[Luis Dias]

I really never got the "FREE WILL" Stuff. It's an american thing, I'm willing to bet.

Please, anyone, are you even able to define "Free Will" in a consistent logical way, a non-nonsensical definition of it?

It's been some time, but the last time I've discussed this, I reached the (probably silly but it's me so) conclusion that free will is an inconsistent concept that has only a lot of attention due to silly philosophical and religious traditions.

[Scotty]

Pardon the ramblings of a sleep-deprived mind, but I wasn't trying to argue strongly acausal free will.  Just that our freedom to make choices exists within a framework built and structured out of genetic, environmental, and other learned factors.  That is to say, we are free to make choices, merely that those choices are heavily influenced by many factors to be predisposed toward one decision or another.

EDIT:  For example:  I do not steal things because I think it is wrong, due to the construction of my personal decision making matrix.  However, I could make the conscious choice to steal something.  Similarly, someone else raised in a place where there is no concept of ownership (woohoo, exaggerated examples!) might have no compunctions at all about stealing.  They can still make the choice not to, influenced by their own decision making matrix.

tl;dr, free-will guided by environment and other factors that predispose more likely actions to certain chioces, though alternate choices are entirely possible.

Well, is it really 'free will' in the classical sense if all actions are causally determined? You're making a good argument for complex contingent causes, mind, and one which I absolutely agree with, but not classical free will.

I begin to think more that 'free will' in the classical sense is a deeply flawed concept that needs redefining.

[General Battuta]

I like to come back to the RPG character metaphor. Your statistics and experiences have predetermined your choices, but the fact that those experiences and statistics are unique to you nonetheless make your choices unique.

[Luis Dias]

"Uniqueness" has nothing to do with "Free Will".

Free Will is an oxymoron of a concept, and perhaps we could even say just "moronic" of a concept.

It means that we have a "Will" that is "Free". Free from what? From ourselves? A dualist would say, it is "free" from our body, and a product of our magical floating eternal mind.

But even that concept is inconsistent. Think about it. "Free Will" in that sense means that a "Floating Mind" (FM) has a Will independently from the body. But this Will is not independent of the FM's nature.

FM will do its choices based entirely on its very nature. It couldn't be otherwise if we are saying that this FM is the one responsible for the choices it makes. IOW, this FM can't help itself doing the choices it does, because that's the way it was either created or born.

Thus, the "WILL" of this FM is not "Free" from itself, and that notion is just silly. Why should my choices be "free" from myself? They can't be.

So the "outsourcing" of the "FREE WILL" problem to a Floating Eternal Mind doesn't really solve it at all, as demonstrated.

Thus the concept is silly and should be fully discarded in all literature.

QED.

[General Battuta]

Who are you addressing and why do you think they're disagreeing with you?

You seem to be following the same path that most of the posters in this thread have already trod.

[Bobboau]

I like to define free will as any self contained decision making process capable of procedural level self adjustment.

[Luis Dias]

Who are you addressing and why do you think they're disagreeing with you?

I'm addressing the audience in general and I'm against the concept of Free Will in itself, not against "anybody" at all. I think that is quite clear.

You seem to be following the same path that most of the posters in this thread have already trod.

Good. So Kumbaya to you too.

[achtung]

Put me in the free will camp, if only because without it, there would be no internal (read: moral/ethical) conflict on whether to undertake a given action.  Even considering that we may be genetically/environmentally pre-determined to favor certain outcomes, there is no guarantee.

I would argue that moral conflict is actually sort-of compatible with many forms of determinism.  Let's take an extreme example of say, a serial killer. Most serial killers are considered sociopaths. A sociopath's behavior is not necessarily that of the conflict between moral choices, but is arguably acting on a practically instinctual notion to do something such as murder for personal satisfaction. The causes of sociopathy tend to revolve around the influences of genetics and physical illness. Yet, time and time again, these people are incarcerated or sentenced to death. I would agree that while the "morality" of sentencing any given sociopath is rendered partially moot by determinism, it is still perfectly reasonable to see that person incarcerated. Human societies are built to sustain themselves, and someone acting as a serial killer draws the ire of a system built for survival because of its negative impact on said desire to survive. As a result of this attention, the society acts to keep itself stable by "putting away" the person who conflicts with that societies survival strategy. The survival strategy, of course, has been determined by past influences.

I also agree that there are no guaranteed outcomes, but I wouldn't agree that the "unpredictable" outcomes are sourced from our internal thinking processes. I would say that that random environmental influences, such as my example of the stochastic behavior of decaying particles, play significant and incredibly complex roles in these events.

I feel that there's some sort of "magic" feeling attached to free will. It's like listening to encrypted radio chatter. Just because you can't discern a pattern doesn't mean there's not a pattern there. Similarly, just because the incredibly complex system of interactions behind determinism don't make sense, that doesn't mean we just have free-will and there's no path being laid before us.

Or something like that...

More to come when I have more time.

