The way people talk about it makes it sound indistinguishable from “random will”. If you believe in the existence of a “self” in any form, be it the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer, you must believe in one of you believe in that self having free will.
Say you were to run a scenario many times on the same person, perfectly resetting every single measurable thing including that person’s memory. If you observe them doing the same thing each time then they don’t have this quality of free will? But if you do different things each time are you really “yourself”? How are your choices changed in a way that preserves an idea of a “self” and isn’t just a dice roll? Doesn’t that put an idea of free will in contradiction with itself?
Edit: I found this article that says what I was trying to say in much gooder words
Actually the unitary self is itself a fiction. There is no “you” outside of whatever exists in the moment, and it is constantly in flux
I agree with that, but is it in flux irrespective of things that happen to you/it insofar as it does exist? It exists in this moment, so if you were to run this moment over again I would type this exact same reply every time, or else there would be no self even in this moment. Quantum effects are as far as I’m aware undeterministic (or at least thus far not understood), but I don’t believe you could construct an idea of “free” will out of them either.
But like I said in another reply, if I’m not a philosophy guy and I figured this out myself more or less, why is there still so much discussion about free will in philosophy circles? That’s why I assume that I’m missing something in my understanding of what they mean by free will.
TBH, I’m not personally very interested in this concept of free will. I think we have to act as though it exists whether or not it actually does. But if, I were, say a moral philosopher, I would probably be very concerned about it because it underpins all my other assumptions about right/wrong.
Often times, there’s stuff that’s extremely critical to a specialist and less so to a layperson. Literally theorists will stab each other to death over interpretation, meaning and language because that stuff is at the base of all their work.
I’m not personally invested in it either I just know I hear about it a lot and, even though philosophy makes my brain feel like it’s overheating, I find it compelling and interesting. If you put a gun to my head I suppose I would say I don’t believe in free will, but I don’t think it’s absence will cause people to start eating babies without feeling guilt or whatever.
This is really more of aporia about selfhood than a proof by contradiction against free will. I mean it is also the latter, but as a side effect.
Anyways the reason I’m saying this is that it has been discussed outside the West (where “free will” in itself is important, especially in Christian theology). For example, the entirety of the Indian philosophical traditions could be described as the questioning the nature of the self.
Buddhism is especially important here. The nature of the self is a tricky question with seemingly vague and contradictory answers. The self neither exists, doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist and not exist both, nor neither… rather it’s a question not to even be answered.
I like these kind of aporetic topics. I believe that in Buddhism the real solution is to experience the truth of a matter personally ie. through meditative insight and enlightenment. Or maybe getting high.
Another way to put it is that it is a linguistic or cognitive issue that requires a perspective shift…maybe Wittgensteinian? That the concept of a self or free will is a limiting one that will lead to holes and contradictions in systems of logic, and are really more useful as a conventional marker for an abstraction. But not reality itself in itself
Do you have a recommendation for something I could read for more information? I do know a very little bit about Buddhist non dualism (think two video essays or so)
I’ll open it up to anyone to follow up on recommendations because I might be a little over the top with it…I like to read the old texts in the original or plain translation. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by Nāgārjuna is what I was thinking of when I wrote up my comment.
I would say to find a translation and commentary (the wiki page has a list), and maybe also watch some video lectures before starting because the Buddhist philosophical tradition is its own beast that you would need context for
I’ll see if I can follow up with some video links later
I’ll give it a go
Eh I think we easily confuse word games with meaning.
Language is necessarily ambiguous, some abstraction of reality that allows us to communicate facts about reality in a simplified abstracted manner. So when we probe the spaces and limits of that abstraction all we find is ambiguity.
It’s like trying to work out how atoms work by repeatedly zooming in on google maps.
The idea of “I have free will” works fine enough for communicating a basic idea of human autonomy but trying work out what “free” really means, or who even is “I”, etc, we aren’t actually finding out anything profound. We are really just reaching to limits of an abstraction and the model stops working.
So you’re saying I can safely
when someone talks about it?Regardless it feels like people wouldn’t talk about free will so much if there wasn’t anything to say about it, would they? It feels like a waste of energy, yet I see it discussed all the time.
It’s required by Christians to resolve The Problem of Evil. There must be some sort of volitional agency that moral actors have that separates them from the deterministic world, otherwise their omnibenevolent god is responsible for anyone sinning and going to hell.
It’s a non-sensical solution to a non-sensical problem.
Yeah basically.
Being a bit more rigorous about it, I think philosophically speaking there is some kind of error in the logic and that error gets smuggled in via the ambiguity of the language.
Like, “I” assumes some singular decision making entity exists but if you really want to zoom in to the level of chemical and electrical impulses in the brain and say ahah well there goes your “free will”, well you’ve broken the model because at this zoom level there is no singular decision making entity. There’s some network of synapses etc that fire quasi-independently.
