point from which to measure
From an external stand point X varies around zero (or there is no zero). From an internal stand point, everyone can measure from X
So externally we can make no meaningful statement, but internally we can generate a whole microcosm. So shared subjectivity is the internal view?
So is the external an effective zero from a meaning standpoint. Then internal+0 = internal. What meaningfully separates the internal from the external?
Is the external meaningfully non zero. Then internal+external > internal. Good. But then we have external meaning. I think you are also saying shared_subjective > external. So internal > external
I realize you solve this. You say the universe contains something, but not meaning. From electricity, behold, I create light -- a shared subjectivity
If I join you -- I agree, the external world makes no moral sense. I step inside and look from your perspective -- a shared subjectivity. So now I see and make statements about morality based on X -- so to agree with you means to take the perspective that I have objectivity?
I think your answer is yes -- I want you to base your life on X
> I think Rawls and the veil of ignorance become pretty useful ideas as a starting point to figure out the details
So this X is a point from which you can measure decisions and the details of morality? What is the quantitative difference between that and the gods of DCT (thanks for the links) -- haven't you recreated god by a different name?
I suppose you might say: Yes, but my God is from electricity. Theirs is from the unknown
I think we can prove such a statement as partly right, and partly wrong
----
I think:
Either nothing is knowable as true or false, and we move on
Or, we know something is true, and then we have a foundation to build on
Maybe this is shared subjective. But we are not able to fully prove it. For instance mathematical proof is based on axioms. Axioms are unproven assumptions. So even the most basic things are unproven in anything beyond the subjective. We are like finite beings trying to reach outside the realm of finite observations. How can we we make categorical statements when we will never be able to fully check them?
Famously: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
But I would like to suggest a way, and the only way I can imagine
We need evidence that
1) Makes categorical statements
2) Makes them within our observation
3) Gives proof not derivable from observation
4) Does that as a unified package
Some kind of object from beyond our finite realm, stepping in, acting in a finite way (so we can understand it), and also acting in a non-finite way (otherwise ignore it); and doing this as a unified package, so we can connect the two together (finite and non-finite, inside and outside observation)
Notes:
Proof would have to be things we consider impossible -- outside of anything we have observed, and not baseable on anything we have observed
Categorical statements should be things we don't agree with, otherwise (If we already agree with them, then they're probably not based on evidence we don't already have)
I suppose we'd also need reason to trust. Aliens can step onto our...
Someone sent me a link just now -- two subjective realities meeting for a shared experience. Sorry not philosophy in the dry sense. But still asking a good existential question, and disagreeing
Personally I think evidence is a necessity. A summation of all, or enough POVs, we must hope contains this evidence, or an indication of
I give you, a music video(!) https://youtu.be/lynwOb2ZiIo
Try like 1:10min -- 5min. Philosophy more properly starts at about 8:30
Nothing published yet but I have many smaller academic writings that are building the pieces of this, and currently have a master outline that basically looks like this:
(1) Hard Determinism
(2) Ethics/Morality under (1)
(3) Social/Political Organization under (2)
(4) Personal/Useful/Practical/Life Philosophy under (1)/(2)/(3)
I started (1) when I was 18 and have many different forms at this point. Recently I have spent a good deal of time on (2) in the past couple years. (3) I have worked on independent of these ideas and am still linking up once I sure up and reflect on (2) more. (4) I'd argue is basically a WIP experiment of my own life since I was 17/18 and will be the last to be completed, probably not for a good deal of time.
Basically if this is a checklist representative of how developed/ready these ideas are, (1) is done, (2) is 75% of the way there and my main focus currently, (3) is up next, and 4 requires all the others and of course much lived experience.
As to when/how I want to publish, right now my plan is to have three forms for each - an accessible article (think 10-30 minute read), a short accessible book form that elaborates, and the formal philosophy for the academic/formal community to pick apart. Right now I essentially am working on the articles and planning to expand out. I'm not sure if I want to publish the articles without the books though, so it could be a long time.
However, given that philosophy benefits from discussion and debate, I think there seems to be a good case for publishing the articles. I might try to stand up my website/blog I've been putting off forever once I finish two and start making progress on three. I'd really love to have all four articles published at the same time as a set though, so I might have to figure out a compromise there.
> Error theory is a form of moral nihilism - what are you exactly disagreeing with here?
More the relativistic morality and psychological morality.
> There is nothing that says just because our formal definitions of morality are false that the entire world doesn't matter. I still care for my happiness and life.
Moral nihilism doesn't mean that they're false - it means moral truths don't exist, there is no right and wrong. You were predetermined to care for your happiness - but your happiness is already determined. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease it, it will be what it will be based on the initial conditions.
It seems, in general, that you need to cling to ethics as a way to convince your belief in determinism - to cover up for its deficiencies, you have to find a way to convince people that ethics still matter, despite continual argument that it doesn't.