[MP-Ryan]

Intriguing discussion.  Behavgen to the rescue? =)

There's a fair pile of intriguing evidence from a variety of species that considerably more of our behaviour that we've ever believed is mediated entirely by our biology.  The simplest examples come from fruit flies and simple nematodes (they're hermaphrodites, of course they're interesting!), but there are even simple gene switches in human beings too.  Cascades do the rest.

The shortish version is that a lot of our "choices" are theoretically available but, in reality, completely ruled out by our biology (which includes psychological development).  Even much of personality has genetic determinants.  So the free will v. dichotomy choice is a fictitious one.  A lot of behavioural genetics seems to suggest that compatibilism is closer to the real answer:  our choices are narrowed by our biology to the point where only a few options (or a single path) are actually available to us despite the illusion of a true open path.  Thus, most of us make few actual choices in our lives even though we are wired to believe that we have actually exercised decision-making capacity rather than following the biological programming that has largely shaped our physical abilities, psychological disposition, personality, and thought-processes.  We're really not all that more advanced than our Drosophila and C. elegans buddies in that regard.

The RPG analogy is fairly apt.  Once you lay the character groundwork (which is pretty much all programmed in pre-birth development, aside from a few aspects of psychological disposition that are programmed in very early childhood), your path in life is a fairly narrow one, despite our perceptions to the contrary.

[Scotty]

I think a major fallacy in that kind of presentation of biological predetermination (if you could call it that), is that it in no way accounts for what I'm going to rather simply call "taste."  For example: give a person two possible routes to the same destination, both of which are identical in exertion required, length of route, and even route itself, but change the scenery.  Which route would the person take?  Obviously, it depends on which scenery the hypothetical person likes best, but there's always the possibility of that person thinking "I want to try something new."  Which path the person takes is entirely up to him/her, and may in fact change from one day to the next, or one person to the next.

Now, I'm not saying this applies to every decision, far from it.  Just something to think about.

[General Battuta]

I think a major fallacy in that kind of presentation of biological predetermination (if you could call it that), is that it in no way accounts for what I'm going to rather simply call "taste."  For example: give a person two possible routes to the same destination, both of which are identical in exertion required, length of route, and even route itself, but change the scenery.  Which route would the person take?  Obviously, it depends on which scenery the hypothetical person likes best, but there's always the possibility of that person thinking "I want to try something new."  Which path the person takes is entirely up to him/her, and may in fact change from one day to the next, or one person to the next.

Sure, but each of those single choices can still be predetermined. This is an argument for complexity, not acausality.

[Mustang19]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)

Free Will has been blown out of all proportion by pop psychology. To academic philosophers it's not even a serious question.

[Luis Dias]

"Man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills"

Shopenhauer

[MP-Ryan]

I think a major fallacy in that kind of presentation of biological predetermination (if you could call it that), is that it in no way accounts for what I'm going to rather simply call "taste."  For example: give a person two possible routes to the same destination, both of which are identical in exertion required, length of route, and even route itself, but change the scenery.  Which route would the person take?  Obviously, it depends on which scenery the hypothetical person likes best, but there's always the possibility of that person thinking "I want to try something new."  Which path the person takes is entirely up to him/her, and may in fact change from one day to the next, or one person to the next.

Now, I'm not saying this applies to every decision, far from it.  Just something to think about.

This calls for an MZ/DZ twin study!

Actually, it doesn't.  What you've described is termed "novelty-seeking."  Some species are pre-disposed to it, some species are not.  Mammals generally are, and thus, given the parameters you've described a human (any human) is likely to take one path, then the other path, and after that revert to whichever they prefer (based on the myriad of personal characteristics that determine their preference, the majority of which are biologically programmed).  Preference is partially based on the principles of behaviourism (see, Skinner isn't a total waste of time) when all other factors are also equal.

Very little in our behaviour is totally freedom of choice, although the complexities of the things that drive our behaviour make it look like we get to choose.

[General Battuta]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)

Free Will has been blown out of all proportion by pop psychology. To academic philosophers it's not even a serious question.

****, where the **** can i generate a good hipster kitty

"Man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills"

Shopenhauer

that's pretty good

[Bobboau]

ok, so we all pretty much agree on everything except maybe what to call things.

[Herra Tohtori]

Determinism does not exclude free will.

Deterministic reality is simply a reality where the law of cause and effect applies. Non-deterministic universe would not make any sense at all, and it's safe to say that our universe is very much deterministic.


What you're thinking here is the controversy between discrete and non-discrete reality.



In a discrete reality, same original setting will ALWAYS yield exactly the same end results. Or, if we're talking about physical model, the model will always give the same results.

In a non-discrete reality, there is an element of chance, and same original setting might result in a variety of scenarios.

Newtonian physics, special and general relativity are good examples of deterministic and discrete models of reality. They always give the same answers (within the precision of tools used).

Quantum mechanics is an example of deterministic but non-discrete model of reality. It only deals in probabilities of each end result, and always spits out probability functions as a result - and it's up to experiments to see if the seemingly random results of an experiment correspond with the predicted probability functions from the theory.



