Philosophy discussion

Joseph wrote: "James, I note what you say, and agree that quantum phenomena and Classical phenomena work side by side. If that were not the case, we could not have discovered anything about quantum mechanics. But..."

Joseph wrote: "If I may, I’d like to make one further comment.

JBHM wrote, "You seem to suggest that the question of the observational element in quantum physics is fully resolved." I did not suggest that at all, nor do I believe that. There is a gapingly open question as to why the presence of an observer has anything to do with the behavior of a quantum particle's waveform. I wasn't suggesting that puzzle is solved. Rather, I reject the Deepak Chopra school of quantum woo-woo which simply replaces "Magic Man did it" with "quantum effect did it." There is a temptation among some when they become aware of quantum weirdness to think that all it takes to do science is to dream up some crackpot idea then say quantum this or that makes it so. No need for any testing. No need for peer review. Works best when the postulate is unfalsifiable, so there isn't even any possibility of testing.

As to Max Tegmark's book, I say this. Claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Now I have not read his book, but I think you may be overstating his conclusions. This Scientific American article http://www.scientificamerican.com/art... where he discusses his Mathematical Universe Postulate goes nowhere near your claim that "the universe only came into 'existence' when human beings acquired self-awareness". But even what Tegmark does claim is not being received as credible by the greater scientific community. See http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wo... and http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&....

JBHM wrote, "If there is such a thing as free will, then it must relate in some way or the other to the origins of the universe." By definition that is true. But it's a deepity, isn't it? One could just as accurately say, "If there is such a thing as a pancake, then it must relate in some way or the other to the origins of the universe." Without the Universe, nothing that is would be.

When you quote Nahmanides and what he claims to read in Genesis 1, I would say that he seems to have had your talent for reading between the lines and finding things that are not in the text, but he had the supercharged version.

Genesis 1 says: "1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

There's NOTHING in there about a singularity. But there is a bunch of nonsense that is wildly out of phase with observed evidence about the origin of the Observable Universe. For instance, God didn't create the heavens and the Earth in the beginning. It was over 9 billion years after the Big Bang that the solar system, and with it the Earth, formed. There was no deep before or immediately after the Big Bang. The first stars didn't form till about 300 million years after the Big Bang, and there was no oxygen to even form water until those nascent stars began to supernova, fusing heavier elements after they fused all the hydrogen that powered their main sequence. I would expect that if the Universe did have a super-intelligent creator, that creator would know how the Universe was actually created.

Joseph, I sense that this could spin on and on, and that your idea of reality and mine are sufficiently different that we'd never come to any agreement. With time pressures of work, I prefer not to invest the time these walls of words would take pursuing a Grail Quest. Feel free to decide that means I am saying uncle and you win.

I do at least salute your interest in such matters. I share that interest. I'd just encourage you to learn more about the scientific method, as it is our best known tool to separate fascinating speculation form well supported ideas that have been shown by rigorous testing again and again to closely map to reality.

James, at least we can agree on one thing: time prohibits further discussion. But do let me say, I find it regrettable that you see this kind of debate as a question of winning or losing – I regard it is learning from others.

But I am compelled to answer two of your assertions.

First, that anything of value can only be empirical.

This is what Martin Rees says about Einstein’s theory of general relativity: It was a “conceptual breakthrough” that arose from “Einstein’s DEEP INSIGHT rather than being STIMULATED by any specific experiment or observation.”

And this was Einstein’s take: “I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical construction the concepts AND THE LAWS … which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they MOST CERTAINLY CANNOT BE DEDUCED from it … In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that PURE THOUGHT can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.”

Secondly, on the question of the ancients, I find your comments on Genesis, Philo and Nahmanides rather dismissive. Perhaps the author/s of Genesis, and great thinkers like Philo and Nahmanides, had the kind of insight Rees is referring to. And from even a superficial reading of Genesis, I find both Philo’s and Nahmanides’ conclusions entirely consistent with the text.

Joseph BH McMillan

I appreciate that James has now disengaged from this debate, as I shall be doing following this comment. But before I do so, I thought I’d make one last reference regarding the phenomenon of insight for anyone who may be interested.

The phenomenon of insight is incontrovertible, as in the remarkable capabilities of the savants.

A particularly intriguing incidence of insight, however, concerns the Indian mathematician Srivinasa Ramanujan (1887 – 1920). He was born in a slum in India, and had no formal mathematical training. Yet he produced mathematical equations revealing incredible insight. Many of his equations are still being worked on today.

