Does Evolution Have An Objective?

Your conscious decision-making abilities are part of that "string of dominoes"; they are not a separate distinct thing. The "instead" in your quote above is a non sequitur. It's like saying you're a collection of cells instead of a person.

I too am a member of the unwashed masses that is finding this discussion fascinating.The deterministic universe vs. one with free-will is a thought exercise that I often ponder over. The point that I keep running into, personally, and one that I would love others feedback on is this:If you were able to exactly duplicate the entirety of the universe at a specific time, and do this repeatably, would any of these duplicates have differing futures?Localizing it further, if I was able to completely replicate myself, brain-state and all, would the copy make the exact same decisions as the original (assuming all stimuli are also equal)?Personally, I have a hard time conceiving of these situations not all leading to identical futures, and hence a deterministic universe. It's not until I start thinking at the quantum level that I can see some glimmer of non-determinism - is this what others believe the source of 'free-will' is? Quantum flux?

The problem of freewill (as I understand it) is the problem of reconciling the seemingly self evident truth that we possess real freewill with the conclusion that the world is deterministic - Reconciling this intuitive notion of freewill with the fact that our actions are caused by past events which precede our own existence and over which we have no control. Compatibilists have not solved this problem. They have simply redefined the problem.The honest approach (in my view) is to accept that the self evident truth of intuitive freewill is in fact an illusion. Furthermore I don't see the point in confusing the issue by redefining the term "freewill" as compatibilists are doing. I don't think this is a necessary step in justifying moral responsibility. It just results in endless - "That isn't what I mean by freewill" - objections which detract from actually solving the issue of assigning moral responsibility. I am not suggesting that it does. I am suggesting that moral responsibility can still be meaningfully assigned even if freewill is an illusion. Whilst compatibilist philosophers concentrate on philosophically coherent definitions of freewill as the answer to this problem I would suggest that a more pragmatic approach provides a more powerful argument. Let me try and explain what I mean by making a comparison with science.Science, with it’s dependence on inductive reasoning and recourse to practical results rather than formal logic to justify it’s methods, is logically imperfect and arguably not entirely philosophically coherent. But from a pragmatic point of view it remains demonstrably the best method we have of investigating reality despite these flaws. Thus we embrace science for wholly pragmatic reasons whilst acknowledging it’s philosophical shortcomings.Likewise we can embrace moral responsibility based on the apparentness of genuine choice for wholly pragmatic reasons whilst acknowledging the philosophical shortcomings of this position too. Taking this approach (and stealing the center-of-gravity analogy used by Dennet elsewhere) — Means that the morally responsible agent free to choose is as real as a center of gravity - "An abstract object, a theorist's fiction, but operationally valid".Freewill is an illusion - But it is an "operationally valid" illusion. That is how I see it. If I have understood that then I think that this is consistent with what I am saying above.

And yet various people in this thread have objected to your use of the word "choice" to describe a situation where there is only one possible outcome. Why is that? It isn't me that has imbued the common conceptual meaning of the word "choice" with dualistic tendencies. Intuitive notions about how we make decisions combined with our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage are probably responsible for that particular baggage.I know you don't like it but - Words conceptually mean what people use them to mean. They don't always mean what is scientifically accurate or philosophically coherent.

I fail to see where they redefined the problem. As far as I am aware, most people that discuss the problem of free will are trying to figure out moral responsibility or praiseworthiness at some point. Compatabilists do define some things differently to the incompatabilists, arguing it is necessary to produce any solution. The compatabilists would agree that the notion that you could have done otherwise is a useful illusion as you say. Do we agree though, that one mustn't simply surrender to it, because if it contains flaws, we might not structure our societies in the most optimal ways.For instance, if we simply assume freewill for the purposes of operational moral decision making, how do we handle the starving person that steals bread?

