“Since all events are causally determined, and we don’t control our past, then we don’t control our future, and if we don’t control our future we have no free will.” The argument is compelling, but fallacious: it depends on an equivocation fallacy, switching from beginning to end between entirely different definitions of “control.” This article is about that. My aim here is to help disentangle you from a semantic confusion that interferes with your ability to make sound judgments about others’ and your own autonomy. And the solution is to abandon the ivory tower and get back in touch with reality—and only use words as they are actually used in everyday life.
I’ve often written on how philosophers and laypeople who think “free will” doesn’t exist are caught in a semantic confusion about what we all even really mean by the term (I’ve also written on how many philosophical disputes are caused by this same failure mode). In the real world, “free will” has nothing to do with defying the laws of causation. It has solely to do with getting to do your will, including allowing your present will to affect your future will—and not having your will thwarted by someone else, or blocked by something in your way. This is what it means in every practical, real-world milieu, from courts of law to medical ethics boards, even everyday moral judgment, self-actualization, and defenses of our personal autonomy.
In no actual application does “free will” ever mean “violating the laws of causation.” That’s just some claptrap theologians and philosophers made up, by forgetting that philosophy should pay attention to reality before trying to make up anything at all. They thus forgot to ask the first and most essential questions of all, “Why do we care? What is this for? And how does it actually work?” In other words, attending to free will in the real world. I’ve covered that in considerable detail already in Sense and Goodness without God (index, “free will”), and in numerous supplementary articles, and in an online course I teach every month on the subject, facing countless questions from numerous students and challengers from all walks of life (and if you have your own million questions on the subject, I encourage you to take that course and ask them there, where you’ll get my full and detailed attention). But after more than a decade of this, never has anyone been able to present any instance in the real world of free will being used in the “contra-causal” sense—as in, not merely talked about, but applied.
That means, for example, in any instance when you ever had to decide whether someone did or didn’t act freely—if they acted with informed consent or not, if they were forced or not, if their autonomy was respected or not—you never “check” if they violated any laws of causation. Nope. You always key on completely different facts to tell whether someone’s autonomy had been violated or not, or even there or not. And ask ten different people and they will give the same answer—given enough real-world information, you will all consistently know when someone acted freely and when they didn’t. And yet at no point did any of you “check” to see if they violated any laws of physics. So that clearly isn’t what you all mean by free will in the real world. You mean something else—the thing you are all looking for, and actually seeing, when telling whether someone is acting freely or not. Which is the same thing all courts of law look for when having to make exactly the same decision. Which is in turn the same thing ethics review boards look for when having to determine if someone’s autonomy was respected or violated or even present. It’s also what we look for when deciding whether we have lived the life we wanted, or the life someone else wanted us to live—whether that pressure and interference came from particular people, or society as a whole. How much of who we are was intentionally and informedly built by us, rather than merely installed or absorbed or “left to happen.”
The Control Condition
“Since all events are causally determined, and we don’t control our past, then we don’t control our future, and if we don’t control our future we have no free will.” Of course we do control our past—as in, we were there, controlling it. So to get this argument to work, we now have to abandon an obvious and ordinary meaning of “control” to mean something else altogether, or forget that we were making decisions in our own past. The premise thus presumes its own conclusion; a circular argument (rather like “abortion is murder because killing is murder”). But rather than untangle that mess, we should instead be asking, “In what sense is it true that if we do control our future, we do have free will?” In other words, start taking seriously the possibility the conclusion is false. What would the word control then have to mean? And does that just happen to be what it usually means in the real world?
My thermostat controls my heater. This is a factually true statement. Yet no laws of physics are being violated. It would be nonsensical of you to insist my thermostat doesn’t control my heater on the mere trivial fact that I, in turn, control my thermostat—and my body’s evolved heat tolerances control my control of my thermostat, and random accidents of celestial history control my body’s evolved heat tolerances, and the Big Bang controlled all the random accidents of celestial history, therefore “the Big Bang controls my heater.” This is a ridiculous semantic game that simply ignores how language works in the real world; and not just how it works, but why. Because we built it that way for a reason.
The Big Bang is completely irrelevant to whether my thermostat is controlling my heater or not—as becomes obvious when, for example, we are trying to find out why my heater turns on at one time and not another. “The Big Bang caused that” is factually true (in a hyper-literal, causally determinist sense), but completely useless information, if what you want to know is why my heater is behaving as it is; even more so if you want my heater to behave differently. Because either way, you’d better figure out that it’s my thermostat that is controlling it, and where my thermostat is, and how to reset it. That’s how the real world works. The ivory tower can go freeze to death for its complete failure to grasp how thermostats work, while it incessantly rambles on about the Big Bang controlling my heater. That’s simply not what “control” means.
Control in ordinary everyday discourse means: if we removed the thing that controls outcome x, it will observably cease to control the outcome x. If you remove my thermostat, my heater won’t turn on, much less at a certain temperature. If you remove the President who controls in odd ways how discretionary budgets get spent, those discretionary budgets will likely get spent differently. If you remove the magistrate who is subversively controlling the police, his subversive control over the police will observably end. If you force a woman to marry someone, you have removed her control over whom she marries. If you removed me from all decision-making about my future, I then no longer have any control over my future. But if it takes removing me from all decision making to do that, then it follows inserting me back in restores my control over my future. I therefore, in every sense that matters, control my future. Obviously not entirely (my will is not free of every constraint—I am not an omnipotent deity), but significantly enough to make a difference—a difference worth realizing and protecting.
Yes, many other contributing causes are “involved.” If I lock my thermostat so no one else can reset it, then I fully control my thermostat, but if I leave it open for anyone to set, then I only provisionally control my thermostat; others then can control it. Then the only common theme to how my heater operates is that my thermostat controls it. Everything else is just external contingencies. In like manner, biological history determined my heat tolerances and thus has a causal effect on how I decide to set my thermostat. But it won’t set that thermostat without me. I have to be a part of the causal chain. And my involvement has to be conscious and deliberate, not something I don’t even know I’m doing and thus am not even as myself deciding to do; nor can I be fooled into thinking I’m doing something else, as then my will is certainly not free, because it is not my will that is actually then being done.
This is obvious when we look at when we all agree our free will is being taken away. If someone threatens to harm me unless I set my thermostat where they want me to and not where I want it, I am no longer freely choosing where to set my thermostat. “But your evolved heat tolerances have that same effect on you” is false, because the person coercing me is not changing my heat tolerances, they are not causing my will to be what it is—they are preventing my will from enacting what it wants. My evolved tolerances determine what I want; they do not subvert what I want. That I was caused to have the heat tolerances I do, and cannot change them, does not mean I am not free to set my thermostat where I want to set it.
“Where I want to set it” is my will. And my will is free not when it is uncaused. Wholly regardless of even physics, every decision must logically necessarily “have causes.” Even decisions that are “random” must be caused to be so by some underlying fact or prior decision or reason, and being wholly random cannot in any sense be said to be caused “by us” (and as such, the idea of “contra-causal free will” is actually a logical impossibility). So “free of being caused” is not what anyone in any real world application means by freedom of the will. Rather, my will is free when nothing and no one interferes with it—when what I will is allowed to happen—and that means, no one tries to replace my will with theirs (like someone coercing me to act against my own will), and nothing thwarts my will (like a defective thermostat that constantly resets to some value I did not set it to).
This is also the case when I want to go against my heat tolerances. I might choose to set my thermostat low, and endure some discomfort, because I have decided I would rather save money. Even that choice will “have causes” (all the things that caused me to value frugality over comfort, for example, which can be a whole chaos of external contingencies ranging from biological proclivities to parental upbringing, even a whole history of political regimes determining my access to resources). But what makes it my will is that it is the will generated by me—who I am—without any interference. That means no mad scientist sticking electrodes in my brain, no one pointing a gun at me. And what makes that will free is that nothing is preventing that will from being realized: I actually can set my thermostat to an uncomfortable temperature whenever I want to. I don’t have to control whether I want to in order to still be free to do what I want.
That is what it means to say I control my thermostat: no one else controls it (either directly, such as by sneaking in and setting it to some other value—or indirectly, such as by coercing me); and but for my causally controlling it, it would do nothing at all. Take me—and my intentions (more on which in a moment)—out of the causal chain and it doesn’t happen. And this is what it means to say “I” (and not merely some random part of my body) controlled the decisions of my past, and thus control my future. It does not mean I controlled all the decisions (much less events) of my past. And it does not mean any (much less all) of my decisions had no causes. To say otherwise is as absurd as saying the Big Bang controls my heater. It does not. Not in any relevant or useful sense. My thermostat controls my heater. And so do I, by controlling my thermostat. And as long as I am free to do that, I am acting with free will. No one is stopping me. Nothing is thwarting me. This is what free will means in ordinary reality.
The Intent Condition
What then is the difference between me and my thermostat? Does the thermostat have free will? Of course not. Because it does not have a will. It is not a conscious being that even has desire-states. It has no intent to do anything, and has no ability to assent to anything. It lacks any knowledge or concern over what it does, or what is done to it. That which has no will obviously cannot have a free one. I am not “coercing” my thermostat when I set it. It has no will for me to subvert, in that way or any other.
Free will thus requires intent; more particularly, conscious assent. A will that is free is a desire we consciously want to satisfy, and which is not prevented from being satisfied, and which we informedly assent to satisfying. It is not a desire “that is uncaused.” All desires are caused. That has nothing to do with the matter.