Ramanujan attributed his abilities to the family goddess Mahalakshmi. After dreaming of drops of blood representing her male counterpart Narasimha, Ramanujan said that he had visions in which scrolls appeared to him containing complex equations. Clearly, he ‘saw’ these equations with such clarity that he could transcribe them, and also understand what they meant. However, he made a remarkable statement regarding how he understood the equations he would ‘see’. He said that “an equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.”

It appears that Ramanujan, like a savant, and like Einstein, was tapping into the mathematical ‘raw data’ in his brain. And that ‘raw data’ was ‘revealed’ to him in a form reminiscent of the Prophets – in dreams and visions, which he attributed to God as being a representation of a “thought of God.”

Joseph BH McMillan

Joseph wrote: "James, at least we can agree on one thing: time prohibits further discussion. But do let me say, I find it regrettable that you see this kind of debate as a question of winning or losing – I regard..."
Hi Joseph. I enjoyed our discussion as well, and learned from it. I'd like to end it on good terms and if I somehow am able to free up time, I'd welcome a return to such discussions. My decision wasn't based on winning or losing, but on budgeting my limited time.

What I did find annoying was your propensity to read into my posts things I neither wrote nor believe. In your post immediately above this one, you wrote:

"But I am compelled to answer two of your assertions."

"First, that anything of value can only be empirical."

I did not say that. I do not believe that. Love is not empirical. The awe we feel in viewing our galaxy through a telescope if not empirical. Listening to Beethoven's 5th Symphony isn't empirical. Certainly those things have value, though. My concern was in trying to establish things as empirical fact without bothering with observation and testing.

Yes, Einstein used thought experiments to develop his Theories of Special and General Relativity. But the postulates he put forward remained mere postulates till they were tested. Only when the predictions they made proved empirically accurate to a reasonable degree did his ideas graduate to scientifically accepted theories.

Further, I would note that because he thought the Universe was static, he introduced the cosmological constant into his Theory of General Relativity. He later became convinced that it did not belong there, and in fact called adding it his "greatest blunder." Oddly, we now know from further observations that the Universe is not either static or collapsing, it is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. So the cosmological constant (or energy of the quantum vacuum) was not a blunder, his original value for it simply wasn't large enough.

Pure thought is fine, and a vital part of expanding our understanding of the natural world. But in the absence of observations and testing, such thought can lead to absurdities such as Aristotle's idea of all objects having "Intentionality" and heavy ones falling faster than light ones because heavy things "want" to return to the Earth more than light ones do. He set science back by more than a millennium with that incorrect idea which could easily have been dismissed as wrong by a simple test like the one Galileo finally ran.

Philosophically, I am an adamant determinist; however, when I walk out my ivory tower door, with Hume, there is nothing but to go along with the everyday fact of free will. My basic philosophical approach is metaphysical naturalism (see Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism) for a good overview of this position. In this book, is a discussion about compatibilism. Although, I don't fully understand it, it posits that we are still the master of our domain. We have the causal power to make choices amongst the available choices. It makes the point, that in US law, free will involves knowledge and intent. This, it is said, does not contradict determinism, for through cause and effect, we are still the cause of our actions. Of course, with cause and effect you have to contend with Hume's exploration into it. However, cause and effect is the best, and possible, only way, to assess what the world is up to.

Another point I would like to make is on those who would defend free will on the basis of quantum or chaos theory. The best this view could show is that our acts are ruled by indeterminism, which is just as hard to reconcile with free will as determinism.

Does free will exist? Does your mother?

My mother no longer exists, G.L. I could exhume her bones, but most of the atoms that went to make up what I though of as her are here and there in nature now, free to be part of the Earth, water or air, or even some other living thing. But even when she was alive and around to see, that made her very different from free will, and thus your question is seen to be a false equivalency fallacy. You can see a person. You can measure their mass, talk to them and get a response. There are myriad ways t0 verify the existence of a person using methodological naturalism. So far, we have not been able to verify the existence of free will in any way other than in noting that it feels very much like we have it.

James wrote: "My mother no longer exists, G.L. I could exhume her bones, but most of the atoms that went to make up what I though of as her are here and there in nature now, free to be part of the Earth, water o..."

Tabula rasa. Your mother gave birth to you, therefore you have free will.

Aristotle, John Locke and others of the storied past weren't addressing free will with tabula rasa, they were asserting that we come into the world a blank slate with no preexisting mental wiring, and therefore all we learn must come through our perceptions and experience. There has been a great deal of subsequent work on the mind since their time, and this work calls their belief into question, but that's a topic for another channel

Setting tabula rasa aside, if having been born of a mother proves anything you want it too, then it works just as well to prove I have an orchard of trees that grow pink unicorns the size of a Clydesdale. I could make a fortune touring with such animals, so it's rather sad I can't magically own such an orchard by right of having been born of woman.

