A defence of libertarian (ish) free will

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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We can express that we will for something. But we just don’t will simply without thinking, reasoning, imagining or intuiting on the result of the willing in moral, financial, social and interpersonal consequences and values.

By having “free” in front of “will”, free will sounds as if it has nothing to do with those implications of the act of willing.

We do will, but not in “free” fashion. We care, and anticipate when we will. So freewill is a contradiction in the name, and empty in its meaning. It is a jargon for locating and asking the responsibility for the results of actions and decisions made by the individuals.

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Yes, but believing what is the right thing to do and wanting to do the right thing is a preference too.

Every behavior exhibited by the self is “selfish”. Moral behavior is such that it promotes the ultimate wellbeing of the self. Which includes the wellbeing of others, and not just because the self thrives in a prosperous, safe and kind society, but also because promotion of the wellbeing of others also has internal beneficial effects in the self, such as harmonizing and integrating the self’s worldview and thus its own mind.

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That is “free will” for you then. I could only label it after seeing your statement confirming your disagreement with me.

There was absolutely no “free will” noticed, perceived or manifested from you before the statement of disagreement regarding the act of disagreeing.

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I fundamentally disagree, and believe that your position undermines the whole of ethics, and does so because you are committed to bad metaphysics. You are justifying the bad behaviour of the worst people and devaluing the genuinely moral and selfless behaviour of the best people. I know you are doing this for non-moral motivations, but the outcome is the same nevertheless: the total devaluation of morality.

To take an extreme case, in the examples of those individuals who sacrificed their own lives fighting for something they deeply believed in, you are claiming that they were only doing that in their own self-interest all along. That is an appalling position to defend.

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Yes well put.
I think a lot of this derives from how private our thoughts are and therefore how separate they feel from the universe around us.
It never really made sense to posit the will being both causally-disconnected and yet reasoned, but I think prior to computer science, and neuroscience, all of cognition was a crapshoot.

Nowadays I think it’s a mix of that intuition, inertia (once a topic has been debated enough, it’s impossible to call it out as bunk) and that most religions still need some kind of spooky FW.

I think I agree with you, but maybe not the phrasing.

I think an error that some make, is thinking that if we can find a way that an organism benefits from an action, then that must be the reason for doing it. But there is nothing in nature or cognition that requires that.

Evolution has given us instincts like empathy and responsibility. I don’t need a thought to go through my mind of “If I help this person, then it will make the world better, and it will help me…” – it can just be part of my personality and feeling of e.g. concern, that I help that person.

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Maybe that’s because you forgot to read the next sentence in which I said that the ultimate wellbeing of the self includes the wellbeing of others.

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Right, moral behavior is often not based on logical inference but on emotions, instincts and habits.

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No, that still hopelessly devalues moral behaviour. You are still trying to argue that those who devote their lives to serving others are really just doing it for their own self-interest.

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I am just stating the obvious: they have a motive to do that and that motive is inside their selves, inside their minds. Where else would it be? You seem to be devaluing self-interest to base biological urges. Human selves are more complex than that.

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I imagine there are more than two answers to the question “What is free will free from?”. Perhaps your position that ‘it’s really simple that when you question the basic framing of the free will debate – “Determinism vs Freedom” – it falls apart pretty easy’ works better with one answer than with the others. It would be easier if you thought there was no freedom of anything sorry to our will, so your questioning of the framing would make any answer fall apart.

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You are still defending narcissism instead of morality. There really isn’t much more to discuss at this point.

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This is the part of your OP I’m most interested in. In your final paragraph of this quote, you lay out a vision of QM in which the wave function defines the space of possible realities, but it’s consciousness collapsing that wavefunction and choosing which part of the wavefunction becomes reality.

Now, if consciousness is doing that, then… that’s “fully determined by the laws of physics/nature”, unless you consider consciousness as not a part of nature. If consciousness determines which part of the wavefunction we end up in, that sounds like determinism. Is consciousness not natural?