Free will means acting with autonomy, a Greek loan word that means, literally, “self-controlling.” That which is autonomous is that which operates on its own. That doesn’t mean free of all external causation; it means free of interference in enacting what it wants, and in assenting to what it wants. An autonomous state means a state that no other government can override the decisions of. It is “self-governing” not in the sense that it can ignore the laws of physics or the demands of trade agreements or external threats and internal difficulties. And it ceases to really be “autonomous” if its internal decisions are being manipulated by external powers, rather than left to its own transparent devices; if its people are being tricked into thinking the decisions being made are their own, it is no longer really their decisions governing the outcome. Likewise a person who is “self-governing,” who acts with “self-control,” who “decides for themselves.” These never mean “free of all causes.” They mean only free of particular kinds of causes—those that would actually subvert their will; not those that would merely determine their will.
Yes, in some cases, that does mean having free will requires being free of interference in choosing what we want, free to determine our own will. If we are being denied the opportunity to evaluate and assent to our own desires as we will to do, our free will is again being subverted. We have no free will over biologically inherited desires, like the desire to eat or be loved or get along with others; and we know that, and thus we know we can only act within the space of freedom we are allowed. We might even be able to vet the desires we were inalienably given and assent to them—on objective analysis it makes sense that we should desire to eat and be loved or get along with others; if we were soundly informed and had the power to change these desires, we wouldn’t. Because we would know, being suitably informed, that we would be less satisfied with our lives without these desires: we would be more inclined to become malnourished, and nourishing ourselves would become pleasureless; we would be more inclined to become unlovable, and would deprive ourselves of the pleasure of being loved for who we really are, and further increase our self-defeating conflicts and disconnects with others; and so on.
Yes, we could perhaps see the utility of eliminating hunger if we acquired bodies that no longer needed to eat, but (A) we haven’t yet acquired such bodies and (B) we still would prefer a world where we can experience culinary pleasures, to one where we couldn’t, had we a choice. And yes, we could perhaps see the utility of eliminating social desires if other people didn’t exist and we weren’t physically dependent on them and didn’t benefit from them, but (A) other people do exist, and we are physically dependent on social systems and benefit from them, and (B) we still would prefer a world where we can experience social pleasures, and even the physical benefits and advantages of a social system, to a world where we couldn’t, had we a choice.
So it is not merely that fate “saddled” us with a bunch of random desires we can do nothing about. In actual fact most of our desires we can change, through decision, habituation, and reorientation of belief; and of the few we can’t change, most have objective utilities, such that we would have given them to ourselves (or something their equivalent) even had evolution not. Only those very few desires that remain that (A) we can’t change and (B) even on adequate knowledge we objectively would get rid of, if we could, are desires that subvert our freedom of will. And we always acknowledge this. That some things, sometimes thwart our will does not mean we have no free will ever (as if only omnipotent deities could “have” free will). That isn’t what we ever mean by “free will” in the real world; “free will” is never a synonym of “omnipotence.”
The Autonomized Android
These distinctions are made evident in the science fiction film Being John Malkovich, where the protagonist finds out how to “inhabit” someone else’s body and control it, while they remain entirely conscious but impotent spectators of everything that then happens with their body. The consciousness shunted aside and no longer “in control” of their body is the consciousness that has lost free will; the consciousness that has moved in and taken over their body, by contrast, is acting freely. The hard determinist would have us believe “there is no difference” between those two people. That is patent hogwash. And thus so is hard determinism.
And this is actually why free will matters. We don’t want to be passengers in a life someone else is controlling. And if you want to be in control of your own life, you have to first acknowledge what the difference is between being in control of it, and not in control of it—the difference between being a passive slave to others’ opinions and the happenstance trends of the external world or random walks of your internal whims, and being a person who actively examines and vets who they are and what they want and the decisions they are making, and begins selecting only those they informedly assent to on a basis of evidence and reason, and thus ends being a wholly passive victim of social forces.
That difference matters. And that is why free will matters. If you start training yourself to see no free will in anything, you are training yourself to see no difference between being the manipulable slave of society or an independent thinker who actually chooses who they become, what they want and believe, based on evidence and reason, rather than influence and easiness. You will be training yourself to see no difference between being the puppet and being the puppeteer; which ensures the puppet you will be.
To grasp all of this imagine a different science fiction scenario:
A sentient android has been manufactured to believe it is Indiana Jones and that the first woman it sees after waking each day is his fictional love interest Marion Ravenwood, all in service to a sex club catering to women who want to live out their sexual fantasies. To prevent him from discovering this impelled delusion, the android has been programmed to “not perceive” any information that would expose the truth to them. For example, if any woman, posing as a client, tries telling him the truth, he will simply never consciously hear or remember her words to that effect, or he will disbelieve her with a pre-programmed “insurmountable confidence,” such that persuading him of the truth will be impossible even should he recognize what is being told him.
I think it would be obvious to anyone that this android is being denied a great deal of their free will. They are being manipulated by lies, and with meddling in the very structure of their brain, to believe false things; and with the specific result that someone else’s will (that of the clients he’s being made to satisfy, and of the company serving them with this “product”) is being substituted for his own. Because of their intentional interference he cannot assent to the beliefs and desires he has been assigned, and thus they are not really his desires in the sense required for him to be really an autonomous person. This is manipulation; and in result, slavery.
Now imagine some valorous women blast their way into the company and rescue this android from his invisible prison, and escaping to safety, realize they have to change his programming to make it possible for him to learn the truth about himself. They then face the conundrum of how they respect his autonomy at that point. How can they “free” him? If they “reprogram” him, aren’t they violating his autonomy as much as his manufacturer did? Is there really no difference between what the company did to him, and what they’d be doing to him?
To be consistent, the hard determinist would have to insist there isn’t. They’d have to maintain there is no difference between the company lying to him and preventing him from discovering the truth and the women removing those program-locks and telling him the truth—a truth he could then be persuaded of by a presentation of evidence and sound reasoning, and not by “simply being programmed to believe it.” Fact is, far from there being no difference, there is a universe of difference between his being programmed to believe something, and his being programmed to believe only claims he can personally vet with actual evidence and reason. And that difference is precisely the difference between having a will that is free or a will that is unfree. He could then apply the same “clean” tool (of evidence-based reasoning) to vet all his programming and decide how much of what he was assigned (how much of “Indiana Jones”) he wants to remain to be, and whether even the desires guiding that choice are warrantable independently of his having been programmed to have them. He would then become more of his own person than he began.
“But he would never know for sure he wasn’t still being tricked” is technically true, but that requires maintaining an elaborate Cartesian Demon in control of his every thought and movement. In his freed state he could scour through his own programming code and verify there were no “belief locks” still there manipulating him; and any effort to manipulate that process (such as recursively programming him to be blind to that very same code, or otherwise tricking him) becomes increasingly difficult (and quite frankly, expensive) to maintain. It becomes increasingly improbable the more tests he mounts, continually requiring a more elaborate and resourceful manipulation of reality. As in The Truman Show, the trickery will fail eventually. Reality will give away the game.
But even then the issue is epistemic, not ontological. It would not be “no one has free will, because everyone could be the victim of a Cartesian Demon,” as that’s a possibiliter fallacy (“maybe there is a Cartesian Demon, therefore probably there is a Cartestian Demon”). Ontologically, there remains a very real and relevant difference between that android’s code lacking any belief-locks such as the company had installed—and instead being full of evidence-based reasoning procedures—and being the other way around, tricked and manipulated, recoded to conveniently fail at evidence-based reasoning whenever needed. Which ontological state he was in would merely be an epistemological question. Whereas free will is the ontological question. The android free of those locks and possessed of the ability to self-examine and self-correct in response to evidence and reason is free in precisely the way the android belabored with those locks and devoid of the converse ability is not. The hard determinist’s insistence that there is no ontological difference between those two androids is simply boiled hogwash they should be embarrassed even to be attempting to convince us of—much less themselves.
Conclusion
The reprogrammed android in that scenario is manifestly, indeed physically more free than its factory-default analog. And we exist somewhere in between—we are not “perfectly rational”, but neither are we complete robots “programmed at the factory.” We have some capacity for evidence-based reasoning and can thus vet our programming and change it. We can change what we desire, what our objectives are, what to believe, whom to help or obey, or defy and oppose. We can change those things irrationally, reactively—and thus with less free will, being more controlled than in control. But we can also change them rationally, actively—and thus take more control over our lives, and thus be more free than we’d otherwise be, more a product of our own reasoning and conscious assent. And the difference between those states is not only real, and not only increasingly achievable, it is extraordinarily important to work toward and obtain. And you won’t likely do that if you are led to believe you can’t, that there is “no difference” between being in one state or the other.
Already, that one can have different amounts of free will proves free will exists—because obviously you can’t have “more” or “less” of something that doesn’t even exist. But more importantly, only by understanding what free will really is, and how to increase your degree of it, will you increase your degree of it. Hard determinism will not help you do that. More likely, it will hinder you in any such advancement. And this is why compatibilism is not merely correct belief, it is essential to bettering yourself as a human being. All the supposed “benefits” of hard determinism—like acquiring a more objective grasp and thus (ironically) more control over your own emotions, or a more sanguine perspective on the unchangeables of life, or more sympathy for the passive victims that society or circumstance has molded into fools or monsters—are all achievable, indeed more honestly and informedly achieved, without hard determinism. Compatibilism produces all these same benefits in full measure, without the harmful effect of believing—and trying to convince others to believe—that no one can be more free than they are, or that no one is ever free at all.
You cannot increasingly free yourself from manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy, if you don’t believe “freedom” or “autonomy” even exist. Hard determinism thus condemns you to being the victim of manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy, by denying there is any difference between their presence or absence; it then even virally recruits you into trying to make others into victims of these themselves. A proper grasp of what free will really is, and why it matters, and how to increase (and not diminish) everyone’s proportion of it is a requirement for anyone who wants to make the world a better place, and their lives better in it.
After all, if you are not asking “What does it take to be free?” you will never discover what the answer is, much less take steps to implement it.
-:-
For a deeper dive into this subject see my next article Why Syllogisms Usually Suck: Free Will Edition.
