Hi Rex and Bruno,
I think that you are both missing an important point by taking an from
infinity view. The fact that the world is not given to us in terms where
these is one and only one option given some condition forces us to deal with
alternatives. We can go on and on about causation and determinism but let us
get Real, there is only rarely a situation where there can only be one
singular effect to a singular cause. In fact there is never a actual
singular cause to some event so the argument falls flat because of a false
premise. We can build and knock over straw men for ever or we can look at
Nature honesty and see that our pet theories of Monolithic Static Structure
will always be Incomplete.
Free Will, illusory or otherwise is an attempt to deal with the reality
that there are always alternatives that can occur. We promote a notion of
Agency to act as a mechanism that chooses between alternatives without bias
or cohesion and imagine that we have such an agency. Surely this is a
falsehood from the point of view of infinity where we can imagine we can see
all of the variables, but we are only thinking of ourselves as an observer
that is external to the system that we observe and so can see its properties
and *that our means of perception of such has no effect upon what those
properties are*. This role used to be played by the notion of a Deity. Now
we find a secular version of the same thing and wonder why we make no
progress beyond this conundrum!
We are not Omniscient, we are not Omnipresent and we most certainly are
not Omnipotent. Deal with it.
Onward!
Stephen
-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Allen
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 5:49 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
With your definition of free will, it does not exist. I think we agree.
Very good. So what we are really arguing about here is whether your
definition or my definition is closer to what is generally meant when
people use the term “free will”.
I think your definition is not very close to what is generally meant,
and so you should come up with a different term for it.
I assume that you resist doing this because you are trying to convince
the general populace that they don’t *NEED* what is generally meant by
“free will” in order to continue with their lives pretty much as
before.
However, you (and the other compatibilists) don’t just come out and
say “free will doesn’t exist, but you don’t need it anyway”.
Instead you say: “I have found a way to make free will compatible
with determinism!”
And then you proceed with explicating your theory as to why they don’t
need free will after all - hoping that they won’t notice the subtle
switch from “free will is compatible with determinism” to “you don’t
need free will”.
Ultimately, you have found a way to make free will compatible with
determinism: change the definition of free will.
And maybe this is the best way to get the general populace on-board
with a more reasonable view of things. But it’s still a rhetorical
tactic, and not a valid argument.
Nor would you find many people in
agreement amongst the general populace.
That is not an argument. Yet many compatibilists reason along similar
lines,
but this is not an argument either.
But we’re arguing over whose definition is closer to the general usage
of “free will”.
The general usage by the general populace.
Few people agree that mechanism entails that physics is a branch of
theology, and that matter is an emerging pattern. Few people understand
that
QM = Many worlds. At each epoch few people swallow the new ideas /
theories.
Science is not working like politics. it is not democratic. Usually the
majority is wrong as science history illustrates well. Many people today
find hard the idea that "they are machine" (except perhaps in the DM
large
sense for people with a bit of education).
I’m not necessarily saying that there’s something wrong or
inconsistent or impossible with your proposal. All I’m saying is that
it’s not free will.
The vast majority of the populace certainly does not equate free will
with ignorance of causes.
Again that is not an argument. It would even be doubtful that humans would
be naturally correct on such hard technical question, especially with the
mechanist assumption which justified *why* most truth are just
unbelievable.
“What do you mean by ‘free will’” is not a technically hard question.
Also, “do you believe in ultimate responsibility” is not a technically
hard question.
G* minus G is the precise logic of what is true but unbelievable.
It shows that machine have genuine free-will. But humans already dislike
the
idea that their neighbors have free-will.
They *love* the idea that their neighbors have free-will.
Bertrand Russell:
“Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate metaphysics,
it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone has
always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has
always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on
behaviour. The apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will
power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a
man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And
everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable
diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching
in the world. The one effect that the free- will doctrine has in
practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense
knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that
annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact
that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if
you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his
birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible
by any stretch of imagination.”
