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Author | Topic: Do I have a choice? (determinism vs libertarianism vs compatibilism) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JavaMan Member (Idle past 2573 days) Posts: 475 From: York, England Joined: |
Imagine there is an almost omnipotent, almost omniscient God. It can do everything and anything except know what is going to happen in the future. But while it can't know the future for sure, it can make predictions based on everything which it knows now, which is everything. Those predictions are going to be pretty damn good. I can't imagine a situation where this God ever says to itself "Bugger me! I didn't see that coming! I thought he was going to choose the other one!" Even if you have what feel to you to be utterly ambivalent feelings about vanilla and chocolate, this god is going to know even before your preconcious mind has made its mind up. That would seem to be the case wouldn't it? If you could see all the details of cause and effect laid out before you it's difficult to see how you could be surprised by anything. Even so, I can see some problems: 1. What precisely is the nature of the events your quasi-God is supposed to be observing? We say cause and effect, but are we talking aabout events at the sub-atomic level, at the molecular level, the biological level, the social level? The point I'm trying to make here is similar to one made earlier in the thread by RickJB - that the immutable, deterministic paths of sub-atomic particles, or atoms, or whatever don't really have any bearing on the question of free will, which is a question from a different domain. Knowing everything about the properties of sub-atomic particles, for example, doesn't allow you to predict how chemicals behave. At the sub-atomic level all chemicals are the same. Similarly, knowing everything about the properties of all chemicals found in biological systems doesn't allow you to predict the behaviour of a biological system. At the chemical level all biological systems are identical - all organisms are made up of the same stuff. Now imagine that brain signals and subjective experience stand in exactly the same relation as sub-atomic particles and the chemicals they make up, or as chemicals and the biological systems they make up. What if the operations of your brain generate a higher level system (your subjective experience) that has rules of its own that can't be predicted from the brain signals you're observing? And further, what if one of the emergent properties of that higher level system was a self-awareness that was capable of reflecting on and acting upon the contents of its own awareness? 2. As my wife is after the PC, I'll deal with my second point in a later post (possibly). But RAZD in an earlier post about chaotic systems made essentially the same point I was going to make here (just in case I don't get back to it ). 'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang
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Max Power Member (Idle past 6261 days) Posts: 32 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Joined: |
I think I've been trying to use the whole AI analogy to show that the brain works in a deterministic way, without realizing that compatibalism works with determinism. I appologize for the wasted time.
It seems though, that the thrust of the argument of compatibalism is based on the emergent properties that come from "consciousness." I think this is probably too big to really get into in this thread and possibly I'll write up a new thread on the subject or revive one (I'll have to check).
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
Apologies, this is a rambler. I'm tempted to sit on it a bit longer to sort it out, but the desire to just get it out there and hope that it makes enough sense to you to respond has won through. Hope thats okay!
As you may already have guessed, I've only been looking at people's responses to me and not reading the whole thread. This is a learned response: I always find that if I read many people's posts I always want to reply to them all and then, having bitten off more than I can chew, I give up on the whole thread. I read RAZD's post 8, and although I think his position (like yours I'd imagine) is perfectly fine, I just can't get my head around it. Its strikes me as though he's offering not a god of the gaps but a free-will of the fissures, if you will. But that's not my real objection. To me its a Scylla and Charybdis situation. Determinism and arbitrariness. The universe could be unfolding along predetermined lines. It could be unfolding upon entirely arbitrary lines (but to look around this office everything seems pretty stable), or it could be a mixture of the two - which seems just as possible as it being entirely predetermined. This third option is what I think you might believe in too, and you might be arguing that free will might fit in amongst the random things, and so escape predetermination. To me though, chaos is chaos, and doesn't happen for a reason. The ability to come to decisions seems to be the antithesis of the random to me. Its the ability to look at evidence and come to a conclusion. The same evidence interpreted in the same way will always lead to the same conclusion. Thats the beauty and the power of reasoning. If it could come to two different answers from the same evidence it wouldn't have any power at all. I can also concieve of a fourth option, where events are determined in some cases by randomness, in others predetermination, and it yet other still by neither arbitrariness nor predetermination but by free choice. This free choice would be the ability to see two options and genuinely be able to do either but to choose one. I don't know how any creature could do this, or how such a mechanism could operate. I don't think such a creature would think anything like a human, that is rationally.* RAZD's right - choice might be possible, and it could be that choice might be a legitimate part of a chaotic system. To me though, that doesn't make any sense, and is just as demeaning to us as the idea that everything is predetermined. We are rational beings. That's amazing. We do things for reasons, as far as I can see. They might not be rational reasons in an objective sense, but they are for reasons. So it all seems arse about face to say that there's something chaotic about choice. If anything, the human condition is an escape from the arbitrary, and so to steer towards the Charybdis of randomness merely to escape the Scylla of predetermination seems supremely pointless. The amazing thing about the human condition to me seems to be that it allows us to go through a much richer decision-making process than a tennis racket or a tapeworm. That's enjoyable and life affirming for me, regardless of whether I could do anything else given the circumstances - like a rollercoast is enjoyable and life affirming. But if we reject this, which you do I think, then please tell me how to access the (to me) mysterious third way that isn't governed by predetermination or randomness? *I can't think of a better word than rational but I don't mean rational like a logic machine. Mad people are rational in the sense that they draw conclusions from evidence - its just the very subjective evidence that they have access to.