I know that it feels very much like I have free will, but feelings can deceive us and the more we probe into neuroscience and decision making, the more it looks like free will may be a strong and persistent illusion, not a reality. I may be ruled entirely by some combination of deterministic and quantum indeterminate processes. But even if I am, the feeling of free will is so convincing I know of no other way to live my life other than to act as if it's real.

James wrote: "Aristotle, John Locke and others of the storied past weren't addressing free will with tabula rasa, they were asserting that we come into the world a blank slate with no preexisting mental wiring, ..."

Sartre states indirectly that free will is assured by right of birth. As for rationalism or any other form of idiocy, they have nothing to do with reality.

Yes, yes. Let's hear it for irrationalism. So much more satisfying. And soooo much easier to do. We humans are born quite adept at it. Now there is a besmirchment of that nice clean tabula rasa. :-)

James wrote: "Yes, yes. Let's hear it for irrationalism. So much more satisfying. And soooo much easier to do. We humans are born quite adept at it. Now there is a besmirchment of that nice clean tabula rasa. :-)"

Rationality and rationalism are two different things.

Oh dear me, you've seen my weak underbelly. Yes, I confess. I'm as irrational as Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Liebniz and Descartes. I give up. I know when I am defeated...

And when I am not.

(Nothing in the philosophy group for weeks, so let me have a go ...)

I have read this whole thread again! (See post 229 for an earlier summary.) Once more, I notice the majority determinists leading the argument, and the minority liberationists trying to fight back.

It surprises me that what is surely the strongest argument in favour of free will never turns up. O'connor in this book traces it back to Aquinas, and illustrates it with a quotation from J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds. Haldane belonged to the atheist-materialist school of thinking, which led him into communism. The quote is interesting because it shows a broader view which his own reflective intelligence forced him to take. It is from the chapter "When I am Dead",

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter.

"For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

"In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter."

-- end of quote.

The argument does not exactly refute determinism, but does lead us to the conclusion that if determinism is true, we have no reason to believe it, or indeed to believe anything. Because all our beliefs would then be fixed for us by material processes over which we had no control, and it would be merely an illusion to suppose that we had arrived at them by a process of rational deliberation.

Martin wrote: "(Nothing in the philosophy group for weeks, so let me have a go ...)

I have read this whole thread again! (See post 229 for an earlier summary.) Once more, I notice the majority determinists leadi..."

I would say that we do have reason to believe that determinism is true.

First, we see cause and effect all around us. We don't actually see it, as Hume pointed out. However, we do operate as if it is true. It is much easier (Occam's razor) to surmise that cause and effect exist. Even if we can't get beyond operationalism, it matters in are lives. Therefore, this provides us with a good reason to believe in determinism.

Second, Haldane's argument is just to throw up are hands and surrender without searching for the "truth." Just because something is not palatable for us, does not mean it should not be believed. I don't like the fact that I have type 2 diabetes, but it is to my detriment to ignore it.

Third, all thought relies on brain functions. Does this eliminate my thoughts? No, I still have thoughts all day long. Brain functioning is the reason for me being able to think at all. To say that I don't think is absurd. The same could be said of my actions.

Fourth, I tentatively put forward that free will does exist. It is just not what people think it is. It is not a decision maker; it is a feeling. Since, feelings are involved with decision making (according to some brain imaging studies), free will actually matters a lot. I suppose that this would be some form of compatablism, athough I don't recall any compatablist to have nade this claim. I said tentatively because I am still in the exploration stage of this explanation for freewill.

That's a pretty good summary of my attitude toward compatibilism. Until we fully understand how human consciousness arises we are not likely to get beyond that. Trying to understand consciousness with consciousness seems akin to a hammer trying to discern its intended purpose by attempting to hit itself in the head.

Poor Will. Sign the petition to Free Will!

Jim

James wrote: "That's a pretty good summary of my attitude toward compatibilism. Until we fully understand how human consciousness arises we are not likely to get beyond that. Trying to understand consciousness w..."

Consciousness is a different concept than freewill. Consciousness is still a matter of brain functioning. I am conscious because of the workings of my brain. Consciousness is only the tip of the iceberg as far as thought is concern. I tend to think that it is used to focus are attention on things that are important to us or need our immediate attention. When I am conscious it is consciousness of a situation.

Your analogy is a poor one, since a hammer hitting itself is an impossible action. Nobody has shown that consciousness understanding consciousness is not possible. It is only an extremely difficult task, that might never be fully accomplished. But, to say nothing is known about consciousness is just not correct.

