So sue me (again). Over at Metamagician, Brother Blackford has finally written his long-promised post on free will: “Sean Carroll dobs me in—a little bit about fate and free will.” Here’s part of his take:
Sometimes people who claim that we don’t have free will then go on to say that this knowledge should affect the personal and political choices we make, such as what kind of penalties we impose for crimes. But note what is being said here: it is assumed that we are able to make decisions about these things and that these decisions will play a causal role in what actually ends up happening. . .
I do get that when contemporary philosophers and scientists talk about people not having free will they usually have in mind the claim that we never step out of the causal order of nature, rather than the claim that fatalism is true. But so what? Like Chrysippus (and David Hume and Daniel Dennett, and most contemporary philosophers) I agree that we never step out of the causal order of nature. We are part of it. The fact remains that we often make decisions and our decisions can be efficacious. When we make decisions, that process is itself part of the causal order of nature. What else could it be? Try to imagine a coherent alternative. . .
But still, we are at least sometimes (even often) able to make decisions that are causally related to future events such as our own future health and how long we live, not to mention political outcomes such as what parties are elected to office, what penal approaches are adopted in various jurisdictions, what media ownership restrictions are put in place, and so on. Some of our decisions and consequent actions can be better than others in whatever plausible sense of “better” you like.
The future comes about through naturalistic processes, but those processes include our deliberations and decisions, and the actions that they lead us to. As the Stoics argued in the face of popular kinds of fatalistic thinking, the future comes about partly as a result of human choice.
Russell is in line with many others here in saying that because we seem to make choices; i.e., we’re faced with many alternative things we can do and we don’t do all of them, then we have free will. Yet like me, Russell is also a physical determinist, since he argues that humans cannot “step out of the causal order of nature.” And presumably he also agrees with me that our environment, our experiences, and the actions or speech of others can influence our choices. After all, those are all things that can impinge on your brain and affect its neurons. That other people, or your environment, can influence what you do does not count as evidence against determinism.
What I don’t get is why this is called a “choice.” If the “free” in “free will” means anything, it means that at the moment we make a decision, we could have done otherwise. That’s my definition of free will, which can also be rephrased as “the notion that if the tape of life were rewound to the point of a decision, with every experience and every molecule identical up to that moment, the agent could still make more than one choice.” I believe—though I haven’t taken a poll—that this is how most people would conceive of free will: you can actually make decisions, rather than simply appear to make decisions that are really physically determined at the moment they’re made. Maybe some readers, and some philosophers, see otherwise, but I think the average person really does think that alternative decisions are possible—that there’s some part of ourselves that can override the physics and chemistry of our brain.
When Russell says, “we are able to make decisions that affect our lives,” I think that’s a bit misleading, for “decision” implies that one could have done otherwise. In short, he sees free will as simply the ability to do one thing when faced with a panoply of options. Animals can do that, even very simple ones, and so can computers. So why don’t computers have free will? After all, you can program them to look like they’re choosing, and even make their choices responsive to the environment, so that it looks like their “decisions” are informed by exigent circumstances. What’s the difference between that and what the human brain does?
I think that here we’re stepping into a semantic minefield. Just what is free will? We can make choices, but what, apart from our prior experience and understanding informs the choice we make? Aren’t our choices limited to that? Or are we going to make a choice based on that nebulous quality we call intuition?
Cannot every discussion come down to a semantic argument though, particularly as we are talking about an idea?
Jerry, et. al. –
I have refrained from commenting on any of this because I don’t have a lot of time for a long, complicated discussion, but…
Suppose for a moment we stipulate that there is no free will. I think your argument is well reasoned, and I’d be hard pressed to disagree.
The question I have, though, is: Then what?
What are the implications of this? The approach to isolating dangerous members of society is the only area I’ve seen discussed. But, what are the implications for each of us individually? How is this any different than “God has a plan for each of us?” (Gag!) Why wouldn’t this belief cause me to just roll over and give up?
I KNOW I can influence others’ behavior. I know this from a lifetime of training animals. Does this then mean that I have no influence over my own behavior? Are we then each responsible for everyone but ourselves?
I can’t stand being around irresponsible people who are full of excuses. Maybe that’s just me being a product of my neurons, but the thought of the whole world turning into that rivals the thought of being in heaven, where I’d be surrounded for eternity by a bunch of sanctimonious bigots with no kitties or goats. L
“Then what?
What are the implications of this?”
The implications of something being true have nothing to do with whether it’s true.
“Why wouldn’t this belief cause me to just roll over and give up?”
Because you’d still be caused, by your needs and desires (e.g., hunger), to act on your own behalf.
“Does this then mean that I have no influence over my own behavior?”
No, in most situations you are the controller of your own behavior. You – your desires, motives, plans and decisions – are the main proximate influence on your behavior.
“I can’t stand being around irresponsible people who are full of excuses.”
Only a subset of causal explanations for behavior count as excuses. We can and must still hold each other responsible and accountable for our actions, even if we’re fully determined, since that’s a primary cause of good behavior.
The implications of something being true have nothing to do with whether it’s true.
I realize that. I already stipulated that it’s true. But I’m STILL interested in the implications. I live in the real world. I’m NOT advocating denial.
“Why wouldn’t this belief cause me to just roll over and give up?”
Because you’d still be caused, by your needs and desires (e.g., hunger), to act on your own behalf.
I don’t mean by that giving up and blowing my brains out. What I mean by that is I don’t want to live in a world full of ids, and I want to contribute to making the world more than that.
“I can’t stand being around irresponsible people who are full of excuses.”
Only a subset of causal explanations for behavior count as excuses. We can and must still hold each other responsible and accountable for our actions, even if we’re fully determined, since that’s a primary cause of good behavior.
Whatever your definition – excuses or something else – I STILL don’t want to be around people who refuse to help themselves.
When I was still shrinking heads, I was good at getting people to take control and make changes. But there were those who, for whatever reason, refused. It’s fine to say that they are who they are, etc., but the truth is that for me, they were EXHAUSTING to be around, and pointless to spend time on. They themselves wanted the time and attention from me and others. They just didn’t/couldn’t change. It’s altogether possible that at some point we will understand the neurological processes that go into that, but in the meantime, I’d rather spend my energy where it is most effective.
BTW, I did some postdoc time working with head injuries. So, I do appreciate the physiological limitations. But even with that population, the vast majority were motivated to do the best they could with what they had.
So, I’m still back to looking at the implications. I can spend my time and energy in ways that make a difference, or I can throw them down a rathole. L
“I already stipulated that it’s true.”
Yes, you did, my apologies. No excuses: I should have read more carefully and will be more careful in the future, I hope, with the help of your pointing this out, thanks.
“I STILL don’t want to be around people who refuse to help themselves.”
Can’t blame you for that and I know the frustration when no matter what you do, people you’re trying to help don’t get out of self-defeating and alienating patterns of behavior. At some point you just give up and as you say put your energies where it can do some good.
— “Why wouldn’t this belief cause me to just roll over and give up?”
Because you’d still be caused, by your needs and desires (e.g., hunger), to act on your own behalf.
I don’t mean by that giving up and blowing my brains out. What I mean by that is I don’t want to live in a world full of ids, and I want to contribute to making the world more than that. —
Then do that. I can’t see any relevant difference between “contribute to making the world more than that” and “hunger”.
>What are the implications of this?
And what where the implications of Newton law of gravity, for example? You see, if we learn how something works, it does not change the way it works. Planets do not change their orbits after Kepler found laws of planetary motion. If one found out that love is biochemical process, it does not change the way it feels inside, it only explains it.
But we can use this knowledge for our needs, for example to construct better system for reduction of crime in society.
If we use analogy with computer chess-playing program, than programmer can stop it while it works, study it’s internal state and say exactly what move the program will choose next. One can affect operation of the program, for example by loading records of historical matches or by playing with it (if it is self-learning program, and such programs do exist for half a century). This will change internal state of the program and choices the program made. Our brain works the same way, but it is much more complex than any chess-playing program we now have, so the possibility to predict what we will do is purely theoretical. Also one can not have a complete model of the mind inside the same mind, so it is impossible for us to predict our next action, and this can be one of the components of the illusion of free will.
So, I do not think there will be serious consequences for how our brain works. Some people can became a bit disappointed, of cause… But free will is a very powerful illusion, I know only one person who claims to overcome it: it is Susan Blackmore, and she seems to be ok with it. She have a lot of interesting articles on the subject at http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/index.htm
I see a difference between Newton’s law of gravity and behavioral interactions.
No matter how I posture myself in a situation, I’m not going to change the outcomes of Newton’s law of gravity. I can learn to live with it as best I can, but it will always be the same.
But, different postures on my part in an interaction with another living being may very well produce different outcomes. They may not, too.
So, if I have a good to excellent chance of influencing an outcome in one situation, and a poor to nonexistent chance in another, doesn’t it behoove me to spend my energy where I’m most likely to be successful?
And, can I influence my own behavior in the same way? L
You can do anything you want to do, so long as you’re able to.
If in fact you actually do want to spend your energy where you’re most likely to be successful, however you define those terms, then you have been fully caused to want just that. Free will had noting to do with causing you to want that.
What you can’t ever do, because you have no free will, is betray yourself by doing other than what you most want to do in any given moment.
The chief psychological implication, it seems to me, is that one doesn’t ever have to force oneself to be on one’s own side. To the extent self-recrimination, anxiety and depression are deployed for that purpose, they’re superfluous.
One is free to simply relax in the knowledge that one can trust oneself utterly to unfailingly do that which you actually most want to do.
