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A mechanism for free will?
Ataxia
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Posted 05/04/08 - 01:48 PM:
Subject: A mechanism for free will?
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#1
Most people would agree that free will cannot exist in a universe where there is only randomness or determinism or a combination of the two. That implies that a free choice is one that uses none of those mechanisms, which obviously means there must be a third. Though I have asked what this mechanism might be in various discussions but have never received a straight answer (other than that it must exist in the spirit realm).

I feel, that our view of what free will means is an irrational one. It appears to us that we choose to act (or not to act) at the moment we become consciously aware of having done so. This is not possible under any known mechanism and as yet we are not capable of imagining one - yet we cling to the concept nonetheless.

This, I feel, makes any discussion of free will moot, since we have no working definition of the concepts we discuss.

Thoughts?

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Posted 05/04/08 - 02:00 PM:
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Ataxia wrote:
Most people would agree that free will cannot exist in a universe where there is only randomness or determinism...That implies that a free choice is one that uses none of those mechanisms,


Do you feel that "randomness" is a "mechanism"?

It appears to us that we choose to act (or not to act) at the moment we become consciously aware of having done so.


Are you against the idea that when we experience "choice" as choice, (whether it really is a choice or not), this is what we mean by "free will"?





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Posted 05/04/08 - 08:33 PM:
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#3
The very idea that the explanation (if there is any) of free will must be a "mechanism" begs the question.

A reminder from dictionary.com:

mech·an·ism
–noun
1. an assembly of moving parts performing a complete functional motion, often being part of a large machine; linkage.
2. the agency or means by which an effect is produced or a purpose is accomplished.
3. machinery or mechanical appliances in general.
4. the structure or arrangement of parts of a machine or similar device, or of anything analogous.
5. the mechanical part of something; any mechanical device: the mechanism of a clock.
6. routine methods or procedures; mechanics: the mechanism of government.
7. mechanical execution, as in painting or music; technique.
8. the theory that everything in the universe is produced by matter in motion; materialism. Compare dynamism (def. 1), vitalism (def. 1).
9.Philosophy.
a. the view that all natural processes are explicable in terms of Newtonian mechanics.
b. the view that all biological processes may be described in physicochemical terms.
10. Psychoanalysis. the habitual operation and interaction of psychological forces within an individual that assist in interpreting or dealing with the physical or psychological environment.

Unless "mechanism" is used in sense n.2, the claim that "there is no mechanism which explains free will" is implicit in the definition of free will. Whether it exists or not. Which means, unless we agree to use "mechanism" in sense n.2, we will be arguing about a tautology.


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Posted 05/06/08 - 02:20 PM:
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Of course I meant it in sense n.2. Now do you have one?

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Posted 05/06/08 - 02:30 PM:
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Dunamis wrote:

Are you against the idea that when we experience "choice" as choice, (whether it really is a choice or not), this is what we mean by "free will"?


Choice and free will are basically synonyms. You are saying nothing.

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Posted 05/06/08 - 02:31 PM:
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Ataxia wrote:
Of course I meant it in sense n.2. Now do you have one?

Why do you think free will is a mechanism?

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Posted 05/06/08 - 04:15 PM:
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#7
You are free to define or exemplify free will in any way you like, and we can agree to use your definition to conduct a discussion.

What I mean by free will is exemplified by my ability to decide to type "3" and then "1". As you see, I do have that ability, and I see that (generally) everybody else in the world acts on the assumption that we all (generally) have that kind of ability.

It seems almost self-evident to me that I have this form of free will. I think there is a considerable burden on you to convince me that I do not.




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Posted 05/07/08 - 02:25 PM:
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keda wrote:

Why do you think free will is a mechanism?


No. It requires a mechanism.

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Posted 05/07/08 - 02:41 PM:
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Ataxia wrote:


No. It requires a mechanism.

Ok, so what is the point in finding a mechanism that it uses? If I use my arm to lift something, out of my free will, then does it not constitute a mechanism? Yet it is not necessary for me to have an arm to exercise it. A mechanism to me is something that abides the laws of physics, completely determined, yet it is not inconcievable that it was to an extent determined by my free will.

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The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. -Benjamin Franklin
If my sons did not want wars, there would be none - Gutle Rothschild
It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes - Josef Stalin
Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace - Bob Dylan
A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation. - Immanuel Kant
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Posted 05/07/08 - 02:56 PM:
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The Escapist wrote:
You are free to define or exemplify free will in any way you like, and we can agree to use your definition to conduct a discussion.