Just wanting something does not make it tue. Unless, you follow William James' "will to believe." This does not make it true by his pragmatism. only that it is rational to do so, since we often have to act with incomplete information.

Hello, Steven, thank you for the response. But look, Haldane is not throwing up his hands and surrendering, he has thought through the consequences of determinism carefully and seen that it leads to a big problem. It took me a good while to see the force of the argument, but it really does lead to the conclusion he suggests.

You say for example that "all thought relies on brain functions." But this belief, and indeed all your beliefs, are (if determinism is true) determined by the motions of atoms inside your brain over which you have no control. A belief is then no more the result of rational deliberation than a bodily action is an act of the will.

Similarly any response I might make to your arguments are the consequence of atomic processes in my brain over which I have no control. If I began by saying, "I accept much of what you are saying about seeing cause and effect everywhere, but ...", then I am talking about me accepting part of your argument, but acceptance is an act of the will, and determinism denies the will. Rational thinking entails acts of will, and if the will is illusory so is rational thought.

Martin wrote: "Hello, Steven, thank you for the response. But look, Haldane is not throwing up his hands and surrendering, he has thought through the consequences of determinism carefully and seen that it leads t..."

Your welcome.

Not exactly, from my point of view the brain is creating the rational thoughts we have. It is still my thoughts; it is still my life.

I may not have any control over these thoughts in the traditonal sense, but how often can we actually claim to have control over our thoughts anyway. We can often act without any conscious awareness that we chose to do so.

So am I responsible for my actions? I would say yes. No one else cause me to do the things I did, and as far as the United States legal system is concerned, it would be a freely chosen act.

What exactly is so bad with having a brain that acts in a deterministic manner? What evil is being perpertrated? Why do some people treat the brain as if it is an alien component if the body? The heart keeps on pumping. Without it, there would be no life. Nobody seems to complain about the heart, although it used to be thought that the heart was the seat of the mind. If you grant that the heart is a determinsitic organ, than they had no more freewill back then than we do now in the making decisions sense.

Finally, when you consider rational thought, it appears to me that one thought causes the next, so where exactly is freedom suppose to come through thinking. If we have just random thoughs, I don't think most people would consider that rational thought.

Ah, I think from your remarks, Steven, that you are not a rigid determinist (responsibility for actions, and so on).

But to jump to your last paragraph, the point is not that rational thought entails freedom of the will, but that if our thoughts are determined by the motion of brain atoms over which we have no control (which is usually what a determinist will say), we have no reason to suppose anything we believe it true. I am just restating Haldane here.

(Actually, rational deliberation does entail acts of choice, and so does depend on our will, free or otherwise. You can see it when you say "I accept most of what you are saying..." and so on. I'll admit that this does not apply to some types of enquiry. If A demonstrates Pythagoras' Theorem to B, and B replies "I accept most of what you are saying", than A might reasonably suppose that B fails to understand what geometry is all about. But most rational enquiry is not like that. Political debate for example.)

It is very easy to sidestep the implications of determinism by continuing to imagine that we are thinking for ourselves. I think P, then I think Q, and Q follows, or seems to follow, from P. But thought P is produced by brain events I do not control, and so is Q. I might say that Q follows from P, but that statement about the deductive process is also the production of brain events I do not control. I might say, as you do "it appears to me that one thought causes the next", as if I am looking down on the brain and its functions, and making a general principle about its workings. We could call the general principle G. But G is also produced by brain events I do not control. And so on.

The power of Haldane's argument is that there seems to be no way of answering it. If I try and answer it with an argument A, the reply is that I am only saying A because the atomic structure of my body forces me to do so. If I say, "but don't you accept A?", the answer would be "Even if I do, it is only because the atomic structure of my body forces me to."

Isn't that the brilliance of Laplace's Demon? The laws of physics govern your neurology so completely that you are as much unaware of them, as you are unaware of the weight of the miles high column of air resting on your head.

It seems to me that the only escape is dualism, but that has just as many troublesome questions.

The only logical escape when we honestly do not know the answer is to admit we don't know and keep trying to figure it out.

James wrote: "The only logical escape when we honestly do not know the answer is to admit we don't know and keep trying to figure it out."

Msg 293 - well said. That's actually a brilliant insight!

It's one of the great and fascinating hard questions facing science today.

Martin wrote: "Ah, I think from your remarks, Steven, that you are not a rigid determinist (responsibility for actions, and so on).

But to jump to your last paragraph, the point is not that rational thought enta..."