I don’t understand why anyone would want it any other way.
Enjoy the ride.
I think those who do things that they later regret will not like this concept – that they actually wanted to drink themselves blond drunk and wake up on the bathroom floor, for instance. Add in the idea that even though you may want to do something, doesn’t mean it is smart, or beneficial, or whatever. Hmm – that may be frightening as well – the idea that they are trapped into doing stupid things sometime…yet we have this idea that “people don’t always make the best choices” in free will. So the concept remains the same.
I can also see that through this way, you are responsible for everything you do.
I’m sure someone mentioned it already, but this idea – that who we are and what we do are all part of a long web of interconnections, and that we have “seeds” of influences in our minds is a very buddhist concept – I remember reading it when I first looked into zen a few years back.
You need to think a bit more about what you mean by “could.”
Consider: You presumably don’t want to say that if the tape of the world were rewound and run again that you *would* make a different choice.
You just demand that we *could* have done something else, even though we didn’t (and even if — rerunning the tape — we wouldn’t do anything different).
Well, what does this “could” amount to?
I, along with many compatibilists, say that to say that we could have done differently is just to say that if we had wanted to, we *would* have done differently. And this is perfectly compatible with determinism.
Ask yourself what “could” implies in other contexts. The dinosaurs could have survived another hundred million years (*if* a comet hadn’t hit). The bridge could have collapsed during the commute (*if* the winds had been slightly different, or the beams had been slightly weaker).
Any time we talk about what *could* have happened there’s always an implicit *if* clause — what things are allowed to vary. “Could” just means “would have if . . . ”
In the case of free actions, the relevant question is what *would* have happened if the agent’s desires had been different (to a first approximation, at least.
P.S. You’re right to say that “the average person really does think that . . . there’s some part of ourselves that can override the physics and chemistry of our brain.”
They think this because they’re dualists. And they’re wrong.
Jerry’s use of “could” occurs in his definition of what he perceives most people understand by the term: “free will.” Which he argues against
Jerry says, “If the “free” in “free will” means anything, it means that at the moment we make a decision, we could have done otherwise. That’s my definition of free will, which can also be rephrased as “the notion that if the tape of life were rewound to the point of a decision, with every experience and every molecule identical up to that moment, the agent could still make more than one choice.””
Jerry’s definition of free will is perfectly compatible with determinism.
Determinism is true, and it’s also true that we could have done otherwise. To say that we could have done otherwise is just to say that we would have done otherwise if we had wanted to.
“Determinism is true, and it’s also true that we could have done otherwise.”
We likely could have done otherwise if the situation had been different in some respect (that is, in a counterfactual situation where I had wanted to do otherwise), but since it wasn’t other than what it was, we couldn’t have done otherwise in that (actual) situation, http://www.naturalism.org/choice_and_creativity.htm#chdo
No, you’re granting too much to the incompatibilist here. Someone like Jerry will quite rightly point out that it’s irrelevant to bring in what we could have done if things had been different; we’re interested in what we could *actually* do in the actual world.
The point I’ve been trying to make (which is nicely articulated by Michael Levin) is that we’re making a modal claim when we say “I could have done X,” and that modal claim is true in the actual world — even though it makes reference to other possible worlds.
Ask yourself this: What is the difference between saying “I could have done X if the situation had been different” and saying “I would have done X if the situation had been different”? Notice that our usual modal judgments about what I can do concern the latter: To say that I could have taken the train is just to say that if the situation had been slightly different I would have taken the train. This counterfactual world (in which the circumstances are different and I do take the train) makes it true in the actual world that I could have taken the train. (Of course, in the actual world I don’t take the train, but I could have.)
I’d need to go reread Dennett to see whether he gets this right or not. I’m surprised that Levin’s point isn’t more widely appreciated (I don’t even know that it’s original to him, but I don’t know of others who make the point as strongly as he does, and it’s his article that I have my students read . . . .)
Thanks, very helpful.
“To say that I could have taken the train is just to say that if the situation had been slightly different I would have taken the train.”
This seems to me simply a statement about reliable causation, namely that had a different state of affairs held, then a different outcome would have occurred. One thing depends on another in a law-like fashion (or at least there there’s a reliable patterning of events, if one is skeptical about causation). But of course the folk concept of contra-causal freedom has it that the self isn’t fully constrained in its choices by these patterns, such that this sort of counterfactual could have done otherwise isn’t enough. They want to have been able to have done otherwise – that is, they would have done otherwise, they suppose – all things set the same; but this isn’t coherent.
I agree. The folk do believe that freedom involves violating causal-natural laws, and this notion is incoherent.
However, I think it’s important to point out much of what the folk insist on is in fact perfectly compatible with determinism. They’re just wrong to think that determinism has the consequences they think it does.
a) They say that if an act is determined then it will happen “no matter what.” (But this is mistaking fatalism for determinism.)
b) They say that determinism implies that I have no choice in the matter. (But this just neglects the causal relevance of our mental processes.)
c) They say that determinism means I couldn’t have done otherwise. (But this is based on a mistaken interpretation of counterfactual claims.)
If we keep whittling away the mistaken claims, what’s left over will (or should) seem less and less like it’s anything we care about.
Isn’t Jerry simply arguing that the implication of “could” which you articulate here (“would’ve if”) just isn’t real – we wouldn’t have wanted to do differently the “second time around”?
Right, there’s no reason to suppose that an exact replay would result in a different choice since one’s desires (along with everything else) are hypothesized to be the same. But many folks (including Jerry) think that this means they don’t really choose, since for them a real choice involves not being fully determined in one’s choosing. This intuition is pretty widespread in my experience (at least in the US), which is why many folks find compatibilist free will to be a “cheap substitute,” as Dennett once put it, for what they think of as real free will, which is the contra-causal variety, http://www.naturalism.org/revolution.htm#_ftn2
“Isn’t Jerry simply arguing that the implication of “could” which you articulate here (“would’ve if”) just isn’t real?
No, you’re missing the “if” here. I would have taken the train if I had wanted to (but I didn’t want to, so I drove — but I could have taken the train; I could afford it, and it would have gotten me there on time).
The “if” that is present in all claims about what can or could happen introduces non-actual features; it’s not the mere rewinding of time (leaving all details unchanged) that Jerry considers.
I think you might be overstating the significance of “if.” We can play “would’ve if” all day long. The possibilities are literally endless. The significance any one of those possible environmental/genetic rearrangements may have begins to vanish as it is lost among an infinity of other possibilities.
Yes, “if” things had been different in any way, something else would’ve resulted. For some reason, you were determined not to want to ride the train. If that reason had been different, you may well have been determined to want to ride the train. But it wasn’t. The way it was is the way it was. And the way it is is the
way it is.
I think Jerry’s trying to say that for will to be really free, you’d have to want to ride the train, even in the first scenario wherein all inputs are conspiring to determine you not to want to ride the train. And that makes no sense. So, there’s no free will.
Yes, Jerry believes that freedom requires a violation of causal-natural law. The question is whether he’s right about that.
In part, this is a mere terminological dispute: Jerry and I both agree that we don’t have this contra-causal freedom, we both agree that we are free in the sense that we sometimes deliberate and select among alternatives (i.e., choose) based on our desires, commitments, and character. But does the former or the latter get the honorific title of “real freedom”?
On the other hand, there are some substantial points of disagreement between us, in that we disagree about what all follows from determinism. Jerry believes that if our actions were determined then we “could not have done otherwise.” I’m trying to point out that this runs counter to the way we usually talk about what something can or could do.
It may be true, for example, that my car can go 120 mph. You don’t disprove this merely by pointing out that, since I’m an old fuddy-duddy, I’ll never actually drive it that fast. It has the ability even though that ability will never be used.
Same goes for us. We *can* do all sorts of things that we won’t actually do. And when we consider past events, it is true that we *could* have done many things that we did not actually do. This is perfectly compatible with determinism.
So my lesson for Jerry is that he’s overstating the consequences of determinism. This isn’t to say that he and the common folk don’t think that determinism is incompatible with freedom — they do. But when they try to motivate their position, they say false things. It’s simply not true that I couldn’t have done otherwise: If I had wanted to do something else I *would* have, and that’s how we normally understand the word “could.”
You suggest that it’s pointless to consider what would have happened if things had been different. But this is precisely to complain that we shouldn’t care about what we *could* have done, we should only care about what we actually did do. If this is your line, then you might as well just tell Jerry, “Who cares about the ability to do otherwise? We never do other than we do, so we’ve no use for that ability.” And some compatibilists do make this argument.
But there are all sort of good reasons for us to consider claims about what would have happened if things had been different. This is how we figure out the causal structure of the world; it is the key to understanding and manipulating the world.
We’re talking about free will because we want to know what or who is *responsible* for certain acts (namely, acts that we tend to think deserve blame or praise). The way we establish this sort of responsibility is to see what or who *caused* the result in question. And this requires us consider what would have happened if circumstances had been slightly different.
The nature of the project requires us to figure out when it’s true that I would have done something different if I wanted to (that is, when I could have done something different) and when that isn’t true. If I could have done something else, then I’m responsible for the action. If not, not. And the truth of determinism does nothing to undermine any of this.
For example, *could have done differently* had I been a different person, *could have done differently* had I had different desires (and actually, I think we can make an effort to reevaluate and change our priorities in response to how we’ve behaved in the past, which not everyone seems to think is possible), *could have done differently* had the initial conditions been the same to within 1 part in 1 trillion. Why is it just obvious and only meaningful in this case that one *could have done differently* if the identical situation took place twice? It seems to me that that’s not worth thinking about at all, even for a thought experiment.
