Free Will

[Carôusoul]

Do you think we have it?

[Xaqaria]

LINK At least offer some thoughts of your own. Or are you attempting to illustrate how history repeats itself?

[skysaw]

He was destined to make this topic.

[Howie]

I believe it is free for a small price And good will is free, so why not free will? It sounds free.

[LucidFlanders]

Yes we have free will, you would not have been able to make this thread without it. We don't have 100% free will because we have some of our rights taken away from us, although some it's a good thing. Don't wanna see a crazed pack of demonoied humans drooling at the mouth killing everything they see.

[Carôusoul]

What about if someone were to argue determinism though? Look, deductively; P1: No action is free if it must occur. P2: For any event X there are antecedent causes that ensure the occurrence of X in accordance with impersonal, mechanical causal laws. C: No action is free. The hard determinist defends each premise as follows: P1 simply expresses what is meant by “free”. Surely if an act must occur, it can't be free. P2 is the Thesis of Determinism — the notion that every event is caused in accordance with causal laws, which account completely for its occurrence. Obviously (for the hard determinist), nothing is uncaused. We can't even imagine what it would mean for a thing to be “uncaused.” The hard determinist claims that P2 is thus indubitable. (If you doubt P2 anyway, try to produce a counterexample — an instance of an uncaused event.) Thus, since causes guarantee that their effects occur — that is, if the cause is present, the effect must occur — and since everything that happens is the effect of some cause or set of causes, everything must occur. So nothing is free. Now, people often argue that P2 is true for the vast majority of events but is false for some human actions. Humans are different from mere things, people say. The hard determinist anticipates this objection, and gives the following argument to establish determinism for human actions: P1: No action is free if it must occur. P2: Human actions result from wants, wishes, desires, motivations, feelings, etc. P3: Human wants, wishes, desires, motivations, feelings, etc. are caused in turn by specific antecedent conditions that ensure their occurrence. C: Human actions are not free. Thus, for the hard determinist, humans are no different from other things. Your present actions are part of a causal chain that extends back far before your birth, and each link of the chain determines the next link on the chain. Hence, although it may appear to you that you have control over your present actions and mental states, you really have no control. And if you have no control, you certainly can't be held morally responsible for what you do. Thus hard determinism, if true, is important as an challenge to the very enterprise of normative ethics, which usually assumes people can be held responsible for at least some of their actions. Hard determinists can present their argument in a couple of other ways also. Both these arguments are of the reductio ad absurdum form, i.e., their strategy is to demonstrate that absurd consequences follow from the supposition that people are free. Suppose your will were free. This would mean that your actions were not determined by causal laws. If no causal laws governed your actions, then it would be impossible to predict what you are going to do. But in fact people who know you can predict what you will do, with a fair amount of accuracy. And if they couldn't — if your actions were completely unpredictable — they'd probably say NOT that you were free, but that you were crazy. So your actions must be controlled by causal law. Again, suppose your will were free. This means your actions are freely chosen, and you're morally responsible for them. How then do you make your choices? Either it's an accident that you choose as you do or it's not. If it's an accident, i.e., if you choose randomly or by chance, then it's just a matter of chance that you didn't choose otherwise. So how can you be held morally responsible for choosing as you did? On the other hand, if you didn't choose by accident, then that means there's a causal explanation for your choice, and this confirms hard determinism. If hard determinism is correct, then, There can be no freedom in the sense required for morality. There is no point in punishing or blaming or putting down those who do “wrong,” since they cannot help it. Indeed, there is no point in making value judgments of any kind about other people. People are not “better” or “worse”; they are only different. And if you differ from someone else, you differ, period. If you change, it's because you “have it in you” already to change; if you don't change, you simply “don't have it in you” and can't be blamed. The notion of sin becomes incoherent. If sin is incoherent, then fundamental doctrines of Christianity (e.g., redemption from sin) are pointless. Persons cannot be thought of as in any way “special” or “higher” than other animal species or physical objects. Thus, the interests of humans should not necessarily automatically be thought to override the interests of animals or plants. However, the hard determinist does not think these consequences are necessarily bad. In fact, some hard determinists argue that the consequences might be very good. You can create a much better world, they argue, once you abandon the outdated notion of freedom. For example, B. F. Skinner argues that since people are the result of their conditioning, and will get conditioned by their upbringing and environments anyway, we ought to control people's upbringing and environments as much as possible to ensure that their conditioning is positive. The science of psychology, particularly Skinner's behaviorist principles of positive and negative reinforcement, can and should be applied to this task. Such a plan would be far better than the current situation, in which people's conditioning is more or less random; receiving positive conditioning is now just a matter of luck. But because people's actions and feelings are determined, you can create a perfect society simply by figuring out how to condition people so they don't do anything harmful, make a contribution to society, and have a happy consciousness. Note that Skinner does not discount the importance of feeling free. Like all the interesting hard determinists, he acknowledges as an empirical fact of psychology that people prefer doing what they want to do, and prefer not to be coerced into doing what they don't want to do. Any happy society must take into account what people actually want. But since the hard determinist thinks that people's wants are determined by conditioning, s/he does not place any special emphasis on what people want right now, or what they have wanted at at various points in history. Social order depends on manipulating people's wants, so they voluntarily choose what they have actually been programmed to choose. Freud and the ethologists (e.g., Konrad Lorenz) and sociobiologists (e.g., Richard Dawkins) are determinists of a different stripe, somewhat less optimistic and utopian than Skinner. Like Skinner, they discount the importance of people's actual desires. Actual conscious human wants are simply data, symptoms, residues of evolution or previous conditioning or manifestations of mental structures over which the individual has no control. Human subjectivity has no special status or meaning. Unlike Skinner, Freud and the ethologists posit strong unconscious forces determining desire. These forces are built into human nature by evolution; thus, unfortunately, although these forces might be quite unsavory, they are not going to go away quickly. And they are quite unsavory. Freud, for example, holds that during the so-called “Oedipal” period, everyone wants to have sex with the parent of the opposite sex and kill the parent of the same sex. Lorenz holds that aggression and territoriality and sexual competition are innate instinctive drives. Thus, we are destined to want (unconsciously) to dominate and subjugate others by violence, whether we consciously “want” to or not. All these theories agree that free will is an illusion. According to the hard determinists, since hard determinism is the only scientifically defensible way to understand humanity, the concept of free will only hides the real issues and interferes with true self-knowledge. What do you think..? ~