What I mean by free will is exemplified by my ability to decide to type "3" and then "1". As you see, I do have that ability, and I see that (generally) everybody else in the world acts on the assumption that we all (generally) have that kind of ability.

It seems almost self-evident to me that I have this form of free will. I think there is a considerable burden on you to convince me that I do not.


It depends on what you mean by free will. Our actions follow from the electrochemical reactions within our brain - therefore our brain is in control. But some people do not accept that definition. It is these that the thread is aimed at.

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Posted 05/07/08 - 03:01 PM:
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#11
keda wrote:

Ok, so what is the point in finding a mechanism that it uses? If I use my arm to lift something, out of my free will, then does it not constitute a mechanism? Yet it is not necessary for me to have an arm to exercise it. A mechanism to me is something that abides the laws of physics, completely determined, yet it is not inconcievable that it was to an extent determined by my free will.


Perhaps mechanism is the wrong word. There must (according to some) be a way by which we make decision that is not deterministic or random. That is what I mean.

(BTW, I like your avatar. Pity you guys don't get to vote - we do.)

Edited by Ataxia on 05/07/08 - 03:06 PM

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Posted 05/07/08 - 04:02 PM:
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Ataxia wrote:


Perhaps mechanism is the wrong word. There must (according to some) be a way by which we make decision that is not deterministic or random. That is what I mean.

(BTW, I like your avatar. Pity you guys don't get to vote - we do.)

True. I would like more people to stand up against this sneaky imperialization of EU, and I hope you guys will put a stop to it.

Anyways the way I see it, a cause is either caused or uncaused, either a choice or an accident. To the extent a choice is caused, it is not free, and to the extent it is not caused, it is free, and to the extent an accident is uncaused, it is random (in a metaphysical sense).


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If my sons did not want wars, there would be none - Gutle Rothschild
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A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation. - Immanuel Kant
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Posted 05/08/08 - 01:41 AM:
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#13
Ataxia wrote:


It depends on what you mean by free will. Our actions follow from the electrochemical reactions within our brain - therefore our brain is in control. But some people do not accept that definition. It is these that the thread is aimed at.


The electrochemical reactions don't decide whether I will type "3" or "1", I do.

I'm in control of my brain, to that extent. That's what I mean by free will.

What do you mean by it?

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Posted 05/08/08 - 02:54 AM:
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The electrochemical reactions DO decide that, vitalism and mysticism has no evidence, and all the evidence there exists leads to the conclusion that our brain is a biological machine that makes choices.

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Posted 05/08/08 - 01:02 PM:
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nawitus wrote:
The electrochemical reactions DO decide that, vitalism and mysticism has no evidence, and all the evidence there exists leads to the conclusion that our brain is a biological machine that makes choices.


Precisely.

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Posted 05/08/08 - 01:16 PM:
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#16
keda wrote:

True. I would like more people to stand up against this sneaky imperialization of EU, and I hope you guys will put a stop to it.

Anyways the way I see it, a cause is either caused or uncaused, either a choice or an accident. To the extent a choice is caused, it is not free, and to the extent it is not caused, it is free, and to the extent an accident is uncaused, it is random (in a metaphysical sense).


Random does not mean it is not caused, it means the outcome of the event is not decided by the cause of the event.

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Posted 05/08/08 - 04:42 PM:
Subject: Agency Theoryt
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#17
Hi, Escapist,
The Escapist wrote:
The electrochemical reactions don't decide whether I will type "3" or "1", I do.

I'm in control of my brain, to that extent. That's what I mean by free will.


That is the approach that Roderick Chisholm took in order to escape the dilemma between determinism and mere chance: The person (agent) is the cause of human actions.

Of course it's one thing to make this claim; it's quite another to make it defensible. The following defense is based on Chisholm, but fades into my own thinking in later years.

First, Chisholm's agency theory denies determinism; that's of course what one does in splitting the horns of a dilemma. He says that in (at least some) cases of human action the prior conditions are not sufficient to determine precisely which of the alternatives occurs. To put it another way, given all of the prior conditions (subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, psychological), there are more than one alternative. These conditions are necessary, and jointly they presumably rule out many seemingly possible outcomes; but they are not jointly sufficient to narrow down the selection to just one. Which of these alternatives occurs is the choice of the person.

Moreover, the theory says that the selection of outcome is not just a matter of chance (though it would be if we considered only the prior conditions). We are able to explain what the person is doing by reference to what he believes, intends, expects, etc. The form of this theory is Aristotelean, it invokes the musty old concept of final cause, i.e., that for which the action is done, its purpose. And we all know, of course, from what the British Empiricists taught us, that final causes are muddled ideas that need to be purged in favor of formal, material and efficient causation, nice, clean concepts that science can deal with.

