Navalny is an interesting case. Harry Frankfurt would say yes, it was an
example of free will to go back.For Frankfurt, freedom of the will is when your
first-order desires align with your second-order volitions. A second order
volition is according to Frankfurt a wish about what you want to want.Pessimist
Schopenhauer would argue you cannot want what you want, but Frankfurt says if
you want what you want you have free will. Harry Frankfurt argues what we care
about is important: we have free will because we care about our will. He says
"A person's free will is free only if he is free to have the will he wants"
(*)Navalny apparently wanted to be seen as someone who stands up against
corruption and injustice, and for the Russian people. This means the decision
to go back was in alignment with his second order volition of what he cared
about. And that means it was his free will to go (if I understand Frankfurt
correctly).Best,Jochen* The importance of what we care about: philosophical
essays, Harry G. Frankfurt, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998
-------- Original message --------From: Santafe <[email protected]> Date:
8/19/26 11:07 PM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book Anything I
try to put up as a test case immediately looks to me like a contrived and a bad
example, which illuminates nothing. Maybe that is what I should be learning
from, more than anything I can learn from any of the test cases.I was going to
say, since steaks are low stakes, how about Alexei Navalny’s choice to
challenge Putin? That fits within my narrative about the individual bucking
the nominally-strongest and most-salient or impactful social feedbacks.
Navalny’s knowing, at all points, that he would be attacked, presumably
imprisoned and tortured, and eventually killed, unless a successful
assassination attempt short-circuited the imprisonment. So is that a limit
case of free will? Or is Navalny “complying” with a different overwhelming
pressure: to matter, to have put effort into something morally right or
dignified in an environment where dignity is eroded and hard to sustain? To,
at the cost of depriving his family of himself, have left them with a legacy of
some kind of honor, for having been willing to sacrifice in order to not
submit? Or any of a dozen other things that a debater can come up with to
assert that all the arguments for causation are ultimately specious?I guess, at
the end, for all these real-world cases where choices are hard both to make and
to understand or evaluate, does having a tag named “free will” add something
material to our ability to settle where we are in relation to it?EricOn Aug 19,
2026, at 3:55, Eric Charles <[email protected]> wrote:Good point!
The "scale" at which we view a given event does seem to affect whether we see
it as an example of free will or not. Personally, I would (contra Claude) say
that the reflexive pulling of hand away from the hot stove which it touched was
"zero" free will, not "low" free will. Choosing the steak seem like a high
free-will example, under (my) normal circumstances, but I could certainly
imagine various social-and-cultural pressures modifying my view of someone
else's choice of steak. For example, if you could show me that Bill chose steak
every time, without fail, that the three people before him ordered steak, and
that he never ordered steak otherwise, I would be less confident in my "free
will" attribution. Maybe it was literally beaten into him at some point in his
life? Maybe he's just likes to go with the crowd? On a related note, I feel
like I should throw some Gilbert Ryle into the mix (because I was just flipping
through one of his books): One of the chief intellectual origins of what I have
yet to prove to be the Cartesian
category-mistake seems to be this. When Galileo showed that his methods of
scientific
discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every
occupant of space , Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a
man of
scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a
religious and
moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted , the discouraging rider to
those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity
from clockwork.
The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical. He and subsequent
philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the
following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as
signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as
signifying the
occurrence of non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements
in
space as the effects of other movements in space , other laws must explain some
of the
non-spatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of
minds.
The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent and
those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their
causation ; so,
while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects of mechanical
causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e. some issue
from movements
of particles of matter, others from workings of the mind. .....Since,
according to the doctrine, minds
belong to the same category as bodies and since bodies are rigidly governed by
mechanical laws, it seemed to many theorists to follow that minds must be
similarly
governed by rigid non-mechanical laws. The physical world is a deterministic
system,
so the mental world must be a deterministic system. Bodies cannot help the
modifications that they undergo, so minds cannot help pursuing the careers
fixed for them.