[thegnome54]

I actually came up with the theory of causal determinism while I was in a car on the way home from Pizza Hut once. Provided that true randomness does not exist (a truly random event being one which has no apparent cause), I fall into the category of a hard determinist. As for responsibility being destroyed, this follows naturally. Humans are no more responsible for their crimes than trees are responsible for growing where they grow. However, in my mind this doesn't really change anything. The judicial system is not in place for revenge, or even just punishment - it is in place to attempt to reform criminals so that they will not act out against society again. Therefore, even though it's not Bobby's fault that his brain configuration makes him liable to kill people, it still makes sense to try to alter the way he thinks in order to keep him from doing so. If putting him in jail is enough to scare him away from murder, then mission accomplished. In other words, if a tree is growing too close to your house, you will cut it whether or not you think it's the tree's "fault". The aim of cutting the tree is to stop it from causing problems to your house, not to punish the tree.

[Carôusoul]

I agree with you in reference to the tree. I think the whole idea of "fault" becomes somewhat abstract when you consider hard determinism. Again I think it is language convoluting truth. I really don't understand "fault". It seems odd to me now I think about it, but I would never have thought so a while ago. Anyway I agree basically. Pizza hut is always fitting for philisophical revelations.

[Stevehattan]

Good posts. I settled on the "hard determinist" viewpoint in my teen years and haven't since been able to conceive any way that free will or true randomness could possibly exist. I don't have any moral dilemmas. I know that there's a chance that the other life forms I perceive are also conscious and can experience pain and happiness, so the knowledge that I'm not truly responsible for anything I do doesn't lead me to live the life of a psychopath who's obsessed with his own personal pleasure and who will inflict any amount of pain on others to get it.