People will not like that, but in
the long run, they will prefer that to the idea that *they* have no free
will themselves. It is still genuine partial free will. You can manage
some
of your classes of futures, you have a partial control.
What causes you to manage them one way as opposed to another way?
If you ask “most people”, they will not agree that the human choice is
random, and they will not agree that human choice can be explained by
causal forces.
Such question are known to be hot, and most people disagree with each
other.
Many among those who criticizes determinism often relies on sacred texts,
and show an unwillingness to even reason.
This is true. And it could be that your sneaky approach is the best
way to get them to reason.
How does ignorance of what choice you will make lead to ultimate
responsibility for that choice?
Because I can have a pretty good pictures of the alternatives. Usually the
conflict will be in instantaneous reward against long term rewards. I can
speed my car and look at TV, or respect the speed limits and miss the TV.
I
can stop smoking tobacco and live older, or I can enjoy tobacco here and
now, and die sooner, etc. I do have an amount of choice and information,
but I am ignorant of the details (notably of my brain functioning, my
'unconscious', etc.), and can act accordingly as a responsible person.
Acting as a responsible person doesn’t require free will. It just
requires suitable initial conditions and causal laws.
“Ability to act as a responsible person” isn’t the definition of free will.
I deny the possibility of ultimate responsibility and I’m not a
eliminative materialist.
I follow you that "ultimate responsibility" is asking too much.
Free will is also asking too much.
Even a
sadist murderer is usually not responsible for the existence of its
pulsion,
but this does not preclude him to be responsible for its action, in some
spectrum. Reasons can be multiple. A sadist could commit an act in a
society
where sadism is repressed, and not commit an act if sadism is sublimated
through art and movies, so the society or system can share responsibility
with some act without preventing such act to be done. Free will is not
ultimate: i can choose between tea and coffee, but I have not chose to be
a
drinking entity.
If something caused you to choose tea over coffee, then the choice wasn’t
free.
If the choice was the result of a random event, the choice wasn’t free.
There are no square circles. There is no free will.
As far as I can see, at least.
As to “person”, I take a deflationary view of the term. There’s less
to it than meets the eye.
I guess we differ a lot on this.
I wonder why? What causes us to differ?
This comes back to my earlier point. She “feels” a sense of
responsibility and therefore believes that she is genuinely and
legitimately responsible.
But the fact that she feels responsibility in no way means that she
actually is responsible.
That is true. But she is not just feeling being free, she is, genuinely
so,
with the definition I gave of "free-will".
Right, we’re really arguing about definitions. Whose definition is
closer to the general usage of the term “free will”.
I think all of your arguments are actually arguments about why we
don’t *need* free will as generally defined. They aren’t arguments
that free will actually exists.
You’re trying to convince people to abandon the original definition
and switch to your definition without ever making it explicit that
this is what you’re doing.
Though, admittedly, the world would probably be a better place if you
succeeded in your attempt.
Aren’t you making consciousness an epiphenomenon of the digital machine?
Reread my work. It explains why consciousness is the creator of all
realities consistent with arithmetical truth.
Our reality seems to produce all manner of schizophrenic,
hallucinogenic, and delusional conscious experiences.
So what conscious experiences aren’t consistent with arithmetical truth?
If no conscious experiences are ruled out by arithmetical truth...then
what good does it do to posit it as a factor in producing conscious
experience?
Consciousness is the most
effective things ever. It is the mother of all forces, or of all
acceleration. A theory of everything is a theory of consciousness. And
assuming mechanism, as I have explained, consciousness and differentiating
consciousness fluxes are "easly" derivable from the numbers relations (and
the classical theory of knowledge by Theaetetus).
Perhaps it would be better to say that consciousness and consciousness
fluxes are easily representable using numbers relations. That would
be my opinion at least.
The hard part is the
derivation of the physical laws, and my logical point is that we have to
do
that derivation, if we assume mechanism, to solve the mind-body problem.
(and then in AUDA I explain how to do it, and I did a little bit).
Consciousness is not an epiphenomemon. If it was, then indeed free-will
would not exist.
Free will doesn’t exist.
