We're starting from the position that we are not entirely sure how the physical world works. From that starting point, pushing the problem of free will off into some other metaphysical realm which we also don't fully understand solves no problems. Unless we can posit rules or mechanisms that apply to souls but that can't apply physically, and show what those are, they are philosophically indistinguishable.
Personally I'm very much in the compatibilist camp. For a decision to be mine, it must depend on my state. If the decision does not derive directly from my state (memories, personality, emotions, etc) then it is not my decision. So the extent to which a decision comes from some other source, to that extent the decision is not mine. Again punting the problem off to a 'soul' adds no conceptual value. Either the soul is part of me and part of my state, or it isn't.
That aside, I'm saying that I don't see how non-physicality solves the problem of free will. In a physicalist interpretation decisions can be influenced by internal state, influenced randomly, or influenced by external forces. Non-empirical facts are still state. What additional factor does non-physicality contribute that I didn't list?
Is a 'soul' part of the person or external? Does it have state? Does it contribute randomness? What is it that it actually does except add something else we have to ask these questions about?
When you have a group of people "gathered together" ("In my name") there surely must be a subtle but coherent magnetic field that interacts with the physical to bring about "unexplainable phenomena". Perhaps the notion of God/gods could be explained this way.
Indo-european rune technology involves subtle magnetic fields in complex shapes, and are believed to affect the physical in "non-deterministic" ways as well. [1]
1. "Runelore" by Edred Thorsson
Only if you want to stay with reality not venture into phantasy.
You seem somewhat knowledgeable about this topic, so maybe you or someone else can answer this.
Why can't free will just be a complex system feedback loop and name for the way we humans perceive our own decision making process in this loop. I mean why can it not be that "free will" is the decision making process which is influenced by unconscious processes and in turn influences those unconscious processes? It could be deterministic and random or the universe could turn out to work differently at some level and it really wouldn't matter.
Is something like this a standard view in this whole debate on Free Will?
Second, I'm not sure what you mean by "mirrors reality". The debate surrounding free will is about defining the term and its properties and how it's a factor in moral responsibility. To do so, it must provide a justifiable framework for moral reasoning and our moral language to make sense of how we use the term. Compatibilism convincingly meets the necessary criteria, and that's why it's the majority view.
The holdouts are people who insist free will must have certain properties that Compatibilism probably doesn't have, but they haven't been able to argue this convincingly enough to persuade a majority.
The actions causally derived from randomness in our universe seem random because we inside the system have no Informational view in to the meta-system in which they have some kind of causal logic, but the decision makes sense when you have access to that higher-order logic in the meta-system. The random state of some set of particles in someone's brain that makes them choose one action over another, could be a connective tissue by which the meta-'soul' asserts its control.
It's useless for any kind of pragmatic ethical effort, and really it's just pushing the problem up one level, but it's fun to think about.
This was commonly believed for a long time, but there have been numerous studies in experimental philosophy that actually tested this question, and it turns out that people's moral reasoning is Compatibilist. See the latest:
Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and Millan, https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDWCI-3
So people only claim to be incompatibilists when they confuse determinism with fatalism. Regardless, they tended to agree strongly with Compatibilist moral reasoning.
I pretty strongly disagree with this statement. I am not a compatibilist, but I am fully aware of the differences between fatalism and determinism. If I believed in fatalism then I would believe that If am fated to recover or die from an illness, it would happen regardless of whatever actions I take, etc. With determinism I believe the outcome from whatever illness I receive will depend on the illness, the actions taken, my overall health, etc. etc. etc., all the way back through the causal chain at the start of the universe.
I believe everything adheres to causality. Compatabilists and I would both agree that we cannot determine our motivations, but then we would disagree if there is "free will" in the choice we make based on those motivations. My brain is a physical entity, ruled by the laws of physics. Every decision I make is ruled by those laws, because my brain cannot work in any other way. If we had perfect knowledge of how the brain works (and I believe this is possible), you can boil down the thought process of "I have a memory of stubbing my toe and it hurt, so I will make the conscious effort to avoid stubbing my toe" to the composite physics that result in said thought process. Given all of the same inputs, the same outputs will come in to play.
This somewhat ignores the randomness of the quantum world, but I don't think it particularly effects the outcome - if time could be rewound to the start of the universe, and the play button pushed, quantum effects would likely mean that we do not end up with the same universe we have today, but I don't see how having randomness fundamentally would mean that I as a human being have any increase in my ability to come to a decision. The inputs would be different, if I were to exist at all, but I would still be bound by the same laws of physics that determine how my brain functions.
