ambisinister_gecko t1_j970yd2 wrote
Reply to comment by jamesj in Compatibilism is supported by deep intuitions about responsibility and control. It can also feel "obviously" wrong and absurd. Slavoj Žižek's commentary can help us navigate the intuitive standoff. by matthewharlow
Do you believe the incompatibilists conception of free will is coherent?
jamesj t1_j976xaz wrote
No, I don't see a coherent way of integrating free will with my observations. I believe that free will as commonly understood is likely incompatible with either a deterministic or stochastic universe. I'm open to evidence and argument to the contrary though.
ambisinister_gecko t1_j97aqfx wrote
No, I don't want to convince you that libertarian free will is coherent. I think it's not, which is part of what drives the compatibilist intuition to recontextualize what is called the "feeling of having free will" - if the Libertarian approach is not only non existent, but not even coherent, that opens us up to the idea that a different approach from the libertarian one might produce something more coherent, more valuable.
jamesj t1_j97dmsd wrote
Sure, I think I can get behind a statement that we can redefine free will to be the most useful plausible version. That then wouldn't be the kind of free will many people think they have. I'm also not sure how that version of free will supports the kind of moral responsibility that many people think other people have.
ambisinister_gecko t1_j97g44s wrote
>the kind of moral responsibility that many people think other people have.
People intuitively think you have moral responsibility for actions you were in control of. The article centers their conception of free will around control as well. I think that's a really solid place to center it.
jamesj t1_j97xptk wrote
In what way is someone in control of their actions if they are determined by causes they are not in control of?
Ytar0 t1_j989r0b wrote
Have you actually never heard the term “free will is an illusion”? I feel like it perfectly describes compatibilism. You can never escape the subjectivity of your personal perspective, objective truths might exist but they will never be known to you. Determinism might ultimately mean that your fate is inevitable, but that whole discussion is redundant since you can’t see the future. Even if it might be an illusion I do experience, and I am not omniscient so I feel free.
fartmouthbreather t1_j98cf2m wrote
Free will being an illusion is obviously compatible with determinism. That’s the whole point of determinism, that isn’t a free will worth wanting, and that’s OP’s point. The author has redefined it to make it a negligible epiphenomenon.
OldMillenial t1_j98czub wrote
>The author has redefined it to make it a negligible epiphenomenon.
The author has attempted to redefine it, and at the same time attempted to leverage the "common sense" perception of moral responsibility that is most certainly not based on his new definition.
The author is playing a semantic shell game, all while desperately attempting to convince you that he gets to go to dinners with more interesting people, and that those who disagree with him and his cool friends are just "Philosophy 101 students."
Ytar0 t1_j98eili wrote
I honestly feel like so much of "philosophy" is just miscommunication lol.
fartmouthbreather t1_j98lejv wrote
It’s easy when people define their own terms. :(
keelanstuart t1_j9ajkrn wrote
Is watching a movie for the first time, whose story you cannot control, any less enjoyable because of that fact? What is "worth wanting" then? Why does determinism feel oppressive if the illusion of free will is persistent? If we had everything we wanted in life, would we feel put upon by forces we cannot control or would we never question things as we do when we suffer? Shrug. Points to ponder.
fartmouthbreather t1_j9b7902 wrote
I don’t want that. The author claims “people do”.
jamesj t1_j98aavi wrote
Sure, but why is that called compatibilism and not illusionism, which seems like a much more appropriate label? It just feels to me that compatibilists want the claim that free will is compatible with determinism (because they are physicalists who like the idea of moral responsibility) more than they want clarity around the words "free will".
Ytar0 t1_j98c0mi wrote
Well, not all philosophers are very "compatible" themselves lol. But that aside, yes you might call that flavor of compatibilism, illusionism. But for the most part, I think they just have a different definition of free will. I.e. one that isn't:
- If someone acts of their own free will, then they could have done otherwise (A-C).
- If determinism is true, no one can do otherwise than one actually does (D-E).
- Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will (F).
Compatibilism reminds me of Absurdism, in that you're embracing "the absurd" (even though it's a slightly different absurd here lol)
Atilla_The_Honey t1_j99xtdn wrote
I’ve seen something like this argument before and I wonder if you can clarify it for me. In the first premise, what does “could have done otherwise” mean? That if they had decided to do otherwise, they could have?
Surely in a deterministic universe this could still be true, because the deciding to do otherwise would be part of the causal chain leading them to act, so changing that part could change the resulting action.
I don’t really understand the second premise either - surely whether the universe is deterministic or not, once an action has been taken it can’t be changed. Can you clarify how someone could do otherwise than they actually do in any kind of universe?
I think I broadly agree that the article above is arguing from a different conception of free will, in a rather sneaky way.
dirtmother t1_j9acftr wrote
Compatibilism often reads to me as, "I will express my moral intuition, and I never could have done otherwise".
Correct me if I'm wrong lol.
Ytar0 t1_j99z04n wrote
Determinism ultimately means that there only is one possible future. And that all actions will inevitably lead to that future. From an outside perspective we are simply following the laws of casualty.
So “deciding to do otherwise” means creating a different future, one where you has done otherwise than what was predetermined. Idk if that makes more sense.
jamesj t1_j993fmi wrote
That's interesting because absurdism appeals to me quite a lot while compatibilism makes little sense to me at all.
Ytar0 t1_j9bwkg6 wrote
Hmm. Then let me ask you some, since I am not sure how to relate to incompatibilists. Are you at all times aware that whatever you choose to do (and chose to do) is outside of your control?? Because for the life of me I have never felt that I wasn't free in my actions. And while this might be an illusion (I am a determinist after all) I will never and don't believe I ever can be aware of how this changes anything in my life. (since I simply am not given this information)
What do you think about that ^ ?
jamesj t1_j9bzbrb wrote
Yes, there are two important levels where things are outside of my control: first, i didn't choose my place of birth, language, parents, schools, upbringing, and what ideas I was exposed to. Second, I conceive of my self as a subset of my brain and body, and at a deep level I don't believe that part of me is in control. I'm along for the ride, and I experience stories about why things happen, some of those stories involving the idea of choices, but I don't believe all of those stories.
Ytar0 t1_j9cvzbv wrote
Hmm yeah, I guess it’s too hard for me to truly explain my pov. But to put it another way, while the concept of objective truths might exist in this universe, I don’t believe we could ever know them, since we’re always bound by the confines of our brains, and our perspective. Your experience and subjective opinion is just as valid is mine, I just argue that “being along for the ride” is the same as what compatibilists call “free will”. Because this “ride” isn’t one you know or can wholly predict, and it also feels the same as if it weren’t a ride. The difference is unknowable imo.
OldMillenial t1_j98dc3y wrote
>Have you actually never heard the term “free will is an illusion”? I feel like it perfectly describes compatibilism.
Whether this does or does not perfectly define compatibilism, I do not know.
I do know that this description is in fairly direct opposition to the relationship between free will and compatibilism as presented in the article.
deepfield67 t1_j99uo0g wrote
I'm not convinced the very concept of free will isn't meaningless. It doesn't necessarily correspond to any aspect of reality. There is an embedded assumption that there is an objective reality in which that free will is exercised and that's a meaningless concept, too. I can only be point to my own subjective experience, and I don't know if the idea of free will has any significance in that context. It feels purely conceptual, purely semantic.
cloake t1_j9985n7 wrote
It's fairly trivial to contradict libertarian free will. If you can prove to me you don't need to breathe and don't need to crap, I'll entertain a will bound by no limitation.
Drawmeomg t1_j97tf2y wrote
Do you accept a physicalist definition of self? "Self" is the sum of processes in the brain and/or body in some way that isn't fully worked out but isn't fundamentally mysterious?
jamesj t1_j97xvzf wrote
I'm not a physicalist.
