xeren

I don't want to derail the naturalism and free will thread so I thought I'd start a new one. bd-from-kg wrote:

He said that he didn't want to go down that road again(argue about this again) so "could" someone else tell me how the word "could" is being used differently in (i) and (ii), because I am not seeing it.

And even if this particular argument for determinism is fallacious I still can't imagine how we could actually have free will. If anyone can, I'd like to hear that too.

-xeren

Blake

I don't see the difference in meanings either. They both seem to indicate a sense of possibility. To my view, the argument is fallacious due to a gap in reasoning between (ii) and (iii); it skips from a hypothetical statement to a positive assertion without any intermediate reasoning.

Practically speaking, I think we have free will thanks to the thin wedge of consciousness, which permits us to examine what we plan to do and make choices. Maybe neuroscience will become advanced enough to demonstrate that consciousness is as determined as lower physiological functions, but I haven't read an airtight argument demonstrating that yet.

Bill

You most-likely never will read "an airtight argument" demonstrating "that conscousness is as determined as lower physiological functions" because the "airtightness" of the argument will rest on our inability to understand ever smaller and smaller parts of the universe. Today, it is quantum mechanics that holds out the hope of randomness. But if quantum mechanics is ever integrated with Einsteinian theory in such a way as to prove causality at the quantum level, we will still have the randomness of string theory to hang our hopes on for some sort of a non-causal foundation for physical phenomena.

Personally, I lean towards views of quantum mechanics that preserve causality, such as Cramer's Transactional Interpretation. But so long as quantum mechanics remains disconnected from Einsteinian relativity, none of us can truly say with any real certainty whether or not there are acausal forces at work at the lower levels of reality.

But at the levels of reality most of us operate in, our minds are the clear product of merely physical processes (chemical reactions and other biological processes). Modern neuroscience has very-much proven this assertion. There is a corresponding physical location for every type of thought we can entertain. And while the brain is amazingly-complex, there is no reason to believe that it is not fully-physical in composition. Everything at our levels of reality is fully causal, so barring the influence of quantum effects, there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe that our mental decisionmaking is not also fully-causal. And, there has never been any proof of natural quantum mechanical processes creating true randomness in the operation of any kind of macro-level phenomena. We don't expect anything to magically appear or disappear, even though our brains can entertain the idea that, just perhaps, some individual (but extremely small) chunk of matter might possibly appear and/or disappear due to some sort of a quantum fluctuation. So, why should any randomness in our thought-processes be in any way driven by random quantum mechanical phenomena? We can't answer that question for certain (as I indicated in my opening), but I do tend to believe that, at the end of the investigation, we will not find a causal connection between any quantum phenomena and any randomness in any human thought processes.

Thus, I remain convinced that our thoughts are causally related to our current state of existence, and that our current state of existence is causally related to our prior states of existence. In other words, that "determinism" is true.

== Bill

Kantian

Bill
Do you merely believe in the philosophical view of determinism, i.e. give lip service to an attractive theory, or do you actually presume everyone has absolutely no potential of acting differently, because it could not be otherwise, no moral beliefs, not practice rewards and punishment, never give yourself credit or ever blame others?

Or is it 'strike a philosophical pose' week?

xeren

Ahh, the classic, "determinism leads to a lack of morals" argument... Wait, now that's a new one.

xeren

Bill,

Let's say quantum mechanics does turn out to effect our brains in a way that causes random events. Even given that, it still doesn't give us free will, does it? A random event that influences the way me make decisions only gives the appearance of free will.

-xeren

Jayjay

I haven't followed the whole free will debate, so this might be a redundant comment, but I think that free will as a concept is contradictory. It seems to imply that there is an element to our thinking that doesn't break down to a combination of determinism and randomness. That seems absurd, regardless of whether naturalism is true or not.

bd-from-kg

OK, let me explain my comments here. Since I’ve discussed this extensively on other threads I’ll save time by quoting what I said on a couple of them.

The longest discussion of this issue was in the thread How Can We Be Morally Responsible In A Deterministic World?, in which Kip argued that determinism implies that no one is morally responsible for his actions. To paraphrase slightly, his basic argument was:

(1') You are morally responsible for an action only if it is the case that you could have chosen differently than you did.

(2) But if determinism is true, it is never the case that you could have chosen differently than you did.

(3') Therefore is determinism is true, no one is ever morally responsible for his actions.

This is virtually identical to the argument that I outlined, except that instead of concluding that determinism implies that there is no free will Kip concluded that it implies that no one is morally responsible for his actions. The relationship is obvious: it is generally taken for granted that moral responsibility requires free will. In other words, it is generally agreed that (1) and (1’) are true in some sense. Moreover, it seems clear that any sense of “could” that makes (1) true also makes (1’) true, and vice versa.

Here are a couple of excerpts from my replies.

