My Basic Thought On Free Will

[West]

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1) For any given event, that event is either determined by prior causes, or it randomly occurs.


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I'm unconvinced of the first premise of your argument. Why couldn't an event be influenced, but not determined by, prior causes, and also not be random (because it's 'chosen')?

[David Sklansky]

I agree that my argument fails if the reason we don't have free will is because God programmed us. Because he could also program us to wonder about free will. But not even religious people suggest that so I'm starting with the assumption that it isn't true.

[drzen]

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I agree that my argument fails if the reason we don't have free will is because God programmed us. Because he could also program us to wonder about free will. But not even religious people suggest that so I'm starting with the assumption that it isn't true.

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So your argument is basically that if there is a God, he must have endowed us with free will because we are free to wonder about having free will?

This almost has to be true because most other explanations would be defeated by there being a god of the type Christian theology requires. That god can hardly have created machines that have the illusion of free will as an emergent property because they would not fit his stated purpose.

Without God, the argument is far harder to make. We lack understanding of what the human mind consists of, so there is a handy gap for blatherers to pour their theories into. But there being a gap that you can fill does not make what you fill it with correct.

[Fish Bot]

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But not even religious people suggest that so I'm starting with the assumption that it isn't true.



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That is not entirely true, most religious people believe in free will, but there are still a large number of people who do not.

As you said in your original post free will has to be correctly defined before we can determine whether it actually exists. I tend to think the most common definition of free will in the religious since is the ability to choose between good and evil. According to that definition free will cannot exist because humans from birth only desire evil because we are all born with a sin nature (according to the bible).

If you step back and take a look at our every day decisions in life, for example whether or not you take a shower in the morning is based on your desires. If you wake up and feel dirty you will desire to clean yourself, some people rarely have a desire to clean themselves. People cannot change their desires; your desires cannot be willed differently than what they are. People choose to do that which they desire, and desires cannot be created or changed, therefore we are all slaves to our desires. So the real question is not whether we all have free will, it’s where do our desires come from.

For humans to truly have free will our "will" would have to act independently of our desires or any other outside factor. This means that you would have to exist in an unconscious state of comatose while your "will" made all decisions for your life.

The fact is logically there can be no such thing as free will because it is not possible for our will to act separately from our desires. We “Will” the things we desire, and desires cannot be willed.

[Vex]

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Determinism is completely irrelevant to whether we have free-will or not.

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Notice that true metaphysical randomness, of the kind posited by quantum mechanics, is as irrelevant to the free-will problem as determinism.

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That's not exactly true. If the universe is deterministic, we do not have free will -- our output is the predictable results of all our inputs, whether or not we could ever know all the inputs and all the rules that use them to produce output.

But, a nondeterministic universe does not preclude free will.

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1) For any given event, that event is either determined by prior causes, or it randomly occurs.


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This isn't Boolean logic. The universe is at least fairly deterministic; we're all pretty certain the sun is gonna rise tomorrow morning. But, there appears to be room for randomness in the universe -- just ask any quantum mechanics nerd. Physical phenomena aren't all either completely random or completely not-random, they're a combination of the two. Water is composed of zillions of molecules bouncing around in Brownian motion, each molecule a standing quantum wave -- but the properties and behavior of a macroscopic drop of water are precice and well-understood.

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3) If my actions are determined by prior causes, then they are not free actions.

4) If my actions are random, then they are not free actions.


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The universe might be deterministic, making the whole debate pointless. On the oter hand, if the universe were completely random, we wouldn't be here at all. Assuming the debate is valid, then your actions are a combination of determinism and randomness.

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5) Therefore, my actions are not free actions.


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That statement does not follow, because your actions aren't purely deterministic and aren't purely random. Your statements 3 and 4 above are correct for purely deterministic things and purely random thngs respectively, but it does not follow that those statements would necessarily be true for things that are partially deterministic and partly random.

It's like assuming that the sine function always returns zero because it returns zero at 0 degrees and at 180 degrees.

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I will try to get back to this thread if anyone replies and please let me know if anyone wants some material to read on this problem.

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My take on it is, we have to answer the question of whether or not the universe is deterministic first. Only when that possibility is eliminated, and we are sure that our reality emerges in the margins between predictability and chaos, can we even ask the question if free will can arise.

I think quantum mechanics masks something deterministic in its inscrutable depths. Violation of Bell's Inequality may (or may not) disprove hidden variables (the idea that a quantum system can be completely be defined by discreet values that are unmeasurable but nevertheless completely determine its behavior).

But, if it does disprove hidden variables, then that means causality is being violated. Violation of causality implies a deterministic universe, because that means that the effect is knowable before the cause even happens!

Of course, maybe the truth is stranger still. Why can we know the past with certainty but not know the future equally well? They're clearly not symmetric, and we certainly experience some strange thing we call "now" that rides on the cusp between the past that is set in stone and the future that is a fuzzy cloud of possibilities.

[mvdgaag]

I think your thoughts of determinism all are based on the understanding of them on the 'axis' of time where causality is allways on this axis. While I think we should not treat time differently. It could be on any axis, like space or even parallel dimensions, etc.

You can imagine a deterministic universe as one of variables governed by rules. Then everything would be predetermined. If everything is predetermined you might see the universe as a large multidimentional picture (or a set of variables). When everything is governed by rules there is some ordering in this picture, because it looks like it does because of these rules. If you take out these rules, the picture could still be fixed, couldn't it?