Now, free will can only exist in a deterministic but non-discrete universe, but it doesn't necessarily do it even there. In a discrete universe, everything is pre-determined, there is no element of change or real options, and in such an universe, free will truly could not possibly exist.


However, it appears that our universe is not a discrete one, there seems to be a genuine element of chance hardcoded in the structure of our world, and so far all alternate explanations for quantum phenomena (such as hidden variables) have been either unconfirmed or disproven.

However, even in a non-discrete universe that relies on chance, it's fairly hard to determine the existence of "free will". To begin with, we should define free will, and that is not an easy task at all.

So, how should one determine free will?

Is it a will independent of material confinements of the universe? This would be tantamount to a "soul", which I do not think is a serious contender for a good definition of free will.

The problem is, even as a consciousness emerges from the physical processes responsible for it, it's still basically a sum of those physical processes. It is entirely dependant on those processes (lest you lend some credence to soul hypothesis), and even if there's a random element of how exactly those physical processes turn out, it might still not be enough to qualify as a free will, if the consciousness has no true control over those random elements.

I myself define free will as follows:

If a consciousness (being the sum of some physical processes such as brain functions) can actively affect the processes from which it emerges, then it has free will.


In other words, if consciousness can affect its own actions and functioning, then I think it could be qualified to have a certain degree of free will.



I know there are problems with this (how to separate consciousness into external and internal processes when it is, in the end, a result of bioelectric signals flowing in a bag of flesh?), and it's almost certain that at least majority of what we perceive as "free will" is an illusion created by our brains to tell our consciousness that it's in charge, but I still think that on the higher level, the consciousness is the one responsible for decisions that determine the choice between two or more options (such as picking a food from a menu), or determining what exactly I want to write using my fingers as interface to the computer (as in this text). Low level functions such as motoric functions are largely unconscious, but that doesn't say anything about choices of higher levels.


However, it should be said that there are undoubtedly many other valid definitions and concerns about the existence of free will, but I hope this post clarifies the prerequisites for the free will to exist.

Free will requires universe to be non-discrete, but that is not a guarantee that any decision-making process truly has free will; it could just as easily be classified as an automaton process emerging from the material host, and even if there was an element of randomness, it could just be a result of the tiny variations from quantum level variations that the decision-making process has no control over.


It is a vexing problem, truly. But like said, I am of the opinion that consciousness renders a certain level of free will inevitable (however this is heavily dependant on definitions of consciousness and free will in the first place).


In many ways, this is similar to the question "does god exist" - it doesn't make sense to ask that question before we have a clear definition of what god is... and much like free will, there doesn't seem to be one universally acceptable (or accepted) definition.

[Mr. Vega]

If you believe in free will, you are a:

1. Compatibilist. Free will here is defined here as only freedom from external coercion in your actions. Hobbes and Hume are the standard bearers of this idea. You are in essence controlled by your personality in a deterministic manner, but your reasons for your actions are your own, so your will is in effect "free".

Or, or! You are an:

2. Indeterminist, which means that your definition of free will is having the ability to make more than choice given a particular event and circumstance, and thus your actions cannot be predicted ahead of time. As in, you chose to have fried eggs for breakfast this morning, but that doesn't mean you couldn't have chosen scrambled instead.

There are several explanations for this ability. They are:

A. Random chance. Your decisions have a random element to them. Cue the great William James:

"The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance."

B. Metaphysical/Existential Indeterminism. Our wills are in some manner fundamentally independent from the physical circumstances of our existence. Our choices are not merely random, they are uncertain; in the sense that (paraphrasing Keynes) no rational basis exists for making a calculation of the probability of any particular choice coming to pass. I would put Sartre as the standard bearer of this idea. Comforting because it affirms that our actions are totally free, slaves to neither circumstances nor dice rolls, but a lot of philosophers who go this route neglect to offer explanations for this independence, and it ends up coming off as something you accept out of faith. I personally do follow a variant of this idea, but I think explaining it might take the thread well off topic.

[General Battuta]

B. Metaphysical/Existential Indeterminism. Our wills are in some manner fundamentally independent from the physical circumstances of our existence. Our choices are not merely random, they are uncertain; in the sense that (paraphrasing Keynes) no rational basis exists for making a calculation of the probability of any particular choice coming to pass. I would put Sartre as the standard bearer of this idea. Comforting because it affirms that our actions are totally free, slaves to neither circumstances nor dice rolls, but a lot of philosophers who go this route neglect to offer explanations for this independence, and it ends up coming off as something you accept out of faith. I personally do follow a variant of this idea, but I think explaining it might take the thread well off topic.

Bring it, let's dooooo this

[Mr. Vega]

Hoooh boy. Really? While my explanation would be as far as I know a totally unique one (well, I'm sure you can find equivalents of it in a religion here or there), and I've had years to work it out into something comprehensible to people other than myself, it's going to be a weird one, and it will involve metaphysics.