Even if we had contra-causal free will in the sense that physics let us do otherwise, we’d still expect that our free will would be mostly lawful, following the spooky laws of our individual psychology. Why is it so important for whether those laws of psychology come from somewhere spooky, or whether they emerge from purely natural dynamical behavior physics and biology?
“Why don’t computers have free will? . . . What’s the difference between that and what the human brain does?”
Compatibilist accounts of freedom usually start with choice (as the selection between alternatives), but they don’t end there.
It is important, for example, that we can be influenced by reward and punishment, that moral values influence our actions, and that some of our actions follow from our commitments and character. If a computer program had these psychological traits (and maybe some others that would have to be fleshed out), then why wouldn’t we say that it’s morally responsible for its actions?
Just ask yourself what facts would be relevant for your deciding whether some alien being or android was morally responsible for its actions.
(On this point, it might be worth considering what the legal requirements for responsibility are. Note that the question of whether someone is sane or insane has nothing to do with whether they get to violate the laws of nature.)
What you are calling “appearing to make a choice” is in fact “actually making a choice”.
What you are calling “actual choice” is not only not real, but doesn’t appear to be coherent.
Please explain how what we actually do, which is to use reason, logic, bias, etc… to make choices throughout our lives, is any different from how we intuitively think of people.
For example, just because a criminal was somehow “destined” to make the decision to commit the crime doesn’t change the fact that, as a logical being, they made that choice. That choice reflects on who they are and how they think. True, it doesn’t make sense to say they “sinned”, but criminal justice is a societal tool for maintaining order and for that it makes perfect sense to jail or punish someone for choices they make.
I have to agree with Matt here. The “appearance” of making a choice really and truly is making a choice.
I’ll have the fish – no wait, I had fish yesterday — I’ll have the chicken.
Free will. Not the appearance of free will.
Nobody is “destined” to commit a crime. Some crimes are accidents, pure and simple (negligence behind an automobile, for example). Some are associated with brief, out-of-character moments of anger (assault, manslaughter). Some are the result of a lifetime of deprivation and poor life choices (burglary, robbery).
But aside from the random accidents, one person chooses to commit a crime, while many many others in identical circumstances choose not to. There’s nothing predestined about it at all. And certainly nothing that obviates their responsibility to society for that choice.
Whether responsibility is obviated or not depends on how you construe responsibility. Hume, for instance, viewed the ascription of responsibility (which he construed as being worthy of praise or blame) as appropriate if an action was caused by the stable disposition of the actor. So, we blame a person who is habitually cruel for his cruelty, while withholding blame for a generally kind person who acts cruelly under certain circumstances (fatigue, stress, etc.).
As a descriptive theory of how we assign blame, Hume’s account isn’t totally indefensible.
I interpret “appearance of choice” as meaning that our behavior is best described by something like a psychological equivalent of a Browning random walk. It shouldn’t matter who you put in the situation, everyone has equal probability of doing the same things, and the most important variable is something analogous to a “temperature” of the situation, which can change the distribution of how people will behave.
This still amounts to the appearance of choice because though everyone will behave, on average, the same and for the same non-reasons, different people will make up different excuses for why they behaved the way they did. But really, studying them beforehand and trying to predict how they’ll behave is pretty fruitless. They themselves would not have been able to make much of a guess as to how they’d have behaved differently from anyone else.
Personally, I think that position is absurd, but I don’t know what else “appearance” of choice should mean. And based on the evidence trotted out against free will, i.e. that brains make decisions before we’re consciously aware of the fact, and we can only rationalize the decision afterward, I think that’ what Coyne et. al. must be getting at.
Even taking these experiments at face value (which as Dennett points out is problematical in itself), why should that count as evidence against free will?
Say I spend all day agonizing over a tough dilemma, visualizing various choices and outcomes and how I might feel about them, and finally go to bed still undecided, only to wake up the next morning with my anxiety resolved and a clear plan of action in mind. How is that decision any less mine, or my agonizing any less relevant, simply because I happened to be asleep when the process reached completion?
Even in fully conscious decision-making, I claim, there’s rarely a definitive finger-snap moment when I explicitly say to myself, Now I am deciding; that’s a straw man in my opinion. What typically happens is that in the course of mulling things over, we gradually become aware of which way we’re leaning. But again, that awareness couldn’t happen without the conscious mulling-over that preceded it. In my book that’s close enough to genuine free will as makes no practical difference.
The question is not that decision is made in finger-snap moment, or while one was asleep. The question is that there is no way you can wake up with other plan.
But that just isn’t so.
There were all sorts of ways that I could have woken up with a different plan, if things had been only ever so slightly different in my thinking or the events leading up the decision.
They weren’t different, and in actual fact (in this possible world, if you wish) I did not wake up with a different plan. But that doesn’t seem to be saying anything terribly exciting about free will.
The question addressed by Libet and similar experiments is explicitly finger-snap decision-making, which I take to be a straw-man representation of free will.
The larger question, as I see it, is not whether I could have woken up with a different plan. It’s whether the previous day’s agonizing played a causal role in determining which plan I did wake up with. To me, it seems clear that it did, and that conscious deliberation has the power to move me from a state of indecision to a state of decision. I don’t see what more you could reasonably want from free will.
Let’s not forget that what is going on is an unbroken series of causal events or succession of brain states, most of which are unconscious. Conscious “mulling over” brain states arise unpredictably as do “choosing” brain states. Mulling over brain states supplies the “I” of consciousness with a rationale for the “decision” which it thinks it has made. That, of course isn’t true. The current Self has “made the decison” not the I: the whole organism (conscious and unconscious brain states plus non-brain body) in the context of present and past interactions with the environment.
The I is nothing more than an organised but fluctuating subset (conscious) of brain states. The totality of fluctuating brain states requires an organising principle. The I is created by and serves the purpose of an unconscious organising brain process.
The Self has to fit past experiences with the present experience and the unexperienced future. Past rationales may be updated in the light of new experience. This updating occurs via unconscious processes and is presented as the I of consciousness post-hoc. Rationale crystalises the experiences of the past for the Self (person) in the form of the I. Rationale justify’s the Self’s “choices” and consequent behaviours to itself and to others – via the persona of the I.
The I may believe that it has free will. The I may believe that it makes decisions and acts. The I, however, is merely the awareness of these things. The Self – “mind” (conscious and unconscious brain activity) and body – no less than the I, is also caused to be what it is by something other than itself. Eventually we reach the big bang.
Free will?
Ew, please read “Brownian random walk” instead of “Browning random walk.” Hope that didn’t cause any confusion.
Definitely a pointless minefield.
You all agree on the same points, just set the bar for definitions differently.
This debate seems over, except for the semantic pedantry.
+1
+2
+3, more or less.
+10
Well I don’t agree. This all started with “determinism = ‘free will’/choice is only illusory” but the assertion remains unproven. Why would determinism rule out ‘free will’ and what is the evidence for that? I would accept even a theoretical prediction that free will is illusory but all I see so far is “we are the product of deterministic processes therefore we must be 100% predictable if only we knew everything”. It reminds me a lot of the climate modelers who claim “we could make better predictions if we had more information and if we knew everything we’d make perfect predictions”. Well, in the case of climate models I’m beginning to believe that climate is inherently unpredictable at the level of error we would wish. Humans may also be inherently unpredictable (though the “humans can be 100% predicted if only” crowd doesn’t seem to think much about that).
I think all the bloggers on this topic are agreed about what humans can and can’t physically do. Most of the time spent on this lately has been about what to call it, no?
How about we talk more about the implications for society, justice, etc?
My very general thesis continues to be that it would be a good idea to structure society so that people tend to be as free, happy, and healthy as possible. Feel free to discuss all the problems with this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My very general thesis continues to be that it would be a good idea to structure society so that people tend to be as free, happy, and healthy as possible. Feel free to discuss all the problems with this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
i think you nobody here or anywhere else would dispute the goodness of your idea
do you think you know enough of “the science of human condition” to approach the discussion of your idea in entirely _scientific way_?
can you think of any of your “beliefs” about that structure that however “good” or “right” may seem to you at this moment may turn out to be not supported by “science”
are you ready to give -up those beliefs if pthey are proven to be incompartible with “science”?
“How about we talk more about the implications for society, justice, etc?”
As long as people think there are such implications, they’re going to insist on resolving the argument. Let’s accept (or if necessary pretend) that there are no implications. Then we can get down to the job of structuring society as you suggest. Of course that job is much harder!
I really like the reformulation of “free will” as the mental process of creating multiple simulations of possible futures based upon different actions and then using those simulations to select which action to perform.
It’s entirely natural with the exact same levels of determinism and randomness as in anything else, but it gets to the heart of what we’re actually doing with our choices. As a bonus, all the consequentialist complaints are resolved as well as the materialist ones. Of course, it still leaves the supernatural dualists out in the cold, but they should be used to that by now.
Cheers,
b&
Yes, it is the more biological model. I, like physicist Carroll the other day, simplify to “first order” when discussing this. But it is not always the best, em, choice.
Coincidentally, I think research on mice shows that they interpolate “what if”‘s in both directions when navigating a maze. I.e. I believe they can see that neurons light up that model (“simulate”) the mice both coming to a spot and leaving a spot while working out what to do. Dunno where I read that or how correctly I relate it, but it was recent.
Mice are highly contextual when choosing, and so are our own choices. Why that is, is a question for an evolutionary biologist. Apparently the modeling of how one arrived helps understand what to do better (quite likely IMHO), even if these simulations are piecemeal centered around “now”. Now, how to test such a “just so” story…
Also interesting is that “past, present, future” is biologically hardwired, and not philosophical questions.