I agree 100%. However, you are mismatching objective moral truth with subjective moral truth. I am saying that once you realize the lack of objective moral truth/existence, all that is left is the subjective. Human nature then essentially requires it to become a collective subjective. Subjective preferences of all being essentially become the practical "morality". That's what I am referring to here, not the objective morality that does not and cannot logically exist.
Morality is derived not from the physical world but from our own moral psychology. If we change humans in any way, we change morality. And thus morality is also different for every human. Traits like our social nature, empathy, and equal lack of inherent meaning then morph the problem into a collective/intertwined singular subjective morality based on the world state itself.
> - but your happiness is already determined. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease it, it will be what it will be based on the initial conditions.
This is where you conflate determinism / free will with agency / choice, which are not the same thing. We do not have the ability to see our future choices and path, so we still have to "function" through it, even if it's a set path. And the questions we have to answer along the way are the reason we looked into morality in the first place, and are no less important or worth of time and effort.
> It seems, in general, that you need to cling to ethics as a way to convince your belief in determinism - to cover up for its deficiencies, you have to find a way to convince people that ethics still matter, despite continual argument that it doesn't.
You've got the wrong direction of how philosophy works - I started with determinism at the base, I'm simply asking what it leads to. You're only disagreeing with what comes after moral nihilism, but you've made no actual argument other than "no it's not that way". I'd truly love to understand more what your critique of my steps after is.
I don't see how that follows. Compatibilism is perfectly compatible with moral realism.
As a hard determinist, you'll have to re-invent concepts of pseudo-moral blame in order to justify rehabilitation for those who break the law rather than simply changing the law itself to accomodate rule breakers, at which point you've just reinvented free will and called it something else.
Moral error theory has problems of its own, so I don't think these all hang together very nicely.
"Practical" free will, as described by both of us:
> When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions
> When humans say "free will", they are referring IMO in actuality to a real thing - a combination of many things, but basically agency + lack of prediction powers
You added a very specific phrase outside of the definition though, with no justification: "that grounds moral responsibility". That both implicitly implies moral responsibility, and also claims that it is grounded by this particular definition of free will. I'd be interested in how you got to those conclusions.
The "stricter/formal/whatever label you add here" version, that some try to argue for, including some compatibilists, goes more or less like this:
> Humans have the power to change the state/future of the universe and the universe is not "set" in any way
This feels a bit logically impossible to me, and it may also be something you don't agree with either, but it is still a definition that people use to mean free will, I have seen it way too often. However, the lack of this type of thing still has meaning is what I am trying to say. It is what leads to error theory for me, and then effectively what leads away from it. I wonder if that "away from" part might also solve some of your qualms with error theory.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In terms of hard determinism, it seems to me you only listed off reasons that hard determinism doesn't sound easy, but made no argument against it itself. Just because an idea invalidates many ones that were previously popular does not make it any less true/false, nor does it prevent it from establishing new and helpful ideas on top of it, even if they do not really exist currently.
> you'll have to re-invent concepts of pseudo-moral blame
This is exactly where I think hard determinism has its value. There is no moral blame - hard determinism requires a morality without it, and that's okay. It simply is new because people have focused so hard on blame, but I think that "formal" definition of free will is useful to show precisely that blame is not in play.
> at which point you've just reinvented free will and called it something else
I do think much of this will happen, but the distinction between the definitions has consequences. I already argued about for blame, but I think there is much more to explore there.
> Moral error theory has problems of its own, so I don't think these all hang together very nicely.
Again, I'd love to hear the argument rather than a simple refutation, truly, in a non attacking or confrontational way. At this point I think the HN format is hurting more than it's helping, so if you're interested in talking more feel free to shoot me an email, @gmail.com. You seem well versed in this area and I've love to hear more details on your perspective and reasoning/principles.
I always qualify my use of free will as being specific to the philosophical use in ethics because there's so much conflation around the term [1]. I hold that the term "free will" as used in various contexts are not necessarily the same, and that conflating them or trying to define a more general notion of free will that encompasses them all obscures more than it helps.
Per [2], I then conceive of free will in this context as "moral responsibility as accountability". I am not referring to free will as used in any other context, and I hope I've been strict about preserving that distinction.
> > Humans have the power to change the state/future of the universe and the universe is not "set" in any way
This definition compounds exactly the conflation that I think hurts progress in this debate. People often want more general abstractions to think about entire classes of problems rather than specific instances, but in this context, I think it obscures more than it clarifies.
> This feels a bit logically impossible to me, and it may also be something you don't agree with either, but it is still a definition that people use to mean free will, I have seen it way too often.
Compatibilism is necessarily compatible with determinism in which the universe is "set" in a specific way, that's the whole point. So I disagree with the definition. That said, just because it's "set" doesn't make it predictable, in which case it's outcome is not "set" in a way that can be known in advance.