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That’s not the question that I’m saying there are two positions on.
I mean simply the question of “Do we have free will?”

And, to be clear, I think there are at least 4-5 common answers to this question, it’s not as binary as it might appear.

For the purpose of the point I was making, I wasn’t going to go into all the answers, but based on one of your responses I realized I needed to at least cover 2 cases: “Yes, we have free will because of non-computability / quantum indeterminancy” and “No, we don’t have free will because determinism (and the exceptions to determinism are insufficient)”

Well you’ve agreed with me so far.
But yes, my position is indeed that the framing of “Freedom vs Determinism” is flawed, regardless of what answer someone gives to that question.

As I’ve said in the parallel thread: Determinism is needed for choice. The more deterministic, the more we exercise choice. And if we’re defining freedom in a way that isn’t about making choices, then I don’t know what it means.

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Perhaps this is your overall position? That the basic framing of the free will debate – “Determinism vs Freedom” – falls apart because the more deterministic, the more we exercise choice? If that is what you are saying, then can you explain how we exercise choice more as things become more deterministic? I see in the parallel thread you say this:

Can you expand?

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No no, that’s more like a conclusion that I reached, and relatively recently. I try not to lead with this position because of course when people are engaged in a debate of “Freedom vs Determinism”, it’s not going to be very successful, rhetorically, to claim the reality is the polar opposite.

My journey is more like this:

  1. Realizing that Determinism and predictability are both red herrings, as people who appeal to them as the reason we aren’t free typically handwave data about our universe likely not being deterministic.
  2. Realizing that free will is poorly-defined; as even people who believe in it only ever say what a free will decision isn’t but can’t say how a true free will decision is made (e.g. how an angel chooses between coffee and tea).
  3. Realizing that the closest well-defined thing to free will is choice, and choice actually needs determinism, for the reasons I’ll expand on in my next response.

Yes. Basically reasoned choices are made for reasons. And reasons inherently means talking about past events and states.
So I choose tea, because although I prefer the taste of coffee more, I like tea too, and it’s too late to drink something with high caffeine. In this case, what things I like are antecedents, my biology that caffeine will keep me up late is an antecedent, my knowledge of the effect of coffee is an antecedent. Finally of course how I prioritize these things is down to my personality / predilections, which is an antecedent.

Or maybe I think to myself “No, I’ll fight determinism, and choose coffee!”. But of course my memory of this question being asked in the context of this topic is an antecedent, the desire to be rebellious is part of my personality which is an antecedent, etc.

None of this bothers me btw. I make a decision based on my knowledge and predilections; this is the same way it would work if I were, as I say, an angel in a magical universe, because no-one can even say what a different kind of reasoned choice would even mean.

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I reject the natural/supernatural terminological distinction as inadequate for quantum physics.

Naturalism, Praeternaturalism and Hypernaturalism | Two-Phase Cosmology

Naturalism is belief in a causal order in which everything that happens can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature.

Hypernaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are events or processes that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature.

Praeternaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are no events that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature, but there can be exceptionally improbable events that aren’t reducible to those laws, and aren’t random either. Praeternatural phenomena could have been entirely the result of natural causality, but aren’t.

Consciousness is not natural, for two reasons. Firstly psychegenesis (the evolution of the first conscious animal by retroselecting the timeline that led to itself) is praeternatural, and secondly, once that has happened, the conscious organisms have free will, which operates via the same basic mechanism.

So consciousness is determining things (though it is not fully determined itself), but the way this operates is a fundamentally different sort of causality to the unitary evolution of the wavefunction or classical-relativistic physics. From a “normal” perspective it seems like teleology.

Wavefunction collapse is metaphysical, not physical. It is caused by a logical constraint set up by non-computational valuations, not a law of physics. It happens at the level of quantum information, not physical matter.

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So suppose we saw an event play out, consciousness collapse a wavefunction or two, we observed the consequences…

…and then we rewound time, as some kind of god-like outside observer, making sure not just to rewind the full state of the universe and every aspect of the quantum wavefunction, but also making sure to rewind the exact state of this non-natural consciousness to exactly what it was before the event. And then we, as god, “press play” so to speak.

