Do we have free will? Is the world indeterministic?

[Mechanicalsalvation]

The main problem lies in consciousness. We dont know who we truly are so we are prisoners of some other reality then our true self. First comes material/mineral "level" then in appearance of organic and plant life there is more freedom as well. We have come up to thinking animal - man. But to have more free will one must still develop the consciosness further. Only then one becomes wholly free and has proper free will.

Well sure, we can't choose to fly spontaneously. But there's a whole host of things that we can do spontaneously.

Yes, thats what I said. Limited free will.

Let me just add one quote:
If we live in the body it is all fate.
If we live in the soul it is all free will.

 

[Hygro]

Gorak, fear not, we are creating the machines both within us and without us.

 

[Core Imposter]

In the instant of creation God finished His work. Viewing all not from the perspective of passing time, but as a tapestry laid at his feet, God granted perfect free will to creatures whose lives ended no sooner nor later than the moment they began, from the divine perspective.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Why it is irrational to care for the only universe that matters? If MWI was true, there would be no point to care about anything else than the universe "this" me is in. I certainly perceive only one result of a measurement. There might be other copies of me perceiving other results, but why should I care for them?

The past and present are not what you make choices about. You make choices about the future. According to MWI, you have many futures. You should care about all of them. That's all I'm saying.

How do you arrive at a number that small? I see no reason to assume that the number is that small.

There have been many billions of generations of animals, whose behavioral repertoires eventually built up into what we have now. At any point in that history, an animal which behaves truly randomly would have a reproductive disadvantage against an animal which behaves pseudo-randomly when, say, exploring new territory, but absolutely deterministically (or at least, as close as a fundamentally quantum universe will allow) when it comes to not eating poison berries. Our brains are built on top of their basic neural plan, with minor variations. OK, maybe 1-per-million-generations poison-eating wouldn't be sufficiently selected against to die out by now - or maybe it would. At any rate the probability would have to be quite tiny.

I suppose, it's possible in principle for an animal to have a deterministic part of the brain, and an indeterministic one. But I'm not seeing any results in neurology that suggest that the neurons or glial cells or networks differ from one another in this respect, i.e. their susceptibility to quantum noise. Wouldn't it be simpler - and thus easier for evolution to hit upon - to use deterministic processes everywhere, and then add pseudo-randomness where necessary (easily copied from the environment, which provides many pseudo-random events)?

 

[Leoreth]

The chief point of contention between incompatibalists like you, and compatibalists like me is the definition of free will. So my purpose in bringing up examples like mind control, and having a gun to your head is to demonstrate that the compatibalist definition is more in line with our intuition, closer to other related meanings of the word freedom, and altogether more useful.

I don't know what the value of an appeal to intuition is worth in this case. Our intuition is wrong in many situations, especially when it comes to self-perception.

And this doesn't really address my argument, which is that being under mind control is the same situation no matter if free will is real or an illusion. Your autonomy is taken from you by force. The effect of it doesn't depend on the question if there is a free will exercising this autonomy or not.

But I can also attack you from the other side: Why is free will as you define it a useful concept to have a word for?

Because it is how we perceive reality, obviously. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's how reality is.

It's as if you're asking why "sunrise" is a useful concept to have a word for, even though the sun doesn't literally rise. The answer is because in most contexts it's serviceable to look at it as if it were, even though it isn't.

Overriding freedom is restricting freedom, it means less freedom. So if your free will is over ridden, you don't have free will in a particular choice. This isn't just semantics -- conceptually being overridden is the opposite of being free.

Yes, I agree. But as I said before, that doesn't change whether free will exists or not.

 

[Mise]

I don't know what the value of an appeal to intuition is worth in this case. Our intuition is wrong in many situations, especially when it comes to self-perception.

