I think that the free will debate perhaps suffers from an indefiniteness of terms. If we take free will to mean a will that exists in a vacuum , unaffected by the causal nexus of the world, then it is immediately clear that there can not be a free will. This does not, however, mean that there is no will at all. There is a will, but one that has to negotiate between the different forces that surround and shape it.
I disagree with the conclusion of this article; our conception of free will and will more generally has considerable effects on our perception of morality. We will necessarily engage with the ‘moral world’ and its dynamics differently, so it is not all moot.
I come away from this article with a sense that the debate is essentially resolved, but I would like to hear other opinions on free will and this article, I think it is very interesting.
It’s an interesting argument, and I agree with you about indefiniteness of terms. However, I go further: I don’t think “free will” points to a coherent thing that could exist.
I think it’s a notion we’ve inherited from a time before neuroscience, and computer science, and so it really seemed like decisions came from “nowhere”.
But the idea of a will that is linked to me, that I am culpable for, but isn’t the product of things like memories, predilections etc… doesn’t make any sense.
Thank you for the welcome and for your reply! :))
Your last statement I assume is in reference to the notion of free will, a will that is free. After considering it, I suppose I hold the same view which is perhaps why I find most of the discussion around the notion so confused. The better question is probably what will even is.
I tried to run this through the sieve in my head of Kant’s categories of the quality, quantity relationship modality, from his Critique of Pure Reason and through another set of screens separations from but connected to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche critique free will. The set of sieve becomes too complex and then disintegrates in my head relatively fast. But like a dog with a bone I refuse to give it up. So my next option is to use a design spiral on paper with the hope of some understanding of this very complex issue.
That’s when I defer to a quote that comes from the late author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who famously remarked: "Of course you have free will, you have no choice than to have it. and this statement becomes counterintuitive on its face but makes the most sense to me thus far.
On a personal note. Welcome, I a new here also and have found this to be a great environment for expressing one’s thoughts with a welcoming diverse group of minds and very well thought out mode of operation of this forum. Thank for sharing your thoughts.
Haven’t you come across Benjamin Libet’s 80’s experiment? A readiness potential was measured in the finger before the subject consciously willed to wriggle his finger. In short the body’s not under our control.
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A man can do what he wills but not will what he wills ~ A. Schopenhauer
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Free will is also incoherent: determinism’s more than obvious and then we’re supposed to be magically free! Plus randomness isn’t free will.
What would a “real” free will version of Libet even look like? No brain activity at all prior to the impulse to move the finger (that was apparently uncaused)?
I don’t think the article actually addresses the subject directly. The question of free will is a metaphysical matter of how we view the nature of reality, especially the passing of time. The question is whether reality is such, that as time is passing, there real possibility as to what I will do next. The determinist perspective dictates that there is not any real possibility, and whatever I do is predetermined. The free will perspective dictates that there is real possibility, and I can freely choose between options as to what I will do next.
The article touches on the consequences entailed by this difference in opinion. The free will perspective is extremely consistent with lived experience, and denial of it would produce complacency, and also many questions concerning responsibility. But the determinist perspective is consistent with many scientific principles. Therefore what ensues is a question of whether we ought to reject some scientific principles because they are not consistent with our lived experience of free will.
So we need to start from the bottom, at the fundamental question. Is reality such, that as time passes there is real possibility as to what will happen next? Lived experience tells us that we need to answer this with “yes”. The next question is, which scientific principles are inconsistent with this premise.
I appreciate your framing of the question. I do think that there is real possibility as to what a person does next at any point in time but the range of possibility and even the kinds of possibility are constrained by what comes before. In addition to this, the set of all possible outcomes are not equally probable, owing to the weight of relevant priors. I don’t think that this is too inconsistent with lived experience, we recognise constraints in our everyday.
I also realise that there are instances where there is no real choice at all; it’s not like we deliberate every single action we take. To me it seems like the more concern should be to study the causal system that surrounds will and in which it is an element or participatory force.
Let me know your thoughts.
The crux of the free will debate is identity, that of the agent and that of the determining cause.
The determinist must identify some other agent or object to be the determinant. But often they are the same object as in the determinist’s coveted Libet experiments, where an impulse is said to determine brain activity, as if an agent isn’t comprised of both. If the agent (his impulses) influences the agent (his brain activity) then it is all self-caused or otherwise determined by oneself, which is free will.
It isn’t. I once saw a professor comment that reading Sapolsky’s brick of a book was libel to make the public more ignorant of the free will debate than having read nothing at all (and this was someone who agreed with incompatibalism).