[R.D.735]

The law of cause and effect makes logical sense, but randomness would also mean that people have no free will. Free will is control, and both randomness and determinism reject the idea that any outcome can be controlled. Either way, free will, in an absolute sense, is impossible, as is any form of decision-making or creativity. I prefer, however, the non-absolute sense: that the brain either is or is not capable of guiding its own thought processes. From a deterministic or random perspective, it cannot, but from a less strict, more 'everyday' point of view, the question makes more sense, like asking whether a human can design something. In the absolute sense, he cannot. Ideas are merely the effect of a cause or created by some random process, and what comes out is the product of that, no more 'design' than the process of evolution.

[♥Mark]

Do you think we have it? I can't think so. Why would anyone want to make random decisions anyway?

[Stevehattan]

The law of cause and effect makes logical sense, but randomness would also mean that people have no free will. Free will is control, and both randomness and determinism reject the idea that any outcome can be controlled. Either way, free will, in an absolute sense, is impossible, as is any form of decision-making or creativity. I prefer, however, the non-absolute sense: that the brain either is or is not capable of guiding its own thought processes. From a deterministic or random perspective, it cannot, but from a less strict, more 'everyday' point of view, the question makes more sense, like asking whether a human can design something. In the absolute sense, he cannot. Ideas are merely the effect of a cause or created by some random process, and what comes out is the product of that, no more 'design' than the process of evolution. +1

[Moonbeam]

Yes we have free will, you would not have been able to make this thread without it. Making a thread doesn't prove he has free will. We all "do" things; you're missing the point. Provided that true randomness does not exist (a truly random event being one which has no apparent cause), I fall into the category of a hard determinist. How does adding randomness effect anything? The judicial system is not in place for revenge, or even just punishment - it is in place to attempt to reform criminals so that they will not act out against society again. Therefore, even though it's not Bobby's fault that his brain configuration makes him liable to kill people, it still makes sense to try to alter the way he thinks in order to keep him from doing so. If putting him in jail is enough to scare him away from murder, then mission accomplished. Exactly. Even if reform isn't possible, you still have to keep them out of society.

[Carôusoul]

How does adding randomness effect anything? . I think the point he was making was on the nature of determinism as described in my mammoth post up there somewhere. Basically the only way we can have an entirely free free choice is for it to be entirely random, that is to say that there are NO input factors which influence our choice subconciously; in which case we as humans would be able to make a random choice; this would be true free will Problem we find here is it's entirely impossible, and hence when combined with other, stronger arguments for determinism i have outlined above, free will collapses.

[Taosaur]

If everything is absolutely--therefor equally--determined, then how can we determine probabilities? How are some things more determined than others?

[Carôusoul]

