In my opinion, any discussion about the "free will" or its non-existence should begin with the precise definition of the term. I observed in the past than people have different notions about what the term comprises, and without that common ground the discussions tends to be fruitless.
"Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents perfectly accurate measure of "physical state".
So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.
But those differences would have nothing to do with human will. They would be random, or, more precisely, non-deterministic (per definition, as you can't measure them). So, having a non-deterministic free will is like having no free will at all.
I think a better definition would be "the thing that makes people responsible for their choices." The really hard problem of free will is explaining how on earth people could be responsible for their actions if these actions aren't freely chosen. (Or of explaining what it means for something to be freely chosen if they are indeed freely chosen.) The issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is a complete red herring, IMHO. A belief in free will is not just a belief in non-determinism, or a rejection of physicalism.
You can stop thinking in terms of "responsibility" and start thinking in terms of "incentives." i.e. you can still send a criminal to jail even though they didn't decide to be a criminal, if jail time is more likely to discourage other criminals.
If you don't have free will, you still respond to stimuli. So instead of punishing someone for willful action, you subject them to stimuli.
But I don't want to stop thinking in terms of responsibility.
I just can't view other people as black boxes who "respond to stimuli", because that's incompatible with any kind of moral or human outlook on the world. After all, I don't think of myself as a black box who responds to stimuli. And how can I be a truly moral person if I think others are fundamentally different from me?
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It is true that we respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and yes even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with traditional concepts of free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
It doesn't really change the issue, as far as I can see. I don't think of myself as being nothing more than a very complex machine. The fact that people have mental states doesn't imply that they're responsible for the outcomes of the interaction of those states with the outside world.
Sorry for the double post above. I was replying right as noprocrast kicked and was not able to delete the extra one :-\
I have a couple responses regarding complex machines and responsibility. Firstly, as to whether or not we are complex machines, the fact that you don't want to think of yourself as a black box or a very complex machine is somewhat tangential to the issue. If we both agree that there is some sort of objective reality outside of ourselves than either we are complex machines (materialism) or not (dualism? please forgive me if I am putting words in your mouth) and the way we feel about it does not change that fact (whatever it actually is). My point here is just to be cautious about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis just because of the way it feels.
But as for responsibility, even if we were to suppose that we were "merely" complex machines, I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions. Contemplating root causes beyond that level is problematic no matter how you view the universe--is there a devil that causes one to sin or does it depend on the initial state of the universe?
In my personal opinion, the only domains that materialism remains poor at explaining are free will and qualia. For free will I can hand-wave and assert that free will is an illusion which our brain provides us with because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps in helping us decipher when actions arise from within the individual or from within the environment. For qualia I yet have no explanation. :)
> I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions
We can do that, but it's arguably treating people as means rather than ends. As I said, I don't view myself as merely a bundle of state, and it therefore seems somewhat immoral to treat others as if they were just bundles of state. It's kind of fundamental to a moral view of the world to believe that you are no more or less a person than any other person. So unless I can really persuade myself that I myself am just an automaton of some sort, I'm not sure I can deny free will and nonetheless maintain a satisfactory moral outlook.
It's kind of fundamental to a moral view of the world to believe that you are no more or less a person than any other person.
It would definitely be weird for one to have free will and everyone else not to, and I am certainly not making that claim. However, if you believe that one can behave morally with respect to dolphins, cockroaches or the environment--and most people would agree that some or all of the members of that set are mere bundles of state and/or lack free will--then it seems that one should be able to act morally with respect to a bundle of state person, too.
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It's true that we do respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
The thing that I do that feels like "free will" is use adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff.
Why would that feel like free will? Wouldn't it just feel like using adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff?
It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
Because the choice resulting from problem solving is adaptive and heuristic, I can't run it advance of the evidential state I'm in when I choose. I can't know the evidential state in advance, because the problem/solution space is imperfectly mapped. So it feels like my choices are not determined in advance. (However they're entirely determined at the instant I make them.)
I'm confused by the "because" in the first sentence and the "so" in the penultimate. I see no reason why the one thing should cause the other. As I say, it's logically possibly that there could be such a causal relation, but in general there's no reason to think that doing X should feel like doing Y -- you'd expect it to feel like doing X! If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be. Which is a distinct state from feeling that I have freedom of choice.
In fact if you use your imagination, you can come up with scenarios in which you don't know what your future choice will be, but it clearly doesn't feel like a free choice. E.g. if you say "I will choose to get a coffee if I roll the die and the number is 3 or above, or a tea otherwise."
My mistake regarding because. Yes, I was talking about the causal relationship in the penultimate sentence only.
>The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence
It doesn't explain it, it just asserts it. There is no reason why a lack of foreknowledge about your future decisions should make you feel as if you have free choice. It could just as well make you feel like you're bobbing around at random in the causal flux.