Well, you haven't given us any reason to believe that our intuitions are wrong in this case. To throw it back to you, our intuitions are very often right; why is it wrong in this case? I have no reason to believe that my intuitions are failing me, that my sense that I am making free decision is wrong, in the way that the ingestion of drugs would cause my sense of sight or hearing to fail me. That compatabilist theories fit with our intuitions makes them more plausible. I agree that what you're saying is also plausible, but what Sauron is saying is more plausible, since it certainly feels intuitively true. That it fits with our intuition offers prima facie evidence for Sauron's case; this case, of course, can be defeated with hard, physical evidence to the contrary, but there's really no physical evidence one way or the other.

The crux is simply a matter of plausibility.

 

[Borachio]

Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

I used to love this quote. Grand stuff!

Isn't there something about dogs and sorcerers being the ones who do believe? But just don't act on their belief?

 

[Leoreth]

Well, you haven't given us any reason to believe that our intuitions are wrong in this case. To throw it back to you, our intuitions are very often right; why is it wrong in this case? I have no reason to believe that my intuitions are failing me, that my sense that I am making free decision is wrong, in the way that the ingestion of drugs would cause my sense of sight or hearing to fail me. That compatabilist theories fit with our intuitions makes them more plausible. I agree that what you're saying is also plausible, but what Sauron is saying is more plausible, since it certainly feels intuitively true. That it fits with our intuition offers prima facie evidence for Sauron's case; this case, of course, can be defeated with hard, physical evidence to the contrary, but there's really no physical evidence one way or the other.

The crux is simply a matter of plausibility.

If our intuition is sometimes right and sometimes it isn't, we shouldn't rely on it either way. And I never made the claim that "our intuition is often wrong" is an argument against free will, just that "our intuition says free will exists" is a very weak argument in favor of it.

Intuition is formed by how we're conditioned, and since even people who reject free will generally accept that we perceive the world as if it existed, our intuition is obviously conditioned to think of free will as real.

I should probably mention that I'm very much on this fence on this question as well, and choose to believe that free will doesn't exist mainly on personal preference (even though there is certain evidence that makes me lean this way, such as the study lord_joakim mentioned, which I haven't been able to find). Arguing about whether free will exists wasn't really the reason why I entered this thread, I just took this position as some sort of advocatus diaboli to counter Souron's more pronounced position. I came here to argue against the notion that the non-existence of free will would have any ethical and especially legal consequences.

 

[Mise]

Gah, nobody is "relying" on it... But ideas that fit with our everyday understanding of the reality are clearly preferable to ideas that completely fly in the face of our everyday understanding of reality. A theory of gravity that required hundreds of invisible pixies lifting and pulling things at a certain speed is clearly unsatisfactory and implausible, for example, and I can say this just by appealing to one's intuitions, and without any scientific evidence whatsoever... Such a theory is ridiculous just on the face of it.

 

[Leoreth]

You mean like theories involving virtual particles emerging and disappearing based on random chance alone? Or theories involving extremely counterintuitive conclusions like non-simultaneity?

Relying on things like "common sense" or "intuition" to investigate reality just doesn't work. That's exactly why we've adopted the scientific method.

 

[Mise]

My god, how on earth can you miss the point so completely yet still retain the smug sense of superiority that invariably accompanies a post ending with "the scientific method"

Yes, there are true things that are counterintuitive. No, this in no way refutes what I am saying. Jesus Christ, this is a very simple concept: a theory that is not completely ridiculous is preferable to one that is, even if both of them follow perfectly logically from their premises, and they both confer the same explanatory power.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, it's definitely better to make posts devoid of any argument and accuse the other side of being smug

If I have misunderstood you, I apologize, but I don't see how it would help me to understand you if you become offensive.

Edit: Just saw your edit, response coming. Okay, so your position is that asserting the nonexistance of free will is completely ridiculous? Why am I arguing with you again?

 

[Mise]

No, that is not my position, obviously.....