If you believe in causality/hard determinism, then you are wrong. Simply put, in that sort of universe the notion of control is just an illusion and has no impact on the universe at hand… as there is only one past, one present as the direct result of that one past and only one future with only the illusion of other possibilities and so your argument for control, while part of this caused universe, is of no value.
So you literally just didn’t read the entire article?
Everything you said is extensively refuted there.
Read the article you are pretending to comment on.
Then make an informed comment.
“So you literally just didn’t read the entire article?”
I am wanting to write about this stuff at some point (morality, politics, psychology etc). You seem to have to write this response on almost every article, where someone comments their idea and its literally the thing you are trying to address. It happens so often. There must be some way to alleviate this.
The articles are quite long, maybe a bullet summery of what is addressed or a TLDR at the beginning or something. It is frustrating as a reader, is must be significantly more frustrating for the author.
You literally did not address any argument in my article already refuting your comment. And even when you were called out on that, your only rebuttal is to complain that I called you out on it.
If this is your idea of how to win an argument, I pity you.
Try actually reading the article and commenting on what it actually argues. Merely gainsaying its first sentence and ignoring the rest of the article is a waste of everyone’s time here, including your own.
Your link to compatibilism contains the following critique:
To cite just one shortcoming, various mental illnesses can cause a person to act as she wants and do so unencumbered; yet, intuitively, it would seem that she does not act of her own free will. For example, imagine a person suffering from a form of psychosis that causes full-fledged hallucinations. While hallucinating, she might “act as she wants unencumbered,” but she could hardly be said to be acting of her own free will. Consequently, the classical compatibilist owes us more.
How would you answer that?
That’s not an objection; that’s a confirmation.
In Sense and Goodness without God and some of the articles I listed address the mental illness issue by extensively citing the U.S. Supreme Court and Model Penal Code statements that explicitly discuss the very matter. And their discussions track reality, not ivory tower concerns. And what you find there is that the schizophrenic is not “unencumbered.” So the quoted complaint is conflating “deceived into thinking you are unencumbered” with “actually being unencumbered.” Free will is not the mere belief that you are free (that is an epistemic question); free will is actually being free (that is an ontological question). Hence my android example.
The consequence is that we do indeed lose free will under some psychiatric conditions in some situations, when they do indeed “encumber” us. For example, a schizophrenic who kills someone believing it was self-defense because they were hallucinating being attacked, and had no way to know that, is deemed to lack mens rea under the law—they have no criminal intent, and thus are not guilty of a crime. They genuinely believed they were acting in self defense, and that is an established defense.
But this is not because their disease caused the action. There is no insanity defense if one’s insanity merely causes an action; it must specifically deprive a subject of their autonomy, either through deception, as with psychosis, or the bypassing of conscious control altogether, as with epilepsy or Tourette syndrome.
Hence under the law, the reason the schizophrenic lacks free will in that condition and thus is innocent under the law is because their will was deceived, and thus indirectly restrained. They acted freely on the information they had; they simply were “lied to” by their senses, and thus they acted rightly, not knowing it wasn’t correct. This is why knowledge and intent are required elements of a crime. In that respect they indeed lacked free will, just not in the “coerced” sense but in the same sense as the android in my example.
One can say they had some free will, insofar as they were not “forced” to defend themselves (they could have chosen to “turn the other cheek,” say; their mental illness would have had no effect on that response, so they did freely choose to act in self defense), but that again confirms my point that free will exists by degrees. Which actually entails it exists. You can’t have “more” or “less” of a thing that doesn’t exist.
Hence the issue is confusing “my will was caused” with “my will was not free.” That equation simply does not exist in the concept of free will actually applied in the world. Escaping causation isn’t what free will is about; it’s about escaping certain kinds of causes, such that you (A) can make decisions and (B) informedly assent to them. This is how it is applied everywhere in the real world, from courts of law to interpersonal moral judgment. And the schizophrenic in the example, like the android, lacks condition (B). They have thus had their free will impaired (and impaired relevantly: they are not deemed a murderer).
Just one other response to this is that, part of the amount of free will one has stems from the level of competence one has. That is competence to evaluate the world and form rational beliefs, competence to make action plans that would fulfil desires based on those beliefs etc. A human is more morally competent than a tiger because of the increased ability to evaluate etc. Mental illness reduces competence and thus actions are less free.
The more competent you are the more free you are to do otherwise (in general, for these general types of situations, judgments or actions).
Simon is indeed repeating what my article says: that free will exists by degrees and below a certain level of mental capacity you lack free will altogether. Any correct account of free will must be able to explain those facts.
I go into an ice cream store, look at all the flavors and think, “What looks good to me?” Is free will doing the deciding?
“The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all nations of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.”
Bertrand Russell
If you get to choose the one you want, you have free will. If you don’t, you don’t.
Bertrand Russell was stuck in the ivory tower, ignoring reality and how free will as a concept is actually applied and determined in real world situations. Convincing himself that a human will does not cause anything in the world is one of his greatest blunders. A human will manifestly does cause all sorts of things in the world. As one can prove by removing human wills from any chain of causation and watching what happens differently.
Free will isn’t the source of the decision but a property of the decision-making process. Treating free will as a source is where we start getting into magic sources of causality.
That’s a good way to put it, Paul.
Free will is a condition—as should have been obvious grammatically from the use of a descriptive adjective: free. We have scientifically established that a will exists (people want outcomes, and make choices to produce them, and different things happen when they do make choices than when they don’t). So all one then need grasp is what is the difference, in ordinary life, between a will that is free and a will that is not.
The answer to that question becomes clear when you look at what distinctions are actually referred to when determining whether someone acted freely or not—in courts of law especially, which have honed the task in meticulous, time-tested detail across thousands of years, but also in less formal venues (such as medical ethics boards, which have to decide whether a patient was able to consent, and did consent, to a given medical procedure; in sexual ethics, where we have to decide whether someone is consenting to a particular sexual act or not; and so on), and in everyday life (how do we decide when our freedom to choose is protected or taken away? how do we decide whether someone intentionally harmed us or only accidentally did? how do we decide whether someone really earned an accolade or not? and so on).
Never, ever, in any of those situations do we ever look for violations of the laws of physics. That is never in any way whatever relevant to answering the question of whether we acted freely or not in any given case. The only things we look for are the presence of causal conditions, not their absence: knowledge and intent; desire and assent; informed consent. Have it, and your acts of will are free. Lack it, and your acts of will are not free. This isn’t a metaphysical power. It’s a state of being. Until someone understands that, they will never understand what free will is.
These seem to be the key points here. Comments follow.
1) Much thinking is unconscious, and is always inextricable from the state of the body. The picture of a conscious mind somehow giving orders to a body is a false image, the doctrine of the soul restated in superficially secular terms. There is no “my” will to be thwarted in the sense implied.
2) In everyday moral language, free will means the proposition that the soul has the power to determine actions. Apologists for this view in my experience equivocate this point, pretending for example that supposedly extreme cases, such as mental illness, are properly allowed for. In practice, of course, mental illness is rarely, if ever allowed as a defense. Chemical dependencies are actively punished, correctly so, according to compatibilism. Every day compatibilism tells us a person who gets sucked into payday loans is merely a fool who should be expected to pay, as they chose freely. Compatibilism is a classic motte-and-bailey argument meant to justify punishment meant to break the evil will of bad souls or to wreak retribution or both.
3) Quite aside from how it can be demonstrated that “we” can change most of our desires at will, this implicitly violates competent biology, ignoring variation in human beings. It is the equivalent of a manager picking the strongest, fastest worker on an assembly line to set the pace. Any such alleged process must have variable results for individuals, because they are individuals. Further, no such process will be inevitably perfect, and individuals will “freely” fail to change. So much for the merely verbal concession that “free will” is not a synonym for “omnipotence.” In everyday life, compatibilists think fat people have freely chosen to overeat and thus, entirely correctly by compatibilist principles, blame them for being fat.
4) Capacity for evidence-based reasoning is not an act of free will. It is not even immune to basic biology, such as blood sugar levels. It is entirely inseparable from social life, which is not simply formal education. There are no magical revelations from philosophy, religion and law of what is “rational.”
5) Acknowledging variation in human beings, acknowledging the reality of brains being part of the body, acknowledging that there is no soul that is our true self that can revise our wants according to the dictates of reason, these things are not the causes of human unfreedom. The idea that hard determinism is an active evil ignores the fact that compatibilism as justification for punishment has always been the silk glove for the iron fist. It is compatibilism, free will, that has always justified external compulsion of bad people. The idea that self-will by an immaterial soul that reorders the desires of the body is an entirely false picture of humanity. It is not even clear that the ideal of autonomy implicitly presented here doesn’t falsify the social nature of human beings in general. A hermit is self-willed but is an outlier in human personality. Claiming that a bad idea like hard determinism is the cause of unfreedom is obscurantism.
Hard determinism does not need to justify wants as meeting some nonexistent ideal of rationality. Hard determinism that accepts human life in general is not an exercise in autonomy but a social existence needs only accept that the requirements of social life—without which there are no individuals with or without “autonomy”—are the general interest.
(1) “Much thinking is unconscious” is irrelevant. If all thinking were unconscious, then free will would not exist. Hence free will exists when we consciously evaluate and assent to any decision we make. Even decisions generated, hence caused by unconscious process.
Insofar as our conscious assent is not involved (e.g. epilepsy, Tourette syndrome), free will does not exist. But insofar as our conscious assent is causally involved in what we eventually decide to do, and does so without being deceived, we have free will. Where ideas or desires come from is irrelevant to this assessment. Free will exists at the conscious monitoring stage, not before (it resides when and where we formulate knowledge and intent in our decision). Which means the actual information processing, not awareness of its occurrence; it takes milliseconds to process an awareness of that conscious monitoring, but it is in that monitoring, not the final awareness of it, that free will resides. Take that monitoring away, and you take away free will.