Splitting the phrase/concept "free choice" into "free" and "choice", I have been mostly talking about the "free", because it describes the feeling that a choice "might be anything and I won't know until I've made it". Above, you are more concerned with whether it's a "choice" (versus "bobbing around at random") - but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff. So it will make a "choice" (defined in this context as a purposeful decision). Therefore, free choice.
I don't think your analysis of "free choice" captures the relevant meaning. You can't answer these sorts of questions by playing with words. You need to think about the phenomenon that is being referred to, not the phrase I used to describe it.
>but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff
Actually, I'm not sure that I know any of those things (it might help if one of those terms actually meant something).
"I don't think your analysis of "free choice" captures the relevant meaning."
Can you tell me why you think it doesn't? You think I was playing word games. I think I was cleanly picking a concept apart into fundamentals and relating my definition to each piece.
I assert that free choice means
1. you make purposeful choices
2. your choices don't feel like they are definite until you choose them
and that I have sufficiently shown why each of these relates to the definition I gave.
"it might help if one of those terms actually meant something"
They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
>I think I was cleanly picking a concept apart into fundamentals and relating my definition to each piece.
You were picking a particular stipulated definition apart, but the definition in question doesn't correspond to the concept of "free will" or "free choice" that people actually have. Playing around with definitions like this doesn't address any important issue.
Tthere is no sense in which (1) and (2) explain our sense of freedom of choice. You can perfectly well imagine that even if both (1) and (2) were true, you might nonetheless have no sense of free will. Even if you don't know what you future decisions will be, you can still feel like a "cog in the machine" with no power to act of your own volition. In fact, I sometimes really do feel like this. For example, if you've ever been extremely angry, you've probably had the feeling of not knowing exactly what you're going to do next, but nonetheless feeling that you have very little control over your actions.
>They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
Really? If I google for "value fulfillment payoff", the only result is a link to these posts. I'm know what the individual words mean, but I find the phrase a little baffling.
Comments
In my opinion, any discussion about the "free will" or its non-existence should begin with the precise definition of the term. I observed in the past than people have different notions about what the term comprises, and without that common ground the discussions tends to be fruitless.
I'll try.
"Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents perfectly accurate measure of "physical state".
So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.
But those differences would have nothing to do with human will. They would be random, or, more precisely, non-deterministic (per definition, as you can't measure them). So, having a non-deterministic free will is like having no free will at all.
Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)
Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)
The alternative interpretation is that all particles in the universe have free will. ;)
At a bigger scale, they seem to act randomly, though.
But maybe if we could follow one particle in its everyday life, we see how it exercises its free will?
" If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove."
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Math_...
Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents perfectly accurate measure of "physical state".
So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.
You are right about the definition but wrong about your conclusion. It is impossible to measure 2 brains and be sure they are physically identical.
But this does not mean 2 brains cannot be physically identical.
I really thought that Heisenberg was talking about the reality and not the measure.
I think I'm wrong on this one: A deterministic behavior would rule out free will.
Free will would be non-deterministic, by definition.
Revised conclusion: We have as much free will as our particles.
Still no fate, though ;)
I think a better definition would be "the thing that makes people responsible for their choices." The really hard problem of free will is explaining how on earth people could be responsible for their actions if these actions aren't freely chosen. (Or of explaining what it means for something to be freely chosen if they are indeed freely chosen.) The issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is a complete red herring, IMHO. A belief in free will is not just a belief in non-determinism, or a rejection of physicalism.
You can stop thinking in terms of "responsibility" and start thinking in terms of "incentives." i.e. you can still send a criminal to jail even though they didn't decide to be a criminal, if jail time is more likely to discourage other criminals.
If you don't have free will, you still respond to stimuli. So instead of punishing someone for willful action, you subject them to stimuli.
But I don't want to stop thinking in terms of responsibility.
I just can't view other people as black boxes who "respond to stimuli", because that's incompatible with any kind of moral or human outlook on the world. After all, I don't think of myself as a black box who responds to stimuli. And how can I be a truly moral person if I think others are fundamentally different from me?
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It is true that we respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and yes even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with traditional concepts of free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
It doesn't really change the issue, as far as I can see. I don't think of myself as being nothing more than a very complex machine. The fact that people have mental states doesn't imply that they're responsible for the outcomes of the interaction of those states with the outside world.
Sorry for the double post above. I was replying right as noprocrast kicked and was not able to delete the extra one :-\
I have a couple responses regarding complex machines and responsibility. Firstly, as to whether or not we are complex machines, the fact that you don't want to think of yourself as a black box or a very complex machine is somewhat tangential to the issue. If we both agree that there is some sort of objective reality outside of ourselves than either we are complex machines (materialism) or not (dualism? please forgive me if I am putting words in your mouth) and the way we feel about it does not change that fact (whatever it actually is). My point here is just to be cautious about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis just because of the way it feels.