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Hyroglyphx Inactive Member |
RAZD's right - choice might be possible, and it could be that choice might be a legitimate part of a chaotic system. To me though, that doesn't make any sense, and is just as demeaning to us as the idea that everything is predetermined. We are rational beings. That's amazing. We do things for reasons, as far as I can see. They might not be rational reasons in an objective sense, but they are for reasons. So it all seems arse about face to say that there's something chaotic about choice. I have to concur with you on this one. All these rational choices made from cognizance, certainly seeming to come from our own volition, does not seem to be apart of some chaotic system organizing the disorganized. You could take your deductive reasoning a step further to include nature. What are the odds that all of these things happening at once, with millions of variables to choose from, does chaos never seem to live up to its name? How is that chaos seems to be so orderly and purposeful? And besides, just as you shared, wouldn't it just be tantamount to being predetermined anyway? What have you surmised about freewill :vs: determinism? "There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt
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nwr Member Posts: 6484 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 8.7 |
We need to distinguish between two notions of determinism. I'll call them "cosmic determinism" and "agent determinism", for want of better names. Cosmic determinism is the idea of determinism in the cosmos as a whole. This appears to be what hard determinists assume, in their argument that what will happen is predetermined so any sense of choice is illusory.
I'll use "agent determinism" for the idea that the procedures that control a persons behavior are deterministic, even if the cosmos as a whole is not deterministic. For myself, I don't see a necessary problem in agent determinism. If we want to say that an agent has free will, then we want that agent to be able to determine his choices. So agent determinism would seem to be desirable. On the question of randomness, if we are talking about cosmic randomness, which breaks cosmic determinism, then I don't see that it has the problems that you worry about. However, agent randomness (the alternative to agent determinism) does lead to your concerns. I think a small amount of agent randomness is not really a problem, as long as the agent behavior is predominately due to determined processes. In summary, I don't see that there is any real problem with the kinds of randomness that might exist. Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
Whoops, I hadn't noticed I hadn't responded to this one.
When you talk about "a freedom worth having", I completely and utterly agree with you, so I'm not sure what you are getting at. I agree that adding a random element to avoid determinism doesn't confer a meaningful freedom. All I'm asking - I assume you know this already - is how can free will fit in at all if we accept determinism and/or randomness occur? Both seem contrary to free will. Nwr suggests this is because I have an eccentric definition of free will. I guess that's where this confusion is stemming from. In my view there has to be some third way that avoids arbitrariness and predetermination for free will to work, and I haven't got the faintest idea how that would be arranged. I don't see any gap where free could manage to squeeze in between these two bad boys. The problem I'm having is this. If people want to assert free-will by denying absolute determinism, thats fine. However, it seems to me the only recourse they have is to some argument which can ultimately be boiled down to an invocation of chaos, arbitrariness or randomness, none of which offers even the most paltry fig leaf to protect the notion of free will. How else is it done? Moving on...