But “I” still exist at a higher level of zoom as some emergent phenomena from those synapses. But “I” am more than just those synapses, I have an experience that cannot really be described by those synapses even if it is emergent from them.
So the error is to confuse levels of abstraction. To deny properties of “I” by zooming down to a level where “I” doesn’t exist anymore and then trying to draw conclusions about what “I” am.
Does this make sense?
Basically the entire concept of me and a self exists at a certain zoom level, and my will or the qualia of my existence only make any sense at all at a certain zoom level.
So zooming in further down to the point of electrical actions is an error. It’s like trying to figure someone’s birthday by studying the atoms they’re made of. It’s nonsense.
Or to skin this cat another way, and remain at this level of abstraction you can still describe the inputs into my decisions at the same level of abstraction at which “I” exist. Like, you can say I’m aggressive because my dad was toxic when I was a child or whatever some quasi-deterministic social factor that influences my behavior, right?
But what am “I” if not the sum of my experiences? By saying that I am controlled by my past experiences and therefore that I can’t make independent decisions, well this is just the same as saying that “I” exist somehow independently of my past. But that’s also nonsense, but here the nonsense is by secretly introducing via sleight of hand another level abstraction which is the metaphysical “I” which transcends my physical existence.
Basically, the question “what does it mean to have free will” always involves some shifting frame of abstraction and it’s the way this frame of abstraction shifts that, I think, is the philosophical error in asking the question.
universe is too chaotic for me to care, if it’s deterministic we would never be able to replicate the conditions to tell
be gay do crimes
Do crimes yes, but only do cool ones. This is my oc philosophy and it’s illegal to steal it (therefore you must)
I like this question because it asks how is ‘free will’ defined exactly. Depending on how that is done, one might argue that sociopaths have more ‘free will’ than others due to social context. I think this is pretty useful to force philosophy to have a more social context with this stuff.
It’s similar to the contrast between “liberty to X” vs “liberty from X”. Defining ‘free will’ only in the context of individualism doesn’t seem to be very helpful, but I’ve not seen much of this discussed around this topic. It’s mostly tug-of-war BS between philosophy, religion, neuroscience. We need more social sciences in there.
Sartre defines free will as being our ability (or our curse) to choose and to be responsible for those choices. Furthermore, our freedom is dependant upon the freedom of others, so in this context sociopaths who encroach upon the freedom of others in turn reduce their own freedom. At least in existential, Levinasian, or Derridean philosophies, freedom is always defined in relation to others and the responsibility we have for them and ourselves.
I tried making this same argument on
once, of course no one understood what I was saying.the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer
Functionally I don’t see how it would make any difference one way or the other in this argument. I’m not a big philosophy guy I’m sorry if I’m saying something reductive or ignorant here.
Agreed, I mostly commented this because I see these models as fully compatible with reality. Sorry I don’t have more to contribute. I don’t think you’re being reductive, but I do feel that modeling freedom of will by repeatedly experimentally observing an actor in a fixed context and condition and summarizing the distribution of their choices doesn’t capture some ideas I intuitively associate with the notion of free will (assuming it is not entirely an illusion, though there are results in neuroscience that show that in certain cases, people only become aware of a stimulus after their motor cortex has commanded their muscles to respond to it, so in some cases, free will is either illusory or absent):
-an individual in the experiment may be exercising significant mental effort to prevent an autonomic or habitual response to a repeated stimulus, and if they succeed every time, their sequence of decisions is constant, but it is also constant if they fail every time
hardly. if you can’t measure or observe something it existing or not becomes equivalent and therefore we shouldn’t assume wildly complex things incongruent with all our other observations.
can’t measure or observe something
maybe we’re talking about different things, but here’s where I’m coming from: modern experimental neuroscience has developed and continues to churn out new ways of probing self-organizing patterns in neural activity that have meaning encoded in them
I’m thinking of the ghost as neural signals themselves and not their representations in a brain, where I’m modeling a conscious being as the pairing of the representations of said patterns and the feedback loops that perpetuate them, which is physical in the sense that it’s implemented in a physical machine, but is non-physical in the same way that these words have meaning in your mind: they’re signals.
sorry if I’m being ambiguous/imprecise
i guess i don’t think trying to use “ghost” language for physical phenomena is clarifying or helpful when a huge proportion of people are still dualists and/or believe in magic spirits and use the analogy’s terms literally.
The signals are still some physical thing with electrons and shit
You make strong points.
I find the religious argument of free will to be silly. God knows every action you’ll commit. But you also have the power to change. Basically, god knows every variation of your choices, including the variation that will actually be your life and not hypothetical
He’s just double checking
But he also knows which ones are hypothetical and which ones aren’t right? In effect he knows what you will and won’t do