I did declare that I was an adamant determinist in message 276, so I wonder how you think I am not a strict determinist. As a determinist I except that it is "my" brian that produces my actions in conjunction with "my" body. I fully accept this, so I fully accept my responsibility for my actions.

Having said this, I do accept that quantum events do not have causes, but this does nothing for freewill. It turns it into willy-nilly. Anyway, it has not been demonstrated that quantum events occur in the brain. Experiments are done on isolated quantum systems, so whether they can occur within a larger system is something I have not heard about.

I still say that whether it is the brain that causes my thoughts and actions or not, I am still in control. Nobody else is typing this for me. If it is not me, who than? I just cannot accept the force of Haldane's argument.

But wait, it gets worse if you accept eliminative materialism. In this scheme we don't even have any thoughts, like Gollum who didn't have any friends according to one side of his split personality in the movie version of The Lord of the Rings.

The main problem with eliminative materialism is how do you explain felt experience or qualia. Of course, with the present state of neuroscience we don't have an explanation on how the brain actually produces these experiences. And, that to me is more problematic. To eliminate folk psychology (our way of explaining our thoughts, feelings, and actions) we would need total understanding of what the brain is doing. This to me is involves a huge promissory note, not likely to be cashed in my life time, if ever. So, while I find eliminative materialism attractive is some respects, I am not at this point fully on board.

Steven,

Well, lot's of people say they're determinists when they're not. Determinists express resentment, feel shame for their worst actions, believe in reponsibility, and tell you about their choices and why they made them, just the same as people who believe in free will. Since you say "there is nothing but to go along with the everyday fact of free will", I assume that, for you too, determinism is primarily a philosophical position.

Incidentally, I quite agree with your statements about the indeterminacy of events as explained by quantum physics. Making choices is not random brain behaviour, it "turns it into willy-nilly" as you say.

I'm sorry you reject the Haldane argument. (I wonder what other members of the group think of it?)

James wrote: "The only logical escape when we honestly do not know the answer is to admit we don't know and keep trying to figure it out."

I agree. None of my comments should be taken as dogmatic, as should anything in philosophy. When philosophy becomes dogmatic, it becomes agin to theology.

Some would put Plato in the dogmatic category, but Plato never declare anything to be such. Plato is best seen as an explorer. The impetus of philosophical inquiry is ignorance (thanks Socrates). So, I can not agree with ignorance is bliss. Knowledge (not certainty) is a road to a richer life.

Martin wrote: "Steven,

Well, lot's of people say they're determinists when they're not. Determinists express resentment, feel shame for their worst actions, believe in reponsibility, and tell you about their cho..."

I admit as much in message 276. However, I do not reject freewill; I just believe it is an emotional state. Accordingly, I live my life with freewill in full force.

Neuroscience indicates that emotions are intimately involved with decision making. I go further and posit that emotions are intimately connect with all thought. There are plenty of connections between the emotional center (the limbic system) and the critical thinking area (prefrontal cortex), so how could it not?

The notion of some rationalists is that we should aim to eschew emotions from our thinking. This if the above is correct maybe an impossibility. The best thing is to try to understand how our emotions influence our thoughts, and maybe just as important how our thoughts influence our emotions. I believe our emotional wellness depends on this last point.

If I remember right, Socrates said something like "know thyself." This involves our emotions as well as our thoughts.

I think that Locke certainly addresses what is meant by freewill with respect to civil society quite adequately in his Second Treatise.

But back to the earlier topic in this thread:
Has anyone read Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil? I have not finished it - in fact I had to put it down because it was generating so many ideas that I could easily have found myself in a brown study for months on end (I do intend to go back to it at some later point). But after starting to dig into his book, I began to think of freewill in terms of relative and sufficient to whatever context in which it should be deemed free, rather than to think in absolute terms of whether or not the will is actually free.

I have Plantinga on my To-Read list but have yet to take the plunge.

Sounds like you'd find Dennet's compatibilism would resonate with you. It works for me.

That is an interesting concept, but it doesn't quite define what I was thinking. Let's take a set of causes influencing an actor; some of these are internal to the actor, and some external, and some are both (perceived on some level). Now, for the moment, let's ignore any cognitive divisions between conscious thought, intuitive thought, sub-conscious thought, etc, and simply consider the whole of thought as the decision making process. Now, whatever external causes that are not perceived could be said to provide a relatively stable context wherein the actor has no awareness with which to alter his/her environs. Therefore, the relatively stable context cannot be acted on in any way in which the actor could be said to be aware of it; hence, the actor has free will relative the the relatively stable context so far as his/her internal causes are concerned.