Drawmeomg t1_j9af7zz wrote
Gotcha. To try to at least make compatibilism comprehensible:
If physicalism is true, then desires are some combination of physical states and/or processes.
Whether determinism is true or not, you are inevitably going to ‘choose’ those desires in exactly the libertarian free will sense, by definition. The only things you’re not free to choose are the things you don’t choose. You could have chosen differently - if a combination of processes in your mind had given a different result, which is to say, if you were a different person in the relevant sense (which could be quite minor in the case of an arbitrary choice, but major in the case of something that speaks to your core beliefs).
The only real difference between this and libertarian free will is the belief that desires aren’t fundamentally mysterious. It might founder on some other rock (if, for example, determinism is false, or if there’s some other property of free will not being captured here, or if there’s no such thing as ‘self’, or if you define brain processes as being outside of self), but hopefully it’s at least a bit more understandable how a person could believe that, and what exactly they believe.
Professional-Bat2966 t1_j98zz30 wrote
This is my view of it as well. To me it seems more rational based on what is known but of course the merits of that may be debated.
Thelonious_Cube t1_j99abqg wrote
> free will as commonly understood
Are you certain that the way free will is commonly understood is coherent?
I don't think it is
jamesj t1_j99bqfk wrote
I think it could be true that people exercise real choice. But I don't think it is consistent with determinism.
https://cogsci.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Thesis2018Hietala.pdf
Scholarly definitions aside, ordinary people generally understand free will as the ability to choose a desired course of action without restraint (Monroe, Dillon & Malle, 2014; Feldman, Wong & Baumeister, 2014; Feldman, 2017). Even if some scholars conceptualize free will in abstract, metaphysical terms (Greene & Cohen, 2004; Montague, 2008; Bargh, 2008), people tend to link free will most closely with the psychological concept of choice, not metaphysical concepts (Vonash, Baumeister, & Mele, 2018).
Thelonious_Cube t1_j99e3sn wrote
And they also believe that their free choices should be governed by their values and preferences which are a product of their upbringing
> ordinary people generally understand free will as the ability to choose a desired course of action without restraint
And that is perfectly compatible with determinism
jamesj t1_j99ebw7 wrote
- If someone acts of her own free will, then she could have done otherwise.
- If determinism is true, no one can do otherwise than one actually does.
- Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.
Is the standard argument.
What's your argument for your claim?
Thelonious_Cube t1_j9e0xid wrote
That "could have done otherwise" means there's a possible world in which a different choice was made, not that determinism is false.
jamesj t1_j9e2cn6 wrote
In practice I live in only one world. My position is that I couldn't have done otherwise and any other very-nearly-mes in other worlds also couldn't have.
Thelonious_Cube t1_j9e2jnx wrote
That ignores the purpose of possible-world thinking
jamesj t1_j9e35d1 wrote
Theorizing worlds doesn't make them true. The fact we can imagine other worlds doesn't make them exist. They could exist, they might exist, but I'm still not in control of which one I end up in, even if they do exist.
Im-a-magpie t1_j9jy5yo wrote
>And that is perfectly compatible with determinism
It isn't though. The ordinary concept of free will (the way most people use the term) is directly on contradiction with a deterministic universe
Thelonious_Cube t1_j9mg1io wrote
No, it's not - the ordinary concept is vague and contradictory
Im-a-magpie t1_j9toado wrote
The ordinary concept is simple libertarian free will. There's nothing contradictory about it. Most people just reject a deterministic universe. Compatibilism is motivated by some desperate need to preserve our intuitive notions of justice, morality and ethics instead of accepting that those intuitions are flawed and don't reflect reality.
Thelonious_Cube t1_ja1lvwc wrote
No, that's not correct.
The ordinary concept also includes the idea that one's choices are a product of one's taste, values and experience - therefore tied to the causal history of one's life.
Im-a-magpie t1_ja1uetw wrote
But also that you could, for whatever reason, choose to go against those things.