Bear in mind that there is a more general tendency towards virtually all book reviews being positive (outside of partisan issues). This issue has been remarked upon by a number of critics; bad reviews hardly exist anymore. Reviews of technical books tend to be particularly reticent to include strong criticisms, and NDPR exemplifies this. Yet even they couldn’t avoid pointing out that Sapolsky refuses to even define any of his terms. When he does get around to attempting to explain what he is even talking about, he defines free will as something like causeless action (wholly undetermined), which, by definition, in being wholly undetermined, would be random (hardly what any philosopher means by freedom). It is unclear if he had any clear target in mind when writing it.
This wouldn’t be quite so aggregious if he didn’t claim to have extensively researched the philosophy of free will in the introduction (the text gives no indication that this is true).
It will suffice to say that the debate is very much alive. Second, your intuition is a strong one. Most philosophers think moral responsibility is related to freedom. Not all do, but I have never seen anyone argue that they are wholly unrelated except in cases where they deny freedom in any metaphysically meaningful sense and are self-consciously attempting to “save” morality from this result.
As to the crux of the contemporary debate, I think one difficulty is that modern Western thought has tended to focus rather narrowly on freedom as choice, and moreover as sheer choice (i.e., ordered to no particular ends). The problem here is that we can ask of any desire we might freely act upon “is this desire truly worthy of choice, is it good?” This sets off an infinite regress, and it is obvious that if nothing is ever truly more or less worthy of choice then choice will reveal itself to be arbitrary, no matter how many smokescreens we deploy around this fact.
Whereas, if freedom is something like the self-determining capacity to achieve the good (whatever that turns out to be) then this explains most of our intuitions about freedom (particularly that we are not wholly self-determining, creating ourselves out of nothing, but neither are we wholly bereft of self-mastery, self-government, and self-movement). This also helps explain why ignorance about what is truly worth doing is a limitation on freedom and why weakness of will is also a limitation on freedom.
Unfortunately, lay debates are even worse. 99% of them are really just debates about mechanism and reductionism (Sapolsky fits in here with Sam Harris).
At any rate, Alex Rosenberg provides the Harris/Sapolsky take, but at least with the requisite philosophical experience to realize his commitments and make them explicit.
There’s Hume’s view. He rejects the Cartesian notion of substance, and from that it follows that the self has no substance – there is no “solid core” at the center of the self. This leads Hume to his bundle theory of the self – when he looked for that core, all he could find was “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity.” Of course, this raises the question of what it was that was “doing the looking” so to speak. Hume had to admit defeat on this question.
Roger Sperry perfomed brain surgery on patients who were severely debilitated by epliepsy. By severing the lateral commisure (the corpus callosum) he broke the main information highway between the two cerebral hemispheres in order to prevent the seizure spreading from the hemisphere of origin to the other. His student, Michael Gazzaniga, went on to perform behvioral tests on the recovering patients in the 1960s and discovered a function of the human brain he called “the interpreter.” It’s role is to make sense of the world by relating input to the brain’s concept of self. He found that it weaves a narrative around that input, putting self at the center of the narrative. When a person performs an action, the interpreter provides an account that says “I did it because…”
These accounts point towards a view that the organism operates in a manner that is conditioned by prior events, even if the organism attributes some of its own behavior to an idea of self. But the libertarian free will vs. hard determinism debate may still be a false dichotomy.
If the Cartesian notion of substance is a misconception as Hume concluded, then not only does the self have no substance, but the world that is considered substantially distinct from the self also has no substance. Self and world arise in mutual dependence in a knot of causes and conditions. This is the Buddhist view, and so where does it leave the idea of “freedom”?
The Madhyamaka view is that this “knot of causes and conditions” can be seen for what it is, and this is where the idea of freedom enters the picture. Once recognized, it can be “let go of,” with the eventual realization that there was never anything to be determined or to be free in the first place… and nothing to do the “letting go.” The whole thing was a “tale told by an idiot,” and the “letting go” stage of the tale sees misconception “blown out” like the extinguishing of a candle flame.
Of course freely willed acts are constrained by the current conditions, no supporter of “free will” would argue otherwise. That would be like claiming that a being with free will is necessarily omnipotent. That is not an issue with “free will”.
So the real issue with the debate on free will is whether there is any real possibility within the universe, for a being to select from. The determinist will argue that any so-called choice is predetermined, so it is not actually a choice at all. The so-called agent could not have done otherwise, therefore this is not a choice at all. It may appear to the person like they could actually choose between one thing and another, but that is just an illusion. In reality there is no real possibility of choosing anything other than what one ends up choosing. That is determinism.