Now, consider the universe as tending toward entropy. Given such a conception, it is reasonable to assume that nothing is ever *exactly* replicable (although through our own limitations and tendency to abstract data into conceptual models, we might not actually "perceive" this to be the case). It would then also be reasonable to consider that any given actor's actions would likewise not be exactly replicable, nor the will that is the cause of those actions. It would then follow that the will of the actor in question would impossible to exactly predict. Therefore, in addition to the freedom of will that I speculated about in the paragraph above, any two or more actors, not being able to exactly predict the actions of any of the others, would have free will relative to one another, even if not relative any of the sets of causes acting upon each and every one of them...

...

Time for you to read about what neuroscience shows is really going on. I'm as tempted as anyone to just cling to my sense there is free will and salvage it through sophistry, but the data are clear. ALL thoughts start below the conscious level. Our conscience in our prefrontal lobes can kick in and belay a decision to act pending moral review. But even then the trigger for it to do so, and what we eventually determine is the right course of action, appears to bubble up from layers of the brain outside our awareness through some voting/veto process carried on by neural networks designed for such decision making. We don't know what is going on until the neural network tells us what we have "decided."

Chaos and quantum mechanics buy us nothing in the way of control. If increasing entropy or quantum indeterminacy influences neural activity, that places us even less in charge.

It's impossible to review experimental results from neuroscience and still place us where we feel we are, on the bridge looking at the viewscreen and commanding our body as if we are Captain Kirk. :-)

That is an interesting perspective. Yet, because of the conscious veto process, and because of the ability to change and to adapt through consciously directed actions, we are able to condition ourselves and to reprogram our knee-jerk reaction-desires. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (and other kinds of behavioral therapy) would not work if this were not the case. So, at the very least, we are more than just what bubbles up because we have conscious feedback loops that re-condition what goes on down below our conscious levels of awareness.

Now, what's wrong with Captain Kirk? ;)

Oh, and that still does not invalidate my second argument for freewill of one individual relative to another. One can look back in hindsight with a sort of fatalism, yet, THAT is a choice in itself, and could tend very well toward self-defeat, say in a stand-off with Kirk - lol! There is an awesome Scottish Gaelic/English poem from WWI about freewill. I don't have time to find it now, but I might share it later :-).

I think in this vein, that there is a definite advantage to believing that you have freewill versus not believing that you have freewill; in this sense, freewill is very much akin to faith.

Must admit I do not know anything about neurological science, but just taking what James said at face value (by which I mean I am not able to provide any context myself), I tend to agree with Boradicus.

Does it really matter that our thoughts originate at a non-conscious level? Is it not precisely the ability of a conscious mind to alter a decision once it becomes conscious that potentially establishes free will?

Indeed, an agent who lacks such a corrective ability would not have free will, it seems to me. The pigs on my grandparents' farm did not appear to be moral agents - I have not once seen a pig sitting back contemplating whether it may not be better for its health to withstand the non-conscious impulse to indulge.

So it seems to me that neural science does not solve this issue - it just shifts the problem to the point of consciousness. Why do we correct a non-conscious action in a particular way? Do we have absolute freedom to do so, and to choose the way in which we correct it? Or dont we? This is still the same problem, I am afraid... I know which way I am leaning, and I am happy to share this in a future post, but right now I just wanted to point out that in my view, the problem of free will survives the neurological origin of a thought.

I don't know very much about the neurological science behind such assertions either, except for what I read from Marvin Minsky's "The Emotion Machine." But that is an interesting point about the shifting of the argument to where in the neurological process of the human brain a choice is resolved.

I wanted to share this poem related to the topic of fatalism versus freewill that inspires me. It is rather long, so I hope that the moderator will indulge me because it is topically appropriate as well as inspiring (although this is a discussion in a philosophical vein, poetry is not unrelated to philosophy; in fact, it could be said to be related to philosophy on multiple levels).

This poem is from the the book, "Nua-Bhardachd Ghadhlig: Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems," [ISBN: 0862414946] and the poem is entitled "Meftah Babkum Es-Sabar (Patience, The Key To Our Door; a line from and Arabic poem), and was written by George Campbell Hay. Although the poem was originally penned in Scottish Gaelic, I will only quote the English translation:

"I remember at Suq el-Khemis,
while we argued in the dark cafe,
a voice, melancholy as the voice of evening bells,
that counseled me to be submissive to Providence.
'My heart own, your struggle against It is in vain,
for every beginning and ending
has been written by It already.'

He gazed at the palm of his hand and went on:

'Your portion, your destiny, and your shadow -
These accompany you in every place.