E: Also people believe taste, values and such are the product of conscious choice.
Thelonious_Cube t1_ja6l8hm wrote
Perhaps so, but the point still stands
Michamus t1_j99qkjy wrote
It’s also incompatible with the observational data we’ve gathered so far. When we perform fMRI scans of the various structures of the brain and ask the subject to decide between binary options, the decision is made in the subconscious regions and then reported to the conscious regions. This means that when we’re deciding something, our “conscious mind” is told what’s being “thought about” and the eventual verdict, rather than being involved in it.
It appears that not only is free will non-existent, but consciousness may not actually be anything like we think it is. What we call consciousness may in fact just be the communication channels between the various brains that have been strapped on over the years.
Another example is when the connections between hemispheres are temporarily chemically “severed” the hemispheres begin behaving as two distinct minds. When isolating each hemispheres from the other’s field of vision from the other’s, you end up with extremely bizarre behaviors. One such behavior is the subject handing themselves an item from one hand to the next. They’re then asked how the item got into that hand. The response is universally that someone handed it to them.
My personal favorite rebuttal against free will though is “of course the brain would tell you it’s the master of the body.”
subito_lucres t1_j98jdmb wrote
I'm a scientist, not a philosopher. But since we are getting into physics, I will say this:
I don't think we know enough about existence to have much certainty whether or not we have free will. I understand the argument that free will does not necessary follow from either a predetermined or stochastic universe. But it could be an emergent property we don't yet understand. The deep intuition argument is, to me, the best. We have to define axioms to make sense of anything, and perhaps (like existence itself) the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it.
LordMongrove t1_j98ml1x wrote
Does it matter if the universe is stochastic or predetermined? It seems that neither leave room for free will.
There is no crack that I can know of in physics where free will could hide.
So if have some options, I’d love to hear them.
subito_lucres t1_j98ncg2 wrote
I said that free will does not follow from either model.
However, the models are merely models, and they can't really rule out free will.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio....
Not suggesting we accept free will either. But again, we accept existence itself on axiomatic principles. I don't know if we have free will or not, but one could argue it's self-evident.
PariahDong t1_j98pjeq wrote
The issue is that the sense in which it's "self-evident" falls away very quickly, for many people, with even a little bit of concentrated/guided introspection.
I got a chance during undergrad to spend quite a bit of time on research which surveyed non-philosophy participants on their thoughts/feelings regarding free will/self issues. It's the "illusion of free will is itself an illusion" idea; it's difficult, because the whole topic is so conceptually muddy and there are so many concepts which overlap definitionally with day-to-day use, but, overwhelmingly, when you get people thinking clearly about the idea and sharpen some of the conceptual edges they come away with pretty clear incompatibilist intuitions that they do not actually have free will.
I can dig up some of the research to link if you're interested, but with even just a little bit of conceptual clean-up most non-philosophy people become pretty quickly disillusioned about their free will.
erkling27 t1_j999xhc wrote
I will say, I feel like just introducing people to determinism and them suddenly feeling a dampened sense of self or free will is kinda like saying kids who can't swim that get thrown into the deep end of a pool stuggle to stay afloat.
But, I will say that it's a solid point that determinism's immediate logical follow up is "free will as I understand it, is sus."
At the end of the day, I think free will is such a loosely defined concept entirely because it kinda takes a whole lot to justify it. Like beyond what is currently or ever may be possible. But that's kinda why it's all very philisophical and not science really.
subito_lucres t1_j98qneu wrote
First of all, your answer is condescending, and also doesn't really make an argument so much as imply that if I only knew what you know, I'd agree with you.
Second, I already do not believe in free will. I'm merely commenting that, as a scientist, efforts to argue against the possibility of free will based on our current models of physics are not very convincing to me. Because our understanding is incomplete.