So I would revise the clause "the universe is not 'set' in any way" to read, "the universe is not 'set' in a way that's relevant to responsibility", or something along those lines. But again, maybe you're thinking along more general lines that conflate the ethical properties with properties needed for other purposes (like an experimenters' freedom in science).
> Just because an idea invalidates many ones that were previously popular does not make it any less true/false, nor does it prevent it from establishing new and helpful ideas on top of it, even if they do not really exist currently.
I agree. I don't see anything in hard determinism which doesn't already have a satisfactory answer in Compatibilism though. The only quality which people seem to find appealing is a lack of blame, but as you later say, pseudo-blame will also likely be a feature of hard determinism in order to make it workable.
In the hundreds of debates I've had on this topic, pretty much the only reason people have used to justify hard determinism is that they don't think punishment is justified, and they see eliminating blame as a way to avoid punishment. This conflates justice with the simpler question of moral responsibility, and as a result, they erroneously believe that free will and Compatibilism necessarily entail punishment.
> Again, I'd love to hear the argument [refuting error theory] rather than a simple refutation, truly, in a non attacking or confrontational way.
Here's a rough summary of my thoughts when I first read it:
1. The Argument from Relativity: we're apparently not troubled at all by disagreement over natural facts (see: flat earthers), but disagreement over moral facts is somehow more problematic? We distinguish "fact" from "belief" for exactly this reason. I don't see any motivation for error theory here.
2. The Argument from Metaphysical Queerness, aka, moral properties are "qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the u...
1. I feel like we keep talking in circles on the definitional aspect. I'm with you on the many definitions causing confusion and I would love to see expanded vocabulary around this. But you haven't said anything to convince me against the idea that all three have moral relevancy in various ways.
2. To be clear, I do not believe hard determinism needs any sort of pseudo-blame to be workable, at least how I understand you are using that term. The only thing needed is causality in order in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.
3. I actually agree with you on the lack of convincing of 1 and 3 for error theory (slightly different reasons but details not needed), but the argument from queerness seems to fit quite well. I'm not sure what part you're claiming is misunderstood.
4. The mentioned "justifications" on hard determinism are going the wrong way logically - you don't decide if something is true by if you need it to make morals that look nice, you follow what is true and see the results, and only then can you "check your work" with a sanity test. You've seem to cut off your thoughts on determinism before ever getting to a point where it actually produced a full set of moral ideas to check in favor of compatabilism simply because it produced something that passed said check, but if the underlying principle is false that's simply a coincidental state. Obviously you've also personally eliminated error theory, which is the core of our disagreement.
As to justice, I fully agree on that being way oversimplified. For context, looking ahead, my theories on morality out of error theory basically lead to a consequentialist version of Rawls, so that's about where I stand re justice, with some nuance.
> I think there are reasons to think we already know some moral facts.
Can you give examples? Single or multiple, whatever you think is more useful in this context. I don't see how we get to moral facts without them being tied back subjectively to humans, which either invalidates the objectivism tract (now we're back at arguing metaethics fully) or you'd have to get there from the error theory route I've been talking about.
To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.
All of this reasoning is still useful to an error theorist, but it is laid on the groundwork that morality is subjective to the state of humans/beings. If you mean to say that this is objective, then there is basically infinite moral facts in existence, we just debate them because humans and society are complex. That is to me the precise meaning of that "optimal organization" I reference, which is essentially that collection of all true moral facts, which I would argue are always subjective to the deterministic state of the world. Change anything about the world, and you likely change ethics itself. The argument from queerness highlights that without our perspective and values, objective morality wouldn't exist at all.
I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective? To me, that is subjective and then the combinations of subjectiveness along with the lack of inherent meaning or value produces a single objective level practical morality. I can understand the argument to classify that set of things itself as objective morality, but I think that weakens the base of the argument needlessly.
Because I think only one has moral relevancy, not all three. I've been saying it's a mistake to conflate the others with the one specific to moral responsibility.
> The only thing needed [in hard determinism] is causality in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.
The "ideal organization" necessarily designate faulty parts which don't conform to the ideal, and so the parts that require rehabilitation. That's blame however you want to spin it.
> To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees by mistaking an existential claim for a universal claim. Suppose we swap out the human child with an alien that doesn't feel pain as we do, but has an adverse reaction to some other stimulus. The same argument applies by parity of reasoning. You're focused on the specifics of the human case, but the moral fact in that case is just an instance of a more general principle from which this fact derives.
It's like I'm pointing out 1+2=3, that's a fact, an instance of the general rule of addition. You then agree that 1+2=3, but gotcha, 1+3!=3, therefore 1+2=3 is not a general fact applicable to all numbers. No argument there, but it was never suggested as such.
> I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective?
"Objective" means "mind independent", which is to say, that any form of intelligence will reach the same conclusions given the same understanding.
Any intelligence will reach the same conclusion that a human child undergoing a painful surgery ought to be given anesthetic, all else being equal, assuming they fully understand the meaning of every word in that sentence.