I don’t see how probability is relevant. The probabilities as to what a person will choose, are produced from habits and things like that. But a person can readily choose something which is not supported by the probabilities. That’s the point with probabilities, they don’t produce certainty. So for example, a person may get up in the morning and have a coffee and a cigarette, day after day, even for years, making the probability of this very high for the next day. Then the person decides to quit smoking and doesn’t have a cigarette in the morning, contrary to the probabilities. That one thing is said to be more probable than another, has no real bearing on whether or not there is free will.
Again, this is not relevant, because it is not the issue. It’s just like the habit described above. The real question is whether the possibility is there, to stop, deliberate, and choose something else. The person may act the same way, by habit, hundreds of times, but this does not prove that these acts are necessarily predetermined. The person just has to stop, deliberate, and act differently once, to demonstrate the falsity of that deterministic assumption.
I don’t agree. I think the real, important question is whether or not there is free will. The concept, “free will”, implies an uncaused cause. If it is the case, that free will is real, then this would have very significant meaning in relation to how we understand the nature of reality, relative to some deterministic principles of science.
Here’s one random definition: free will is a decision-making process that can’t be fully predicted or controlled by humans.
I see no problems with it?
Which is why we use our ability to discuss what’s inside our consciousness using our body, not a trick our subconscious mind can perform on its own and then just inform our consciousness once it’s accomplished.
Because our subconscious mind obviously isn’t stupid, look at how well it keeps us from dirtying our pants.
You either follow some algorithm, which makes your choice predictable.
Or choose at random, which obviously isn’t the case.
Or choose at random when you want it, which is enough to break determinism, but doesn’t change much globally. And it doesn’t make you more ‘free’, only harder to predict.
There are major problems with Libet, in the sense of drawing these conclusions. The readiness potential is not a certain cause of the apparent delays, the reported timing is highly unreliable and the form/substance of what was happening in the mind wouldn’t extrapolate to much but what was done in the experiment (moving the wrist, from memory).
It seems more likely that the experiment was able to “see” deliberation, rather than decision. They don’t seem to speak much to the Free Will debate, post-several-meta-reviews in the last decade.
This wildly mis-represents the argument for determinism. Which is essentially inarguable.
The argument is that there is nothing which has no prior cause. If you disagree, we can start there. But this does not seem arguable. If it is not arguable, brain activity follows from prior brain activity and sensory input. These are, in principle, entirely trackable and predictable. We can’t actually do those tracking and predicting activities yet, but in principle there is no room for a non-determined event.
Can we start with whether you’re suggesting there are truly random events in the brain, and if so, can you explain?
I note that this does not remove the potential for moral culpability. That’s just downstream, so i don’t wnat to start multiple fires at this stage. Even if you bite the .50 cal bullet of “randomness” this does not provide free will in the sense meant by hte debate (to my understanding) which has to do with choosing one’s motivations.
I think, again, this (in this case) grossly misrepresents both the expertise, and the actual arguments made by Harris at least (Sapolsky I’ve only seen talk about his views/book and I wasn’t impressed). It would be better to lay out what their views are, before dismissing them this way. I don’t have a settled opinion, because I’m not sure the competing views are talking about hte same thing (i’ve tried to delineate above).
Wrongly. His take explains identity perfectly, and his impulses/opinions were what was “looking”. There is entire literature failing to find any decent take on “identity” that could be useful for humans.
Only showed how the belief in free will arises in the brain. I do not think any of his work actually touched the question we’re on.
Funnily enough, his conclusion was actually much closer to where I’m sitting above where I quoted you lol.
Or can they just think they are? Belief in free will is an amazing evolutionary tactic.
Throwing some coins out to the crowd here - I have no strong position.
It isn’t though, they aren’t respected amongst specialists on free will. That’s just a fact. They are well informed about other things, just not what they have become famous writing about.
Sam Harris, for instance, in the Moral Landscape demonstrates not even a basic, freshman level competence in what a “Platonic Good” would be (claiming it would be “irrelevant for all conscious creatures”). He also attacks the same incoherent target re free will (the wholly undetermined and yet somehow paradigmatically “free” action). They say informed things that are relevant to the free will debate, but don’t seem to have bothered to actually learn much about the debate itself before writing book-length discourses on the topic.
For example:
Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?
Presumably we are only free if we “choose” all these things from a position of absolute potency (i.e., prior to having any genes, any history, any desires at all, and so any reason for making any choice in the first place, which is absurd). This is not a fair target for attacking free will because it is rather obviously incoherent, as has been pointed out by philosophers for centuries re voluntarist limit cases (e.g., Hegel to open up The Philosophy of Right).
And I am being more charitable than Harris himself is: “Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.” (Not even accurate as a straw man for many types of compatibalism).
Or this dualist howler: “How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?” - and yet, on his own account being aware of our thoughts, memories, desires, and intentions just is being aware of neuronal activity. Carteisian dualism for thee, not for me I guess.