Tusko writes: When something is done by a person (or indeed a salmon), it is being done because it has already been predetermined by the brain state. PaulK writes: To clarify that it is NOT done independantly of the actual process of deciding - it is the outcome of that process that is fixed - but it only happens because the process is followed. There is no way to shortcircuit that. I'm not really making any point more profound than this: if I have certain beliefs, then they determine what conclusion I come to. I can't see how to make a distinction between "hard-wiring" for instinct and "beliefs", conscious and unconscious. These facts, written in chemicals and electricity in a brain form the tracks along which a train of thought must necessarily run. Rationality seems to me to be only able to function effectively, indeed to be meaningful, as far as there is determinism. I predict that this isn't going to be satisfactory for you, and its frustrating because I want to be able to see it how you do. Edited by Tusko, : No reason given.
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JavaMan Member (Idle past 2573 days) Posts: 475 From: York, England Joined: |
I quite agree with your comments about randomness here. I should really have finished making my point 2, which was simply to point out chaotic systems as examples of deterministic systems that aren't predictable. (By the way, don't assume that a chaotic system necessarily includes an element of randomness - the rolling of a dice is entirely deterministic, it's just an unpredicatble deterministic process).
Point 2 was actually my lesser point - I was just trying to undermine your assumption that your quasi-God would be able to predict an outcome just because the process that led to it was deterministic. My main point was actually point 1. I'll repeat the salient paragraph here, to save me trying to make the argument again:
Knowing everything about the properties of sub-atomic particles, for example, doesn't allow you to predict how chemicals behave. At the sub-atomic level all chemicals are the same. Similarly, knowing everything about the properties of all chemicals found in biological systems doesn't allow you to predict the behaviour of a biological system. At the chemical level all biological systems are identical - all organisms are made up of the same stuff. Now imagine that brain signals and subjective experience stand in exactly the same relation as sub-atomic particles and the chemicals they make up, or as chemicals and the biological systems they make up. What if the operations of your brain generate a higher level system (your subjective experience) that has rules of its own that can't be predicted from the brain signals you're observing? And further, what if one of the emergent properties of that higher level system was a self-awareness that was capable of reflecting on and acting upon the contents of its own awareness? Can you conceive of free will as an emergent property of consciousness? One that depends on our subjective experience of being aware of our own thoughts? 'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
I don't know whether there are some things that occur completely at random or not. It is possible I suppose for things that we observe that seem to be happening entirely at random could instead be occurring as part of a pattern as yet unsuspected. It could be that they are genuinely random and so completely unpredictable.
But whether the universe is unfolding in a way that is entirely predictable, or whether there is a degree of genuine randomness that makes such predictions impossible, I don't see how free-will fits into the picture. Perhaps this is because my idea of free-will is a bit eccentric. Here it is:
quote: I simply cannot see how a choice can be neither predetermined nor random. Consequently I cannot see how there can be such a thing as free will, at least by my definition. A libertarian notion of free will suggests that decisions are free if they are merely reached through some kind of randomness, which doesn't seem much like free will to me. To me a compatablist notion of free will is all very well, but in a deterministic universe, and given enough information, a person's decisions could all be predicted before they are reached, and so don't seem free to me. Saying that someone is free merely if they are unconstrained physically seems to neglect the importance of beliefs and instincts in leading each person to one possible course of action. Similarly, I don't see how, in a universe with a degree of genuine arbitrariness at some physical level, a compatablist notion of free will could allow genuinely free choices. People in such a universe wouldn't be any more free because they would be subject to the whims of the cosmic dice. An example might help here. You might argue that if there are two things that you feel the same about (like chocolate and vanilla ice-cream), and that when you come to a decision about which one to buy in the ice-cream parlour you are exercising your free-will. To me though, this is either the product of preferences that you are conciously unaware of, or the product of a genuinely arbitrary event in the brain. This expression of true randomness might be allowed because the preferences, conscious or unconscious, are so finely balanced that they allow genuine randomness to come into play. You might respond "well, how do you know that you are guided by subconcious preferences? Thats just a guess on your part because unconcious preferences are necessarily hidden." Alternatively you might say "how do you know that your prefences are sometimes guided by true randomness?" I agree that its speculative, but to me it seems more probable because for free will to work, it seems as though a third, unknown element is introduced into the equation that is neither random nor predetermined. To me this element seems impossible.
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Hyroglyphx Inactive Member |
I simply cannot see how a choice can be neither predetermined nor random. Consequently I cannot see how there can be such a thing as free will, at least by my definition. That's an interesting proposition and one that CS Lewis has touched upon in a latter chapter of "Mere Christianity." His discourse made alot of sense and it nimbly gets around the conundrum of determinism and freewill. As you've shared, both seem to have some fundamental flaw. It almost seems like there are elements of both, and would have to be, without having them cancel each other out. I wish I could remember off-hand how the argument was presented.