In other words, the only way to deprive someone of free will in the real world sense is to physically deceive them (e.g. manipulate their will with lies) or physically force (e.g. push) or coerce (e.g. threaten) them. This is what free will means in everyday life, in courts of law, everywhere it has any actual application in human society. When we discuss whether someone acted with consent or not, we are discussing whether they acted freely or not. Free will is thus a synonym of consensual action, not freedom from “all causes,” much less freedom from unconscious processes.
And we know this because that’s how everyone acts in the real world; we never ask if someone defied the laws of physics or had no unconscious processing when we ask whether they consented to some outcome. We ask if they were honestly informed and aware, were allowed to evaluate and assess the choice, and were allowed to do what they chose. That is what “free will” means everywhere it matters. The ivory tower definition of free will has no practical application and thus has never been applied anywhere. Useless concepts ought to be abandoned. We ought to attend to reality instead.
(2) I have no idea where you get any of that about compatibilists. I have to call your bluff here: find me an actual confirmed compatibilist who says anything the like of what you inferred. Because in my experience they say quite the opposite of everything you just alleged. See my discussion of the insanity defense, for example, in Sense and Goodness without God. Indeed, it would be irrational of a compatibilist to make those statements; such attitudes would not be coherent with compatibilism itself.
(3) I did not say we can change “most” desires “at will” (if what you mean by that is “instantly”; for I said “through decision, habituation, and reorientation of belief,” not “instantly”). It is a scientifically proven fact (and indeed, of biology) that people can change their beliefs, attitudes, goals, desires, decisions, quite extensively. That it often takes time and effort is irrelevant to the fact that they can do it. So you cannot stand on some denial of this capacity. Its existence is a fully established empirical fact. And indeed, denying this scientific fact is the very danger I am calling hard determinists out for.
Meanwhile, once again, I have never heard any compatibilist say “fat people have freely chosen to overeat” and thus are fully to blame for their medical condition; bluff called: give me evidence of this or admit you have none. That notion is not even coherent with the compatibilist position. See Dennett, Freedom Evolves, pp. 293ff., for a coherent, and scientifically informed, discussion of the actual place “willpower” has in a compatibilist framework.
(4) “Capacity for evidence-based reasoning is not an act of free will” is not relevant. I did not say it was. To the contrary, I said the capacity for evidence-based reasoning is one way to exercise free will; as in, we do not freely choose to have a will or to have a free will, rather, we have one insofar as we are able, and allowed, to make decisions using some measure of evidence-based reasoning when we choose to; and we are the more free, the more we base decisions on evidence and reason—thus, as I said, free will exists by degrees; it is not binary.
I also explicitly said there are many causes of our decisions, including biological; free will does not abide in freedom from causes, it abides in conscious informed assent to decisions. If some biological fact were to make someone incapable of producing conscious informed assent to decisions, they lack free will. Exactly as we conclude: those so drugged they cannot consent lack free will; those who are not so drugged, have free will. The ability to consent, and its exercise without interference, is free will.
That has nothing to do with whether our consent “had causes.” Consent always has causes. Having causes does not mean we can never consent to anything. The distinction between “consented” and “not consented” is one-to-one identical to “had free will” and “lacked free will.” And yet never do we conclude no one ever consents to anything “because determinism.” Yet that hard determinists must think so to be consistent is what is dangerously erroneous about hard determinists. They are simply not using any concept of free will used in the real world.
(5) Compatibilists are typically physicalists. They do not believe in souls. They also concur humans vary. And that all decisions have causes. So I have no idea what you are going on about here.
You seem in your conclusion to be confusing “hard determinism” with “determinism.” Maybe you are unfamiliar with the vocabulary. Compatibilists are determinists—by definition. That’s what “compatibilism” refers to: the conclusion that the concept of free will applied in the real world is “compatible” with determinism. “Hard” determinists are a subset of determinists who deny that compatibility. And that is what I demonstrate is toxic. Not “determinism.” After all, I am a determinist myself. And just repeatedly advocated it as a given in the article you are commenting on.
1)The unconscious processes affect the supposedly conscious stage, which does not even exist in the strong sense compatibilism logically requires. The judges who hand down harsher sentences before lunch than after have free will in your sense. But in assessing the morality of punishments, your compatibilism is irrelevant and misleading. Compatibilists do not advocate for criminal justice based on deterrence. Indeed, they are not notable for advocating rehabilitation!
2) Most people in daily life are compatibilist, in precisely your sense. The demand to find a professional ideologist trying to justify retributive punishments, or escalating punishments designed to shatter recalcitrance, i.e., a trained compatibilist philosopher who will acknowledge that compatibilism is in fact the prevailing attitude, ignores that compatiblism is a bunch of excuses designed to avoid the ugly reality of compatibilism in practice. It’s like demanding that a Republican politician should openly admit that their policies are designed to favor rich people. Demanding a confession is not calling a bluff. But I will call yours: Cite the compatilbilist philosophers campaigning against the penal system, repudiating lex talionis as barbarism, condemning denial of social causes of crime as superstition.
3)Again, most people in everyday life are compatibilists, even the ones who, for example, give lip service to the notion that the psychotic are not criminally responsible…then convict them, wail about criminals getting off on technicalities, pressure politicians for severe prosecutions and deny psychiatric treatment to prisoners. Yes, it is incoherent for compatibilists to do such things, or merely fat shame. But they do. It’s compatibilism that is incoherent. The irrelevant response that there are philosophy journals that pretend such real world thinking isn’t true compatibilism is exactly like the people who pretend that refined theologians are the real deal, and the actual beliefs held by ordinary people are somehow unrelated.
4)Since evidence based reason, habituation and reorientation of belief are acts of will, then fat people have simply refused to reason on evidence, cultivated habits and reoriented their beliefs, which is why claiming compatibilism doesn’t fat shame. It may be that the gut microbes have as much to do with obesity as their freely willed gluttony. Or maybe not? Maybe that sort of thinking is just more despicable hard determinist hatefulness depriving fat people of true freedom, by undermining their belief in their power to choose consciously! But, in practice, most people are compatibilists. The reality you deny is that social practice, despite the alleged justification by compatibilism, is unjustifiable, save by some sort of speculative, contemplative reason that substitutes for reality, especially social reality.
5)A free will attained by conforming the emotions and habits to the precepts of ideals asserted by philosophy/religion/law (in this context the three inhumanities are indistinguishable) is a secularized disguise for the soul. It is a pompous substitute for the libertarian free will with escape clauses for whenever an unfashionable cruelty is justified.
Look, reason is instrumental or it is nothing. It is not the touchstone for molding the soul, however much philosophers imagine themselves as ministers without portfolio, no official office in religion but nevertheless, somehow, possessing magisterium. The purpose of compatibilism, to justify the status quo, ignores the status quo is frequently barbarous. I’ve talked mostly about the criminal system, something with you’ve studiously avoided admitting you endorse. But in what sense is there free will in something like war? Compatibilism has nothing to say about the free will infested with bad ideas imposed by social forces. Compatibilism is apologetics.
Consciousness doesn’t exist? Conscious assent has no causal effect on our behavior? What pseudoscience are you on about?
Do you really think that even when you don’t assent to a behavior your body will do it anyway? Or that when you do assent, your body will ignore you? That you don’t consciously control any decision you ever make? That there is no causal connection between your character and desires and knowledge, and your choices? The entirety of the sciences of mind contradict your bizarre worldview here.
You are confusing the correctness of a decision with its freedom. Free will isn’t limited to perfectly rational decisions. Those judges didn’t choose one sentence, but then pronounce another, nor were they forced to decide as they did, nor were they mentally incompetent or lied to; they were fully aware of what they were choosing and consented to those choices. They freely chose each time. That the choice is sometimes illogical or inconsistent is not a factor in assessing whether it was free. How you don’t know the difference escapes me.
Actually most people in daily life have no coherent understanding of their own intuitions. There is a ton of empirical philosophy demonstrating this, specifically with regard to free will (regular people vacillate between LFW and compatibilist and hard determinist positions depending on context; and rarely know anything about how things like “the insanity defense” or medicalization of bodily conditions actually work). Real free will is what their intuitions (their behaviors) actually track; not what they mistakenly think or say they do. And this has been formally codified in institutions that have paid particular attention to this fact and thus aligned formal concepts with intuitions and their demonstrated function and utility, e.g. courts of law, ethics committees, etc.
That latter outcome, where we see rational, well-thought-out applications of a concept that actually affects people’s lives, that’s the real thing. Not the made up things or irrational errors of the ivory tower or hoi polloi. Since the only thing that matters is the actual thing that exists—as in, actually affects people’s judgments about other people and themselves, actually affects outcomes at law, actually affects human behavior—that’s the only kind of free will we should be talking about. Just as we should not waste time talking about faeries; we should be talking about ferries. No matter how many people irrationally believe in faeries or act like they exist. Because only ferries actually exist and perform an actual social function.
No, illogical people do that. For irrational reasons. Because most people are irrational. Not compatibilists; compatibilists are the philosophically minded who actually have reasoned out how free will works and identified its compatibility with determinism; they actually know what the concept is and thus can rationally reach conclusions about the world through its application. Hence you will not find a person who actually intelligibly calls themselves a compatibilist and says those things. Because they know better, precisely because of the lessons an understanding of compatibilism teaches. That’s why we should learn those lessons. Because it’s actually people operating on LFW or ignorance of causation who say those things you credit; self-identifying compatibilists are neither—which is the point of teaching people to think more like compatibilists.
Who says this? You just did. Not me. Nor any self-identifying compatibilist. Actual compatibilists say this. Learn it. Live it.
You are confusing free will with cause of mind. What causes a mind is irrelevant to whether free will exists, and vice versa. We just happen to know no souls exist. Only brains. Free will is just computational assessment. Yet we can determine when and where it exists and doesn’t, without even knowing that, because free will is solely about whether conscious assent exists or doesn’t exist. It “just so happens” that we also know that it is brains that generate that assent or dissent, not souls. So you can cut it with your bullshit about souls.