Compatabilitists and I sharing similar ideas about moral reasoning doesn't change that. My "moral reasoning" is that things like the laws we create are still all based on causality, and that the actions people take are in turn causally related to the inputs we give them, such as the laws. Changing this inputs results in different outputs when considering things like potential futures, which are then inputs into the decision making process, etc.
But I also believe that it doesn't really matter, as far as day to day life goes. At current, humans lack the ability to perceive life in such a way that we can figure out how any of that shit actually works. I can behave and think in a way that is similar enough to how free will would work that it doesn't matter. To change this, we would need perfect knowledge of how basically everything works, have the ability to measure every necessary input in the system, and calculate the outcomes. If we are ever able to reach that point, I'm pretty sure it'll be so far into the future it's nothing worth worrying myself about.
Its pretty easy to argue that this is impossible. To exploit determinism to 'predict the future' you'd have to simulate a large chunk of reality at the sub-atomic level. Arguably, you might have to simulate the whole universe. But lets just say you were trying to simulate our planet - you would need a computer running a model of the world at the sub-atomic level and somehow running it faster than the world itself unfolds. I'm 100% sure that would be impossible. Also, there's the whole 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' for your simulation (see chaos theory etc).
So you can think of the universe as a computer that is calculating its own future in real time. There is no way to 'get ahead' of the univere's own unfolding. As such the fact that it might be deterministic becomes irrelevant because there is no way to exploit that determinism. Simply put: It may be deterministic but its fundamentally unpredictable.
Yep! It is very likely that this is impossible.
>you would need a computer running a model of the world at the sub-atomic level and somehow running it faster than the world itself unfolds. I'm 100% sure that would be impossible.
I'm not 100% sure.
The universe? Sure. We know that's impossible because of our understanding of physics - we cannot store the amount of information in the universe in anything smaller than the universe, much less compute on that information. Every single state we compute would again require the entirety of the universe to be stored, plus any transitional states in between. But I can't say with 100% certainty we'll never be able to compute everything necessary to predict how humans behave.
It might be, at some point in the future.
But my point was less about the theoretical possibility of this and more of how the fact that it currently is not, and is unlikely to be so at any point that is particularly relevant.
Pretty close!
Laplace's Demon also talks about seeing the past - which my hypothetical does not. Nor am I concerned with calculating the entire universe, only the portions that would effect human cognition - just that which will be observable. Much of the universe is beyond our light cone, and unless we are in the center of the universe, almost certainly the vast majority is, and none of that needs to be calculated. Severely restricts the requirements vs. Laplace's demon.
>It has been disproven by chaos theory.
Not quite! Chaos theory relies on imperfect information. It does nothing to disprove Laplace's Demon, which involves perfect information. For chaos theory to be applicable, there has to be minor variations between the initial conditions. Chaos theory is not a theory that we cannot predict things because they are unpredictable, it is a theory that says that minor variations at the onset can result in huge differences in the eventual outcome. These problems only exist if you do not have perfect information.
Thermodynamic irreversibility disproves Laplace's Demon's seeing into the past portion. The Copenhagan interpretation of quantum mechanics also puts a nail in the Demon.
Things get interesting if we are ever able to create a 300 qubit quantum computer - at this point, you can perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the known universe. Is that granular enough to accurately determine human behavior?
The whole computer thing is more an aside than anything, though - just providing a hypothetical in which case free will not existing would actually have practical application on how humans live. Without it, I can't think of any reason why we should behave in any other way than we do, regardless of the underlying truth.
It might not work for telling the future, but if you limit the computation to see if it accurately models what is now history, you don't need it to simulate itself.
Compatibilism is specifically the position that free will is compatible with deterministic agents. Merely stating you disagree that this qualifies as free will isn't particularly compelling. Compatibilism makes sense of our moral language, we clearly have the free will described by Compatibilism, and it's strongly predictive of our moral reasoning as the paper I linked shows.
That seems to describe what most people mean when they use the term "free will" quite well, just like "day job" describes quite well what I do every weekday from 9AM to 5PM.
Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now.
Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism, but from my point of view, it doesn't really matter what philosophers think. It's a matter of what the science says.
I don't see any real incompatibilities with moral reasoning between a universe where there is no free will and one where it is compatible with determinism, so saying that compatbilist moral reasoning is predictive of how we generally behave is not an argument for free will.
Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent definition/non-empty set.
Compatibilism entails that any universe featuring intelligent agents acting on reasons and capable of understanding and learning from their actions will have free will. So basically, you're claiming that a universe that features such intelligent agents is indistinguishable from a universe that has no such intelligent agents.
> Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now.
I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply not relevant to this sort of question. What populations are you comparing here exactly?
Secondly, Compatibilism describes exactly what humans do because it's compatible with both deterministic and indeterministic worlds (see point above re:universes with Compatibilism). Compatibilist free will clearly exists in our universe virtually by definition, ie. we are clearly intelligent agents acting on reasons and capable of understanding and learning from our choices.
> Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism
Because most people don't have the requisite knowledge to evaluate possibilities that require profound domain knowledge. Would you be similarly derisive if I referenced the medical consensus when wading through a health debate?
It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct. There's no evidence that this is the case.
>I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply not relevant to this sort of question. What populations are you comparing here exactly?
What? The null hypothesis is 100% relevant to this sort of question. The scientific null assumption is that something doesn't exist. If you are claiming it does, you're the one that needs to prove it.
>Because most people don't have the requisite knowledge to evaluate possibilities that require profound domain knowledge. Would you be similarly derisive if I referenced the medical consensus when wading through a health debate?
Philosophers do not have profound domain knowledge in determining how the universe actually works. Physicists do. The medical consensus question makes no sense because that is a false equivalency.
Take a look at the actual definition of null hypothesis and tell me how it's relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
You're suggesting there's no relationship between what two phenomena when it comes to free will?
> The scientific null assumption is that something doesn't exist.
No it's not. Science is agnostic on such questions until there's evidence, and that's the proper answer. Making a definitive claim of existence or non-existence both require proof.
> It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct.
Lay out what constitutes proof of such a question, because I frankly think you're very confused either about what Compatibilism actually says, or what the whole free will debate is actually about.
> Philosophers do not have profound domain knowledge in determining how the universe actually works.
Fortunately, the philosophical question of free will is not about how the universe works.
>Scientific null assumptions are used to directly advance a theory. For example, the angular momentum of the universe is zero. If not true, the theory of the early universe may need revision.
We have not proven that the angular momentum of the universe is zero. We assume it is, and have created our equations of how the universe works assuming this, and those equations have accurately described how the universe works.
However, it is not impossible that the universe is has angular momentum, and some scientists have proposed that it does, actually, and have some evidence that backs their claims. However, it hasn't been proven, so most scientists still work under the assumption that the angular momentum is zero.
>Fortunately, the philosophical question of free will is not about how the universe works.
Uh. What?
Whether or not we have free will is 100% about how the universe works. Either we have it, and the laws of nature allow it, or we do not.
I asked you specifically about how the null hypothesis applies to free will. Angular momentum has no bearing on this question.
> Whether or not we have free will is 100% about how the universe works.
And this is why you're confused. Because it's not. Some definitions of free will depend on physical or metaphysical assumptions, and some do not and absolutely and unequivocally apply to our universe. One such definition is Comaptibilism, and if you don't think so, then you don't understand Compatibilism.
There is no such proof, and as such, the null hypothesis or null assumption is that free will doesn't exist, in the same way we assume the angular momentum of the universe is zero.
I'm not arguing about whether or not that's what Compatibilism believes, I'm arguing that Compatibilism is wrong because you cannot separate the way humans act and think from the physical laws of the universe. Regardless of whether or not most humans act in a way that is compatible with Compatibilism doesn't prove Compatibilism, especially if Compatibilism basically agrees with all of the physics that say free will likely doesn't exist, and then does a philosophical shoulder shrug and says that free will exists anyway, because we have freedom to act, despite that not being nearly enough to encompass actual free will.
I very much agree but have to conceed that your view on the label 'universe' might be too narrow. I too vigourisly oppose to the notion that the philosophical question of free will is not about how the universe works. Because will is all about how I will work the universe.
I suppose meeting somewhere halfway would be compromise, and naasking was just teasing with a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment.
Agreed.
> There is no such proof, and as such, the null hypothesis or null assumption is that free will doesn't exist
1. This is a misapplication of the null hypothesis. There are good reasons why angular momentum should be zero and that's why that would be the null hypothesis. If I were to accept that a null hypothesis is sensible in this scenario, then the opposite is the case here: we directly observe us making choices free from coercion and are good at inferring and understanding other people's choices with or without coercion; we use terms like "free will" and are able to communicate precisely what this means to others, and they easily understand our meaning. The null hypothesis is then that we do have free will and a test must be devised to disprove this (some might argue that something like the MRI tests that detect decisions before we're consciously aware of them would qualify).