'What is fated and has been written
is a dungeon that the Divine King has locked upon us.
Patience with a downcast look
is the key to the door of our wretched prison.'

The tyranny of the flaming sun
and the violence of the hot skies of Africa
had begotten the bruised, tired wisdom of these words.

Wisdom like the slow bells of evening,
not for us is your like!
For a choice apart has been written for us:
peace and death, or struggling and life.

Are the full ears gone, and only the stubble remaining?
Fallen are the townships, and up has sprung the bracken?
Is there a clump of rushes on every threshold?
Oh, world, we are here and live on in spite of it;
the hot ember is yet under the ashes.

Do not ask us, then, to set down for you
some musical wizardry of polished words,
soft, downy things or tales of the fairy knowe,
mist or songs for young girls,
the lullaby of some peaceful old woman
as she rocks her oe and gives it fondling talk -
do not ask that, but the scream of the pipes.
Nice, conventional, certain opinions,
a plausible oration from a sleek head,
customary ways or smoothness,
the tranquility of the white turbans of Islam,
the patience of an Arab prostrating
himself before Allah in the eternal sultriness,
do not ask for them - we are alive in earnest
and 'Cold is the wind over Islay
that blows on them in Kintyre."
Ask for laughter, and cheerful and angry moods,
friendship, enmity, pleasure and displeasure.
Ask for the true reflexion of our mind.

Seek in each new work of our hand
life, sore, rough and triumphant,
for Providence has offered us during our days
the choice between life and death.

The battlefield of our will,
the hearthstone we kindle our fire upon,
the field of our ploughteam will awaken,
the foundation for the building of our hand and our zeal;
the hall we found without melody,
and where will be heard, early and evening,
the music of our forebears and the clamor of our singing;
the book where we will write
new poetry below the last verse
put in it by the poets of old
- such will be our land. Or, if there be no struggle,
a mean thing of no account, hidden away in a corner,
which another people drained dry and forgot."

Thanks, Boradicus. Lovely verses. Much appreciated.

"Free will is limited."
Indeed, how can it be
free any other way?

Hello, I am new to the group but recently finished the book Free Will Explained: How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion . You can find my review here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... . I agree with the Hard Determinists. I do not think free will exists, and I also think free will is a dangerous idea. Without a concept of free will we lose justification for revenge, retribution, etc. This would be replaced with operant conditioning.

Not too long ago, I read this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

It was an audio book, so I did not have the ability to mark passages. However, Dennett had some interesting ideas to explore. He tended to take the stance that free will does not technically exist, but that this is immaterial when it comes to how we live, and that regardless of the illusion of freewill being in his view, just an illusion, that we still have the ability to make choices.

Personally, when I think of freewill, I think "freewill with respect to who?" Most discussion about freewill seems to be more or less focused on freewill with respect "to what." Often the "what" that is discussed is "the first cause." But, a "first cause" is an hypothesis. The fact remains that we have to this day no absolute understanding of the origins of our universe. There are many theories, some theistic, and some non-theistic, yet interestingly, there is this tendency to focus the idea of the universe's origin on a singular cause.

But when we think of taking a snap shot of what is happening both in and around us right now, there are multiple causes with multiple consequences. Reality is happening in highly reticulated clusters. So far as we have seen, isolation is never total. So, if we substitute a plurality of "first causes" for a first cause, our thinking about freewill might shift a bit.

For one, if we consider that not only at any given moment are there many external causes for our actions, but also many internal causes for our actions, then the framework for causation begins to look more plastic than when we consider a single event, or first cause, which is supposed to have set a predetermined course for the entirety of reality. In other words, if we accept a plurality of first causes, then the individual importance of any causes, first or otherwise, seem to take on more locally relevant weight.

There is also the discussion of what "the self" consists in, and whether "the self," once defined and delimited, can actually be responsible for making decisions. Dennett gets into this a bit, and it was an interesting discussion. Ultimately, I am not convinced that it matters when it comes to day to day living - and in this respect, I agree with Dennett.

As Dennett points out, there is also a benefit to thinking in such a way as to believe in freewill. When thinking about this, perhaps the best example that I can readily think of is this story I once heard about a man who had his fortune read. There was this man who ran into a fortune teller one day and was asked if he wanted to have his fortune read. He agreed, and the fortune teller read his fortune and told him that later in life that he would become a very rich man. The man was so satisfied by having his fortune read that he never made anything of his life, and never became rich because he continually thought to himself that he didn't need to bother because one day he would be rich.

So.... there is definitely benefit to be had in believing in our own agency; and to believe in our own agency is to believe in our ability to make "free" choices - at least in our own thinking.