Now it understandable why science doesn't like final causes: they work backwards! If I move my finger in order to turn on a light by flipping a switch. The ultimate final cause (turning on the light) occurs after the penultimate final cause (flipping the switch), which occurs after the action (moving my finger). We're explaining an action by what comes after it. It looks like the reverse of good, old-fashioned efficient causation.

'Cept the problem is, we just can't seem to do much with human behavior without final causes. We are able to explain, and thus predict human behavior much more accurately when we interpret what people do in terms of what they believe, intend, hope, expect, etc., than we can by reference only to the efficient causes that the empiricists would restrict us to, i.e., to facts about prior subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, psychological conditions.

But why, you might ask? If we can explain the action by reference to what people believe, intend, etc., aren't we invoking prior psychological conditions? Can't these be reinterpreted into acceptable efficient causes? Such a strategy has long been the approach of empiricists, and until recently skepticshave been cowed into submission.

But all is not well in Empiria. The task of mapping what we know about what people believe and intend and so on, either to independently verifiable psychological states or independently verifiable events in the brain, has resisted the cleverest of empiricists. There seems to be an uncertainty principle of brain activity: the more precisely you locate the behavior of neurons in the brain, the less accurately you know what the brain is doing. The brain seems to be holographic: every event meaningful to behavior involves large segments, if not the whole brain. The result is that we cannot examine the brain to determine whether John believes that individual liberty is more important than personal security, a belief that is likely to have significant impact on John's future voting.

The fact is that the best available theory of a person's behavior is one that makes use of what we can know about what he (or she) believes, intends, etc. And the 'he" (or 'she') is not just a grammatical dummy, like the 'it' of 'it is raining'. The subject refers to a particular person, namely, the one who is subject to praise or blame, reward or punishment, for the performance of that action.

Even accepting this (and I don't expect you to; it goes to much against the grain of our empiricist conditioning), we still encounter the further problem that final causes explain without determining an action. Suppose John says that individual liberty is more important than personal security. Assuming we believe he is speaking honestly, we still do not have a causally sufficient condition for his voting for a gun-control opponent. Even if he listed all of his relevant beliefs of this sort, we would not have sufficient conditions. The reason is that beliefs of this kind don't express some kind of political temperature of the brain. They are principles that John find attractive; ones he is willing to advocate in the abstract. But when the campaign is over and John has to cast his ballot, a causal interpretation of these beliefs would not work unless we could discover some auxiliary believe about the relative importance of the beliefs in this list. And the fact is that such prioritization is rare; and even when it exists, it is extremely volatile. We typically don't decide which of competing beliefs is most important until we have to act; the decision about priorities is usually the same as the choice of action.

So people make choices among the available alternatives, taking into account what they believe about current conditions, about likely consequences of alternative actions in those conditions, and about the principles that they use to assess the relative merits of those likely consequences. But taking into account something is not itself a condition that can be weighed like an efficient cause. It's a whole new brand of logic.

One further point. Causation by people (agent causation) refers to the selection among alternatives by a whole system. When you think about it, having such a capability makes a whole lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, if all the rules and algorithms for causation were determined completely by the physics of quarks or such critters, how would those quarks ever figure out how to program a set of algorithms that would both help our pre-hominid ancestor choose a strategy for avoiding a sabertooth, and help us avoid another George Bush in the White House. The problem is that the behavioral rules have to be at the right mereological level. Rules that work for nourishing a cell don't mean squate for feeding a primate.

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Posted 05/08/08 - 05:45 PM:
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Ataxia wrote:


Random does not mean it is not caused, it means the outcome of the event is not decided by the cause of the event.

It depends on how you define it. People who bring up the objection that there is no free will because indeterminism just means that it is random (which really is a false dichotomy) do use another definition. Even if we use your definition, it does not make free will conceptually impossible.