My position is that, given two theories that confer equal predictive power and both follow logically from their premises, a theory that fits with existing, commonly held, intuitive understandings of the subject is more plausible than one that requires you to completely throw away commonly held, intuitive understandings of the subject. The consequence of that is that a completely ridiculous theory (i.e. one that fits so ill with our understanding of the world that it is completely implausible) can be dismissed on the face of it. In other words, this is why we can dismiss the notion that invisible pixies are responsible for gravity, without actually devising experiements to disprove the theory scientifically.

None of this has anything to do with science or the scientific method. It is to do with theories of equal explanatory power, that equally fit the scientific facts, and that follow logically from their premises. It is similar in form to Okham's Razor, and it can similarly be refuted by evidence of higher quality being presented. It does not mean that a theory that has intuitive support is irrefutable or automatically true, that it is unassailable by scientific method, or that scientific evidence cannot touch it. In short, it does not mean any of the things you suppose it means in your posts. All it does is confer an air of greater plausibility to the theory.

This really isn't that complicated and I don't know why you are struggling with it.

 

[Leoreth]

I already suspected you were going for something like Occam's Razor, but your argument isn't quite that. Occam's Razor states that "entities should not be needlessly multiplicated", i.e. we shouldn't assume things that are unnecessary to explain what we observe. To say that according to Occam's Razor it's better to assume that we experience free will because we have free will as some kind of zero hypothesis would have been a point I would not have disagreed with.

But intuition means something else instead, which I tried to explain with my comment about how our intuition is conditioned by our experiences. We experience the sun rising and moving across the sky, therefore we are conditioned to think of "the sun moves around the Earth" as intuitively correct, until we become aware of the greater picture and our notion of what is intuitively right changes. Or think of atheists and theists. If the former haven't been conditioned with the notion of "a deity exists", they think of "deities don't exist" as intuitive, while theists who grew up with the idea that God exists, think of "God exists" as intuitive. Both of their intuition is the product of their conditioning, neither is inherently preferable over the other, and both are inadequate to resolve the question at hand.

Now you might say that if there is no hard evidence for either alternative, you might just as well go with your intuition, but there is no reason why this should be imperative. Therefore my original assessment of Souron's appeal to intuition as a very weak argument.

So the reason I'm struggling with this is maybe that unlike you (apparently?), I tend to make a difference between Occam's-Razor-like reasoning and appeals to intuition. Maybe I'm just a pedant.

 

[Mise]

Also, this:

If our intuition is sometimes right and sometimes it isn't, we shouldn't rely on it either way.

Is stupid and wrong.

My eye sight is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. But I rely on it either way. My hearing, similarly. My ability to do simple mental arithmetic is often wrong, but I don't answer the question "what's 5 times 6?" with "oh, sorry, I can't answer that because I can't trust that my mental arithmetic will not fail me this time, as it has done so often in the past!" I have no reason to believe that my sight deceives me in this particular moment, so when I see a horse trotting down the street, I don't assume I'm hallucinating -- I assume that there really is a horse trotting down the street.

Moreover, scientific experiments are often wrong! That's why repeatability is so important, and it's why findings take years to publish. And, even when they are published, they are often not reproduceable elsewhere. Science is a ridiculously slow process by everyday standards: it takes years for a theory to become accepted in the scientific community. But just because scientific theories often turn out to be wrong and scientific experiments are often flawed, doesn't mean we should not rely upon them to ascertain facts.

Put simply, while it is entirely possible that my actions are being controlled by aliens from Mars, or by the roll of a quantum dice, I have no reason to believe that this is the case. I have no reason to believe that I am being "fooled" into thinking that my actions are not free. There's simply no reason to believe that we don't have free will, and since it certainly feels like we have free will, this provides prima facie support for free will.

 

[Leoreth]

That would be a better argument if our intuition was the only method available to us to come to a conclusion about things.

(It would also be a better argument if you decided not to call me stupid, but that's of course another matter).