If everything is absolutely--therefor equally--determined, then how can we determine probabilities? How are some things more determined than others? I'm not sure what you mean. Could you explain further, and give this a read. What about if someone were to argue determinism though? Look, deductively; P1: No action is free if it must occur. P2: For any event X there are antecedent causes that ensure the occurrence of X in accordance with impersonal, mechanical causal laws. C: No action is free. The hard determinist defends each premise as follows: P1 simply expresses what is meant by “free”. Surely if an act must occur, it can't be free. P2 is the Thesis of Determinism — the notion that every event is caused in accordance with causal laws, which account completely for its occurrence. Obviously (for the hard determinist), nothing is uncaused. We can't even imagine what it would mean for a thing to be “uncaused.” The hard determinist claims that P2 is thus indubitable. (If you doubt P2 anyway, try to produce a counterexample — an instance of an uncaused event.) Thus, since causes guarantee that their effects occur — that is, if the cause is present, the effect must occur — and since everything that happens is the effect of some cause or set of causes, everything must occur. So nothing is free. Now, people often argue that P2 is true for the vast majority of events but is false for some human actions. Humans are different from mere things, people say. The hard determinist anticipates this objection, and gives the following argument to establish determinism for human actions: P1: No action is free if it must occur. P2: Human actions result from wants, wishes, desires, motivations, feelings, etc. P3: Human wants, wishes, desires, motivations, feelings, etc. are caused in turn by specific antecedent conditions that ensure their occurrence. C: Human actions are not free. Thus, for the hard determinist, humans are no different from other things. Your present actions are part of a causal chain that extends back far before your birth, and each link of the chain determines the next link on the chain. Hence, although it may appear to you that you have control over your present actions and mental states, you really have no control. And if you have no control, you certainly can't be held morally responsible for what you do. Thus hard determinism, if true, is important as an challenge to the very enterprise of normative ethics, which usually assumes people can be held responsible for at least some of their actions. Hard determinists can present their argument in a couple of other ways also. Both these arguments are of the reductio ad absurdum form, i.e., their strategy is to demonstrate that absurd consequences follow from the supposition that people are free. Suppose your will were free. This would mean that your actions were not determined by causal laws. If no causal laws governed your actions, then it would be impossible to predict what you are going to do. But in fact people who know you can predict what you will do, with a fair amount of accuracy. And if they couldn't — if your actions were completely unpredictable — they'd probably say NOT that you were free, but that you were crazy. So your actions must be controlled by causal law. Again, suppose your will were free. This means your actions are freely chosen, and you're morally responsible for them. How then do you make your choices? Either it's an accident that you choose as you do or it's not. If it's an accident, i.e., if you choose randomly or by chance, then it's just a matter of chance that you didn't choose otherwise. So how can you be held morally responsible for choosing as you did? On the other hand, if you didn't choose by accident, then that means there's a causal explanation for your choice, and this confirms hard determinism. If hard determinism is correct, then, There can be no freedom in the sense required for morality. There is no point in punishing or blaming or putting down those who do “wrong,” since they cannot help it. Indeed, there is no point in making value judgments of any kind about other people. People are not “better” or “worse”; they are only different. And if you differ from someone else, you differ, period. If you change, it's because you “have it in you” already to change; if you don't change, you simply “don't have it in you” and can't be blamed. The notion of sin becomes incoherent. If sin is incoherent, then fundamental doctrines of Christianity (e.g., redemption from sin) are pointless. Persons cannot be thought of as in any way “special” or “higher” than other animal species or physical objects. Thus, the interests of humans should not necessarily automatically be thought to override the interests of animals or plants. However, the hard determinist does not think these consequences are necessarily bad. In fact, some hard determinists argue that the consequences might be very good. You can create a much better world, they argue, once you abandon the outdated notion of freedom. For example, B. F. Skinner argues that since people are the result of their conditioning, and will get conditioned by their upbringing and environments anyway, we ought to control people's upbringing and environments as much as possible to ensure that their conditioning is positive. The science of psychology, particularly Skinner's behaviorist principles of positive and negative reinforcement, can and should be applied to this task. Such a plan would be far better than the current situation, in which people's conditioning is more or less random; receiving positive conditioning is now just a matter of luck. But because people's actions and feelings are determined, you can create a perfect society simply by figuring out how to condition people so they don't do anything harmful, make a contribution to society, and have a happy consciousness. Note that Skinner does not discount the importance of feeling free. Like all the interesting hard determinists, he acknowledges as an empirical fact of psychology that people prefer doing what they want to do, and prefer not to be coerced into doing what they don't want to do. Any happy society must take into account what people actually want. But since the hard determinist thinks that people's wants are determined by conditioning, s/he does not place any special emphasis on what people want right now, or what they have wanted at at various points in history. Social order depends on manipulating people's wants, so they voluntarily choose what they have actually been programmed to choose. Freud and the ethologists (e.g., Konrad Lorenz) and sociobiologists (e.g., Richard Dawkins) are determinists of a different stripe, somewhat less optimistic and utopian than Skinner. Like Skinner, they discount the importance of people's actual desires. Actual conscious human wants are simply data, symptoms, residues of evolution or previous conditioning or manifestations of mental structures over which the individual has no control. Human subjectivity has no special status or meaning. Unlike Skinner, Freud and the ethologists posit strong unconscious forces determining desire. These forces are built into human nature by evolution; thus, unfortunately, although these forces might be quite unsavory, they are not going to go away quickly. And they are quite unsavory. Freud, for example, holds that during the so-called “Oedipal” period, everyone wants to have sex with the parent of the opposite sex and kill the parent of the same sex. Lorenz holds that aggression and territoriality and sexual competition are innate instinctive drives. Thus, we are destined to want (unconsciously) to dominate and subjugate others by violence, whether we consciously “want” to or not. All these theories agree that free will is an illusion. According to the hard determinists, since hard determinism is the only scientifically defensible way to understand humanity, the concept of free will only hides the real issues and interferes with true self-knowledge. What do you think..? ~

[NonDualistic]

I would think that to experience free will, one would have to step beyond both the body and its psyche. Both are imprisoned in determinism. The interesting thought I have dwelled on is that it would be through determinism itself that one gets to that point of stepping beyond. Or is it?