And that's exactly where we're stuck, which is all I'm saying. I think all three affect moral responsibility.
> 1+2=3, etc
> Any intelligence will reach the same conclusion that a human child undergoing a painful surgery ought to be given anesthetic, all else being equal, assuming they fully understand the meaning of every word in that sentence.
There's another assumed aspect though that you have not separated, which is that the judging intelligence has empathy if it agrees. You're claiming only using pure logic, but you're using aspects of that subjective human perspective to imply that the reduction of pain/whatever stimuli. Without the human perspective, the example fails to be a "moral" fact. It's just a configuration that raises x, lowers some y maybe, and the beings prefer more x and less y. But without value being projected on x and y, it is not inherently "good". We require the human perspective to create human morality. What if the intelligence viewing this entire scenario loves to see pain/y? Would it not rationally conclude the anesthesia is bad? Only if it assumes or judges based on the values of a human does it get the same conclusion. Yes, within that, it's objective.
I find that distinction is key in how we approach the derivation later. A lack of such distinction can, for one example, enable using the idea of objectivity here to assign value to the entities (more ideal = more value), which then can shift practical effects possibly. And maybe you disagree with this specific example on deriving value from objective nature, but that is one of the many doors the lack of distinction opens. I'm sure if we went far enough down the road, there is likely an argument that you do agree with that comes from the lack of distinction.
You say I'm missing the forest, but I think you are minimizing the importance of the trees through all of this and disagreeing that the trees can be important, even if you zoom out and the forest is the same. You're saying that the rule in play here is "addition", but I'm saying I think you're missing some rules/definition/workings of the "operator" in this metaphor that lead to different results later down the line, even if it works in this case.
> The "ideal organization" necessarily designate faulty parts which don't conform to the ideal, and so the parts that require rehabilitation. That's blame however you want to spin it.
I typed up a longer distinction here, but again this seems to come down to distinguishing between two definitions and if that distinction means something. See importance of trees. In this case, blame being the tree.
As social animals, we have an intrinsic interest in preserving social harmony, in as much as the reproductive success of any individual is contingent on the success of the group as a whole. Morality is just the game theory element of this being played out.
I could make reasoned moral arguments on behalf of the well being of chickens or why we shouldn't destroy the planet, and you may nod and agree, but without a strong emotional impulse to attach to these moral causes, it's hard to get people to take these things very seriously. It's too much of an abstraction.
In other words, you acknowledge that you have no moral justification for assigning blame, you simply do it out of convenience. That's weak sauce IMO.
Giving up cognitivism and moral realism is very problematic on multiple levels, and your response hand waves away these other problems IMO [1]. You just end up reinventing free will and calling it something different.
For people that accept that moral propositions actually have truth values (most people), assigning blame requires free will, and ultimately, we end up in the same place anyway, just with a bunch more people being confused about why we have new jargon that serves the exact same function as the old jargon.
[1] Edit: for instance, life no longer has any intrinsic value, so you can justify all sorts of morally repugnant conclusions, like that totalitarian regimes are justifiable, or that a government should only care about the death rate of its citizens in order to keep it low enough to prevent widespread revolt.
The whole notion of free will is a cultural construct. There are societies that have no perception of it, they believe that their actions are guided by spirits.
Western concepts of justice are founded on the idea of free will, so of course you need it for western rationalizations of how to apply justice, but arguing that we need free will for justice to work is putting the cart before the horse. We just need it for our version of justice. My cat doesn't need it to take a swipe at the dog when it goes for the cat's food.
It is in my interest to argue that life has intrinsic value because if I don't I risk being considered a threat by people who happen to value their own lives quite a bit. It's just simple game theory. I don't see how free will, either real or imagined, is necessary to value the lives of others.
And of course, there are no consequences for killing a chicken, so there are no strong moral impulses against it. By our own rationalizations, life doesn't have any intrinsic value unless it is a life that serves us, or has power over us, and the value of a chicken's life extends only as far as it is tasty to us.
Causally, sure. Morally, I disagree. You've just justified mob rule and the tyranny of the majority.
> there are societies that have no perception of it, they believe that their actions are guided by spirits.
Sure, and what do those societies do when someone kills their neighbour and claims the spirits said their neighbour had to die?
> Western concepts of justice are founded on the idea of free will, so of course you need it for western rationalizations of how to apply justice, but arguing that we need free will for justice to work is putting the cart before the horse.
Western justice is founded on free will because it's a logical necessity for coherently assigning blame.
> It is in my interest to argue that life has intrinsic value because if I don't I risk being considered a threat by people who happen to value their own lives quite a bit.
No, it's actually in your interest to argue that your life has intrinsic value, and that anyone else's life is of lesser value.
So here we arrive at the morally repugnant conclusions I mentioned: if you can effectively argue this point, as they did with the divine right of kings, there is no logical basis upon which you can dispute this conclusion.
Moral progress has been marked by eliminating such artificial distinctions, not justifying them.