C’mon you’re trying to re-invent the language. “Could have done otherwise” doesn’t mean it would have been strictly possible given the laws of physics. It means the opportunity was there. A “choice” is something over which we can deliberate regardless of whether the outcome of the deliberation is completely determined by physical laws. You don’t get to redefine words to strengthen your case. Everyone agrees that ‘free will’ in the sense of un-coerced choices exists and the ‘free-will’ in the sense of contra-causal choice doesn’t. The phrase ‘could have done otherwise’ also has a different meaning in common usage than the one you are giving it. It means unconstrained choice. The stricter meaning is just not what most people mean when the say it. Whenever this is talked about in a way that is precise these confusions go away. So its cumbersome language. Deal with it. With precision those that believe in contra-causal free will can make their position understood and most of us can understand it and disagree with it.
I think part of Jerry’s point is that the average Joe does believe in free will in the contra-causal sense, so in terms that the average Joe understands, the right thing to say is that we don’t have free will.
Telling Joe flat-out that his intuitions are wrong is probably not the right thing to say if you actually wish to convince him. Wouldn’t it be better to offer him an alternative account of free will that affirms the important parts of his intuition (that he is able to make meaningful choices and that his deliberations matter), and omits the incoherent parts (that his decisions are uncaused and yet somehow still his)?
The topic for the latest rationally speaking podcast was free will:
http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs39-the-science-and-philosophy-of-free-will.html
I found this useful, especially for bringing up Roskies’ taxonomy of the variety of different meanings of “choice” (I wasn’t previously aware of her paper). It sounds like the sort of thing that would help Jerry out; many distinct notions get lumped together in these debates, and it’s important to recognize that things can (and probably do) pull apart in important ways.
It seems to boil down to, “Let’s just call the illusion of free will “free will” even though it’s deterministic and not REALLY free will in the magic, impossible sense.”
As much as I agree with that, why are people still then arguing that we have choices and make decisions?
I just don’t get compatibilism; what is this mysterious place where there’s no free will, yet we have choices and make decisions?
You definitely don’t get compatibilism if you think it says that there’s no free will. The whole point of compatibilism is that free will is compatible with physical determinism, and that it consists in exercising our (physically determined) capacity for deliberative choice.
No, no, I do get that part. The part that is hidden from me is the “compatible” part, the part where they go from hard determinism to soft, that place where they define “free” to mean something that *is* compatible. I just don’t see it, don’t understand *what* about free-will is compatible with Causal determinism. Is it that mental models aren’t included as being part of the casual universe? Because I see compatiblists concur that they are, so I’m confused as to what, exactly, *is* compatible?
What’s compatible is that we have causal power to shape the future. Yes, it’s determined, but it’s determined in part by us. It’s not like the entire script was written at the time of the Big Bang, and nothing after that matters; that’s a fallacy. Every moment in our history is determined by the previous moment, and as physical beings, we are fully embedded in that causal chain. There’s no way to get from past to future without going through us. Our decisions have real consequences, and that’s the sense in which free will (i.e. the power to decide) is compatible with physical determinism.
I was with you until “Our decisions have real consequences” where the word “decision” comes up and throw a spanner in the work.
The first part of a predetermined universe is all good and fine, and that in this time the future is determined on what we do now. But in order for us do do anything that breaks the “script from the beginning of the universe”, what is that? And I understand there is no script from the beginning of the universe, even though I don’t see any reason why the allegory fails, though. Our thoughts are part of the physical determined universe, so how can we make decisions that somehow could make things different?
Our decisions have real consequences, as you say, but what is this “decision” you speak of? It sounds like you’ve redefined “decision” as “logic process” making the *word* now compatible, but not the concept behind how the word is normally / folksy used. What am I missing?
To the extent the folk suppose decision-making is making things different in the sense of creating a future not already causally implicit in the present (barring whatever indeterminism exists in nature), the folk are very likely mistaken. But even if this folk concept doesn’t apply, we can still usefully talk about decisions as processes that systems go through to select among epistemically possible alternatives – that is, what the system sees as different possible actions given its necessarily limited predictive capacities. Only one will eventuate, and in terms of the static 4D block universe, that choice is the one that actually exists in space-time. But since the system caused the action, it can’t complain that it wasn’t in control. that it didn’t get what it wanted. To want more, such as “decisions that somehow could make things different” from what they are when you exert this kind of (fully caused) control would be to *give up* control, http://www.naturalism.org/spacetime.htm
Thanks, Tom, that actually makes a lot of sense to me, and thanks for the links. I think this whole kerfuffle stems from slightly folksy definition of decision and choices (that do imply some version of “free”) to a more formal and process-oriented one.
It has been rooted from the system. Not that I” grant compatibilism a pass, mind you, as the debate has shifted from how “decision” is defined to how “free” is defined. 🙂
This seems perverse, at least to me.
Why do you want to insist that only “the magic, impossible sense” is “REALLY” free, while the ordinary possible sense is somehow “illusion”?
It seems to me the compatibilist position is to say, ‘free will’ is what we actually do and have, and let’s just leave the magical impossible imaginary stuff to the theologians, because a) they’re used to that sort of thing; and b) that impossible sense isn’t useful anyway.
I agree with Jerry about this issue pretty much completely. I think people do define free will as he describes (“could have done otherwise”), and this type of free will simply does not exist.
The implications for criminal justice are hardly simple, but it’s clear that some aspects of our current system are less than ideal. The idea of punishment as a deterrent is sound (the possibility of going to jail is, after all, an input to the decision-making machinery in our heads), but there are degrees of culpability even without actual free will. Someone with a brain tumor, for example, would not be behaving as he/she would in the absence of the tumor. People need to be judged on their ground state, so to speak.
But all that will work itself out however it does. Those who become apathetic upon discovering they have no free will were destined to do so. Those who don’t give a damn, and strive for this or that anyway, will engineer changes.
Personally, I like Dennett’s point regarding Cupid’s arrow. There was a time when Cupid’s arrow was thought to be a key causal component of love. In other words, love was the experience that one had following being shot by Cupid’s arrow. Now, at some point, people realized that this was simply untrue and actually unnecessary. It did not follow that the love that remained was not “real” love. All that remained was love without the extra baggage of something not only false, but also unnecessary.
The same point applies to conceptions of free will that require a sui genesis ex nihilo event that is utterly independent of antecedent conditions. Abandoning this does not eliminate free will, but only free will that is loaded with false and unnecessary baggage. As Dennett says, it leaves you with a free will that is worth wanting.
As Ben mentioned, the brain can run multiple possible future scenarios, differentially apply values to them — sometimes with conscious awareness, but usually outside of conscious awareness — and then choose one with the concurrent sensation of personal responsibility for the choice in question. And this does not mean that my brain forced me against my will to do something, because I am not separate from my brain and body at all.
And until we make the choice, we do not know which of the options will be actualized, which is the case whether you believe in deterministic or indeterministic free will.
“My favourite neuroscience joke: two students are in love. One of them comes back from a lecture and says “Apparently the emotion of love is mediated by hormones and signalling molecules such as oxytocin”. And the other one says “See, I told you love was real”. ”
Comment by SAWells, here: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/twentieth-century-vole/#comment-99701
>What I don’t get is why this is called a “choice.”
Well, “free” in “free will” indeed means nothing, and the whole term is misleading. But why do we need to ban term “choice” too?
I do not see any difference between human playing chess and making choices, and computer program doing the same. Programmer can show you the part of the program which make choices and explain how it works.
So choice indeed is a materialistic process which do exists. I think, it can be defined, in your style, something like this: “if the tape of life were rewound to the point of a decision, and the person (computer, or any other control system) in question replaced with other person, than that other person can make other choice”. We should include change of internal state of control system into definition to make sense.
But, speaking of implications of this definition to person responsibility and law, this is not different from your position. And I think that conception of “free will” do not leads to reasonable justice, in fact it leads to revenge.
I’m a philosophy guy, so I try (am determined?) to think in terms of arguments. Here’s an argument that decisions are not free (i.e., an argument that they are fully determined by preceding physical states or events):
P1. Physical events are fully determined by preceding physical events or physical states (i.e., the physical domain is causally closed to outside causes)
P2. Mental events are physical events
P3. Decisions are mental events
C1. Decisions are physical events (P2, P3)
C2. Decisions are fully determined by preceding physical events or physical states (P1, P3, C1)
P4. A decision demonstrates free will if and only if it is not fully determined by preceding physical states or physical events.
C3. No decisions demonstrate free will (C2, P4).
I think that Blackford would agree with everything before P4, my necessary and sufficient conditions for calling a decision “free.” But I don’t see how it makes any sense to call it “free” if it is fully determined. I think compatibilism is probably incoherent, though.
You should be more careful with P4. I think, one can see 3 variants here:
1. Decisions are fully determined by preceding physical events and physical states
2. Decisions have random component additionally to (1)
3. Decisions are determined by free will
So “free will” is something that is neither determined no random, and this is nonsense.
You’re probably right. Too hastily assembled.
P4 should probably be something like “A decision demonstrates free will if and only if it is neither fully determined by preceding physical states or physical events nor the result of randomness”
I don’t think free will advocate would want to disagree with this, since they don’t want to argue that free choice is random, but that it is not determined.
But if someone were to try to argue that a choice is not fully determined (i.e., that it contains a random element) then they are essentially denying P1.
So long as you’re revising it, you can easily get rid of all the restrictions on this being physical as superfluous.