When you mentally try not to separate these rules from the other variables then we could still have a fixed picture in which the rules (that we think govern the picture) are only a part of this picture. This is how I like to think off determinism; no confusing poolball causality analogies, just that everything is fixed.

About the combination of randomness and determinism... If everything would be purely random, but there are limited options, things would act deterministic on the surface, because they are the result of many random events that converge towards the mean. This mean looks like a deterministic truth, but actually is just a statisical value.

But lets assume there really is a combination of determinism and randomness. I think dr dotr's logic still stands. if we take his point 3 (determinism) from the mix, it's not a free action and if we take point 4 (randomness) out, it's not a free action.
If we take 25% determinism and 75% point randomness, it's 25% not free and 75% not free, which is 100% not free. So no free will...

[Vex]

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I think your thoughts of determinism ... just that everything is fixed.

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I can't make heads or tails of the first three paragraphs of your response. Here's the American Heritage Dicstionary's definition of determinism: The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.

So, clearly, this is a key point: If the universe is deterministic, then so are we.

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About the combination of randomness and determinism ... This mean looks like a deterministic truth, but actually is just a statisical value.


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Suppose a cosmic ray has a chance of disrupting the computer in the return vehicle of the first lunar astronauts, right as they are executing the rocket burns to line themselves up to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. If the cosmic ray collides with a memory module and flips a bit in the computer's memory, the computer will execute the burn incorrectly, sending the astronauts to their doom.

If the astronauts die, none of them will ever have more children, and the space program itself would be in jeopardy. Otherwise, the space program continues and at least some of the astronauts have additional children. However it works out, it's clear that whether that single cosmic ray hits or misses the computer has far-reaching consequences into the foreseeable future, because it impacts not only the astronauts but all their future progeny for as long as human beings exist.

If the universe is deterministic, then it's not a random event -- it happens based on uncountable, unknowable variables and the rules of the universe. However, if randomness determines whether or not the collision occurs (like quantum mechanics says it would), then a single random event can have significant impact on future events. The behavior of that system is not the convergence uncountable random events.

Now, this is not an argument in free will. It is an argument that if the universe is indeed random at the quantum level, then the future truly is unpredictable and that means there exists the possibility that human beings have free will.

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I think dr dotr's logic still stands. if we take his point 3 (determinism) from the mix, it's not a free action and if we take point 4 (randomness) out, it's not a free action. If we take 25% determinism and 75% point randomness, it's 25% not free and 75% not free, which is 100% not free. So no free will...

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You're combining Boolean logic and linear algebra. That just doesn't fly.

You're basing your thinking on a faulty assumption. You can't assume that since rule-based means "not free" and random means "not free", any combination of rule-based and random also means "not free".

In order to prove your point, you have to prove that there are no emergent behaviors when you mix non-random behavior and random behavior. I personally don't know how to prove or disprove that.

I'm saying that I don't know if it's true that there are emergent behaviors when you combine rules and randomness. I'm saying that

1> If we do have free will, its existence depends on there being some emergence between deterministic rules and randomness.

2> In order to have that emergence, the universe has to allow both randomness AND predetermined behavior.

3> We know the universe has deterministic properties. We don't know for sure whether the universe allows for true randomness.

4> Therefore, we have to know whether or not the universe allows randomness before we can even begin to ask about free will.

[mvdgaag]

Sorry for not being clear, but I'm not educated in this matter and was using analogies to explain my thoughts (also to myself). What I meant to say is that the 'antecedent states' in the Heritage Dicstionary's definition do not have to be antecedent in time. Also I wanted to say that the deterministic rules that govern a deterministic universe do not have to be seen as different things from the values/variables.

I see how a small event can change everything dramatically, but what I meant is that it might be possible for all things to be completely random and may still 'look' deterministic to us because of convergence towards the average. There is a small chance that all the air molecules in your room would be in one corner at the sealing. We're just lucky we don't have to sufficate, because there is a distribution that's almost allways closer to the average.

For the point about the combination of boolean logic and linear agebra. I see that if everything on one axis is true and on another its also true nothing has been said about the span of these axes.

I can't imagine something being both deterministic and random (might be my problem here), only a separable combination of both. Like ((A+B)/random*C)+D which is separable. This means we separate all the rules/values in the above cases and are left with either pure random or pure deterministic things.

If you take a fixed rule/formula insert any value then some other value will come out that directly corresponds to the original number by the translation of the formula. In other words: Running any formula twice with the same input will deliver the same results.
Therefore both random numbers and these same numbers, but translated by this formula, will be random.

I figure these are the options (if you want to separate rules from values):

- deterministic values
- deterministic rules
- random values
- random rules

random rules will lead to random values so we are left with

- deterministic values
- deterministic rules
- random values

deterministic values in deterministic rules will have deterministic results.
random values in deterministic rules will have altered (in a reproducable way) but still random results.

I must agree that if there is free will there must be room for something more than pure randomness or pure determinism. Something in between (in an unseparable form) is hard to imagine for me.

[WelshMackem]

The only thing that worries me about free will is how many whales were hurt in filming.

Might seem a glib answer, but it adds about as much new material to the debate as the rest of the thread.

[Magellan]

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Well if you are going to discuss this question rigorously, it is imperative that you define what you mean by "free will" in very precise technical terms.

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Can you give us an idea of what you personally think of as free will when you consider the subject?