> By our own rationalizations, life doesn't have any intrinsic value unless it is a life that serves us, or has power over us, and the value of a chicken's life extends only as far as it is tasty to us.
Please explain how this follows from anything I've said in this thread.
At the risk of mirroring Fricken's reply, this isn't so. Suppose a brain tumour drives someone to commit murder, as may have been the case with Charles Whitman. The act remains morally atrocious even if the individual's culpability is doubtful.
Same goes for a killer animal, or natural disaster, or even disease.
Moral blame is discounted entirely in pure utilitarianism (which is of course deeply flawed, but I think it's still illustrative here).
And why is his culpability doubtful? I think you'll find his lack of free will implicit in your argument.
You skipped the more relevant application in this case though - not the treatment of criminals, but, to get a bit minority report here, the treatment of pre-criminals. Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly? What is fair? How much effort does morality dictate we owe to their happiness?
The lack of moral responsibility doesn't change the real world effects or causal responsibility, you're right there. However, these questions get very different answers based on if the world has formalized free will or not.
Essentially, if you accept determinism, society becomes a configuration optimization game. The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
> you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of criminals.
There are absolutely many ways to get here, I'm simply pointing out determinism also leads to it as a data point that determinism can lead to moralities that pass the sanity check. Many, including the author if this piece, write off or get very worried about that issue.
Imagine you run the government along with law enforcement. Say that one day someone on Hacker News announced that they figured out how to predict a person’s future behavior with a resolution of about one day, simply by running some terminal command along with that person’s social media profiles.
As the authority, it becomes imperative for you to use this information. The choice becomes: are people still at fault for their future crimes even if they never commit them? If they are morally bad, then you are justified in executing some people for future crimes, if you believe that they are not responsible for crimes uncommitted, then you might take a more humane approach.
A person, P, will commit crime X at place Y at time Z. So you pour resources into changing Y and Z for future crimes, because you realize that outcomes are a product of P, X, Y and Z. In this equation, it makes no sense to speak of “punishing” the environment, of a time on the clock being “bad”. In exactly the same way, it no longer makes sense that a person is “bad”. What makes sense is: change, influence, separate, nudge the variables to get the outcome you want.
This is an exaggerated version of what happens to an individual once they accept hard determinism. They realize that people can’t be morally at fault because they are simply a small part of the equation, an equation that includes all moments that preceded it.
Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.
I hope this thought makes some sense to you considering your deeper dives into determinism. I would love to read your writing!
Well said, and this is exactly the underpinning of how I approach the world frankly.
Here's something to think on. Say you accept all this. Now consider anger. Is it ever justified to be angry at someone given all this, ever? I think when you stop and begin to understand and at least imagine all the things that happened to them to lead them to this moment to do the thing that is frustrating you, it becomes clear you can only be frustrated, but never angry. The next question becomes then how do you approach any sort of conflict that would arise from that anger.
People don't believe me when I say this without knowing me in person for a good deal of time, but I can't remember being angry since I started down this path of ideas around my junior year of high school. Anger more or less becomes existential frustration followed by a desire to figure out the causes and solutions to the situation.
> Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.
+1 here too. As I said in some other threads, a configuration optimization problem.
> I would love to read your writing!
Wow, thank you! I have some academic stuff and have been formulating it into some more article/short book style stuff privately but had no intention of publishing. You're not the first person to say this now though, so I might just reconsider how/when I publish!
Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g. favored a retributive system of justice.
> Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly
Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.
To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't choose to want to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.
>The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
How so?
Saying someone "did the crime" is just another way of saying that they are responsible for the crime.
> the concept of crime itself is provided by lawmaker, not by human's judgement.
What? The entire point of the judicial system is to interpret the law with respect to human judgement.
You've just made another coincidental compatibility here, so I'm curious - how did you arrive at only valuing material circumstances? For me, that is explicitly derived from following determinism into meta-ethics which then follows into a consequentialist physicalist view.
> To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
That's a different argument. Something else has to underpin that, and I would again be curious what that is, and if that also shares compatibility.
> The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism. > How so?
I'm still formulating this fully, but essentially it follows from determinism that objective ethics essentially don't exist (I go with error theory here), which then passes off all of practical ethical meaning to the physical state of the universe in relation to what all beings care about, which I suspect is the step that ends up causing much of the coincidence. So for morality, things that humans (and other beings, but we'll set them aside for now) care about are ethics. I tend to focus on happiness, empathy, and fairness, but there's of course a lot more there. Generally, it means moral psychology actually informs ethics quite a bit.
Since I suspect this isn't going to change anything you specifically believe given the compatibility seen elsewhere, let me highlight some specific ethical views that immediately come under intense pressure from those conclusions:
- basically all deontology (Immanuel Kant and others)
- virtue ethics are then limited to admitting to being a practical compromise at best (originally Aristotle but virtue ethics has been on the rise in many modern debates, and this could 100% shape those)
- even many forms of consequentialism make arguments to optimize for a singular thing or one somewhat removed from humans. This highlights the optimization function is not on a single or even a few variables given that humans don't have a single psychological focus. Or maybe we do and we should be spending more of our time in ethics doing psychological research. But all of this derives originally from that conclusion on determinism.