Either something follows a set of defined rules and is therefore deterministic; it does not and is random; or it is weighted random (such as a loaded pair of dice) and is probabilistic. There is no fourth option. This applies equally well to hypothetical souls in the spirit realm as it does to actual corporeal phenomena.
Cheers,
b&
That’s an interesting suggestion, but I can easily see the advocate of free will arguing that there is indeed a fourth option. It’s human free will acting as an uncaused cause in the decision making process. Placing the discussion within the domain of the physical ensures that the game is played on a field in which there is no reason to believe that nonrandom uncaused causes play any role.
Yes, but does that uncaused cause follow a set of rules, or does it just flail about willy-nilly?
It doesn’t matter if the rulebook is hidden or unknowable. It just matters whether it’s there or not…and, of course, only to the extent that it becomes apparent that all this is bafflegab.
Cheers,
b&
I don’t want to say too much about uncaused causes for fear Ye Olde Statistician will arrive with his leatherbound edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas, but those that hold the will is genuinely free (i.e., not the compatibilist position that quasi-free will people advocate) would hold that the only rules that constrain free will are the rules of logic and (maybe) our natural limitations.
“… would hold that the only rules that constrain free will are the rules of logic and (maybe) our natural limitations.”
Looks like rules and limitations to me.
kharamatha beat me to it.
This “uncaused cause” is therefore primarily deterministic in that it follows the rules of logic and (maybe) our natural limitations. Of those portions of the process that aren’t determined by those rules and limitations, are there additional rules that apply, or is it just tossing darts at a wall?
b&
I don’t think the fact that free will has to be exercised within some logical or natural constraints makes the idea incoherent at all.
I don’t want to presume to speak too much for the advocate of free will since I’m not one, but I don’t think arguing “our choices can’t violate the rules of logic, therefore there is no truly free will” will be particularly convincing.
It seems to be arguing against a straw man version of free will as entirely unfettered by constraint of any kind that I doubt anyone advocates.
Unless I’m missing the point of what you fellers are saying.
@OysterMonkey
Meh, at this point this discussion is a lot about how to justify calling something by certain names.
We have “will”. But should we say “free will”? What information does the “free” add? Is the “free” misleading?
I would like this out into a structured comment when I’m settled into this residence, but I think “will” is the loadbearing word, except in the context of legal arrangements, where “free” makes a meaningful legal distinction between gun-to-the-head-having-ness and non-gun-to-the-head-having-ness.
*would like to flesh this out into a structured et.c.
Seriously, damn I feel worn out.
P1 contradicts quantum physics. It can be discussed if quantum events can influence our behavior, or if we have some sort of higher level [pseudo]random generators inside brain, but that indeed will not help free will advocates. Quantum physics and pseudorandom generators still belongs to science and explain our behavior as inevitable consequence of physical laws.
Free will should be neither determined nor random, and I see no way how such thing could exists, it just violates definition of randomness and determination.
I’m not convinced that quantum physics is proven to be random, only that we human measure it as such at our physical and time scales with our various instruments.
Having said that, though, I *hope* there is lots of randomness in our universe to prevent it from being completely fixed from beginning to end (meaning, start the universe again, and I’d still be writing this blog comment, same words, same thoughts in my head …).
Well, we know that there aren’t any hidden variables, which pretty much rules out the last realistic hopes for quantum determinacy.
At this point, it’s looking like it’s as sure a bet that quantum randomness really is random as it’s sure that the high temperature in Phoenix on the 4th of July will be over 100° F. Granted, it’s not quite up to “the sun will rise in the East” or “nothing violates conservation,” but the rounding error makes that distinction nothing more than an academic oddity.
Cheers,
b&
Hidden variables seems like grasping for straws, but then again, I would grasp for straws.
I personally still don’t know that there aren’t any.
Well, the experiments have been run…you could look them up….
b&
Right. P1 should be revised to include randomness as well. I wasn’t really thinking about randomness when I was constructing the argument, mainly because it doesn’t do free willers any favors.
Revised P1: Physical events are either random or are fully determined by preceding physical events or physical states (i.e., the physical domain is causally closed to outside causes)
And just a comment on the idea that the key component of free will is the capacity to have done otherwise. Let us say that we have a libertarian form of free will in which a choice is made in a way that is utterly divorced from antecedent causal conditions, but this choice is made without my conscious awareness. This would meet the criteria of being able to have done otherwise, because the choice made was not dictated by deterministic causal conditions. However, is this something we would consider a choice for which we can be responsible?
I think that this capacity to have done otherwise is a red herring. In order to know if we have such a capacity would require time travel, which is impossible. It makes little sense to me to base a capacity upon properties that are simply impossible to verify, and yet to say that these properties are absolutely essential to the capacity in question.
Jerry don’t worry about it. It’s an illusion, but a very useful one for representing in our conscious minds a fairly workable model of how the world works.
You are right, at the nuts & bolts level, our brains are basically I/O computers. A computer chess program, given a particular position, and exactly the same time to think, the same processor, same operating conditions, will compute the same “best move”. So in if you replay the game, the computer chess will play the same moves over and over. Unless its program includes some randomness, which is by definition does not contribute to free will because it is random.
In the same way, a human brain, or a cockroach brain, given the same situation, the same external environmental conditions, the same internal brain state –memory, emotion, stress, excitation, information (including of potential punishment & reward) — , body and brain health, body temperature, etc.. every thing EXACTLY the same, we expect will come to the same choice. There are much more variables affecting the brain computation, so it will be much harder if not impossible to “replay” a choice, but if we can, we should expect the output to be the same. Otherwise where would a different output come from?
But this reductive view doesn’t invalidate our working model of “free will”, “justice”, “responsibility”, etc. Our brains have concocted this whole model for consumption of our conscious minds — a model that would not have been necessary to concoct if we did not have consciousness. Nevertheless, the behaviors (social behaviors of punishment & rewards, and other social behaviors) would be exactly the same.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think your second statement (about rewinding the tape) is an accurate representation of what people mean when they say “I could have done X”. They’re not making a statement about physical causality or Laplacean predictability. What they’re saying is a combination of:
(a) X is within their behavioral repertoire; they know how to do X, and can visualize a sequence of behaviors leading from here to X.
(b) Given their state of knowledge at the start of deliberations, X could not be ruled out as a possible outcome of the decision process. Indeed, the whole point of deliberation is to narrow the range of options from many to one.
That’s what people mean by “I could have done X”. They mean that X was one of the possibilities they considered. Not the one they ultimately chose, as it turned out, but they didn’t (and couldn’t) know that in advance.
As for your final question about what makes human decision-making different from that of other animals, we’ve been over this several times. Humans have the power to imagine alternative futures, and those imaginings are part of the causal chain that ultimately produces a decision. If you want to claim that that’s not really deciding, I guess you’re free to do that, but to me it seems a lot like arguing that a computer program that calculates the digits of pi isn’t really calculating, because after all there’s only one possible sequence of digits it can produce, and it will always produce that same sequence no matter how many times you run it.
I think your last sentence was what I was trying to say – below. I think it was…!?
Oh, this. I’d think these are the *important* things people mean when they say “could have done otherwise.” They might also think that implies that that they may have done differently if the tape were rewound, but you’d think that on reflection, they’d decide that no, that part isn’t so important or coherent.
But “could have done otherwise” implies that you could *actually* have done otherwise, but that’s incompatible with determinism. Should we invoke a folk-choice vs. deterministic choice (an illusionary one)?
Maybe these are semantic nitpicks, but is there truly anything more important? 🙂
“Should we invoke a folk-choice vs. deterministic choice (an illusionary one)?”
Maybe so. Isn’t there a solid folk-rainbow and an optical rainbow (an unwalkable one)? 😛
Surely we have all been in the position of saying to ourselves, ‘If I had known x at the time of deciding to do y, I should have decided differently.’? This is quite unlike Sam Harris’s wild regrets over something done that gives you the illusion that it would have been possible to do whatever it was differently if the tape of time were rewound, and quite unlike the rewinding of the tape in Jerry’s formulation. No, of course, there is not any whimsical, shrivelled homunculus sitting inside us somewhere and gleefully making wholly arbitrary and unconstrained decisions (which would then determine our actions!). And there surely is a continuum between the decision-making of non-human animals and ours, though ours, because of our vastly greater brain power and abilities to envisage various futures, is less constrained by the immediate situation. And once again, the assumption that ‘free will’ is integral to Christianity (which is why, I think, there is the desire to attack the notion) is untrue: look at Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination, and in Catholicism, too, there is the assumption that the Christian god has known from the beginning of time which of his creatures will be saved and which damned (if he did not, he would not be omniscient – Milton, incidentally, gets into some curious contortions in this respect in the speech of God that opens Book III of Paradise Lost). The Calvinist, after a struggle, can discern that he is one of the elect (or not!), the Catholic doesn’t know whether he belongs to the sheep or the goats until after his death. (Read up on theology!)
No, there is no ‘free will’ in any absolute sense, but it is nevertheless true that my actions and decisions are freer (or less constrained, if you prefer) than they would be if, say, I was suffering seriously from Alzheimer’s disease, or if I was an ant.
Finally, I don’t really understand all the fuss that is being made in this respect about criminals, since what Jerry is saying applies to all of us, including H. Allen Orr, who wrote a review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion that Jerry was furious about despite the fact that if what Jerry is saying is true, Orr could not have written otherwise, and of course Jerry could not have been otherwise than furious…
“No, there is no ‘free will’ in any absolute sense, but it is nevertheless true that my actions and decisions are freer (or less constrained, if you prefer) than they would be if, say, I was suffering seriously from Alzheimer’s disease, or if I was an ant.”