Responsibility, choice, merit and demerit are therefore inapplicable concepts —
unless the
compromise solution is adopted of saying that the laws governing mental
processes, unlike those governing physical processes, have the congenial
attribute of being only
rather rigid. The problem of the Freedom of the Will was the problem how to
reconcile
the hypothesis that minds are to be described in terms drawn from the
categories of
mechanics with the knowledge that higher-grade human conduct is not of a piece
with
the behaviour of machines. .... [Descartes] had mistaken the logic of his
problem. Instead of asking by what criteria intelligent
behaviour is actually distinguished from non-intelligent behaviour, he asked
"Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the
difference, what
other causal principle will tell us?" He realised that the problem was not one
of
mechanics and assumed that it must therefore be one of some counterpart to
mechanics. On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 4:15 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]>
wrote: "Do I act of my own free will when I select a certain steak from the
menu and request a certain doneness?"A good question. Sociologists argue that
the personal taste that someone has normally fits to the class or tribe that he
belongs to - or wants to belong to. Bourdieu, Wilson and Olah argue taste is a
mechanism of class distinction. What we experience as an instinctive preference
- liking jazz rather than pop music, wine rather than beer, Ascot horse races
rather than Formula 1 competitions - is shaped by our upbringing, education,
social environment and position within the class structure.+ Pierre Bourdieu,
"Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste"+ Carl Wilson, "Let's
Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste"+ Nathalie Olah,
"Nathalie Olah, "Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness""BestJochen--------
Original message --------From: Eric Charles <[email protected]>
Date: 8/17/26 12:31 AM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book
Well... as you point out in the book, I "Serves as the list's operational
skeptic and meeting chronicler. Consistently advocates for "sciencing the
problem" and tethering complex philosophical concepts back to empirical
behavioral testing (e.g., "rats in mazes")." 😅In that vein I think the crucial
starting point would be to find at least a few examples in which we agree
someone acted of their own free will and a few examples in which they did not
act of their own free will, and integrate those examples to determine the
difference. Do I act of my own free will when I select a certain steak from the
menu and request a certain doneness? Does the mugging victim act of their own
free will when a gun is pointed at their child and their wallet requested? When
my kid asks where we are going, and I tell them I want to take the scenic route
to school today, was that free will? Etc. Whatever we find freewill to be, when
we have finished engaging in that task, I doubt we will find discussion of
quantum mechanics or structural-decay-that-might-make-the-past-unknowable to be
relevant. (And, by "doubt" I am not asserting certainty of irrelevance, I only
mean that I do not think it will be the outcome, but I could be wrong.)
Best,EricOn Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 1:28 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]>
wrote:A long and thoughtful post Jon. I like the drunkard's streetlight
metaphor.Physicists would not agree that "the world" unfolds deterministically.
The weather for example that Nick mentions so often is unpredictable in the
long run - as you know due to chaos theory and the butterfly effect.Biological
systems in turn have and keep low internal entropy because of their high degree
of internal order and complexity. Human behavior is operating 4 or 5 levels
above the physical level of atoms and molecules, on top of and in a low-entropy
biological system.I see the problem differently, more from a human and less
from a mere physical perspective. For me the interesting thing is why we can
have free will although our behavior is determined by our habits, our emotional
reactions, and the character formed by our past environments. By the wiring of
our hardware so to speak.The interesting question for me is not if a human mind
can magically break the laws of physics by some kind of quantum woo, but how
constraints, habits, and conscious interventions interact and which forms of
agency emerge from it. But I agree that we should not to let a 17th-century
view of the universe dictate the terms of 21st-century thinking. It is probably
better to see human freedom and agency as a dynamic spectrum. Some people have
fewer cognitive degrees of freedom than others, and there are moments where we
show full free will, and others where we lack it.Instead of asking, "Did this
person act out of free will?", we should probably better ask "Given their
biological state, stress level, history, psychological conditioning, and
available information, how many meaningful alternative paths could this system
actually evaluate and take in that moment?"-J.-------- Original message
--------From: Jon Zingale <[email protected]> Date: 8/15/26 6:21 PM
(GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book Jochen,Implicit in