Basically, even a small difference in underpinning can still lead to different focuses and conclusions down the chain of course.
They don't mean anything. Although indeterminism of choice originally had meaning, today it's a meme in itself without meaning and propagates by mere memetic infection and is seen as an axiom, the argument about responsibility is a rationalization of this axiom, not a justification.
Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever?
The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all abstractions do).
So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car?
If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will".
Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.
When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world.
The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.
There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will.
So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".
My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree.
However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications.
You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.
[1] Around 60% Compatibilist, https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
I think we're both on the same page on the definitional problem of free will, but I don't see how/why you are minimizing all other definitions.
This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief.
Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.
Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble.
Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.
The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm.
When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will.
Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.
I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!
As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.
I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.
I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.
Sure, it's frustrating knowing something intuitively without being able to articulate why it makes sense!
If you want to make sense of free will and see evidence that lay people actually accept Compatibilism in which free will is compatible with determinism, I suggest my post elsewhere in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919
Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency.
And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views, such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all kinds of things.
A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame.
So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person chooses to act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate everything.
I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking people who believe in it to define it in ways that does not just boil down to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again, because it remains just as relevant.
Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with logical flaw after logical flaw over this.
Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.
If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.
I disagree:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do?
When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it?
In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans.
We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition.
> Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all.
Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.
There is no difference, as long as those transistors are part of a general learning system. A roomba thus does not qualify.
Decision process is making decisions. Why create additional conditions? Most people would agree a person with no long term memory still has free will.
The only reason people add these conditions is to be able to continue living in an illusion of free will and of being something more than algorithm :)
Not at all. A sorting algorithm can't learn to not sort. A learning algorithm can learn to choose between right and wrong. That's why it has free will.
"You" as a stable, persistent entity does not exist, but you as a momentary observer, with the ability to exert will to guide the evolution of the universe sure seems to.
Which hypothesis fits Occam's Razor better: that the same pattern of observation and response occurs at all scales in the universe, with the only variable being the complexity, or that there are two different processes, one of which takes over only at one very specific scale? If we don't have free will, if we're just dumb machines, why would we even be conscious in the first place? IMO it's far too big a thing to just be a random side effect.
As for your question as to why humans or other sentient beings would be conscious if they belonged to the physical universe, the answer is obvious: for the same reason that we and other animals possess all other attributes, because of its functional value in enhancing our survival fitness as a species. Perhaps high level information-processing requires consciousness, or consciousness is a byproduct of some or all high level information-processing with organic matter.
I should say I'm agnostic about consciousness because I think we know next to nothing about it.
I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken.
> The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.
I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either.
I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery.
I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness".
I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example.
So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.
What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? Usually when people distinguish the two in order to suggest that the first is 'easy' and the second 'hard', they beg the question and build their conclusion into their premise.
If you assume from the beginning that the first is subject to the normal canons of empirical investigation as to how the physical world operates, and the second isn't, then of course they will appear as 'easy' and 'hard'. But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.
Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.
If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer.
> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device
Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed.
But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion?
> subjective experience
Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.
What I don’t understand here is how consciousness can both 1) have survival value and thus be passed on through evolution and 2) be an epiphenomenon that has no influence whatsoever on the physical world.
I suppose both statements could be true, but only if a very non-intuitive definition of consciousness is used, and that seems to me to be also begging the question.
Update: fixed a typo
All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question. It is obviously the case that a converse statement could beg the question in the opposite direction. I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.
Reading what I wrote again, I agree that it could have been expressed better. Sorry about that.
> If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.
Ok. If I try to look at it from the physicalist's point of view, I have trouble understanding how the subjective side of consciousness is explained. It seems to me to be just ignored or waved away.
Why couldn't the functions of consciousness in influencing the world exist without subjectively experienced consciousness? What evolutionary value does this subjectively experienced consciousness have (as seen from a physicalist point of view)?
> All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question.
You're not necessarily wrong, it depends on what exactly is meant by begging the question.
What you wrote was:
> What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? <
Intuitively it seems to me that there is a difference of quality, even if I'm incapable of describing exactly what that difference is. I can't even imagine how one would go about explaining the difference in quality to the satisfaction of everyone.
This doesn't bother me too much though, because, put perhaps too briefly, philosophy is not science and logical arguments are not mathematical logic.
However, I can also see how someone could see not answering your question as begging the question.
> I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.
My way of thinking is perhaps not so different.
I think of philosophy as being constrained by science, in that you don't want philosophy to contradict well established scientific facts, but as being otherwise freer than science to explore how the world might work. I also think of philosophy as having a role in dealing with questions that are largely outside the domain of science (beauty, ethics, etc.), but which can still sometimes be informed by science.