Why? You need to invoke some kind of dualism for that to be true. But if it follows that mental modes are derived from physical modes, then there’s nothing about our thinking (which include choices, decisions and so on) that’s not determined.
I still haven’t seen anyone convincing me that the universe isn’t fully and absolutely determined, down to what every creature in it thinks and feels and dreams, and if the universe could be played again, this exact comment would be written exactly like this would appear just about now, and I would have the same thoughts in my head, and all my “decisions” throughout my life couldn’t have been any other way*. Free-will, decisions, choices, all just illusions.
* With the hopes that quantum physics have real randomness to it (as opposed to perceived randomness) so at least different universes could happen, not that it matters much. 🙂
Compatiblists are *not* arguing that our behavior isn’t fully “determined” or more precisely, natural and consistent with the laws of the universe. The argument is that we are fully natural phenomena, and that’s enough, that non-physical, contra-causal free will can’t be in any worthwhile way more free than the fully natural “approximation” (if you like) version we actually have.
Hey, approximation. How’s that? Newton’s laws aren’t “illusory,” but they aren’t absolutely true, either. They’re good enough for most of what we do. Similarly, can the incompatibilists just accept that “free will” is a good-enough approximation? What more is really worth hoping for?
So … the argument is to say that we can’t tell the difference anyway, so why bother?
“non-physical, contra-causal free will can’t be in any worthwhile way more free than the fully natural “approximation” (if you like) version we actually have.”
No, I don’t like. These compatible approximations have not been shown to be just as good as the concept we generally think of with “free-will.” This is semantically shifting “free” to mean “illusion we’re happy with”, and I frankly don’t understand how that is compatible as opposed to redefined.
Btw, all expressions are approximations, but shouldn’t we try to better express things rather than just accepting the approximation as finite?
“the argument is to say that we can’t tell the difference anyway, so why bother?”
No, it’s that whatever anyone may have naively thought of as free will before 20th century science, is compatible with what we’ve learned since then. Partly because free will has always had a psychological determinism built into it anyway, and it doesn’t much matter whether that determinism came from a spooky place or is actually rooted in the natural world.
“These compatible approximations have not been shown to be just as good…”
What more do you expect to get out of libertarian free will?
“shouldn’t we try to better express things rather than just accepting the approximation as finite?”
We should often be completely satisfied with approximations.
I’m curious: “We should often be completely satisfied with approximations.”
Why?
(Thanks for the rest of your comment though, it’s starting to make more sense now)
Alexander, where are you getting the idea that just because a decision is physically determined, it’s not a real decision? That’s like saying that calculating the digits of pi isn’t real calculation, because there can be only one correct answer.
Nevertheless, if you want to actually know the digits of pi, you have to do the calculation. And if you want to be an effective agent in the world, you have to make decisions. It doesn’t get any realer than that.
I could ask the opposite back to you; Where do you get the idea that you have a real decision when it is determined? If something is determined you do not have a choice. Maybe we need to make the distinction as predetermined so to cause less confusion, but I keep coming back to this;
What does it mean to have a choice? It seems to me that compatibilists are simply redefining “choice” to mean “logical process”, and go from there.
“Where do you get the idea that you have a real decision when it is determined?”
It’s a real decision in the sense that a deliberative process reduced a menu of potential behaviors to a single actual behavior. And it’s my decision in the sense that it happened in my brain, as a result of mental activity on my part.
Contrary to what you seem to think, determinism is not a barrier to making real choices; on the contrary, it’s a requirement, because uncaused choices (of the kind you seem to think of as “real”) can by definition have no causal connection to my deliberative process and are therefore not “decisions” in any coherent sense.
So, yes, you’ve redefined “decision” and “choice” and “free-will” to make them more like logic processes? (And that’s fine, I can understand how that makes it compatibilism)
I’ll grant that my definitions seem to be different than yours, but I don’t consider that I’ve redefined them. Rather, I use what seem to me to be the only useful definitions those terms can have. The idea of an uncaused “decision” that’s independent of brain activity or reason seems incoherent, so that can’t possibly be what’s meant by a “real” decision. Real decisions are (by definition) the kind that real people actually make.
@Gregory:
“The idea of an uncaused “decision” that’s independent of brain activity or reason seems incoherent, so that can’t possibly be what’s meant by a “real” decision.”
Well, that the folk (including Jerry) have an incoherent and impossible notion of what a “real” decision is doesn’t mean that isn’t what they mean by decision. I’ve encountered lots of folks who have this incoherent notion firmly installed in their wetware, and to try to root it out is pretty difficult in my experience. It’s why many folks find compatibilist free will to be a “cheap substitute,” as Dennett once put it, for what they think of as real free will, which is the contra-causal variety, http://www.naturalism.org/revolution.htm#_ftn2
Philosophy & Physics folk – is this Free Will thing an argument about causality a&/or the nature of time?
We (think we) know the past, we are conscious of a wave of ‘moment’ that lasts as long as we do, but we do not know where that moment will take us. We think we can work back from present conditions to build a picture of an approximation of the past at various points going right back to shortly after what we think was the beginning of the universe, but we were not there in our moments of consciousness so there are inevitable gaps & haziness. We think we can extrapolate forward in broad terms as well, but we have no memory of the future as we do for the past. We cannot possibly know what a different past ‘choice’ would have meant ‘exactly’ any more than we could say in our moments of ‘now’ what ‘exactly’ a future will be. Unless we have a universe of infinite results (where every possible movement of a molecule happens only our consciousness follows just one route), then there can only be one total outcome. does this make sense???!
PS since I have twice in the past screwed things up with italics on these august pages, I have chosen to eschew them, hence the machine gun smattering of apostrophes (like a wall in Berlin!). Find it in your hearts to forgive me!
Causality is an important component of the issue.
The debate is a potent brew of confusion over (i) the nature of the mind/soul, (ii) notions of self and agency, (iii) causation and counterfactuals, (iv) moral responsibility, (v) ethics of punishment, and a few other philosophical conundrums besides.
You considered multiple options and picked one.
That’s a choice.
Are we done?
No. What does it mean to “pick one”?
If the waiter asks if you want the chicken or the fish, and you ask for the chicken: you picked the chicken. You made a choice. This is the thing in the world to which the description “making a choice” applies.
This notion that it isn’t a choice unless it violates the laws of nature makes absolutely no sense to me.
I’m now waiting for a series of columns insisting that we abolish the terms “sunrise” and “sunset” because it’s actually the earth rotating.
No, computers cannot do that. The only “choice” made by a computer is that which was programmed into it.
The computer is built and programmed in accordance with the “rational agent” model of behavior. It makes its “choices” based on logic and truth, where the standard of truth is externally imposed.
The computer does not have free will, because no rational agent (as “rational agency” is usually defined) can have free will.
There is a lot of philosophy that says we are rational agents. There is a lot of psychology that says we are not. Some of the psychologists conclude that we are irrational. But I think the better explanation is that the rational agent model does not fit very well. “Free will” is a term we use to better describe the kind of agent we are. Hmm, maybe I should post something about this on my blog.
First, computers are far less rational than you portray them to be.
Second, it’s not just philosophers who equate human cognition with what goes on in computers but computer scientists and information theorists as well. Specifically, if the Church-Turing thesis holds, then there’s nothing a human brain can do that a sufficiently sophisticated computer model of a brain can’t. And since it’s not that hard to construct perpetual motion machines from computation devices that violate the Church-Turing thesis, that’s a pretty good way to place your bet.
Cheers,
b&
You seem to be going by what the SEP entry suggests is one of the common misunderstandings of the thesis.
While some people speculate that it is “misunderstanding”, nobody was able to show any model of calculation that can calculate more than Turing machine do, and was not infinite or violate some laws of physics.
So, while there is no proof that such calculation procedure can not exist, there is nothing to suggest that it can. And I see no reason to attribute such powers to human brain, which is finite and works according to physical laws, as far as we can see. And, by the way, it was proven that artificial neural networks are equivalent to Turing machines.
I’ve yet to actually be impressed by the Stanford encyclopedia, and this case proves to be no exception.
Every single proposed example I’ve come across for something that’s super-Turing has involved infinite computational power of one sort or another. Even if it’s not immediately apparent from the description, it’s never been hard to come up with a way to use the device to complete an infinite number of calculations in a finite amount of time.
When somebody can explain to me how that’s not a violation of the law of conservation, then I’ll concede the point that there might maybe perhaps be a problem with Church-Turing.
Until such a time, Stanford’s “common misunderstanding” is exactly the point of the thesis.
(Yes, this would be another example of philosophy losing touch with reality and becoming as irrelevant as theology — for the exact same reason, no less.)
Cheers,
b&
+1 +1 +1 … [recursing infinitely].
Doing otherwise is a modal notion. It’s bizarre to think that you could do otherwise even if the world was exactly the same. I could do otherwise, if I had chosen something else. But I didn’t.
This is the standard Compatibilist line on choice. Not the appearance of choice, but choice.
There can be more than one “common-sense formulation” of a technical concept, and these formulations are not necessarily compatible with each other.
ISTM that another thing that “people mean by free will” is that people feel the burden of making choices. To put it in sharp terms, we may imagine a smoker who has just quit, and is now “deciding” whether to have a cigarette or not. The fact that free will is an illusion does not change this person’s predicament in any way, right?
Yes, consciousness and the self may be illusions (this is one of the key insights of Buddhism, after all) and free will along with them, but for practical purposes we are stuck with them.
