Thank you for putting together so many words! It's good to read something from you here that doesn't sound like a tweet!
(I just mean here on this thread up till now - not all the time)
Though I wouldn't say that animals are at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum - I'd say 'higher' animals all have some level of conscious decision-making ability, though much more limited than ours. The simplest animals of course have the least, moving on up till you reach humans, where there's a pretty huge leap thanks to the much more highly developed cerebrum.
I'm not sure I accept the validity of that argument - that given the exact same circumstances you'd do the exact same thing every time. I mean of course, I accept that it's probably
true - but I'm not sure that's really a good measure of what free will actually is. It makes certain assumptions that don't apply to all decision making - for instance if I understand it correctly you're only setting the clock back a few seconds. What about decisions that take a lot longer than that, like the one I mentioned earlier - what school to go to or whether to just go to work in a factory or join the army instead. That's not a decision you make in a few seconds, and it involves a lot of very complex variables. To me this is a much more 'human level' type of decision - as opposed to the much simpler decisions most people seem to be bringing up here. What kind of food to eat is really something even an animal can decide differently from time to time, assuming they have a choice in the matter (if you'd put out several different things for them). The cerebral cortex allows us to think abstractly on multiple levels, and to make complex decisions involving many variables - how come all the examples I've seen people mention so far completely ignore this? Its a new type of decision-making that no animal is capable of. And I agree - maybe we don't have MUCH free will - we might only really exercise it a few dozen times in a lifetime. But then all I'm saying is it's more than any other living thing we're aware of has. Little is not the same as none. That's another argument a few people seem to be saying - essentially "We have very little ability to choose really - therefore no free will" - which doesn't make any sense if you think about it!
How about this - a different take on that same example (about going back a few seconds and making the same decision each time). What if you lived the same day over and over - sort of like Groundhog Day, only unlike Bill Murray you don't know it's happening. When you've lived the same day a hundred times, do you think at the end of the day you'll have done exactly the same things a hundred times? I think some days you'll end up having accomplished and experience very different scenarios - you might have the same breakfast each day but by the time bedtime rolls around I'd say you've got the capacity for some very different things to have occurred - because you've made different choices. But then I'm not sure this is really about free will - it's more about randomness or chaos theory. The drop of water never rolls off exactly the same way twice. That's why I say it seems like a lot of people are discussing randomness rather than free will.
Free will doesn't really mean "Will you make
different decisions given the exact same circumstances?" - it's more "Do you have the ability to decide what you'll do?"
So I don't think that's really a good thought experiment. I'm not sure offhand what would be, but I'm starting to think even some of the deep thinkers of the past have gotten side-tracked into fallacious thinking about free will.
Bookmarks