I disagree on this point. When we think of matter, in terms of physics or chemistry, we think of matter as having certain qualities, such as mass, volume, velocity, etc. However subjective experience doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to share those qualities.
Can the existence of subjective experience be explained using only the qualities currently associated with matter, as understood in today’s physics? It doesn’t seem so.
So it seems to me that the fact that subjective experience exists is a hint that our current models are incomplete and need revising.
How exactly do they need revising? No idea whatsoever.
My view is that the universe is a big movie. Consciousness is just a lens through which you get to watch the movie. But the movie script is already written, or being generated by mechanisms out of your control. You just get the immersive experience of the “feeling” of being one of the characters, including the feeling of making each decision—which are being/have been made for you.
1) it doesn't exist, but our brains are thinking and talking about it
2) it exists, but it's overdetermined: it just so happens that your brain starts thinking and talking about it while it also exists
3) it exists as a phenomenon in the physical world, able to affect other physical things
As I said, I don’t know. I agree it’s not clear.
The first book I read on the subject, many years ago, was “Body and Mind”, by Keith Campbell. The book outlines various positions taken on the mind problem. I still have the book. Your position appears to be a version of epiphenominalism.
I found the book helpful as a short overview of the subject. For example, in chapter two the book describes the mind-body problem as four propositions that form an inconsistent tetrad. Any three are mutually consistent and can all be true. But any three together imply that the fourth is false.
The four propositions are: (1) The human body is a material thing. (2) The human mind is a spiritual thing. (3) Mind and body interact. (4) Spirit and matter do not interact.
The author describes a “spiritual object” as “one that does not have all the qualities of matter; it lacks at least some of: mass, volume, velocity, solidity”. (Some qualities of matter are allowed, just not all.)
This is such a bullshit.
In fact, quantum mechanics is so bizarre, it can't even explain what is objective reality from the macroscopic point of view. The only thing it explains for us, classical creatures, is that our world is much more "complex" than we could imagine. Pun intended.
But what do you class as an external influence? Do social norms, including widely held moral codes, count? What about laws, and the threat of punishment for breaking them? What about environmental conditions that provoke emotional states (fear, anger, joy)?
That doesn't make them any less real in their potential effects. Say I want to steal a stockbrocker's Bentley, but I don't because I fear the legal consequences. Is my will free from external influences?
> There are many social norms many people don't share
But there are few people who don't share any social norms.
> it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any coherent system
I don't see that they have to. Hypocrisy has never been a bar to such norms: for example, not that long ago (and to some extent still today), men with illegitimate children were commonly excused or even lionised, while women with illegitimate children were stigmatised.
I can choose to have beer for breakfast, or I can restrain myself and eat some eggs & toast instead. I have faced this choice numerous times, and I do not choose the same way every time. I can feel that choice dangling in front of me, and know I have the ability to do either one. Sometimes I can't decide, and I flip a coin.
The idea that free will doesn't exist is not a concept most humans beings are ready to even try to think about-- I like to think I possess at least average intelligence, and despite trying for years I cannot make sense of the world while trying to hold that thought in my mind.
There is a lot of stuff we do 'automatically', but a world where my choices are all deterministic simply does not make sense to me and is not useful.
In my case, my study of the topic has helped me to manifest more compassion for myself and for others. That change, in turn, improved all my relationships.
With regard to evaluating others, I agree that this mindset can definitely help foster increased kindness, which in many circumstances is one of the most useful outcomes you can hope for. For example, it does seem fairly clear at this point that the retribution/punishment model of treating lawbreakers causes more problems than it solves.
Because free will implies that cause and effect breaks down, but in a way that is not random but governed by some agency that is not following the cause and effect of the physical structure of the brain.
Where would that agency come from? How would it enable a decision that is not then just deterministic one step removed, or randomness one step removed, or agency one step removed?
And so we have infinite regression: For each additional step of agency you add to sidestep the problem, the same questions arises of how the decision can be made without being a combination of determinism and randomness or involve some external agency...
Conversely, the idea that we do not have free will is easy to resolve for me: Consider yourself a character in a movie. Conceptually your character has free will within the movie universe. Your character could have chosen differently if it had been written differently. But in the movie they will always make the same choice, no matter how many times you rewind, because the choice is already locked in.
That does not follow. In fact, the idea that we “should” or “should not” is irrelevant unless you assume free will. Because what we should do only matters if we have a choice.
Consider that eg the US legal system has absolutely awful reoffending rates compared to eg Norway - it is geared for punishment rather than minimising harm.
No, I'm saying if we don't have free will, having a legal system or not isn't a choice either. If the actions a legal system might regulate are predetermined, so is whether or not we have a legal system, and what the nature of that system is.
> So why punish people if they don't have free will?
If we don't have free will, what does the question “Why?” even mean, other than asking for an explanation of the mechanical forces producing an outcome? Questions of purpose behind actions presuppose free will directing actions for a purpose.