You might respond "well, how do you know that you are guided by subconcious preferences? Thats just a guess on your part because unconcious preferences are necessarily hidden." Alternatively you might say "how do you know that your prefences are sometimes guided by true randomness?" I agree that its speculative, but to me it seems more probable because for free will to work, it seems as though a third, unknown element is introduced into the equation that is neither random nor predetermined. To me this element seems impossible. Yeah, but all these arguments are made for beings bound by a timeline. I wouldn't say we are bound by our preferences. Indeed, even if we were, surely we arrived at those preferences testing out our freewill. For instance, I'm not too particular on vanilla or chocolate. Either will do depending on my mood. But I am not a fan of strawberry ice cream at all. The only way I arrived at my decision is by testing all three of my own volition. My preference may determine future outcomes, but that does not mean that I didn't make a meaningful choice since the inception of my original choice. And if God is, then all of our actions are happening now, have yet to happen, and already passed, all at once. And there may be infinite choices for us, things that could have been had we chosen differently. This bit is pure speculation, but it makes some sense philosophically. "There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
An apology is in order here - I wrote an answer to the second point, and as I walked away i remembered there was a first point too! I couldn't go back yesterday because I was busy. Thanks for rephrasing it here for me. I'll do my best to give you an answer.
I guess its possible that you are right, I just can't comprehend the mechanism. I think this is because I have a definition of free will that is atypical.
Javaman writes: And further, what if one of the emergent properties of that higher level system was a self-awareness that was capable of reflecting on and acting upon the contents of its own awareness? I might be over-simplfying what you are saying here. Perhaps I have missed the thrust of a vital subtlety? Because basically I don't see what you say as problematic. I think we are all imperfectly rational decision-makers, but to me this is not an indicator of free-will. However the ability to make decisions is derived (is it an emergent property? is it something else?), and where this responsibility is ulitmately housed (the conscious mind? the unconscious mind?) a self-aware consciousness that is capable of making decisions will be informed by the beliefs and values that it has learned from experience... or perhaps arbitrary factors will creep in somewhere. I realise that this has been my theme for the day and I've mentioned it in about all the posts in this thread today... but if it isn't predetermined and it isn't aribtrary, what is it, this free-will?
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
I think this "agent determinism" distinction is really useful; that's what I've been talking about! Thanks for giving it a name.
I think we agree than that agent determinism and free-will cannot coexist? That's what I think anyway. Although if you have been chained to the wall you have a smaller pool of options than someone who is unchained, you can still only ever reach one decision of how to act given the circumstances, and this will be determined by what the occupier of your preconscious driving seat thinks is the right thing to do given previous experience. Cosmic randomness breaks cosmic determinism but like you I don't think that it has much effect on agent determinism. If there is loads of cosmic randomness or none, I don't see where room could be made for free will. Javaman was talking about free will as an emergent property from randomness, but I am as yet unable to see how the ability to make decisions could be based on something random. To me it looks as though the ability to make decisions comes from the beliefs and the ability to reason (and the physical state of their brain). However the ability to reason arises and how you explain it, I think this is inescapable. Got to dash now! Hope that makes sense.
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nwr Member Posts: 6484 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 8.7 |
I think we agree than that agent determinism and free-will cannot coexist?