But as for responsibility, even if we were to suppose that we were "merely" complex machines, I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions. Contemplating root causes beyond that level is problematic no matter how you view the universe--is there a devil that causes one to sin or does it depend on the initial state of the universe?
In my personal opinion, the only domains that materialism remains poor at explaining are free will and qualia. For free will I can hand-wave and assert that free will is an illusion which our brain provides us with because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps in helping us decipher when actions arise from within the individual or from within the environment. For qualia I yet have no explanation. :)
> I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions
We can do that, but it's arguably treating people as means rather than ends. As I said, I don't view myself as merely a bundle of state, and it therefore seems somewhat immoral to treat others as if they were just bundles of state. It's kind of fundamental to a moral view of the world to believe that you are no more or less a person than any other person. So unless I can really persuade myself that I myself am just an automaton of some sort, I'm not sure I can deny free will and nonetheless maintain a satisfactory moral outlook.
It's kind of fundamental to a moral view of the world to believe that you are no more or less a person than any other person.
It would definitely be weird for one to have free will and everyone else not to, and I am certainly not making that claim. However, if you believe that one can behave morally with respect to dolphins, cockroaches or the environment--and most people would agree that some or all of the members of that set are mere bundles of state and/or lack free will--then it seems that one should be able to act morally with respect to a bundle of state person, too.
Does anyone here not experience qualia? What is that like?
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It's true that we do respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
The thing that I do that feels like "free will" is use adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff.
Why would that feel like free will? Wouldn't it just feel like using adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff?
It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
Because the choice resulting from problem solving is adaptive and heuristic, I can't run it advance of the evidential state I'm in when I choose. I can't know the evidential state in advance, because the problem/solution space is imperfectly mapped. So it feels like my choices are not determined in advance. (However they're entirely determined at the instant I make them.)
I'm confused by the "because" in the first sentence and the "so" in the penultimate. I see no reason why the one thing should cause the other. As I say, it's logically possibly that there could be such a causal relation, but in general there's no reason to think that doing X should feel like doing Y -- you'd expect it to feel like doing X! If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be. Which is a distinct state from feeling that I have freedom of choice.
In fact if you use your imagination, you can come up with scenarios in which you don't know what your future choice will be, but it clearly doesn't feel like a free choice. E.g. if you say "I will choose to get a coffee if I roll the die and the number is 3 or above, or a tea otherwise."
Did you misread? That "because" is an internal connective inside the first sentence only. (I'd rephrase, but I'm not sure what would be clearer.)
The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence, "it feels like my choices are not determined in advance".
"If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be."
You expect to know what your choice will be only when you choose it. That equals the feeling of "freedom of choice".
My mistake regarding because. Yes, I was talking about the causal relationship in the penultimate sentence only.
>The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence
It doesn't explain it, it just asserts it. There is no reason why a lack of foreknowledge about your future decisions should make you feel as if you have free choice. It could just as well make you feel like you're bobbing around at random in the causal flux.
Splitting the phrase/concept "free choice" into "free" and "choice", I have been mostly talking about the "free", because it describes the feeling that a choice "might be anything and I won't know until I've made it". Above, you are more concerned with whether it's a "choice" (versus "bobbing around at random") - but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff. So it will make a "choice" (defined in this context as a purposeful decision). Therefore, free choice.
I don't think your analysis of "free choice" captures the relevant meaning. You can't answer these sorts of questions by playing with words. You need to think about the phenomenon that is being referred to, not the phrase I used to describe it.
>but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff
Actually, I'm not sure that I know any of those things (it might help if one of those terms actually meant something).
"I don't think your analysis of "free choice" captures the relevant meaning."
Can you tell me why you think it doesn't? You think I was playing word games. I think I was cleanly picking a concept apart into fundamentals and relating my definition to each piece.
I assert that free choice means
1. you make purposeful choices
2. your choices don't feel like they are definite until you choose them
and that I have sufficiently shown why each of these relates to the definition I gave.
"it might help if one of those terms actually meant something"
They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
>I think I was cleanly picking a concept apart into fundamentals and relating my definition to each piece.
You were picking a particular stipulated definition apart, but the definition in question doesn't correspond to the concept of "free will" or "free choice" that people actually have. Playing around with definitions like this doesn't address any important issue.
Tthere is no sense in which (1) and (2) explain our sense of freedom of choice. You can perfectly well imagine that even if both (1) and (2) were true, you might nonetheless have no sense of free will. Even if you don't know what you future decisions will be, you can still feel like a "cog in the machine" with no power to act of your own volition. In fact, I sometimes really do feel like this. For example, if you've ever been extremely angry, you've probably had the feeling of not knowing exactly what you're going to do next, but nonetheless feeling that you have very little control over your actions.
>They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
Really? If I google for "value fulfillment payoff", the only result is a link to these posts. I'm know what the individual words mean, but I find the phrase a little baffling.