Having typed the last paragraph, it occurs to me that a possible Buddhist understanding of enlightenment might actually entail the *absence* of the burden of choice aka “free will” – that life instead “just flows”.
Decision making and free will are 2 different things. They may be related, as in “If we had free will we could decide to do things other than that which we do … ” but they are not the same. Computers make decisions all the time, millions of times a second in some cases, yet each decision is constrained by the programming, the hardware and the data: specify those three things and you know the choices a computer must make – decisions do not free will make for computers … or for us.
Computers are often programmed with things like neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, etc to learn new strategies to make decisions. IBM’s Watson, for example, is not hard-coded to pick Jeopardy questions, it’s coded to learn how to pick questions.
It’s easy enough to imagine such a system hooked up to a true random number generator, such that specifying hardware, software, and initial data does not allow someone to predict how the resulting strategy will make decisions.
Computers can be programmed to input data, sense temperature, count clock ticks, detect a light beam, recognize faces. Thus, the computer, while programmed in an often rigid way, will make choices based on the unfolding future environment with many unexpected effects, just as we do. This is not fundamentally different than the choices made by an amoebae, or a human being.
Human decision making is made very complex by our emotional propensities…chemical reactions that subvert any hope that we might be purely rational agents.
I subscribe to Jerry’s definition, but I still don’t understand why I should accept some “physical determinism” that either rules out free will or accepts it.
If free will is anything, it’s a mental property which future physics may very well have to accommodate itself to. Generalizing what we know about physics now to conclude about a mental property which we don’t understand very well just seems way too hasty.
Nor have I seen answers to questions regarding cognitive closure, one of which is: are our cognitive capacities such that we can smoothly apply our theories from one domain of science (physics) to another (brain science)? The answer isn’t obvious to me.
Sean Carroll has the right answer to this (follow the links to his earlier posts).
The short answer is that we know the domains of applicability of physical theories, and biological and cognitive processes lie safely within the domain of current physics (basically, quantum electrodynamics and Newtonian gravity). The underlying indeterministic quantum processes give rise to deterministic processes at the level of cells (including neurons). The relevant physics is well-understood, and it’s deterministic.
Just stick to science. Skinner made an attempt to replace the everyday way of thinking about minds with one in which there are no choices. Ultimately his ideas have been rejected, because they are not as powerful as those which say that people really do have desires and reasons which determine what they will do, even though those desires and reasons can’t be directly observed. The best way to think about people is to figure out what they want and to guess what choices they will make. Nothing about physics changes that.
(I’m late to the party, so forgive me if someone has already pointed this out)
Jerry Wrote:
“What I don’t get is why this is called a “choice.” If the “free” in “free will” means anything, it means that at the moment we make a decision, we could have done otherwise. That’s my definition of free will, which can also be rephrased as “the notion that if the tape of life were rewound to the point of a decision, with every experience and every molecule identical up to that moment, the agent could still make more than one choice.”
But that “could have done otherwise” is one of the places where compatibilists point out the underlying assumptions tend to not even make sense. Dennet goes into this in his Freedom Evolves book.
What could you possibly mean by “could have done otherwise?” If you mean, as you imply, that if you “play the tape” up to the point were someone is in precisely the same situation in every way, molecules and all, and ask “could they have chosen otherwise”
if you really think this through the question doesn’t even make sense.
If I had precisely the same experience at point A as point A1 – that is precisely the same beliefs, precisely the same desires etc, what possible sense to say I would have chosen differently? If you think a free willed choice fits that description – could have chosen differently under identical mental circumstances – then your very notion of free willed choice is incoherent. It means a free willed “choice” would be utterly irrational. If you re-wound the tape, played it back, and I still had the same beliefs and desires, yet chose differently, this throws the concept of rationality out the window! It would be alternately irrational, or you have to posit a will as completely uncaused, which still gets you to irrationality.
This is why compatibilists point out that people tend to reject compatibilism, both libertarian AND determinist, on holding a very bizarre and incoherent notion of free will. The very notion of “choice” and “rational” only MAKE SENSE in the context of unbroken causation.
Note that, ultimately, the material world has little to do with this. Even if we were made of “soul stuff” or immaterial (unfortunately an incoherent notion), the compatibilist argument still applies. Because if even a “soul” insofar as it possessed beliefs and desires would alter it’s choices despite having held precisely the same set of beliefs/desires, it too would not qualify as “rational.”
Vaal.
(Yes, yes I know: Dennett with two tts. Didn’t catch the typo)
Arguably, having the “meme” of free will widely embraced by society is of some value, non-existent though FW be. To the extent that ‘everyone knows’ (believes) people are capable of making good and bad choices, and are likely to be condemned for the latter, it becomes one factor in one’s experiences that might result in (determine) making better “choices.”
(That that happens to also be the religious rationale for the concept is pure coincidence. 😀 )
Diane G: “Arguably, having the “meme” of free will widely embraced by society is of some value, non-existent though FW be. ”
How are you defining “value” in the absence of free will?
The way people (who deny free will) throw away the concept of free will still strikes me as ill-considered.
Those who throw it away tend to have, when examined, like Jerry’s, a bizarre notion of “free will” and “choice” that is not worth having.
A determinist may answer: Yeah, so what? That’s the point. Free will never made sense and was always impossible, so there is no free will.
But I think that would be a mistaken appraisal of the situation.
The whole notion of free will as an important topic springs from a desire and/or a worry many people have: What if we don’t have it? If we don’t have it, look at the consequences (no morality etc).
People want to know they can actually make choices. That THEY (themselves) can make choices.
But they are mistaken on how to get that thing they value. They think that if it doesn’t occur within the context of “being able to choose otherwise” – which turns out to be incoherent – then they don’t get it.
Compatibilism points out you the thing of value you want exists – your ability to make choices, moral and rational – but you don’t get it the way you think you did. The “choices” you wanted weren’t “worth wanting.”
The choices that are “worth wanting” – the possibility of rational choice, moral choice – occur within a chain of causation and you don’t want to break that chain, really.
Vaal.
I’m saying, why not let ’em continue to think so? They can think that without requiring some religious rationale for “free will.” I’m proposing that believing in free will could itself act to bring about better ‘choices,’ regardless of the actual nonexistence of the popular conception of free will. Yes, that’s very condescending to the hoi polloi, but this stuff is inordinately hard to grasp, and trying to convince everyone would seem to be a colossal waste of time.
I’m not at all a fan of encouraging delusions as an expedient way to encourage the little people to do the right thing. It’s one of the things I dislike the most about Christian theology, especially the branch started by Eusebius.
If it’s hard to understand, that’s generally a sign that it’s not yet well understood.
I’m increasingly becoming a fan of the mental simulation model of free will. It’s easy to understand, it fits with our intuition, it’s consistent with naturalism, and it doesn’t invalidate the various moral consequences that cause people to hold on to dualistic free will.
Simply, “free will” is the mental activity of imagining the future outcomes of different actions and selecting one of those outcomes based on those mental projections. You create tiny universes in your head, one for each choice you perceive available to you; you set each universe in motion; you compare the outcomes; and trace back to the original option that set the winning outcome in motion. You then attempt to re-create those events in the real world by mimicking the actions in your imagined one.
That’s free will, even though the process is largely deterministic (though somewhat chaotic) and subject to insignificant random variation.
The better your simulations — the more accurate, faster, and varied they are — the more free will you have.
Cheers,
b&
I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher but for a long time I have been intrigued by what I would call the mystery of consciousness. Scientific materialism asserts that consciousness and the mind are created by life processes in the brain and body, and being connected to a physical world. I am not smart enough (or, perhaps, dumb enough) to dispute such an assertion, but if it is true, it is wondrous to me that the mind, which is created by physical processes, is able to understand its situation and then manipulate the very processes that are creating it.
Just a couple of examples would be biofeedback where people who can monitor their own brain waves, heart rate or pulse can then consciously alter physical functions through deep breathing and relaxation exercises. Consciousness, which is created by the body, is now influencing bodily processes. Or the mind, which is created by the brain, can investigate brain function and even perform surgery on the brain.
If consciousness is able to understand and manipulate some of the very forces that are creating it, then it seems to me we could use this as a working definition for what “freedom” and “free will” mean. If I can come to control some of the very forces that are creating me, then I have gained a degree of “freedom” over those forces.
I think we just have a more complex calculating engine (brain) than other animals. This often enables us to take much data — and more complex data, such as abstract ethical models — into our calculations.
The more complex and nuanced the process, the more it seems like conscious decision making to us — because it is conscious decision making.
Could we decide differently without different inputs and a different brain (and a different life history for that brain)? I don’t think so.
I am admittedly a layperson and nowhere near up to speed here, and certainly an admirer of Mr. (Dr.? Professor?) Coyne, but what I’m not getting about the whole discussion is that it seems like the basic premise is: crude Laplacian (correct reference? – not sure) determinism, ergo no free will. Am I missing something? If I suddenly decide to listen to the Chausson Double Concerto, or the Khatchaturian Third, or read Proust, is that solely the outcome of molecular determinism? Or, if that is just a ‘choice’, then what is meant by ‘free will’? Obviously, ‘free will’ can’t mean that I can turn into a bat, or add two more time dimensions, so what is the difference between ‘choice’ and ‘free will’?
And yes, certainly free will is constrained – probably most of the time for most people – by what I would see as sociological factors (economics, ideology, etc.) that don’t reduce (or only remotely do so) to the sort of molecular level that seems to be implied.