This is exactly the opposite of the truth. LFW holds that nothing causes consent. Compatibilism holds that consent is entirely caused, such as by reason, character, knowledge, and desires. Those are not the same things. They are exactly the opposite things. And no one who actually affirms compatibilism acts otherwise or does any of the bullshit things you claim.
Too vague a question. If you mean, e.g, “Was the United States forced to enter WWII?” the answer is yes. If you mean, e.g., “Was the United States forced into the Second Iraq War” the answer is no. If you mean, e.g., “Were the American People manipulated by their own government to support WWII?” the answer is no. If you mean, e.g., “Were the American People manipulated by their own government to support the Second Iraq War?” the answer is yes. If you mean something else, you’ll have to get specific.
“War” is a vast concept that includes chosen and unchosen wars, just and unjust wars, in countless combinations, and which in turn consists of millions of decisions by thousands of individuals, which will vary enormously in how free they are in every single moment, because every specific event has a different degree of allowing or ignoring each individual’s consent. And since “acting of one’s own free will” simply means “acting with informed consent,” the question you must ask of each individual event implicated in a war (from the decision to enter one to each human decision ensuing) is whether the people making the decision (thus causing the resulting outcome) did so with informed consent, or whether they were (a) forced against their will, (b) manipulated against their will, or (c) not allowed to even interject their will (through barriers of circumstance or deprivation of consciousness or competence).
And that’s a wholly separate question from whether a free decision is right or wrong, benevolent or malevolent, or even rational or irrational. Bad people can freely choose to do malevolent things. Irrational people can do irrational things. It does not make them any less free. Freedom is solely the question of whether they knew what they were doing and wanted to do it anyway. Desire, and knowledge. They are either present or absent. Nothing else pertains. Not souls. Not freedom from causation. Nothing.
I read it and ones before this where you argued in favor of the block universe… so which is it? is there a single block of time where there is only what was is and will be eternally fixed and we are deluded into thinking otherwise or something else? do you change your beliefs to suit your arguments? You have confused me, which is it?
I don’t understand what your question is or how it relates to this article.
If you want to understand how a B-Theory of time is compatible with temporal and causal reasoning, read my complete account of that in Sense and Goodness without God (index, “time”).
I accept the legal FICTION known as freewill when it comes to performance of contracts by legal entities. but when people argue for or against freewill the legal fiction is not what is most important… there is a desire to understand whether or not we actually have any say in reality or are just along for the ride.
three lines ||| past present and future… how much “time” separates them? from my understanding of physics its on the order of 10^-23 seconds (ten to the power of negative 23 seconds) while consciousness on average is something like 3*10^-1 or 0.3 seconds which basically means awareness is a part of our brain recording what happened in the distant past… not something involved in doing the present. The present moment you live in is the direct result of a quantum event that happened so fast nothing known could possibly change it… random or determined is irrelevant….and every single present moment of your entire life has been exactly the same, so when do think you make any real decision? where do you think control enters? you are aware of a domino that fell in a sequence trillions of dominoes ago and you have no ability to do anything about it at all… ever. you have the illusion that you decided one path over another consciously… but that decision was made long before you knew anything about it and no decision has ever been otherwise… or has it?
There is nothing fictional about consent. You either factually do consent to a thing, or you don’t. There are measurable material differences between those two states. And they morally matter quite a great deal.
As to what you are trying to say about the operation of consciousness, I have no idea what you mean. Conscious thought is a computation, and as such it requires processing time. That a computation takes time is not an argument that it doesn’t exist, didn’t happen, or didn’t change anything. Consent and its lack is a computational process. It does not cease to exist because of how much processing time it takes. As for what “control” means, read the article you purport to be commenting on. It seems now you either didn’t, or forgot everything it said.
what you seem unable to see is that the present moment appearance of relative freedom is irrelevant. If you and I are both patterns of energy in a block universe, neither one of us has any actual freedom. Sure if you take any particular slice out of the whole you will not see any necessary connection between my acts and yours… but that lack of connection is not freedom nor is it evidence of will. I read your theory but you fail to address this obvious flaw in your theory. You can’t have your block universe and your freedom too… only the illusion of freedom if you ignore the entirety of what is going on. You accept that our mental computation is smeared out over many slices of the block universe… but you ignore my point that there is no time between these slices to do anything freely… one slice leads directly into the next so fast that nothing we think or do could be considered free of this cascade of energies… there is no place where you can point and say, look there, a free act! from the higher dimensional perspective(which YOU argued for in another post) can’t be ignored now because you don’t like what it implies.
There is no “appearance” that no one is coercing me and I want to do what I am doing and nothing is stopping me from doing it. There is no mere “appearance” that I consent to be typing this message now and letting it say what it says. This is an objective physical fact about me, my brain, and hence the universe. And that is what people mean by acting with free will. The opposite would require someone putting a gun to my head and forcing me to type this, or my hands disobeying my instructions and desires and typing and sending this message anyway against my total opposition to that outcome.
None of that has one whit to do with “how long it takes” for me to process what to type here and whether to type it, much less whether to send it once typed. The duration of the processing is wholly irrelevant to whether I was coerced or prevented from doing what I wanted or not. The latter conditions depend on facts other than time. So you aren’t making any sense here.
From the compatibilism page:
“everything human agents do flows from the laws of nature and the way the world was in the distant past. … These lines of argument … [appear in works dating from the 1990s and more recent]”
I’m still kind of WTF that present-day academic philosophy is still wrestling with this 18th century clockwork-universe notion of determinism that physicists abandoned over a century ago, one that never made sense even on its own terms (*), .. and I thought David Hume had already dealt with why, even if the universe actually worked that way (what they assumed in his day), it STILL wouldn’t be incompatible with free will —
… admittedly using a different argument than yours
and I’ll agree that it probably is useful to have a practical definition of “free will” that won’t get derailed by notions of determinism if anyone really is still stuck on those, i.e., we should NOT be having to appeal to quantum mechanics to argue that free will exists.
() A fun exercise from my intro quantum mechanics class was to consider the problem of predicting what happens on a pool table immediately after the break in a typical 8-ball game and the question of what effect a millionth of a centimeter error in measuring the starting position of one of the racked up balls would have, i.e., how long does it take for the prediction to go visibly off the rails — the answer is ridiculously short: after something like a millionth of a second, the balls are headed off in completely different directions; the problem is *that chaotic.
And that’s all before we even get to the difference between the classical and quantum models, the latter of which has actual randomness baked in, i.e., events that are inherently unpredictable — you can calculate from a given context a probability [e.g., 36%] that something [e.g., photon emission] will happen and that’s ALL you can ever get.
How can anyone be a determinist these days?
Quantum indeterminism actually is still quasi-determinism in the relevant sense. As you note, the probability distributions it entails are actually themselves deterministically fixed; and have little macroscale significance, so couldn’t relate to the philosophical example in question, except to probabilities too small to take seriously.
It also remains unproven. I suspect it will dissolve back into traditional determinism once we unify QM and RT and explain the whys of the Standard Model. Because classical determinism can provide a more parsimonious explanation for quantum randomness than any indeterminist quantum theory yet proposed (e.g. look at how effectively classical determinism explained thermodynamics through tracking deterministic randomization; quantum phenomena look suspiciously similar). Superstring theory is just one example of a determinist theory of quantum mechanics, and it’s quite popular among real physicists. So I wouldn’t place any bets on indeterminism.
But yes, it also affords no help to LFW advocates. QM indeterminism actually is a threat to free will, if it occurred at the scales on which human decisions were made. If, for example, the probability of spontaneous macro-events (like “a rabbit popping into existence for no reason” or “your character switching from good to evil instantaneously”) were within the realm of terrestrial historical scales, the world, even our own minds, would be impossible to trust or predict. And responsibility for anything would become all but impossible to ascertain.
And also yes, it would be interesting to see these philosophers attempt to defend a reverse-causation model using quantum mechanics (which on the right ontological interpretation they could), i.e. it actually could be that my raising my hand right now changes past history, in the sense of quantum wave collapse (wherein nothing as such would have “changed” except the collapse of many worlds into one). That’s not logically impossible. It’s just very unlikely (it’s a poor explanatory model for what we actually observe).
I am charitable with things like this. Because even a great many physicists are inclined toward determinist interpretations of quantum mechanics, I assume these philosophers know that or if they did they’d proceed with the same arguments and just add the apt footnote that they are rejecting the reverse-causation model because it’s improbable on present evidence, not because it is logically impossible.
we know that is how it SEEMS to you, but we also know that is mostly an illusion, don’t we?
You told me that the universe is like those cartoon flip books.(though you still never explained what was doing the flipping) and that gives us the illusion of motion… I put it to you that your same analogy must be giving you the illusion of doing what you want, yes?
As an atheist, I am pretty sure you don’t believe you are a supernatural entity standing outside the universe flipping the book, or do you?
Each page of this book seems to be about 10^-23 seconds(a quantum step if you will)… and you fail to see how that is relevant… its relevant because you can’t have it both ways… there is some you that is beyond explanation giving you mystical freewill or there is only the universe and you have the illusion that you are pulling your own strings… you tell me which you actually believe.
So your theory is that some hidden entity is pointing a gun to my head and coercing me but I have no idea they exist or are coercing me? That’s literally logically impossible. Coercion can only physically exist when it is known to be occurring. Otherwise it can’t coerce. The only other thing you could mean is that I am consenting to things but am being deceived as to what they are, so I think I’m consenting to one thing, but am doing something else, and somehow there is no evidence whatever that this is happening. That requires an elaborate Cartesian Demon, which renders your supposition vanishingly improbable.