many of the group's discussions of free will and determinism is the premise
that the world unfolds deterministically, and that the remaining question is
whether something extra exists that can escape or modify that mechanism. I do
not think that this setup is necessary or given. More importantly, I think it
installs a false dichotomy at the center of what may be an ill-posed
problem.Locally, and for many purposes, causal accounts work extraordinarily
well. We can often treat physical laws as stable, or at least as evolving
according to some effective computable rule. We can model bounded domains,
specify state variables, solve or approximate equations, and aim to obtain
predictive control. Nothing I wish to say here denies that success.But a
successful local model is not yet a warrant for the stronger metaphysical
conclusion that there exists a complete global state of the universe, that this
state retains every relevant distinction in a lossless way, and that its entire
evolution is specified by a computable rule. Those are substantive further
assumptions.My disagreement with the "aggregation of history" picture begins
here. A world with finite physical resources cannot straightforwardly be
assumed to be an indefinitely accumulating, lossless record of arbitrarily fine
distinctions. Entropy and information bounds are often read as limits on how
much information can be stored in a finite region with finite energy. At a
minimum, physical history must be represented through selective persistence:
some distinctions become stable records, some are dispersed into inaccessible
correlations, some are erased relative to a scale of description, and some
cease to be recoverable by any physically available process.So I wonder whether
*the total state of the universe* is doing more metaphysical work than it has
earned. If one allows that the global unfolding may involve non-computable
structure, then no finite internal description can, in general, serve as a
complete ledger of that unfolding. The universe cannot stand outside itself
with a second, lossless copy of its own full history.I am not claiming that
noncomputability establishes free will. I am asking whether the familiar
determinism vs free will framing already presupposes an idealized total-state
picture that may not be physically meaningful.There is a related mathematical
point. Scientists understandably favor well-posed models: operators and
dynamical systems with domains, regularity, stability, and convergence
properties sufficient for analysis and prediction. But those are selected
virtues, not neutral evidence that the space of possible physical evolutions is
itself globally well behaved. Compact operators, for example, are a special
class. They map bounded sets to relatively compact sets and are necessarily
bounded, but they are not representative of all operators one might write down.
I would like to not confuse the tractability of the mathematical objects we can
successfully use with a demonstration that reality is exhausted by such
objects.The same caution applies to computability. Under the ordinary Lebesgue
measure on the reals, the computable reals form a countable set and therefore a
set of *measure-zero*. By contrast, algorithmically random sequences are
typical under the fair-coin measure. That is, Martin-Löf random sequences have
*measure-one*. Of course, there is no canonical uniform distribution over *all
laws* or *all operators*, so this is not a probability calculation showing that
physical law is non-computable. It is an admonition against quietly assuming
computability merely because computable descriptions are the ones available to
us.I am imagining the drunkard under the streetlight metaphor. It is sensible
to look where mathematical models offer light: computable dynamics, well-posed
initial-value problems, bounded domains, compactness arguments, and stable
approximations. But their usefulness does not establish that the deep structure
of the universe is confined to those regions of conceptual illumination.For me,
the more difficult thought is that materialism may imply not a perfectly
preserved cosmic archive, but an unfolding in which persistence is selective
and forgetting is real. Perhaps there is no complete *deep history* available
even in principle. Instead there may only exist present structures bearing
partial, transformed, scale-dependent traces of what preceded them. I am
tempted to say that what leaves no trace whatsoever *never existed* in any
ontologically robust sense. I suppose I am arguing for a surprisingly shallow
image of history.If so, the future may be genuinely productive (immanence)
rather than merely unknown to us. Not necessarily because an agent steps
outside causality, but because the global boundary conditions, state
description, and rule of unfolding are not available in the form demanded by
classical determinism.This may make *free will* the wrong label. We may all be
acting in ways that are locally causal, constrained, and intelligible while
global determinism remains undefined, ungrounded, or simply irrelevant. I do
not yet know what positive concept should replace it. But I do not think that
uncertainty should be hidden by accepting the *determinism vs free will*
dichotomy as our starting point.My two cents.Jon
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