Given that the wave function is exactly the same this time around as it was last time, and consciousness is exactly the same this time around as it was last time, would this consciousness choose to collapse the wave function in the same way this time that it did last time?

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This cannot be done. In 2PC, time is directly linked to wavefunction collapse. The arrow of time is determined by the irreversibility of collapse. So it is physically/metaphysically impossible to rewind time.

If we take it as a hypothetical question then the answer is almost certainly no. Things would not play out exactly as before. Small differences would occur, and the butterfly effect would very rapidly lead to a very different timeline, changing everybody’s available choices.

What matters about free will is that it is ours. We made decisions according to our own intuition and many of those decisions might go either way. This doesn’t make them random, because it was us who make them. We are the authors of our own destiny, at least within the range of possibilities available.

EDIT: At this point many people respond by insisting we need to ask why these differences occured. Why did we choose X rather than Y this time, and Y rather than X last time. We may not even know why - not in a way that we could explain or quantify. But we do know that it was us who made that decision. We create the “why” ourselves. Meaning and value are created by consciousness, not by antecedent conditions.

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Right but if differences would occur, they wouldn’t occur because of any fact that’s true about the consciousness (since it was the same), or any fact that’s true about the wave function (since it was the same), so if there’s a difference that occurs, but it’s not explainable by any fact about any of the causally relevant things involved, then…

that’s random.

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This, and what you say after, is good. Let me try to see if we agree on things. Sorry for being long-winded, but it’s all very easy reading. Although what I’m trying to get at is not complicated, I want to be clear.

I have often mentioned a book called Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. Wonderful book, imo. They say:
A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body.

By their definition, a mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements: a sensor and a doer. The simplest hypothetical mind would have one sensor and one doer. Apparently, we are not aware of such a thing on the planet. The simplest mind we are aware of, and the place they begin the journey, is the archaea. The archaea has what they call a molecule mind:
“All the thinking elements in molecule minds consist of individually identifiable molecules.”

Archaea has two sensors - eyespots - and two doers - flagella (technically, archaella). The general idea is that a protein called rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of events that leads to the archaella moving, which moves the archaea. A little more detail is found starting at 3:00 of this video.
The “chain of events” is a string of chemical reactions, such as phosphorylation. Chemical reactions are physical events. Atoms combining; molecules being broken up; ions in motion; etc.

Another creature Ogas and Gaddam write about is the roundworm. The roundworm is more advanced. Rather than a molecule mind, it has a neuron mind. Roundworm has a new thinking element, to help out its sensors and doers (now sensory neurons and motor neurons). These are neurons that the authors call thinkers, and are usually called interneurons. It has two interneurons: one activates the motor neurons that move the roundworm forward, and the other activates the motor neurons that move the roundworm backward. These interneurons are also connected to each other, and inhibit each other. If food is sensed ahead, the forward interneuron starts its motor neurons, and inhibits the backward interneuron. If poison is sensed ahead, the backward interneuron starts its motor neurons, and inhibits the forward interneuron. The stronger the signal one interneuron receives, the stronger it inhibits the other.

The roundworm is choosing between two options, both of which are beneficial; go toward food, and to go away from poison. More factors go into the roundworm’s “decision” than we see in archaea. We call these kinds of physical events chemical reactions, as opposed to brute force physical events, such as rocks and dirt rolling down a mountain during an avalanche. But they are still physical events.

The big question, of course, is: Are human choices made the same way as they are made by the archaea and roundworm, and even the avalanche? Certainly more complicated, with more variables, than we can follow. But we can say the same of an avalanche. All just physical events, interacting as they run their course, until it all settles on one arrangement. Archaea swims toward the light; roundworm moves away from poison; the dirt, rocks, and vegetation land in a certain arrangement at the foot of the mountain; I drink tea instead of coffee.

Is that how humans choose?