 

[Mise]

I already suspected you were going for something like Occam's Razor, but your argument isn't quite that. Occam's Razor states that "entities should not be needlessly multiplicated", i.e. we shouldn't assume things that are unnecessary to explain what we observe. To say that according to Occam's Razor it's better to assume that we experience free will because we have free will as some kind of zero hypothesis would have been a point I would not have disagreed with.

But intuition means something else instead, which I tried to explain with my comment about how our intuition is conditioned by our experiences. We experience the sun rising and moving across the sky, therefore we are conditioned to think of "the sun moves around the Earth" as intuitively correct, until we become aware of the greater picture and our notion of what is intuitively right changes. Or think of atheists and theists. If the former haven't been conditioned with the notion of "a deity exists", they think of "deities don't exist" as intuitive, while theists who grew up with the idea that God exists, think of "God exists" as intuitive. Both of their intuition is the product of their conditioning, neither is inherently preferable over the other, and both are inadequate to resolve the question at hand.

Now you might say that if there is no hard evidence for either alternative, you might just as well go with your intuition, but there is no reason why this should be imperative. Therefore my original assessment of Souron's appeal to intuition as a very weak argument.

So the reason I'm struggling with this is maybe that unlike you (apparently?), I tend to make a difference between Occam's-Razor-like reasoning and appeals to intuition. Maybe I'm just a pedant.

No, there is no reason to believe that my perception of free will is false or flawed. The burden of proof, when people first realised that the Earth revolved around the Sun, was upon those who sought to tear down our intuitive notions based on the path the Sun takes across the sky. Without evidence that the Earth revolved around the Sun, it is rational to accept that the Sun was something that moved across the sky. Similarly, the burden of proof is on those who claim that free will is an illusion to prove that it is an illusion. Something something mumble mumble "the scientific method".

 

[Mise]

Also I'm not "going for something like Okham's Razor", but in any case, Okham's Razor would say, in the absence of evidence otherwise, that the Sun was a big circle of light and heat that moved across the sky, because that is indeed the simplest -- dare I say, most intuitive -- explanation.

EDIT: Also also,

That would be a better argument if our intuition was the only method available to us to come to a conclusion about things.

It doesn't matter: the statement is stupid and wrong, because there are plenty of things that we rely on that are merely sometimes right and sometimes wrong. All I did was give counterexamples.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

In the instant of creation God finished His work. Viewing all not from the perspective of passing time, but as a tapestry laid at his feet, God granted perfect free will to creatures whose lives ended no sooner nor later than the moment they began, from the divine perspective.

I think I agree with you that the will humans posses may be perfect free will from certain (divine) perspective. But the divinity and perfection have their own degree and thats what all matters.
If you want to look at it like that you can say that humans are perfect or have degree of perfection. You can say that human imperfection is their perfection becouse thats what human being is suppose to be like: weak, strugling and seeking.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

And whosoever will - this is simple statement but is actually quite complex when transmitted to practical reality; not everybody is inspired to follow this message and even those who do they may do it in different degrees. Is it not proof that not everybody has the same will? That will is something which is developing together with evolving consciousness?

 

[Traitorfish]

The self is a fuzzy idea, but not a useless one in my mind. I don't see how being manifest as a network diminishes the concept.

In fact there is a sense (like touch and sight) specifically for identifying what is and isn't part of your body. It can lead people to want to amputate themselves when it goes awry. So your self could be defined as the part of the world that you identify as you.

That's a pretty good starting place, I agree! But what is it that we identify as "us"? At times we isolate parts of our own body from ourselves; if I hold my hand up to examine it, I'm not examining it as part of my body-subject, but as an object. At the same time, if I write with a pen, it is as effectively part of my body-subject as the hand holding it, just far more loosely integrated. So it becomes quickly apparent that the non-precision of the concept of "I" has some pretty major implications for any statement involving that "I", and while they certainly don't preclude making such statements accurately (we do it all the time!), they do cast some doubt on the meaning of more abstract claims such as "I have free will". Not imply that they're false, as such, but certainly raising the question of whether they represent effective ways of approaching questions of selfhood.