Actually, no. We don't agree. I think we agree that the kind of robot that is made today could not have free will. But that's because we see that the behavior of the robot is determined by its programming. I think I would actually deny that the term "agent" is properly applicable to such robots, so there is no agent there to credit with having made decisions. But what about a person, who does meet the requirements of agency. It seems perverse to credit decisions made in the behavior of that person to any agent other than the person. Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber
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JavaMan Member (Idle past 2573 days) Posts: 475 From: York, England Joined: |
Javaman was talking about free will as an emergent property from randomness, but I am as yet unable to see how the ability to make decisions could be based on something random. To me it looks as though the ability to make decisions comes from the beliefs and the ability to reason (and the physical state of their brain). However the ability to reason arises and how you explain it, I think this is inescapable. I think you misunderstood. I was claiming that free will was an emergent property of deterministic processes, not random ones. 'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang
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JavaMan Member (Idle past 2573 days) Posts: 475 From: York, England Joined: |
However the ability to make decisions is derived (is it an emergent property? is it something else?), and where this responsibility is ulitmately housed (the conscious mind? the unconscious mind?) a self-aware consciousness that is capable of making decisions will be informed by the beliefs and values that it has learned from experience... or perhaps arbitrary factors will creep in somewhere. I realise that this has been my theme for the day and I've mentioned it in about all the posts in this thread today... but if it isn't predetermined and it isn't aribtrary, what is it, this free-will? The problem I have with your position, and any hard-determinist position, is that you're basing these assumptions about what's possible on a rational argument, not on either our subjective experience or on any scientific evidence. Science doesn't work like that. Science is based on experience (experiments are just very formal ways of using experience to test out an hypothesis). Now the experience we start with is that pretty much everybody has experience of making decisions or choosing between alternatives. We do it every day. In fact it's so much part of our normal experience, that anyone who believes they're being manipulated like a puppet is considered to be abnormal (there's a technical term for this pathological condition, but I can't remember it offhand ). The aim of science here is to understand how this situation came to be, how we came to have this subjective experience, and what the purpose of it is, not to explain it away with some overly-simplistic rational argument based on a very, very old (and very, very misleading) notion of what the material world is like. Edited by JavaMan, : typo 'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang
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Tusko Member (Idle past 355 days) Posts: 615 From: London, UK Joined: |
Javaman writes: I think you misunderstood. I was claiming that free will was an emergent property of deterministic processes, not random ones. Okay. I agree with this then - apart from the free will bit. We both agree that genuine choice can't arise from the arbitrary. I wish I was having better luch at understanding how you believe that genuine choice can somehow emerge from deterministic processes. I think you believe that when an individual is faced with a choice (and is free from obvious physical constraints that would prevent the most obvious outcomes), that they might sometimes do what seemed to be - at that moment in time and in subjective terms - the second-best course of action. Maybe even the third or fourth best. I'm not just talking about concious choice here, just to make it clear. Wherever the buck stops in terms of decision-making in the brain, I think that this is a strange thing to be saying. Assume for a moment it is possible: why would you ever want to do it? What would be attractive about having the ability to carry out acts that seem less appropriate than others you can concieve of? Of course, or beliefs about the world around us aren't always right. A belief can at best only be a tool to aid interaction with the world outside. But I can't see how we can have anything above or beyond those beliefs. I think this is the key area of disagreement between us. Even if you believe that there is some discrete decision-making stage of the cognitive process, I think the burden is upon you to explain how it could act - or at least act usefully - outside the learned experience of that individual. I don't see how a decision-maker can weigh up the evidence, can indeed even recognise evidence, except in the terms that their experience informs them. I don't think there is anything that we can percieve with our senses that we can have opinions about that don't relate to our experience of them. I think a case in point arises in your post 149 to me. You say
Javaman writes: Now the experience we start with is that pretty much everybody has experience of making decisions or choosing between alternatives. To me, all this demonstrates is that we are taught to believe that we have the ability to choose between alternatives. Where does this belief come from? From other individuals who were taught it in turn. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to teach children something entirely different. This in fact leads back to my thread that I have for the moment abandoned because this discussion feels more fundamental. In that thread I proposed a community who indoctinated their children with a different belief: namely, that we can only ever make one decision in a given circumstance. Perhaps you think this is impossible? For this reason I'm a bit skeptical about beleifs that many hold as self-evident, like the fact that at any moment there might be two different things one could do. Subjective experience is so malleable that I don't think its very useful for evaluative the existence of non-existence fo free will. Consequently, I don't think your attack on hard determinism from subjective experience is pursuasive. That leaves science. Or does it? Isn't it true that the questions that scientists are able to pose are influenced strongly by culture? And that the interpretive frameworks for their results they are similarly hobbled? Could the idea of natural selection have come about without the contribution of Malthus and Lamark? I'm not sure they could. But that's not a whole answer. As you have probably already guessed, I'm not very hot on the latest (or indeed any) developments in cognitive science. But I'd be interested if you could offer me any scientific studies that proport to offer evidence for free-will. (By the way, I'm going to have a look at that article you mentioned now.. I forgot about it... but I think I'd be quite surprised if it was able to offer evidence that free-will existed.) Personally, I don't see the belief in free-will as any more scientific, and less coherent than a belief in hard-determinism... at least at the level of the choice-making agent.
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