Lastly, and I emphasise that I not referring to any sort of woo that consciousness is on the quantum level, but I had thought that quantum mechanics had overturned strict determinism? – though I have come across references that complete determination is possible on the quantum level with sufficient information, so I imagine I’m uninformed.
There is, as yet, no evidence that quantum effects influence brain function. It also seems unlikely that they would. Random effects on brain function would be inimicable to survival.
Sorry, guilty of fuzzy thinking here. I suppose I’m thinking more in philosophical terms than of what actually goes on in the brain.
I’m guessing, if I actually knew the subject, I would be a compatibilist, maybe, and the concept of emergent properties appeals to me. I’m also a bit of a Jaynesian, and inclined to think there is a heavy learned/cultural element in consciousness itself.
Sociological factors are perceived via vision/hearing, analyzed and stored in memory. Thus they affect structure of brain on cellular/molecular level. Our behavior than is influenced by this state of the brain. So sociological factors influence our behavior indirectly, by the changes they impose on brain structure during person life.
I think the quantum mechanics aspect is a bit of red herring in the “free will” debate, since randomness seems to nothing to do with choice.
<blockquote"I had a flat tire on the way to work this morning."
"Well, that was your choice, wasn't it?"
Whether quantum events on the micro scale actually influence events on the macro scale is another question. Obviously they do in some contrived experiments, like the hypothetical Schroedingers cat, but are such effects typical in real life? Even if they are, they aren’t about “choice”.
Actually, the point of Schroedinger’s Cat is that they don’t. Schroedinger’s Cat is always either alive or dead; and never in superposition.
I didn’t mean so much that choice comes from randomness, but rather that the “no free will” position seemed to be rooted in a kind of determinism I thought was passé. I see what you mean about micro vs. macro, that does clarify that point for me a bit.
Jerry,
You keep making the same basic philosophical mistake, which is to assume that words have definitions, in something like the classical sense of necessary and sufficient conditions.
In general, they don’t. Words like “choice” (or “gold” or “water” or “life” or “species”) generally refer to things that have been observed, which are often more or less poorly understood, and the definitions must be discovered by studying the actual things referred to. We nearly always refer to things before we can actually define them.
That’s what scientists do all the time. We didn’t decide that water doesn’t really exist because it turned out to be the compound H20 rather than a basic element with an essence of liquidity. We didn’t decide that species don’t exist because we didn’t find immutable essences of kinds.
Likewise, the term “choosing” was coined to describe something people actually do—whatever they really do when they do that, that’s what “choosing” actually refers to.
As with gold, water, life and species, we have some prototypical examples that have to still count (most of them) once we discover what’s actually going on.
We don’t say that the water that falls from the sky and flows through rivers isn’t real water because it’s not an element, and we don’t say that the gold jewelers use isn’t real gold because it IS an element. We don’t say that organisms “aren’t really alive” because they turn out to be fancy machines. We don’t say that homo sapiens is not a species because it isn’t an immutable kind distinct from all others at all times due to its fixed essence.
Why should we say that “choosing” isn’t really choosing just because it turns out to be deterministic?
Consider a prototypical case of choosing—e.g., if somebody offers you ice cream, your choice of flavors. You decide whether you want ice cream based on things like whether you’re hungry, whether you like ice cream, and whether you’re worried about spoiling your appetite for dinner. You pick a flavor similarly, based on your knowledge of what flavors you’ve liked in the past, whether you’re bored with that and want a change of pace, etc.
Nothing about that prototypical example suggests that the choosing isn’t deterministic—there are reasons to say yes or no, and reasons for and against various flavors.
In fact, the normal commonsense understanding of choosing in normal situations assumes a fairly high degree of determinism. People would be simply astonished if you started flipping coins to decide, rather than deciding based on whether you’re hungry, how much you like chocolate, etc. (They’d be equally astonished if they found out your answers were random due to random neural firings. Most people do have both stable and situation-depenedent preferences. Everybody knows that much about choosing.)
Whatever “choosing” turns out to really mean, that sort of thing has to count. It’s what we were talking about when we came up with the word “choosing, definitions be damned.
The funny thing is that the compatibilist philosophers are talking like scientists, in terms of what real phenomena words turn out to refer to—and a lot of scientists aren’t getting that, and are getting hung up on inessential aspects of supposed “definitions.”
You should really have a look at the “causal theory of reference” (a.k.a. the New Theory of Reference) and “natural kind terms.” IMHO, that’s some of the best and most important philosophy in the last couple of millenia. It makes clear how these “semantic” arguments often go astray because people don’t understand semantics, i.e., how words mean what they mean
Executive summary:
Science:
1) No Free Will
Philosophy:
a) I choose to fool myself in fooling myself that I am free to chose option a)
I don’t think that’s quite how I’d summarize it.
Rather:
A) “Free will” as commonly used is an incoherent concept that implies the existence of a fourth option aside from deterministic, random, and probabilistic processes. It’s a married bachelor.
ii) The mental process of acting based on one’s mental simulations of probable outcomes of various choices is a near-perfect fit for the common experience associated with the term.
Toy with it for a while and see how it fits.
Cheers,
b&
“When we make decisions, that process is itself part of the causal order of nature. What else could it be? Try to imagine a coherent alternative. . .”
I’m not sure, but is it really part of the causal order of nature? I’m mindful of the comments made on this topic by Schopenhauer and possibly Kant. The results of a decision, say, to throw a ball in the air, follow well-known physical laws, but the decision itself is outside the causal order of nature, in a “noumenon”. My explanation is perhaps too short to do justice to the work of those philosophers, but I don’t feel that it can be written off as incoherent.
I think the problem is that it can be coherent only under the presupposition that the mind is somehow outside the causal order of nature. That is, on the presupposition of dualism. But this entire discussion (here) presupposes that dualism is false (as it seems actually to be).
It struck me earlier today why some of this discussion seems so strange to me.
Some people seem to be insisting that what is we actually have, which seems a reasonable referent of ‘free will’, is somehow “illusion”, while only the magical, impossible, incoherent form is “REAL” ‘free will’.
Which makes me feel like someone is falling down a Platonist rabbit hole.
Well put Ben Goren!
@ llwddythlw,
Your invocation of a decision as being outside the causal order of nature (“noumenon”) highlights the essential issues in the free will debate.
It seems most people, and certainly most theists, think the problem is materialism and it’s implications for free will.
It’s not materialism: it is causation. The question is if you think that free will somewhere needs to have a break in causation in order to be “free,” then were do you put that break?
I’ve seen people try to move that breaking point around, but it never gets you anything you want in terms of preserving rationality, self-hood etc.
Even if you posit some sort of dualism, that minds/souls operate in some “immaterial realm” the question of causation applies.
If you want to break the chain, and say at some point that input – that is external experience of any sort – has no causal effect on our mind-state, then how could we
think we could even reason about something that wasn’t causing any change in our mind-state? Say my current mind-state is that I’m safe at home. If someone enters and declares “Your house is on fire” and that causes no change in my mind-state how could I respond to it at all? Where is the connection, once you introduce this causal break between mind/environment/stimuli?
Again, this isn’t just an issue for materialism: it’s a central issue for any concept were you want to preserve notions of person-hood, rationality, etc.
Vaal.
It’s a debate that I’ve skirted round for a number of years, but I still find it difficult to understand how the actual making of a decision itself is part of the causal world. Any causal link between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds is, I believe, denied by Schopenhauer, a regrettable decision I suspect.
So sue me (again)…
It’s like you just can’t stop yourself; as if you had no free will.
Consider all the time –at practically infinite resolution– that goes by in which we are not making decisions, and events do not happen. Decisions and events are very sparse in time.
Because causal systems can make choices between pathways.
Where your fuzzy line will be drawn between simple stochastic/deterministic algorithm modeling outcome, or sufficiently complex to adhere to effective theory of “free agents”, is arbitrary. Reminds of that speciation problem biologists like to discuss.
Sure, either it happens because there is some genuine stochasticity, deterministic chaos, or it seems to happen because you watch a distribution of tests.
However, the idea that you can wind back the clock is a pipe dream or deterministic chaos wouldn’t exist. You can’t restore parameters exactly with infinite precision in the real world.
So that is a gedanken experiment at best but not an actual scientific test. It is irrelevant for the empirical emergent theory of free will/agents.
Who says they doesn’t? In fact the Turing test is precisely that when you can’t distinguish between a computer response and an organisms response (for a sufficiently advanced organism, usually a human), it has effectively emulated the same trait.
In this case, free will.
As with most things in this world, there is no definite answer to the question of “what is freewill?”. It’s not that we can make any decision based on our experience and knowledge, and we are most assuredly not limited to one decision either. The range of decisions one can make is most likely limited by our experience and knowledge, albeit with an occasional oddity occurring irregularly i.e. A recession strikes the country and a college graduate loses his/her job, will he/she a) start applying for new jobs. b) go back to school, earn an additional degree, and wait out the recession. c) bite the bullet, go live with her/his parents, and work at WcArnolds until the recession has passed. d) get heavily addicted to heroine and go completely insane. f) rob a bank. Judging by the college graduate’s past success rate and education level, 95% of the time they would probably pick a,b, or c…. but the other 5% of the time they may pick the less rational and informed decisions d and f. Freewill definitely exists… it’s just not a particle, it more likely resembles a probability wave 🙂
In my humble opinion, all this guff over the existence – or not – of ‘free will’ is, well, guff. How does it matter at all whether one percieves oneself as having a ‘free will’ or not?
It seems to me that there are many questions to answer that are of more immediate importance. Most of ’em are more easily solved and of more utility.
As, for example, when this place gets hot, where are we going to grow the grain that we need?
JW