These comments apply virtually word for word to the “free will vs. determinism” argument. Thus, according to (1’), Smith and Jones should not be praised or blamed because they did not act freely – that is, they did not have free will regarding the choice in question. I submit that these conclusions are transparently absurd – that Smith’s act is obviously praiseworthy and Jones’s blameworthy – and that any understanding of free will which yields a different conclusion is plainly wrong on its face on this account alone.

Later I dealt more directly with the question of what it means to have a choice (i.e., what “could” means in (1) and (1’), or at any rate what it clearly doesn’t mean):

In other words, being “free to choose” does not mean that one is a “random number generator” able to make random choices unrelated to who one is – one’s character, personality, likes and dislikes, but just the opposite: that one is able to base one’s choices on who one is – on what one prefers. In other words, I want to be able to choose between a strawberry and a chocolate milkshake because I prefer strawberry, whereas if the choice were imposed on me I would probably wind up with chocolate because that’s what most people prefer. I want to be able to choose between Mary and Linda because I have a definite preference for Mary; if I were indifferent as to which of the two I wound up with I wouldn’t mind if someone else did the choosing. The cases where it is most plausible that I “could” make either of two choices in the sense that the probability of my making each of the choices is roughly equal are precisely the cases where I care least about whether I can “choose freely”. Thus, if I vastly prefer an Accord to a Corolla, I want to be free to choose between then so that I can choose the Accord. If I find the relative merits of the Accord and the Corolla so close that I have a hard time deciding which one to choose, this is a situation in which I care very little whether I can choose freely between them. In other words, we value being able to choose freely just when, and because, we know what choice we’ll make if we’re able to choose. That is, we care most about having “free will” when there is not a nonzero probability of making either choice, but rather is a 100% certainty that we’ll make one choice rather than the other (if we’re allowed to choose). This shows clearly that “free will” is not about having a nonzero probability of making more than one choice.

In fact, the very concept of acting is logically incompatible with the idea of having a nonzero probability of doing otherwise. To say that someone did something (i.e., that he acted) is to say that he intentionally caused the action in question; otherwise it is considered an accidental or involuntary movement. Thus, if I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and the rock face gives way, I’ll fall, but this is not an act on my part. Similarly, some victims of Tourette’s syndrome will often use vulgar language in totally inappropriate circumstances, but this is recognized as an involuntary reflex arising from neural dysfunction and so is not considered an “act”. In order for a movement to be an “act” (i.e., in order for questions of moral responsibility and free will to even arise) there must be a causal relationship between the agent and the act (in fact it has to be the “right kind” of causal relationship). But to say that there is a causal relationship means that, given the agent’s state at the time, it was inevitable that the act must occur; no other act was “possible” – i.e., he could not have done otherwise in the “having nonzero probability” sense. Thus, far from the notions of free will and moral responsibility being incompatible with an act’s being caused (and thus inevitable), an act’s being caused (and thus inevitable) is part of what it means for it to be willed, and hence part of what it means to be freely willed. An agent cannot be responsible (morally or otherwise) for an act that he did not himself cause. If he didn’t cause it, he didn’t do it; it “just happened”. Or to put it another way, if he “could have done otherwise” in the “having nonzero probability” sense, he didn’t do it at all.

So what does “could” mean in (1) and (1’); i.e., what does it mean in this context to say that one “could” have done otherwise? Well, this isn’t entirely clear, but in another thread I proposed several possible interpretations:

I would add a fourth plausible meaning:

4. X would do Y if his character and dispositions were different (in an appropriate way) from what they are.

It’s not clear that these possibilities are enough to cover what most people mean by saying that someone is not morally responsible for an action unless he could have done otherwise, or that he does not have free will unless he could (sometimes) do otherwise, but they’re certainly enough to show that there are a number of plausible interpretations under which these statements makes sense, whereas the interpretation of “having nonzero probability” is totally implausible because it makes both statements nonsensical.

jj

It's safe to say that QM DOES in fact make our brains random at some level. It also does seem that QM is in fact describing a fundamentally random process, not a process that can not be observed.

Ergo, there exists randomness in decisions. Now, one can argue if that represents free will or not, but it most surely refutes determinism completely.

Of course, once a mechanism to deal with randomness evolves, and our brains do have such mechanisms, this means that randomness allows multiple paths to the same thing. Since this mechanism is also governed by randomness, this means that eventually one can arrive at some different thing, as a function of random walk plus learning.

I would suggest that once learning can be shown to possibly arise from random events, that free will of some sort is effectively guaranteed. This comes from the chaotic behavior of neural networks, basically it takes a small change to come up with some new decision or "creation".

xeren

From Bill's post, and from what I've been reading elsewhere, it sounds like it is not safe to say that at all.

I'm afraid I don't follow. Even if introducing quantum phenomena does destroy the determinism we previously thought existed(which I don't know if I agree) it doesn't bring back our free will. Intoducing randomness to the decision-making processes in the brain would only give us less free will than we already didn't have.

I can't really get on board with your randomness + learning theory. How would our brains adapt to random quantum effects we couldn't even perceive? I can see how we could adapt to randomness in our environment, but not what's going on inside our brains. Please explain further.

-xeren