Consent has nothing to do with magical flipping of books. It solely has to do with (a) knowledge and (b) intent. Do I know what I am assenting to (which is a deterministic computational process), and do I want to assent to it (which is a deterministic computational process). At no point do I need to be flipping the book by any other means than the very deterministic computational process I observe it to be. The only way to lack free will is to be (a) coerced or (b) forced or (c) deceived. And I don’t need “magical book flipping” to observe neither (a), nor (b), nor (c) are occurring. And that’s all I need to be free.
“That requires an elaborate Cartesian Demon”. But what about Laplace’s demon who yesterday predicted what you will do today (which is technically possible on determinism). Will he consider you a free being? And if not, then how we are different from the “autonomized androids” who have the illusion of freedom because their program makes them feel so (just because it lacks a complete data of the laws of nature and the initial conditions)?
It actually isn’t possible to do that. To reliably predict (as in, with 100% certainly, no chance of being wrong) the behavior of a system requires building a system more complex than the system being modeled (because you need a model that has the same complexity as the system being modeled, otherwise you are leaving variables out; and you need a system to run that model on, so you need additional architectural complexity). This is computationally impossible. You can’t build a computer inside the universe that has more components than the universe itself. As it turns out, the most efficient computer to model a system…is the system itself.
So then let’s assume you mean a computer outside our universe that does this. So you bypass at least the resource problem. For instance, we set up all the contents and variables identically to this universe and then run it, to see what “will” happen in it. But there will be no significant difference between that model and the actual universe, i.e. the “you” in the model will be fully conscious and living in that world exactly as you are now. So you are basically just creating a universe and recording, historically, what happens in it.
That you can do.
But you can’t then change any of it. For instance, you can’t interject your prediction of what a person in that universe “will do” into the causal stream before they do it; because they will already have done it by the time you learned what they would do. And if you rebuild and rerun the model to “interject” that new cause, you are no longer modeling that universe anymore, but a completely different one, one where the causes are different. There is no way to avoid this problem. You either model the exact same universe, in which case you cannot preemptively predict what the model will compute before it computes it; or you model a different universe, which is no longer informing you about this one.
But if we skip 100% reliability, then Laplacean demons already exist: us. The human mind evolved consciousness specifically for its metacognitive ability to predict the behavior and choices of other people: by modeling other minds, and relating those models to the model we build of our own mind, so we can “run sims” on how people will act in certain situations (a skill we call “imagination”). The more (and more accurate) information we have about a person and the circumstances, the more reliably we can predict their behavior. But that I can totally predict, with near 100% certainty, how someone I know really well will act in any given situation, is not held by them as evidence they weren’t freely acting that way; to the contrary, it reassures them of their belief that how they act is caused by their own reasoning and character, and not by someone else’s, or in defiance of either. And that is what they mean by being free to act.
Freedom is not about being free of causes. Freedom is about being free to be caused—by one’s own reasoning and qualities, not someone else’s, or in defiance of either. I discuss the Laplacean demon case in detail in Sense and Goodness without God (though not under that moniker: see pp. 102-03). This also means freedom is not about “feeling” free. It is about whether that feeling is correct. And if I feel that it is my reasoning and qualities causing what I do, my feeling is correct. That’s it. There is nothing more to it.
Thank you for your answer. I have read Sense and goodness book but there are still many questions unanswered. I am planning to attend your course on the matter.
while ignoring that ones own reasoning and qualities are not really ones own at all, just patterns of computation from the overall universe in motion. you do not stand apart from this sequence of events but an intrinsic part of it. Just because you FEEL like you are separate does not make you separate… you keep ignoring your own understanding of the block universe to accomplish this self delusion.
You seem not to have read the article you are commenting on then. You are using a definition of freedom no one actually uses in the real world. Read the article for what I mean and why that matters.
You also seem to be ignoring the very comment you are commenting on. I already explained it has nothing to do with feelings. That you are completely ignoring what I said suggests you are not interested in rational engagement here. Why?
you sound exactly like those who see no issue with an all knowing God. They claim just because God created everything and can stand outside of time(whatever that is supposed to mean) and see all of history exactly as it happen(ed). That Humans still had freewill and most of them still deserve to be punished because they made their choices against God.
so, if 99.9999% are deluded, we should just say, ok, really? you don’t do that, so neither will I.
The problem is not that I am ignoring anything, the problem is that my words are not triggering the experiences I am intending… I can’t see your experiences, nor can you see mine, so what I see and try to convey is not working, yet… but perhaps something someday will trigger the correct ones.
The problem with an all-knowing God is that he doesn’t do anything with his knowledge. The problem is not that he could predict human behavior. That would be great!
If we had a God, who really was morally perfect (and thus would never abuse his knowledge or use it corruptly or disseminate it carelessly—all the things we rightly fear a government would do and thus the only actual reason we oppose governments having that knowledge), and was knowledgeable and smart enough to predict who would do what (and responsible for basic starting facts like the actual physical design of the human brain and who got to successfully conceive, bear, and raise children), then he could morally intervene (speaking to them, teaching them, fixing any defects in their cognition, helping them avoid undermining accidents, or even just getting in their way), and thus prevent vast amounts of pointless suffering and injustice.
No one would complain were that the case. Not even the villains thereby thwarted, as they would have been thereby enlightened as to their own folly and thank God for helping them swerve onto a better path and see the light.
By contrast, you are talking about irrational theologies that think it’s the other way around: that a God who does nothing is good. Nope. That God is evil, indeed the most horrific of monsters conceivable. It’s for that reason it’s fortunate God doesn’t exist.
And yes, Christians are delusional. I’ve written on this extensively. But Christians are far less than “99.9999%” of the population. And they aren’t the ones defining words in public use. Even non-Christians agree in the usage of free will in real world contexts.
Delusion is a false belief of fact; that free will is everywhere in real life used to refer to acting with informed consent is a true belief. True beliefs are by definition not delusions. If you think that is a false belief, you are the one trapped in a delusion. I’ve presented vast evidence of the actual way the phrase is used in practice (in courts of law and so on). That you persist in ignoring that evidence and maintaining a firm belief against it is by definition delusional.
for some reason your brain is broken. You expect an all knowing God to change what he knows or be able to do so… while knowing full well if he could, he would not be all knowing.
likewise you believe the blockheads who tell you that all of time is already set in temporal amber in the block universe and still insist that the delusion of choice exists as a reality even though you believe it does not.
Not change what he already knows or did. But act differently than we currently observe. That’s how we know there is no God. Same way we know there is no Santa Claus or even Krampus.
And “all knowing” means knowing all things possible to know. Logically impossible knowledge is not properly included in the term “omniscience.” Not understanding that is a common mistake.
And the B-Theory of time has been empirically proven by physics, from Einstein to Nobel laureate Theodor Hänsch. The exact opposite of blockheads.
No one has every demonstrated that the past exists outside of traces formed into present matter/memories and no one has demonstrated that there exists a future already existent before it has happened… but let us ignore this inconvenient truth and accept that you are right… why do you ignore your own view of reality? by your view you KNOW that you have NO choice in anything you do, only the illusion of choices as the future already exists and you have no ability to change anything… so why do you promote the fiction of freewill just because that is how everyone who does not know this does so? this is irrational and perhaps you can’t change your view… after all its already fixed and immutable no matter what anyone says, right?
Newtonian physics works for a very useful range of tests but no current physicist would say therefore it is the correct view and we don’t have to worry that it is fundamentally wrong… most people will never do anything to notice the error… I would hope you would not fall into that category.
Yes, they have.
Follow the links and read them.
We have scientifically proved time is relative to reference frame, not absolute. Which requires that the past and future are entirely relative to point of view, which requires the future to already exist. As Einstein first proposed (and as has since been multiply empirically confirmed), events that appear simultaneous to observers in one reference frame, are not simultaneous in another. There is no other way for that to be possible but for that the future already exists, and people in one reference frame just haven’t gotten there yet. One observer’s future is already in another observer’s past.
Time dilation has also been proved to follow Einstein’s prediction, such that the higher your relative velocity, the slower time flows for you, such that at the speed of light time flow is reduced to zero. Yet at the same time, distance in the direction of motion also reduces to zero. This means that for any photon that avoids random absorption by colliding with a charged particle, it has already reached the end of the universe in zero time, having crossed zero distance. While we remain back here, farther back in time, at a nonzero distance. This requires the entire history of the universe has already been crossed by every such photon. Which requires that the entire history of the universe has already transpired. We just haven’t gotten there yet, because we are in a “slower” frame of reference than those photons.
This is false. You are using bogus definitions of “choice” that correspond to no actual uses of that word in the real world. To choose between two options does not require even randomness, much less freedom from causal determinism. To the contrary, choice requires causal determinism; as the only thing that exists other than that is randomness, and randomness is the opposite of making a choice.
As long as your reason and your desires are what caused that selection, and no one tricked you, you caused the selection—you chose. Not someone else. Nor something else apart from you. Nor did “no choice” occur. But for your reasoning and desires, that selection—a choice—would not have occurred. That’s what “choosing” means in the real world.
But this has already been explained to you multiple times now. You are completely ignoring the entire article you are commenting on, and are completely ignoring everything I say. This indicates you are delusional, and incapable of even comprehending, much less acknowledging, anything you are told. You are fixated on an irrational obsession, and cannot even “see” any refutation of it. You are on this subject cognitively blind. So I doubt any further discussion would be productive. If you cannot even hear what I say, what use is there in speaking to you?
Of course there is another way. Just because different observers see different things, do you really believe that two different events actually occurred? That is just plain silly… there was a single event, but two different people can see this single event differently because of how the speed of light is involved. That does not require in any way shape or form that anything but the ever present exist. What people are SEEING is the arrival of photons from a past event no matter what frame they are in… but different points of view will have photons arriving at different times and give a divergent view of what really occurred, but can you really believe that means that a single event was not the actual cause of both differing views? how would that even work?