And arguing that it 'breaks' apart because you don't like the consequences is ludicrous.
Give me a definition of free will that doesn't suffer the problems I described, and we can talk.
I'm not authoritarian by any means, and I think defunding a bunch of police departments in the U.S. might be a good idea, but when people start acting like everything is deterministic society falls apart. You have different outcomes than you would otherwise have. I know this from having given up on life a few times.
And yes there is every incentive to limit damage, to protect people even if there was no decision. But that also then extends to the perpetrators.
There is no logic at all to your assertions here.
I disagree. You have well-known atheist figures that have expressed views similar to what I was describing. That rape isn't inherently bad, it's just something that exists in the world. That incest is ok if it's between "consenting adults". Or Dawkins defending pedophilia. There literally isn't a gauge to determine whether something is moral or not anymore. It may sound absurd or over-exaggerating, but that is the logical conclusion of a purely materialistic view. We've seen its effects throughout history.
How does this follow "logically"? This is just an opinion.
In the end of the day if _everyone_ had no free will, legal systems are besides the question - we would busy ourselves in figuring out whether someone is going to commit a crime before it is committed, and would be capable of doing so highly reliably with enough technological advancement. Some war criminals today think they can already do that, killing innocent children by familial association to terrorists.
On the basis that there is no justification for "punishment" or "vengeance" based on responsibility if there was no choice. We still need a legal system because events still happen that causes harm and that needs to be resolved, but if we acknowledge people have no agency, then there is no justification for assigning blame, but still a need to e.g. prevent reoccurrence. But when we take steps to protect society against people we recognize are blameless or without agency today, such as e.g. mentally ill people or children, we aim to pick the least invasive means possible, because we recognize it is not meant to be a punishment.
> In the end of the day if _everyone_ had no free will, legal systems are besides the question - we would busy ourselves in figuring out whether someone is going to commit a crime before it is committed, and would be capable of doing so highly reliably with enough technological advancement. Some war criminals today think they can already do that, killing innocent children by familial association to terrorists.
No, this does not follow for two reasons: 1) Sheer systems complexity. E.g. we still can't reliably predict the weather, and the weather is far simpler to predict because of 2: 2) it devolves trivially to the halting problem, in that actions can and would change depending on our actions to try to prevent crime, because people, deterministic or not, act on input from the environment in extremely complex manners.
As such it is wildly unreasonable to think that we can remove crime. Reduce it, sure. We know many ways of doing that: Redistribution for example; poverty is a massive driver of crime. Education; low education is a massive driver of crime. And so on. But nothing we do will remove the need for a legal system at any point in the near future.
Your war criminal example is an example of #2 above: how response feeds back into actions, and part of why trying to resolve this issue will remain largely as difficult.
But it would be easier, as harsh punishment-focused legal systems are a massive driver of high reoffending rates.
I think what the author is trying to say is that our psychological experience is influencing the molecular forces. But the psychological experience is just an abstraction, a collection of patterns that exist in the 'data' of the brain's connectivity and charge states. The brain's circuitry "runs" the software and its rules. Just because those rules flip a few electrical switches here and there doesn't mean those switches don't follow logic.
This is a hopelessly confused mess of an article by someone who clearly doesn't understand computation.
What people mean by free will is more like 'what happens next is influenced by things inside my skull, rather than solely from outside of it'. Which is fine.
Think of the universe as a determinstic computer that is calculating its own future microsecond by microsecond. There is no way to jump ahead in the calculations, even though it may be determistic.
What about a (very) small deterministic part of the universe, and a very large machine to compute its outcomes? At some scale differential the machine could compute faster, or that small part of the universe could be frozen at zero kelvin, to give the machine a head start
That could be a useful exploit of determinism. Even if the machine never computes faster, it could be used as a test to see if it always gave the same result as that part of the universe
----
But I agree your suggestion is enough to give value to a deterministic universe -- if there's no other way to get an outcome from the universe, than to run it. Then enough complexity by itself gives value to our lives, even within a deterministic system
I don't think this is enough for free will though, or giving us intrinsic value, beyond being part of a computation. Especially since the computation result is unknowable at this present time -- let us hope it is useful
A non-deterministic system however gives us free will; our decisions have an effect beyond initial conditions; our lives can then have a value more commensurate to the extent we feel for them. We are worthwhile, valuable. It also makes interesting conclusions about God
Quantum mechanics argues strongly for non-determinism, and I don't have a reason to argue otherwise
I suppose a good/bad value system though would require more... I don't know where @adjkant gets his/hers from? For any decision to be more than hitting a target with a blindfold on... We need some information surely. Some kind of source that indicates good/bad. This could be the outcome of your computation, or something else...
I suppose without that source, from our perspective, there is no real value difference between determinism, and free will -- our personal input would be zero, or random
For that source... there is an easy 5 letter answer accepted by about 33%