Liquidrage

This is why I think we have an illusion of free will - we don't know what our final decision will be until we have retrieved lots of memories and weighed it all up. We don't know in advance what we are going to decide. And if we were told what we were going to decide, we might change our mind, even if that would be a stupid thing to do because we might value our independence over the negative side of the bad choice.

So from our perspective our will is free because we are ignorant of our final decisions until we arrive at them. This is assuming you put a lot of effort into making your decisions. If you follow a simple set of rules (e.g. obey your master) then your behaviour is very predictable by yourself and not free, from your own perspective.

I think we want to be objective mostly for practical reasons - so we can anticipate things and seek/repeat/avoid things in the most effective ways possible.


Can't diagree with much there.

Though I would add that there's no reason to think people always make the most desirable choices. I'm even accounting for the absract ones like self mutalation seeming beneficial or defying for independance.

The human mind can make mistakes.
Mechanically, it's not perfect.

[ June 12, 2002: Message edited by: Liquidrage ]</p>

excreationist

Morally justified from who's perspective? And a conclusion about what? I don't understand your summary.

We can still have priorities within a deterministic universe. Morality is about priorities (values) I think. e.g. some might value their own life a lot - others might value the lives of the majority more than their own, etc.

Is this your own belief? This is different from your original post. Maybe you're saying that the compatibilists believe this. Anyway, there can still be a "debate" over priorites/values (morality) even if the outcome is an inevitable result of the preceeding things.

As I said in another thread, you'd need to have a time machine and repeatedly view events and see if it ever changes (without externally influencing those events, even in a small way). You could see if people's lives repeat in exactly the same way each time. Then you could assume that your life works in the same way.
Or you could give someone else a time machine and get them to go to the future and find out about your life and come back and write it down and seal it in an envelope. Then after those future events have happened, you can see if that matches what is written in the envelope.

Well if you had a time machine you could work out if elementary particles act in a deterministic way or a probabilistic way (that is different when you repeat history). If there was a random component to physics then our choices wouldn't be predetermined but we'd still be at the mercy of physics.

I think people should be punished to discourage them from committing crimes in the future and to discourage potential criminals as well. It makes sense for people to be punished even if their behaviour is deterministic. The punishment or absence of punishment affects their future behaviour - their future behaviour isn't oblivious to whether they were punished.

"Free will" is a popular defence used by theists when critics say that God can't be all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful while suffering exists.
They would say that "free will" or choice is good, and it means that we can choose between goodness and suffering. Without the real possibility of making a bad choice, there is no choice.
People would have had a problem with a god knowing what they would do in their future. If God is all-knowing he would know our future but he lets us choose anyway. If there is no-one that can see into our future then from the perspectives of all people - our lives aren't predictable. In practice, we usually don't know what is going to happen in the future or exactly what choices we are going to make. Since no-one is capable of seeing our deterministic lives play out like clockwork, our exact futures including our future plans or "will" is unknown to us - it is not fixed - from our point of view - it is free. From an external god's point of view our future is fixed, but we don't know the future so from our perspective, we *are* free.

In theory we might know that our futures are predetermined, but in practise, we don't know our future decisions and experiences so we treat them as not being predetermined - we have to go through the motions for the unknown predetermined future to become a known reality.

excreationist

Just to explain how I think choices are made:
Each option would have a value associated with it.
e.g. for a normal person,
moving out of oncoming traffic -5 (it takes effort)
and dying might be -1000.

So they'd choose the lesser of two evils, (assuming that they were the only choices) - which is to move out of the path of oncoming traffic.

For them to make a mistake, there would be a corruption in the signal which represents how desirable or undesirable something is.
e.g.
The pathway that transmits the desirability of death could be clogged up and it could send a signal of -1. So the person could have a phobia of moving and not care about the threat of death.

I think this kind of corruption happens when people are sleep deprived, etc. Their "weightings" or preferences are a bit screwed up and so they make bad decisions. (I read that the Chernobyl disaster was caused by sleep-deprived people). If they take their time to make decisions then this interferring noise would cancel itself out - more memories would be triggered making their decision more balanced and based on more data.

phaedrus

Emphasis mine

Second that and Amen (sic!)

boneyard bill

I think the question posed here was a definition of free will, not a debate over whether or not free will exists. Indeed, it is entirely premature to discuss its existence before you define what it means. So here's my proposed definition:

Free will means that the human mind can act as a causal agent.

John Page

Why is this restricted to humans and what role does the agent play?

I think we're exploring here by refining our definitions to match reality as opposed to an imaginary or theoretical "free will".

Let me try and work backwards from a thought experiment. Person A believes sentient beings have a "will" that is independent of their body and this "will" is essentially free to act through the body in any way it wishes. However, Person A does not know about robotics, but observes a robot with complex control circuitry driven by telemetry from its environment. The robot is programmed to identify cheese, pick it up and stuff it into an orifice in its front end. Thus Person A observes the "will" of the robot as being in the form of the spirit of a mouse as created by god that is the source of life in all things etc.

Hopefully I've made my point clear. The inner workings of the robot are the cause, no agents, no spirits, nothing. Will, therefore, is a word we can use to express the unknown mechanics behind a pattern of behavior we don't understand.

I think its inevitable that in observing behavior we would notice that some choices seem directly driven by environmental factors (i.e. strictly deterministically) whereas others seem more neutral to external factors and therefore appear "free". In reality (IMO) the learning faculty of the mind creates an internal environment in which the choice is still a deterministic result.

I had no free will in writing this, but I did have a choice.

Cheers, John

[ June 13, 2002: Message edited by: John Page ]</p>

Mr. Sammi

I suppose the arguments will eventually end up with FREE-WILL being the DETERMINING FACTOR.

I suppose we would now have to determine what fully-determined is as opposed to lately-determined. One can argue the idea of being fully-determined if one can trace an experience to the beginning of time. We are lately-determined if an unexpected event occured like, met stranger and we smiled, talked and decided to meet later.

The question concerning morality can arise through a lately-determined chain of events which has never happened before. There is no precedence. What are the rules to apply? Does having no rules mean not having to play by any rules? If we did decide to make rules what then?


Basically I think there is a misconception and a cross-argument when determinsm is argued. Determinism changes its face from a causal relation which is the chaining of events, to the intention behind the chaining of the events.

In all reality, we cannot stop or argue against the chaining of events which is soft determinism AND the reason why we are regular people.

When the determinists fail to win or protect ground on the intent or direct impetus of the cause the determinists fall to the simple chaining of events argument to protect themselves. We should watch carefully for these sorts of evasive arguments.

I have no conclusions in this post, my conclusions are indeterminate...

Sammi Na boodie ()

John Page

Sammi:

What do you suppose has the "intention" and performs the act of intending? Do you think your answer avoids the infinite regress issue that, for example, Intelligent Design encounters?

Cheers, John

NialScorva

I posed the question as a stepping point to discuss my suspicion that "free will" isn't a meaningful concept except when there's a hypothetical outside observer, such as an omni-god or time traveller that can second guess moral presecriptions.

It's perfectly on topic for what I wanted to explore.


I'm trying to re-evaluate my summary based upon feedback, hopefully I'll post and address some responses later today.

DRFseven

When you really examine the question, you have to ask yourself how there could be an impulse without motivation. Something motivates, always, whether the motivation arises from hard-wired response mechanism or from learned valence tagging schemes, a phenomenon that addresses something else you said:

It's that big M; the mediating mental event. Experience E results in neural action potential, a set-up for memory, which will "tumble" to a particular code, along with other firing sequences, as well. This is automatic; we don't do anything to choose associations other than to "try to remember", which is another learned response.