It’s the same event, accessed at different points in time by different observers, that’s why we know time is dimensional. As I just explained.
You seem not to understand Einsteinian time-space dilation. The speed of light is only constant because of time-space dilation. And it is time-space dilation that empirically proves the “block” universe model. Read the article you were directed to, and the scientific books it references, if you want to understand what I am talking about.
1 event accessed at 2 different points in time by different observers does not prove what you claim. but does show limits in your ability to think for yourself.
event A happens. Person 1 sees event A from position X at T1 Person 2 sees event A from position Y at T2… does that mean T1 and T2 exist at a single moment, of course not. we Just said they were two different times. Spacial dilation may alter how we calculate the difference between T1 and T2 but does not make them exist at the same spacetime moment.
Alpha Centauri explodes… here on earth I witness this even 4.3 yeas after it occurred… A probe launched from earth 20 years ago is about half way there and records the very same explosion 2.15 years after it occurred… there is nothing here requiring that the past and future persist in any fashion…. at the universal present moment the star exploded 4.3 years ago. I am just now getting a transmission from the probe at the very same moment since it relayed that explosion 2.15 years ago… only the present exists.
if we postulate a 3rd craft moving at 99% of light speed relative to us on earth, the time it records its view of the explosion and the time it sends it to us date stamped my seem off because of time dilation, but we can use the Lorenz transformation to correct for the differences and once again, only the present moment exists for everyone. There is never an example that you can give which requires more than the present moment to exist. You just have to understand that observers have to adjust their reception of photons by their speed and relative locations is all.
Rather then pretend you understand this by just parroting the errors of others, try thinking it through.
Yes, it does.
Read the science. I’ve directed you to it. With diagrams even, both from books on the subject and my own illustrations explaining them. All of which you are ignoring. You’ve been told to school yourself before commenting further. Do so.
The thing you are continually ignoring is what has been explained to you multiple times, and is well explained in the scientific literature on time, which you have been referred to more than once: free photons have already finished the universe from their POV; while we are still watching them get there. This proves the future is already fixed and done. We just haven’t gotten there yet. But those photons have. We can’t run up to stop them getting there. They got there the moment they came into existence—as the time it takes for them to cross the entire universe’s history, in their reference frame, is zero.
This is why all physicists are B-Theorists about time. Read the scientific literature on time to find out why all scientists on Earth disagree with you who specialize in the study of time. Or ignore science. Your choice.
that is just silly. they have NO point of view. A point of view only exists in the consciousness of the living and the living experience THE PRESENT moment they exist in, no other… your view of the universe can not explain anyone ever having a present moment as all moments are present, which should tell you that it is really stupid. But you think that just because a lot of degreed people believe something stupid it must be true… I have read all the science before you were born and I reject it because it really is stupid.
Now you are resorting to equivocation fallacies. I do not mean by POV conscious awareness. I am talking about reference frame—that which is objectively true for a photon.
I am starting to think you are being dishonest here. This looks like you are disingenuously pretending to have misunderstood what I said, as an excuse to avoid reading any of the actual science I told you to read.
You closing childish “pooh-poohing” of all modern science only affirms my hypothesis.
I don’t know what you are not reading, but B-theory of time is not without critics in real physics. Pretending that one theory is established fact is disingenuous.
A photon exists in the present moment… if it has any means of encoding its prior states, those exist with it… but a photon only travels at the speed of light and so does NOT exist beyond its present location… that would make the term speed of light meaningless. won’t it?
what you can’t get through your thought process is that you cannot explain motion in a block universe, you simply assume it. There are competing theories such as the growing block and presentism that are debated, however they still view the situation incorrectly by trying to make time a thing rather than the measurement of things.
What exists in THE PRESENT is all that exists… the question of where it exists can SEEM different to different observers… not when because in presentism there is actually no WHEN something exists… it exists NOW. You see A1 at XYZ1 I see A1 at XYZ2 so here is the SR conundrum where does A1 actually exist? in presentism A1 exists at XYZnow which is not where you see it nor where I see it… our sight is delayed by photons reaching us from different starting points… so yes it can SEEM that A1 to B1 was not simultaneous which from my point of view it seemed it was… SR explains the difference but in no way requires A1 to B1 be two separate events… it happened 1 time but our relative location to that 1 time made the difference. if we both go to XYZ1 or XYZ2 neither of us will find A1 there because it has moved to XYZnow… what we experience is the past encoded into the present. both of us can use information gathered and predict an XYZ3 where both of us might actually meet and find A1 there… the block universe is not required for this to be so.
I know physics is not your field, but its not that difficult to see that the block universe has major problems.
Continuing to ramble on with your uninformed peudoscience is not helping your case. Least of all as you here demonstrate you didn’t even read my blog article on this, much less the scientific work it cites.
Why not do what you were told, and actually read up on the contemporary science of time and identify the false or illogical statements all scientific experts on time rely on according to you?
Otherwise your armchair pseudophilosophy is a waste of everyone’s time here.
I am not trained in form presentations so maybe your bias is causing you to ignore what I am saying, but try someone who is in the field of relativity who shows why the basic premise of the block universe is false.
https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/block-universe-refuting-common-argument/
my from perspective it seems that anyone should be able to see what I see, namely:
a theory is FALSE when it cannot explain the measurable universe.
The measurable universe is moving, the block universe postulates a static universe, thus must be false as it does not account for movement.
That only deconstructs the Andromeda paradox. It actually concludes by agreeing that for photons that have reached the boundary of the universe, the universe that contains us in the past is a fixed 4D construct. I suggest you actually read the article you linked to, rather than thinking you understood it from its headline.
I am floored by your ability to ignore the entire point of the article and then tell me I need to read it.
you latch onto the false interpretation that seems to vindicate your erroneous position… ignoring that it says that the fixed 4D construct you are talking about is AFTER it has happened NOT before, like now. Those photons have not reached their end points YET, but you can’t seem to fathom that part…
but then, if you are right and everything is fixed, you have no choice.
Find a single sentence in that article (not it’s title) that says the 4D universe is not correct.
The article only explains why the Andromeda paradox is not a paradox because we aren’t at the end of the universe yet. It never argues that the rest of the universe isn’t already a foregone conclusion for, say, a photon we release today.
It is thus not actually arguing against the 4D universe. It is arguing against a believed consequence of that fact.
And to illustrate this to you, let’s start by you finding any sentence anywhere in the article (not its headline) that says other than what I just explained.
Quoting:
We might summarize this argument in a single sentence as: relativity of simultaneity implies the block universe (i.e., it implies that all of 4-D spacetime must be fixed).
Quoting:
All events in the past light cone of a given event are real (i.e., fixed and certain) for an observer at that event.
me: note – IN THE PAST –
Quoting:
What we directly observe is our past light cone; 3D worlds are constructions from the data in our past light cones. But there is nothing requiring us to accept constructions from our data as fixed and certain, and there is at least one good reason not to: our constructions may end up being wrong, because our information is incomplete.
me: in other words anything not the past is OUR CONSTRUCTION thus not necessarily FIXED.
Quoting:
so there is no need to postulate entire 3D worlds in order to explain the observations; simply accepting their past light cones as real is enough.
me: Special Relativity does not = block universe.
Quoting:
So the block universe view is not established by this argument
me: your acceptance of the block universe is based on the mistaken notion that it is required by modern science, it is not. Your ignoring its fundamental flaw, that it cannot explain motion nor the present moment without assuming it seems to be rooted in your blind acceptance of false science.
“We might summarize this argument in a single sentence as: relativity of simultaneity implies the block universe (i.e., it implies that all of 4-D spacetime must be fixed).”
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
All events in the past light cone of a given event are real (i.e., fixed and certain) for an observer at that event.
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
What we directly observe is our past light cone; 3D worlds are constructions from the data in our past light cones.
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
But there is nothing requiring us to accept constructions from our data as fixed and certain, and there is at least one good reason not to: our constructions may end up being wrong, because our information is incomplete.
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
(Note here he is talking about epistemic conclusions, not ontological conclusions; this should have clued you in to his actually addressing the Andromeda paradox, not the physical reality of spacetime being a manifold)
so there is no need to postulate entire 3D worlds in order to explain the observations; simply accepting their past light cones as real is enough.
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
So the block universe view is not established by this argument
Doesn’t say the 4D universe isn’t correct; at all, much less as a description for the photon reaching the boundary of the universe.
You failed to find a single sentence that says the universe is not a four-dimensional manifold. At all. Much less that it is not such for a photon reaching the boundary of the universe. Which it did the instant it left our flashlight. In no way can it have instantly gotten there and somehow the entire history of the universe (its past, our future) could “change” after it did so. If it could know things at all, a photon would know the whole future of the universe is fixed the moment it comes into existence. We just haven’t caught up with that photon yet.
no it does not, it moves at the SPEED OF LIGHT which is not infinite. what left alpha centauri 4.3 years ago just reached us today… what is leaving there NOW is 4.3 years away… surely you don’t think otherwise?
Just because the block universe is not eliminated by the statements in the article does not mean it is accurate to reality, which of course you KNOW it is not. you KNOW you experience a NOW that is always different from the past and you KNOW that you have no accurate means of telling the precise future other than gross generalities, you KNOW you see things moving and the block universe cannot explain any of these things and should tell you easily that it must be false until it can… you just assume motion and so don’t seem capable of realizing this glaring flaw that is still causing A LOT of debate among real scientists.
you can pretend all you want that it is I that ignores the facts, but it is not and I will keep put your nose into the facts you are ignoring until you see them or just pretend you are right.
You are not listening.
The photon as soon as it is created has, from its POV, already finished the history of the universe. The time it takes to do that is zero, and the distance between where it was emitted and where it ended (the boundary of the universe) is zero. Thus, the instant the photon was released, the history of the universe ended. You can’t run ahead of the photon and stop that from happening. You are entirely in its distant past the instant it comes to exist.
