My Basic Thought On Free Will

[Splendour]

I am not very knowledgable about free will, but as I think about it I remember something interesting from the novel "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett...In that novel the character being sought by the hero tells a story about how he abandoned his family and whole life after a beam falls off a building and almost kills him...The weird thing was that after having this consciousness altering experience he remarried a woman similar to his first wife and took up a career and life similar to the one he originally had...in other words he jumped tracks then ended up in a very similar groove to the one he started from...makes you think...do we run from one thing to run back to what we just came from...how does free will fit into that? Personally I get bored with the same routine so I doubt if I ever jumped tracks I would end up back in the same place, but you gotta wonder...

[Gabe]

if there is something other than our genes and our experience that determines what we do, what is it?

if there is nothing else, then it is merely our extensive use of symbols for metaphors of reality, that gives us the illusion of free will.

[goofball]

David,

How do you know god isn't forcing us to consider the free will problem?

[pete fabrizio]

not to be a philosophy snob, but i don't think there's anything in this thread that isn't covered a hundred times in an undergraduate survey course on free will. people are making a lot of statements or conclusions that they think are dispositive, as if philosophers haven't considered every one of these arguments since aristotle -- and a million articles have been written on the implications that genetics and quantum mechanics have for the debate.

If someone has made a dispositive statement about free will, it would probably be the aforementioned Bertrand Russell, from Why I am Not a Christian:

"If when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other."

This doesn't really say much on the question of whether we have free will or not, but it illustrates the necessity of acting as if.

[EnderIII]

The idea of a proof of free will resulting from the premise of deliberating about free will is interesting. As far as I know, the opposite approach is normatlly taken (without free will we could not deliberate, or at least without the future seeming open we could not deliberate)

I would probably challenge the premise that we actually deliberate (or that this word is as murky as the other terms in the debate) as my earlier post suggested. But I think most people will accept that we deliberate (it seems even more basic than free will in a way and while free will may be necessary for deliberation, deliberation may be sufficient for free will) so it is an argument that would have wide appeal.

There is a potential problem since all that may be required for deliberation is the illusion of free will. But the OP may well have been intending to go a different direction with this. Also while almost certainly a minority position, it seems to me that the link between moral responsibility and free will is exagerated. From a utilitarian perspective, learning that we have no free will does not present good grounds to give up the current moral structure we have in place unless we can replace it with a better (in terms of utility) structure. No structure at all is almost certainly negative utility for society.

A similar error is often made in terms of skepticism:

We don't know that we aren't brains in vat.
If we don't know we aren't brains in a vat, we don't know we have hands.
We don't know we have hands.

But then an additional step is usually taken,

Since we don't know we have hands, we should stop believing that we have hands. Then iterate this for all other beliefs and you arrive at the principle that you should stop believing everything. But this principle of belief revision does not follow from skepticism and is an independent assertion.

[NT!]

David,

Do you think this is a problem that will be solved by logical proof, or one that scientists will eventually address when we start to better understand the brain? It seems to me it's just a level of complexity that neuroscience hasn't yet reached... and one I'm not all that anxious for them to reach, either.

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
David,

Do you think this is a problem that will be solved by logical proof, or one that scientists will eventually address when we start to better understand the brain? It seems to me it's just a level of complexity that neuroscience hasn't yet reached... and one I'm not all that anxious for them to reach, either.

[/ QUOTE ]

Science can help moderately with the determinism question, but not with the compatibalism question. Most people in the debate are determinists these days, but moreover, most people who argue that we do have free will argue that determinism is irrelevant whether they believe in it or not.

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
"If when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other."

This doesn't really say much on the question of whether we have free will or not, but it illustrates the necessity of acting as if.

[/ QUOTE ]
I assume Russell is talking morality because its fairly obvious why we would seek to stop behavior that hurt us and encourage behavior we like.

If someones going around murdering people then we want him stopped. What difference does it make whether or not we believe the murdering is an act of free-will?

How would you behave differently if you believed you had no free-will?

chez

[Marnixvdb]

David,

your 'proof' sounds very much like the logically flawed ontological God proof to me

It seems impossible to give a conclusive proof of free will as it is impossible to repeat the exact circumstances under which an hypothetical act of free will was made: we cannot undo a previous experience, and we cannot undo time.

[keith123]

so by saying we have free will, is one saying that free will is the cause of our choices?