Murder is just a category you’ve made up for your own convenience. It
has no ontological status separate from you.
I wish I did. But I doubt this. To be murdered is universally embarrassing
for any sufficiently sound machine. "thou shall not kill" belongs to G*
minus G type of mechanist proposition, and that could explain notably why
people *saying* (normatively) "thou shall not kill" kill the most.
Murder is only bad if you think that death is bad, right?
Assuming that death leads to non-existence and oblivion, I have no
problem with it.
What I have a problem with is suffering.
I’m perfectly fine with euthanasia, as death seems by far the lesser
of two evils.
The torturer is far worse than the murderer, in my view.
Life...once you’ve seen a bit of it, it’s pretty much the same thing
repeated from there on out. Highly overrated.
Either there’s a reason for the killing act, or there isn’t. If
there’s a reason, then it was an unavoidable consequence of reality’s
causal structure.
At which level? Usually I mock this kind of statement by mentioning a
lawyer
who says "yes, my client did murder those children but I let you know that
my client was just obeying to the Schroedinger wave equation, so he has no
responsibility".
A belief in free will generally leads to a focus on the criminal.
A rejection of free will promotes a focus on addressing the conditions
that lead to crime.
After all, if you believe the criminal freely chooses his actions,
what good would it do to improve conditions? In this view, poor
conditions don’t cause crime, criminals do. The high recidivism rate
shows that some people are innately bad, so best to keep them locked
up for as long as possible and then it doesn’t matter what they choose
to do. Three strikes and you’re out!
I tend to think that your promotion of “free will” just feeds into and
strengthens that view, and thus is harmful.
Even probabilistic laws are a form of causation. In this case the
course of events are genuinely unpredictable (within limits), this
unpredictablity also doesn't amount to free will.
I am glad we totally agree on that. You can use the infinite iteration of
the self-duplication (Washington/Moscow for example) to illustrate that
random oracle does not introduce free-will. It will change the measure on
the domains livable from our first person indeterminacy, and as such will
play a role in stabilizing the physical laws, and this plays a role in the
emergence of "matter" and sharable histories (it defines the right tensor
product), but free-will remains a determinate matter. The many worlds of
the
conditional tense does not, unlike the many worlds of DM and QM, need to
"really exist". You could jump out of the window, does not entail that you
will jump out of the window in some real parallel reality: the imaginary
one
are enough. (Independently of the fact that both DM and QM entails that
there is a real world where you jump out of the window, but they are not
needed for the meaning of "could" (and they are rare, Harry Potter like).
I forget, what is it that makes them rare?
If you believe that the fact that the action was determinable in
principles
by some very powerful computer prevent real free-will, then you might
say
that consciousness is also an illusion and you will be led to
eliminativism.
Consciousness stands or falls independently of free will.
Do you agree that consciousness is needed for free-will? Usually people
agree with this.
Well given that I think free will is similar to “square circle” in not
referring to anything, *and* given that I think that nothing exists
outside of conscious experience - I’m not sure what to say in answer
to this question.
Could Chalmers-style philosophical-zombies have free-will? I don’t think
so.
Could conscious entities have free will? I don’t think so.
The presence or absence of consciousness doesn’t make any difference
to my answer.
But I think the converse is true too, although I have to say (it is a bit
embarrassing) that the salvia divinorum experience has put a doubt in my
mind on the argument which follows.
It looks like we can imagine being conscious without having free-will.
When
trying to do that, we imagine being conscious, but without any degree of
freedom, like in the ultimate jail (the big nightmare). But this, I
think,
is a confusion between free-will, and freedom. If you feel to be a
prisoner
in that prison, it means that you have free-will, because the "wanting of
freedom" is somehow a product of free-will. So you have to imagine that
actually, in that state of consciousness without free-will, you are not
aware of being in a prison. But you are in the ultimate prison, so what is
it that you are aware of, and I thought that to be conscious you have to
be
aware of at least some alternate possibilities ("Dt?", "~Bf?"). But OK,
the
plant did contradict me on this point. Obviously that was an
hallucination,
but mechanism still seem to me to imply that such an hallucination is just
impossible, or (I guess so) that a correction should be made to the
classical theory of knowledge.