Edit: disagree by downvoting all you want, this is a philosophy forum and we should be directly making our arguments here, not describing how our arguments would make someone feel if we made them. It's not politics or debate club, it's philosophy. I don't care how popular the idea is, I care if it's a sound logical argument.
PariahDong t1_j98ulxs wrote
? You must reading some tone/implication into my comment that was not intended. I'm sorry you felt condescended to, just sharing an interesting personal connection I have to this very specific question and responding to the claim that we might be able to think of free will as self-evident or axiomatic.
Your initial claim was that "perhaps the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it," which makes sense. All I was saying is that, for most people, even when they don't spend much time with the topic, it's surprisingly easy for their subjective experience of free will to fall away.
That our "baseline" subjective experience seems to be one of experiencing free will is certainly true, and there are really interesting & open potential cultural/social/evolutionary reasons for that, but generally we wouldn't accept a claim on axiomatic principles if it had the property of seeming to exist or fall away with the relative ease that the experience of free will does.
Again, not making any claims about what you do or don't believe, just responding to the comment that accepting free will as axiomatic or self-evident might make sense with some reasons why it might not make sense.
warren_stupidity t1_j9a2kj4 wrote
So kind of a ‘free will of the gaps’ argument?
subito_lucres t1_j9a5zym wrote
It's similar, in that I'm arguing we can't prove it doesn't exist and is perhaps self-evident. Obviously, no one here is going around "believing in things" simply because we can't prove them wrong. So whether or not this is a sound argument hinges on whether or not you think free will is self-evident.
I am not sure of that, myself, and I'm not convinced the answer is known to anyone. I don't think physics really answers that question. Neither does psychology or neuroscience.
branedead t1_j98uwgm wrote
Incomplete, and something you said earlier that's important, they are MODELS.
LordMongrove t1_j9fa7t5 wrote
You say you are a scientist, yet your arguments seem to come from a different place. What kind of scientist exactly?
The only way there is a place for free will is if all our fundamental science is wrong. There was no place for free will in classical (Newtonian) mechanics, there is no place for it in quantum mechanics, nor in relativity. There is no place for it in string theory or the standard particle model.
Basically, everything we think we know about the universe would need to be wrong for free will to have a chance. You are grasping at straws.
subito_lucres t1_j9fgary wrote
I do not believe in free will. However, I do not think our models of the universe are very complete, so I do not think there's a logical basis for dismissing the possibility of free will.
I don't want to make this about my credentials, I was only mentioning my scientific background to help relate my epistemological framework, not to claim any authority. Furthermore, I like to come to r/philosophy to discuss ideas, and it's unfortunate to see that so many debates veer into various logical fallacies, like ad hominem, straw man, argument from authority, etc. So I think it's very important that neither of us do that, which is why I don't want to claim authority, nor assume you are attacking my credentials. But if it helps to understand my state of mind, I will share that I'm an academic biologist, with expertise in molecular biology, biophysics, cell biology, analytical geometry, optics/microscopy, bacterial pathogenesis, evolution, and genetics.
Obviously, it's not the same field as we are discussing (although, really, there is no one field that encompasses all of the science we are discussing, unless we remain so hopelessly broad as to say something like "theoretical physics"), but biology and physics use the same toolset in terms of building and assessing models. Good scientists are skeptics, and it's important to have some sense of what we are reasonably sure is true, what we are reasonably sure is untrue, and everything else. To quote the statistician George Box, "all models are wrong, but some are useful."
To me, as a scientist... I think it's more fair to say that free will is not predicted or explained by any of our models than to say that our models eliminate the possibility of free will. Hopefully, our models are getting better all of the time, and we can approach but never achieve certainty. Most people want certainty, but there is none, only degrees of uncertainty. So, I am arguing from a place of skepticism.
Since it seems to be getting lost somehow, I will repeat for the fourth time that I do not believe in free will. However, all epistemological frameworks that I am aware of require accepting certain axioms. For example, "I think therefore I am," or "A = A," or "existence exists." How do we decide if something is self-evident?
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