Deterministic in a probabalistic way. It utterly depends what we mean by "freewill". But by any common conception of freewill as intuitively derived - No. This form of freewill is an illusion. Intuitively we believe that we can make conscious decisions regarding genuine possible alternatives. That these decisions shape the course of reality. That these decisions are not restricted to a single possible outcome entirely dictated by prior events over which we have absolutely no control. This, I believe, is broadly what is popularly meant by the term "freewill". No. It felt like you could. It felt like you had freewill. But this was illusory. In fact that act, your mental state and everything else at that point is entirely dictated by past events over which you have no control. Redefining freewill to be philosophically coherent is all very well but if that new definition isn't what people actually mean when they use the term "freewill" what is the point?

Hasn't the problem of freewill traditionally been to reconcile a degree of freedom that has been viewed as a self evident human truth with determinism? Sure - "At some point". But compatibilists seem to treat this as the sole focus. Thus the problem of freewill becomes the problem of defining "freewill" in a philosophically coherent manner which intellectually justifies moral responsibility in a deterministic world. If the philosophical coherence of the solution is the primary aim then they might be right. But I would suggest that the primary aim of the solution should be to ask why exactly we want to assign moral responsibility and to assign it on that basis regardless of whether or not freewill is illusory or otherwise. OK. This also forms the basis of most morality in practise doesn't it? If the aim of assigning moral responsibility is to optimise the structure of our societies then we would base our method of assigning moral responsibility on that. If there are avoidable flaws in our method then - by definition - we change it. Determinism and the "is it/isn't it" illusory nature of freewill doesn't come into it. Exactly as we would if we completely ignored the whole issue of determinism. Exactly as people do in real life. In this case we would treat stealing as a crime because we want to deter that particular socially destructive action but we would take into account the very desperate circumstances of that particular individual in this particular case.Personally I would advocate extreme leniency and question whether the society that produced that situation has been structured in the most optimal way.

It's part of it, but there isn't a single 'problem of free will'. From the Stanford Encyclopedia

quote:

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Some person (qua agent), at some time, could have acted otherwise than she did.
Actions are events.
Every event has a cause.
If an event is caused, then it is causally determined.
If an event is an act that is causally determined, then the agent of the act could not have acted otherwise than in the way that she did.

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Note that this formulation involves a mutually inconsistent set of propositions, and yet each is (seemingly) rooted in our contemporary conception of the world.

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That's one wording of the problem, referred to as the 'Classical Formulation'. Just because I've focused on that? Wiki's article on 'Freedom Evolves' by Dan Dennett

quote:

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Dennett's stance on free will is compatibilism with an evolutionary twist — the view that, although in the strict physical sense our actions might be pre-determined, we can still be free in all the ways that matter, because of the abilities we evolved. Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make decisions without duress, as opposed to an impossible and unnecessary freedom from causality itself. To clarify this distinction, he coins the term 'evitability' as the opposite of 'inevitability', defining it as the ability of an agent to anticipate likely consequences and act to avoid undesirable ones. Evitability is entirely compatible with, and actually requires, human action being deterministic.

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But the problem of freewill remains hanging, since many people will say they want to assign moral responsibility because we have freewill. We can choose to ignore the whole thing if we want to, but that's not really a solution to the problem itself.

Oh, but I'm not talking about "something that is not determined by something else".

That's the contention here... And them not being that is the contradiction with determinism that you've been failing to see. If you just assume that you're correct. A person isn't just a collection of cells: person > collection of cellconscious decision making > string of dominoes

So what about the randomness of mutations as proposed by the ToE? Are they actually non-random?Or what about which particular radioactive atom will decay next? Or the positions of particles in Brownian Motion?

So what did you mean by nondeterministic?

If you reran the universe, you could have chose something different.

And that choice, what is it determined by, if not the history of the chooser, and their various circumstances? If it is determined by something, then it is not nondeterministic. If it is not determined by something else then my original question about moral responsibility holds.

The Will.along with that other stuff... Nondeterministic doesn't mean "not determined by something", that would be indeterminism. Determinism means "that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen". Nondeterminism just means not that.