My plants are OK with you that consciousness could exist in absence of
free
will, but I still find that very weird ! :)
I don’t see anything at all weird with the idea. And even after
reading your scenario above several times, I don’t see why you should
find it weird...?
Your initial intuition was that if we don’t have free will then we
shouldn’t “feel” as though we do?
Hmmmm. I don’t know what to say about that. Except to refer you back
to my previous point that it is this “I feel as though I have free
will, therefore I must actually have free will?” intuition that keeps
the debate alive, even though the conclusion doesn’t follow from the
premise.
I see no reason at all to say that consciousness requires free will.
None.
Consciousness is related to some gradient in a landscape of possible
histories/worlds (by UDA). Each state of consciousness defines some "next"
alternate states, or neighborhoods . I thought consciousness was related
to
time (subjective time à-la Brouwer). Time is what gives your closest
observable alternative. I will not insist so much because I could have to
change my mind on this, so I am open to the idea that "we" can be
conscious
yet without free-will and out of space and time. But that would be a very
special form, rather peculiar, form of state of consciousness, and I have
to
experiment more.
I will go with Kant on space and time being aspects of our experience,
not aspects of the noumenal world.
Can we be aware of anything that isn't represented indirectly by the
internal structure of our minds?
In other words, are we aware of anything *except* what is represented
indirectly by the internal structure of our minds?
If we are aware of space and time and free-will, it can only be our
subjective conception of these things that we know, not the
things-in-themselves. Right?
The feeling of free will is an aspect of conscious experience.
Feeling of free will => conscious. OK.
But
conscious experience has no dependency on free will.
NOT(Conscious experience => free will or feeling of free will)?
I really doubt that. But my plant agrees with you, apparently, and this is
something I have to think hard about. What remains possible is that
peculiar
form of consciousness without free-will is very unstable and seems to be
bounded to large infinities of possibilities.
Unstable in what sense?
Not every conscious experience I have is an experience of making a
choice, or even involves a feeling being able to make a choice.
Further, I have occasionally done or (especially) said things that I
was fully aware of - without ever having been made a conscious
decision to do or say those things. Mini-Tourette syndrome episodes
maybe.
And Plotinus is a bit unclear on this, should reread it. It is almost the
question if the origin (of consciousness) is conscious, or not, or if God
is
a person or a thing. Hard question.
Hmmm.
A machine will seem to have consciousness, but will not have genuine
consciousness, with such confusion. There is genuine free-will, because
the
ignorance of the machine is real and genuine, independently of the fact
that
the machine believes in free-will or not, or seems to have free-will or
not.
Such an ignorance cannot be eliminated by adding knowledge to the
machine,
without transforming it into a new and different machine which will
still
be
ignorant about herself at another level.
I still don’t see any connection between ignorance and free will.
It is the root of the hesitation between the possible acts. If you
determinate yourself by the determination laws at each instant, you would
not have hesitation.
I can be caused to hesitate in the same way I can be caused to act.
Because that’s not free will, and by claiming that it is you’re just
muddying the water.
“Ignorant Will”. That’s catchy. Use that.
I could say that your definition of free will is too much trivial so as to
be immediately self-contradictory. In some conversation with
non-compatibilists sometimes I argue that "free-will" is a bad choice of
term, and that I believe we should just say "will". I don't believe in the
"naive notion of free-will". The "free" does not add a lot, except a vague
idea of *ultimate* responsibility and of *pure* choice, a bit like if we
could knew what is good and bad for another (we know this only for oneself
and even just partially). Such ultimate universal notion are just ideal
for
any terrestrial or relatively embodied entity, which is truly ignorant of
who she is, and who the others are, or which machine or number she is
(here
and now) relatively to a plenty full arithmetical reality.
So I agree: the mechanist notion of free will proposed here is a form of
Ignorant will. OK. I can live with that. Nice expression.
Excellent!
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