[Stevehattan]

I would think that to experience free will, one would have to step beyond both the body and its psyche. Both are imprisoned in determinism. The interesting thought I have dwelled on is that it would be through determinism itself that one gets to that point of stepping beyond. Or is it? Well, if you step beyond causality/determinism (one possible outcome per scenario, so no free will), you step into randomness (nothing has any control over anything, so no free will). Either things are influenced by other things or they aren't. There's no possible in-between or beyond as far as I can tell, but if there is, it would be pretty mind-blowing.

[Moonbeam]

Basically the only way we can have an entirely free free choice is for it to be entirely random, that is to say that there are NO input factors which influence our choice subconciously; in which case we as humans would be able to make a random choice; this would be true free will Problem we find here is it's entirely impossible, and hence when combined with other, stronger arguments for determinism i have outlined above, free will collapses. Oh, I thought he meant random events affecting neurons or something.

[thegnome54]

How does adding randomness effect anything? Basically the only way we can have an entirely free free choice is for it to be entirely random, that is to say that there are NO input factors which influence our choice subconciously; in which case we as humans would be able to make a random choice; this would be true free will I was alluding to the fact that if true randomness were to exist, causal determinism would be completely invalidated. If every event doesn't have a cause, and all of these interactions do not follow precise laws, then the theoretical possibility of predicting the future collapses, and that is what determinism is all about. Granted, randomness would still not make room for free will - only random will. Either way, I don't think free will is possible. I'm just saying that I leave a door open for randomness to replace determinism as the destroyer of free will. If everything is absolutely--therefor equally--determined, then how can we determine probabilities? How are some things more determined than others? Probabilities are our estimates of the sum effect of uncontrolled variables on the outcome of a trial. Some things are not 'more determined' than others, their outcomes are simply less susceptible to the effects of uncontrolled variables - it's much easier, for example, to predict the probability of a dice rolling a 6 than it is the probability of getting 5.3 inches of snow tomorrow. There are just more influential factors involved in the latter.

[Taosaur]

P1: No action is free if it must occur. P2: For any event X there are antecedent causes that ensure the occurrence of X in accordance with impersonal, mechanical causal laws. Taken to it's logical conclusion, what you're saying is that nothing is happening at all. If all events are rigidly fixed due to causal relationships, it's equally true of past, present and future events--everything has happened, or nothing is happening. I would say this view is valid unto itself, but takes us entirely outside the field of events, and so is incomplete in that it fails, by negating happening, to explain what is happening.

[Taosaur]

Granted, randomness would still not make room for free will - only random will. Either way, I don't think free will is possible. I'm just saying that I leave a door open for randomness to replace determinism as the destroyer of free will. So the two extremes of pure causality or pure randomness make sense to you, but variantly conditioned chaos is untenable?

[Original Poster]

The mind is little more a collection of thoughts that accidentally drift up to the surface of awarness from the depths of the unconscious. To your mind, there is no freewill as it is limited by its beliefs and inclinations. To awareness, however, there are unlimited possibilities.

[thegnome54]

So the two extremes of pure causality or pure randomness make sense to you, but variantly conditioned chaos is untenable? Pure randomness would not make sense, because we are clearly seeing patterns in the behavior of the universe which are predictable at large scales. The two options I can see are pure causality and "some" randomness - meaning that true randomness exists, and causality cannot be trusted at all times. I don't know what "variantly conditioned chaos" means, but I'd love to find out

[Moonbeam]

Pure randomness would not make sense, because we are clearly seeing patterns in the behavior of the universe which are predictable at large scales. Both determinism and randomness could be factors at the same time, if quantum mechanics is a factor.