A Leibizian! You're a member of a very rare breed!

Well, there aren't a lot of supporters of pre-established harmony since the 17th Century. My thesis advisor Jim Van Cleve (when I was at Brown a hundred years ago) has written about this fairly recently. He's a scholar of 17th and 18th Century philosophy who has written great books on both Reid and Kant.

Incidentally, I completely agree with you--and Leibniz--on the modal point that even if the actual world is necessarily the best of all possible worlds (I'm hearing the overture to "Candide" as I type this), it doesn't follow that a single action we take is causally pre-determined. A lot of people get confused about this.

Cheers!

There is free will. And his task is not to make choices, but to find the joy of life. How much choice he can make is already clear and fixed. There is an obligation to choose the most advantageous one according to one's own capacity. In fact, the thing called fate exists precisely because of this necessity, but anyway, this is a separate issue... Not separate, but separate. The self is not separate from this subject. However, destiny and self are the same thing. Free will, on the other hand, is a self's choices to bring together its full potential with consciousness and joy of life. As can be seen, preferences do not occur randomly. They exist within a necessity. An ordinary person does not make a choice based on Hawking's pure mind. He makes choices according to his own pure mind. He does not have the chance to make choices as if he were less mind. Because it would be against the self.

Finding free will, god, consciousness, soul, mind, thought, you name it is fascinating to follow. I have my opinion, ie belief, and so have many others. It's like finding consensus on the phenomenon of MONEY, as useless as the others. Add politics and political bend of people, and au revoir finding and revealing any objective facts. Hopeless.

Here are the views of two contemporary philosophers, both of whom bring a scientific perspective to the question:-

American philosopher Patricia Churchland, for instance, takes a pragmatic stance. She sees free will as a necessary social requirement; we need to be able to hold people responsible for their actions. Sometimes people genuinely can’t help themselves if they commit a crime, but most of the time we do hold people responsible. She suggests moving the debate over free will away from metaphysics and towards the neurology of self-control, and the ways that this could be compromised. Unlike free will, self control is a concept that can usefully be applied to other animals and hence brains in general. It is something that increases as the living being matures.

“It’s metaphysical goofiness.” She says. “The reason I just scratched my foot is because of that causal connection to the big bang? Get real.”

“But what is the ‘self’ of self-control? What am I?” she asks. “In essence, the self is a construction of the brain; a real, but brain-dependant organisational network for monitoring body states, setting priorities and, within the brain itself, creating the separation between inner world and outer world... Essentially, [the self] is a high-level tool... Is one cheapened by this neuroscientific knowledge? I think not... Each of us is a work of art, sculpted first by evolution, and second by experience of the world. With experience and reflection one’s social perception matures, and so also does the level of autonomy. Aristotle called it wisdom.”

In her view you have to hold people responsible for their actions (apart from mitigating conditions such as mental illness). If you don’t, society would just not work.

Another American philosopher, Dan Dennett, produces a rigorous analysis of the question. He demonstrates that you can have free will even in a deterministic universe.

In his book ‘Freedom Evolves’ he examines this problem of where freedom comes from if the world is fully deterministic. That is, if we imagine being able to know where every particle in the universe is and how it is moving then we would be able to work out what is going to happen in the future. In fact from this point of view the future would be completely determined, hence we would not really be ‘free’ to act because everything we did would be pre-determined.

He points out two problems with this view. Firstly there is a question as to the possibility of ever doing this because you would have to deal with things like chaos and the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics (i.e. that it is impossible to determine both the exact position of a particle and its velocity at the same time). The second difficulty is that any model of the universe would itself be part of the universe and so would have to model itself, and to model itself modelling itself… ad infinitum.

So, although we can consider the universe to be deterministic, with effect following cause for instance, it is impossible to know what will happen in the future. Now obviously organisms in the world could not know what is going to happen but they will certainly survive better if they avoid predators and other dangerous situations. So they do best when they take in information about the world and make decisions based upon that information; run, fight, eat or mate. Simple instincts can do very well for many creatures. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould tells the story of when he was a youngster in the US navy, an older seaman gave him the following advice ‘if it moves salute it, if it doesn’t, paint it’, a good way to keep your head down and survive without getting into trouble. Gould went on to show how simple, hard wired instincts serve many animals very well, especially where the cost of running a large brain is prohibitive.

However, the more brain power you can bring to such decisions the more freedom you have to choose a good path. In other words, as per the title of Dennett’s book, freedom evolves, even in a deterministic world. To Dennett, evolutionary theory, not physics, is the key to understanding freedom; it explains how we can be free when our parts aren’t free.