2. Compatibilism doesn't require such low-level physics considerations. It depends only on intelligent agents acting on reasons, a category under which humans fall, and that is proof that Compatibilist free will exists. You can dispute whether this should qualify as "proper" free will, the type of free will that grounds moral responsibility and matches our moral language and moral reasoning, but you cannot deny that Compatibilist free will itself exists. I have further provided considerable evidence that Compatibilist free will does in fact explain our moral language and reasoning and does ground moral responsibility, therefore there is no reason not to accept Compatibilism as "proper" free will.
In both cases, your burden of proof has been met and exceeded.
> I'm not arguing about whether or not that's what Compatibilism believes, I'm arguing that Compatibilism is wrong because you cannot separate the way humans act and think from the physical laws of the universe.
Compatibilism doesn't require you to.
> and then does a philosophical shoulder shrug and says that free will exists anyway, because we have freedom to act, despite that not being nearly enough to encompass actual free will.
Physics says that day jobs don't actually exist. There is nowhere in the fundamental physics ontology for a location in spacetime where certain aggregates of matter must go for 8 hours a day from 9AM to 5PM on week days.
And yet, by and large we all have such a day job. Do you agree? Is it a philsophical shoulder shrug to say that day jobs don't exist, but then say day jobs kinda do exist because I quite clearly go to a day job every week day?
So either the distinction you're making exists but doesn't matter, or it doesn't exist and you're simply making a category error, confusing two phenomena which have no direct relation to each other.
That's not what the null hypothesis is.
And who said the existence of free-will is the null hypothesis?
How could it not be? You don't assume that literally everything is true without evidence of its existence.
Otherwise there is an infinite amount of an infinite variety of things existing in my room right now that I can't observe.
I find even the idea that we could one day compute the human brain completely preposterous. We can't even compute water flowing in a pipe today (I'm saying this as an effective non-expert who has dabbled a bit in computational physics).
So, if the philosophical basis is that "if we can deterministically compute something, it's deterministic" then human cognition at the moment is most indeterminate.
Free will or no free will, we really can't know the difference. So it's best to behave like you have a free will, and own your own actions as far as you can.
This is a slight modification to Pascal's gamble :)
>So, if the philosophical basis is that "if we can deterministically compute something, it's deterministic" then human cognition at the moment is most indeterminate.
My belief, based on my understanding of physics, is that human cognition is deterministic, regardless of whether or not we can compute it.
But I do largely agree with your broader point that whether or not we have free will should have little impact on the inputs in our system. Even if I believe that everything is deterministic and we have no free will, I can't use that information in any practical way, and human cognition (or perhaps more accurately modern Westerner cognition) is slanted towards believing in something resembling what we call free will. No reason to worry about it for anything beyond philosophical discussions. I brought up the computation as a hypothetical point at which acting differently would matter.
I think computational complexity is important, but I also think it's important not to conflate "unpredictable" with "indeterminate", even if they are behaviourally indistinguishable.
> Free will or no free will, we really can't know the difference. So it's best to behave like you have a free will, and own your own actions as far as you can.
Dennett calls this the "intentional stance", ie. that any system of sufficient complexity should be treated as if it were acting with intent.
I'm not sure that I'd agree. Maybe the layman doesn't think about how to reconcile determinism with their concept of free will, but it is possible. Talking about free will without a working definition is hard.
If free will is: "You are free to make any choices presented to you."
Then it becomes simple to argue that you are in fact making these choices regardless of whether what makes up you is pre-determined. The same you would of course make the same choices, but then it is still you making them. The outcomes and opportunity of the choices is irrelevant.
I made the same argument in my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18607762
Even if the universe was run by Greek gods, it would still follow this chain of causality or be completely random. It seems like this applies to any thing you can ask “why?” of.
Interestingly enough you run into a paradox because the chain of causality had to begin some where...which begs the question “why did time begin? What triggered it?”
There's no paradox, just a wrong assumption.
Not only that, but randomness and determinism are equally against the (casual) idea of free will.
Free will, as commonly understood, means there's an "extra layer of abstraction" between the universe (material objects and their relationships) and me. What people called "soul".
It's not just that our decisions (will) are random instead of predetermined by a cascade of material interactions.
Note that if one presumes a soul, free will is then not an illogical impossibility. It's just an extra layer of abstraction: it can decide based on our material-timeline-history (our interactions with the universe and others), but it's not absolutely bound by them (in the way a deterministic brain would be).
A soul, in that sense, is like when a protagonist in a movie breaking the fourth wall. They exist in the world of the movie, but they have some footing outside of it. (Of course in the case of the movie, the breaking is scripted).