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Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace - Bob Dylan
A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation. - Immanuel Kant
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Posted 05/09/08 - 07:43 AM:
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I think people confuse "random" and "nondeterminism". I might say a coin is random, yet I know that it follows a very strict set of physical laws to land on one side or the other. I only consider it "random" in the sense that most humans am not able to measure and calculate the outcome of the coin between the time it is flipped and the time it settles. I consider it "fair" in that the probability of it landing heads or tails is about equal. In computer software, it is even more difficult -- random number generators are considered "pseudo-random", because the result is always well determined from prior states. If you decided to play solitaire giving it a certain seed, you would end up with exactly the same configuration of cards each time. The layout is determined by the seed. Sometimes, programs will take some external variable to initialize the seed -- such as the system clock, meaning the layout depends on when the algorithm starts. You might even use the timing of keystrokes or mouse clicks prior to starting the game -- since the algorithm will no longer depend on internal states. Some people try to tie free will to quantum mechanics, but they are usually ignoring the fact that quantum nondeterminism will collapse as soon as some effect propagates to other mechanics. Lastly, I think it strange to think that anyone's decisions are completely nondeterministic. People make decisions because of their emotional state and valuation of the situation. You can ask people to make decisions and the graph will fit in a nice probability curve.

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Posted 05/09/08 - 08:01 AM:
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swstephe wrote:
I think people confuse "random" and "nondeterminism". I might say a coin is random, yet I know that it follows a very strict set of physical laws to land on one side or the other. I only consider it "random" in the sense that most humans am not able to measure and calculate the outcome of the coin between the time it is flipped and the time it settles. I consider it "fair" in that the probability of it landing heads or tails is about equal.

That's because there are different senses of "random". The epistemic or statistical sense of random is just due to our lack of knowledge while the metaphysical sense of random is that there is something truly random, not just because we don't know how what caused it to become like that. The sense being used is clarified in that those who bring it up tend to refer to quantum indeterminacy as being an example of the kind of random they refer to. This is a different sense from that of just lack of knowledge. "Random" is a very confusing word, I suppose the objection against free will is in general due to some type of amphiboly in the usage of that word.

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The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. -Benjamin Franklin
If my sons did not want wars, there would be none - Gutle Rothschild
It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes - Josef Stalin
Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace - Bob Dylan
A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation. - Immanuel Kant
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Posted 05/09/08 - 01:33 PM:
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swstephe wrote:
I think people confuse "random" and "nondeterminism". I might say a coin is random, yet I know that it follows a very strict set of physical laws to land on one side or the other. I only consider it "random" in the sense that most humans am not able to measure and calculate the outcome of the coin between the time it is flipped and the time it settles. I consider it "fair" in that the probability of it landing heads or tails is about equal. In computer software, it is even more difficult -- random number generators are considered "pseudo-random", because the result is always well determined from prior states. If you decided to play solitaire giving it a certain seed, you would end up with exactly the same configuration of cards each time. The layout is determined by the seed. Sometimes, programs will take some external variable to initialize the seed -- such as the system clock, meaning the layout depends on when the algorithm starts. You might even use the timing of keystrokes or mouse clicks prior to starting the game -- since the algorithm will no longer depend on internal states. Some people try to tie free will to quantum mechanics, but they are usually ignoring the fact that quantum nondeterminism will collapse as soon as some effect propagates to other mechanics. Lastly, I think it strange to think that anyone's decisions are completely nondeterministic. People make decisions because of their emotional state and valuation of the situation. You can ask people to make decisions and the graph will fit in a nice probability curve.


You are correct: a flipped coin is a chaotic rather than a random system. It remains to be seen whether the same can be said for actions on a quantum level.

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Posted 05/11/08 - 06:35 PM:
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#22
DrFree wrote:
First, Chisholm's agency theory denies determinism; that's of course what one does in splitting the horns of a dilemma. He says that in (at least some) cases of human action the prior conditions are not sufficient to determine precisely which of the alternatives occurs. To put it another way, given all of the prior conditions (subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, psychological), there are more than one alternative. These conditions are necessary, and jointly they presumably rule out many seemingly possible outcomes; but they are not jointly sufficient to narrow down the selection to just one. Which of these alternatives occurs is the choice of the person.


This is another way of saying that (metaphysical libertarian) free will must entail Alternate Possibilities. The Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) figures highly in discussions of metaphysical libertarian free will. The problem we face is that PAP is perhaps arguably a necessary condition for such free will, but it is by no means a sufficient condition.

DrFree wrote:
It's a whole new brand of logic.


May I ask what your conclusion is here? Are you suggesting that this premise of a “final cause” gives rise to (metaphysical libertarian) free will?

If what we “believe, intend, hope, expect, etc” provides some kind of “final cause” which determines our behaviour, then we are entitled to ask in turn what is it that determines what we “believe, intend, hope, expect, etc”. Or are these properties (what we believe, intend, hope, expect, etc) somehow a "given" (uncaused), or perhaps random?


Edited by reincarnated on 05/11/08 - 10:35 PM

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