That you keep pointing out that “We haven’t caught up to that photon yet” because for us it is moving slowly, does not address this point. That is simply repeating the fact I keep relating yo you: the photon is already at the end of the universe; we just haven’t caught up to it yet. And that is impossible unless the entire universe’s future has already happened for us to move through to catch up to that photon.
And the article you linked to never gainsays this fact.
because there is NO EVIDENCE that this is a fact. its only part of a theory that has never been nor can ever be demonstrated, so how is it a fact? who got to the end of the universe to verify it? what are you calling a fact here? this is just a mental fantasy not a fact.
You failed to quote a single sentence from that article saying there was no evidence for what I am saying. You have misread what that article is about. Just as I explained to you. An explanation you continue to completely ignore.
Try re-reading my comments. And paying attention to what I am actually saying.
so you are now going to ignore THE FACT that you pretended an unprovable was a fact and put the burden on me to refute your irrational attachment to an obviously false theory? really?
What you call an explanation is in point of fact what most would call a lie… again I ask prove what you just said, you CLAIMED a photon has a property we both know you cannot demonstrate at all as a FACT and now you are pretending it does not matter…
What you believe is obviously false. Why you refuse to see it is beyond me.
Now you are just ignoring me.
I have shown you the facts entailing a 4D fixed-future universe.
You keep ignoring them.
If that is your plan, I can’t help you.
For anyone interested, there’s a really good paper by Leslie Allan that summarises (what I think are) Dr. Carrier’s views on free will and puts them rather succinctly with clear examples:
https://philpapers.org/archive/ALLFWA-7.pdf
https://philpapers.org/archive/ALLFWA-7.pdf
To be clear, I’m suggesting this paper to complement Dr. Carrier’s work, not replace it.
Hi, Dr. Carrier. I just have 2 questions about you and free will.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism. Here’s a link to the SEP page on it for anyone interested: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReasRespComp
My question is, how does this view of Compatibilism mesh with yours? Does it contradict yours, or does it more or less fit pretty well with it?
Have you ever thought about writing a peer-reviewed article on (your view of) Free Will?
Writing such an article is on my list of goals. But other projects take priority at the moment.
As far as “Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism”, it’s reasonably accurate as far as it goes. Pun intended. But so are all other forms of compatibilism. Much of this is just saying the same things but with different vocabularies or focuses.
I have a problem with “named” theories generally, because they are highly prone to “baggage fallacies.” A “baggage fallacy” is where someone says “I agree with (say) Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism” and then someone assumes this means “I agree with (say) every single thing John Martin Fischer every said about it,” and then refutes or challenges one particular thing he said, and concludes therefore they have refuted or challenged my position on compatibilism.
This fallacy is common across all of philosophy but plagues every academic field. I warn against it in both my peer-reviewed books on Jesus, e.g. “You are a mythicist, therefore you argue Nazareth didn’t exist and that’s absurd” is a baggage fallacy; so is “your theory is a minimal Doherty thesis, therefore you endorse everything Doherty said, some of which was false, therefore so is your theory.”
The best way to avoid this fallacy is to limit or qualify all commitments so as to prevent someone doing this. So I would not call myself a “Reasons-Responsive Compatibilist” because I literally don’t know what anyone else actually thinks that means. Which specific arguments by which specific proponents is one assuming to be entailed by that label? I can never know that, because there is no consistent accounting of what that term entails. And I cannot assume that what I think it entails is what you think it entails.
So it’s better to avoid labels whenever possible and just cut to the chase of the actual specific thing you are asking about. So, for example, instead of asking me if my view is compatible with or identical to Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism, ask about a specific claim made by a specific Reasons-Responsive Compatibilist or critic of Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism (and do that the same way you just did: with a link or citation to a source for what you are asking about). That will get a much more useful and productive response.
Hi, Dr. Carrier. This is quite a random question but I’ve been thinking lately. I am a Compatibilist whether or not Causal Determinism (CD) is true, but I was wondering: How would I prove that CD is true to someone that doesn’t think it is?
Better question, do you even think that CD is true? What if everything is caused by prior events/states of affairs, but these are only probabilistic causes instead of deterministic causes? I’d love to hear your input.
All the evidence of physics refutes any possibility of indeterminism in human decision making. All attempts to claim otherwise are either crank or fallacious.
The evidence is extensive (indeed, vast), and only allows that quantum indeterminism could be ontologically fundamental. I doubt it actually is (the evidence trendline is against that interpretation). But it at least could be. It’s allowed by the current state of evidence.
Determinism follows from the fact that quantum randomness aggregates into extremely stable averages. Like if all the coins in the world flipped automatically every minute; the average state of “all coins in the world” would be extremely stable. All of them flipping one way at the same time would be so astronomically improbable we wouldn’t see it in an entire galactic lifetime. Likewise any extreme result. The average would stay extremely close to “half the coins one way, half the other,” when by “close” we mean “within a million or so coins.”
Likewise, like all other macro-systems which, even if quantum mechanically indeterministic, are aggregatively deterministic at that scale, any human decision-making involves the computational interactions of millions of cells, which constitute bazillions of atoms. Any quantum indeterminism is washed out in macro-systems of that scale. The probability of a non-deterministic decision is thus, again, so unlikely we won’t see it in a galactic lifetime, much less a human one. The aggregate outcome of bazillions of atoms will ensure all decisions we ever encounter will have been deterministically decided by macro-scale (not quantum scale) cellular computation—even our most “random” decisions, which will still be as deterministic as dice rolls or weather patterns: causally produced by nonlinear dynamics, with no measurable indeterministic effects.
So in short, “probabilistic causes” only exist at subatomic scales. Human thought is not produced by any causal system so small, but one vastly (vastly!) larger in scale, comprised of something like 10^26 atoms. If you averaged their “probabilistic” behavior, no visible “probabilistic” behavior would remain. Not even a single cell will deviate from causal determinism in a human lifetime, much less the computational system of millions of cells behind any human decision.
Even the average cell contains 100 trillion atoms. So, let’s say that each atom can “flip” a decision from yes to no fifty percent of the time due to quantum indeterminism (and that’s already vastly more than could be the case). And let’s say you need at least half the atoms to do that at once (lining up perfectly against the aggregate average, and not, as usual, scattered randomly across the cell) for the entire cell to “flip” a decision from yes to no (and that’s already impossible, because decisions are the outcome of millions of cells, not just one). The probability of even that happening is going to be 0.5^50,000,000,000,000…which is not even calculable for a desktop computer; it is that small.
If we assume a decision is made in one second, such an event will occur only about once every 1/0.5^50,000,000,000,000 seconds, which is going to be roughly once every million years. For a single cell. To deviate a single bit away from a deterministic computation. In a system requiring millions of cells to agree before motivating an outcome.
That simply is never going to happen, on any scale we will ever observe.
Very interesting reply, seems to make sense (I’ll have to read it a few more times though). The reason I was wondering about this question in the first place is because of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its entry on Causal Determinism, which seems to challenge the idea that physics at the macro-level is completely and demonstrably deterministic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#EpiDet
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#StaDetPhyThe
I could be misunderstanding it though, it’s pretty technical lol
Can you quote a sentence in the section where it says that? Then I can search that sentence and find the section you are referring to.
I tend not to use the term “free will.” it tends to get a bit too messy. Let’s take the average person. Ask them whether they believe in free will. Sure. Ok, take a couple of minutes to explain compatibilism to them. OK. So I was talking to Richard about this earlier. I was telling him I have something you might call “executive dysfunction.” it just means I struggle to make decisions. It doesn’t explain anything about why. As a compatibilist, Richard is sophisticated enough to recognize this means, in effect, that I have “less free will” than average. But if you ask the average person, what would they say? You just explained to them that what you, the compatibilist, calls free will doesn’t work by magic. It’s all science. How long would you have to explain that to them for them to understand that that does mean that I have less free will? That I’m not “making excuses” or whatever? Hmm. Anyway, let’s get to the quotes!
I think it would be obvious to anyone that this android is being denied a great deal of their free will. They are being manipulated by lies, and with meddling in the very structure of their brain, to believe false things; and with the specific result that someone else’s will (that of the clients he’s being made to satisfy, and of the company serving them with this “product”) is being substituted for his own.
Yes, and what is the government-media-military complex doing? Lying to us constantly! They’re trying to take away our free will! We can’t let them!
You cannot increasingly free yourself from manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy[…]
Alright. Here’s where that Sapolsky/Dennett debate I watched comes in. Here’s where Sapolsky would say you’re being a liberal. Awww. He would say that the way to get people to the place where they can do this is to meet their needs! Sapolsky has managed to write several books without even believing in free will. Whether he has it or not, his beliefs about it haven’t seemed to hurt him much in this area.
The reason Sapolsky says we don’t have free will is that it doesn’t comport with the way people do praise and blame. I can see his point. We do seem to be using the idea of “free will” to support this system where some people are billionaires and millions of people are homeless. Where we put some people in jail and bomb others. And [some] people still call this a just world!
Review of “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” Author: Robert Sapolsky.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/stanford-scientist-after-decades-of-study-concludes-we-don-t-have-free-will/ar-AA1ilx0v?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=ENTPSP&cvid=03ab7d2d9f6c4e90887cb2ce18b04b36&ei=29
I’m aware. It’s all useless semantics. More ivory tower angels on the head of a pin.
Sapolsky is arguing about a concept of free will that does not exist in the real world, but only in isolated academic corners of the world; and not the concept as affecting real people in courts of law, personal philosophies, or any other domain of significance (whether medical or sexual ethics or economics or political science).
So his book is a complete waste of time. It’s as if you wanted to read about rhinoceroses, but Sapolsky gave you a book about how unicorns don’t exist. You didn’t ask for a book about unicorns.