Welcome to philosophy?

All fields argue over definitions...how could they not?!

Definitions are conventional, so we have to agree on them in order for them to be meaningful. This requires dialogue.

No. You are conflating will with free will again. This has everything to do with will, and nothing to do with whether that will is free.

What is cool about these experiments is that they demonstrates that our ability to explicitely think, ponder, strategize and imagine is sometimes a detriment. These things are not at issue (in the matter of determinism vs. free will).

Yes, but, in this thread, we have conveniently disregarded the compatibilists.

I have a certain sympathy for them, but only in regards to their understanding of descriptive morality.

Just to make sure I understand how nonsensical I am in simple terms. Today I had the option to cook a nice juicy steak, stop by MacDonalds on the way home from the casino, or just reheat some leftover shish-kebobs. Actually, I had many other options, including not eating at all, but those three topped my list.

Today I chose steak. Tomorrow I might choose another option. But according to the determinists ITT, I don't have any choice at all. These choices are all pre-determined by prior cause and with perfect information are absolutely predictable. And that makes perfect sense, debate over?

There is a scientific basis for free will as proposed by the following eminent scientist:

Martin Heisenberg is a German neurobiologist and geneticist. Before his retirement in 2008, he held the professorial chair for genetics and neurobiology at the Bio Centre of the University of Würzburg. Heisenberg studied chemistry and molecular biology in Munich, Tübingen and Pasadena. In 1975 he became Professor of genetics and neurobiology at the University of Würzburg. He is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is best known for the uncertainty principle.

In an essay in the May 14 2009 issue of Nature entitled "Is Free Will an Illusion" (the illusion reference is to Daniel Wegner) Heisenberg says that the debate on free will

"has focused on humans and ‘conscious free will’. Yet when it comes to understanding how we initiate behaviour, we can learn a lot by looking at animals. Although we do not credit animals with anything like the consciousness in humans, researchers have found that animal behaviour is not as involuntary as it may appear. The idea that animals act only in response to external stimuli has long been abandoned, and it is well established that they initiate behaviour on the basis of their internal states, as we do."
(Nature, vol. 459, 2009, p.164)

for more see the published essay or see:
http://www.informationphilosopher.co...s/heisenbergm/

Sure, but we're not conscious of these internal states until well after the decision has been made (up to ten seconds after according to some studies). So for all intents and purposes, the kind of free will everyone means when they say "free will" does not exist. What difference does it make if decisions are internally caused or externally caused? They're still caused, and there's nothing free about it.

The idea that it's clear we live in a Universe where every effect has a cause seems about 100 years out of date to me. Under at least one interpretation of quatum effects our physical existence at a fundamental level evidently consists of a veritable froth of causeless effects roiling on ceaselessly in quantum events with no hidden local variables possible as causative agents. While such randomness may not provide the kind of freedom posited in free will, it does serve to deflate this notion that physical reality clearly proceeds strictly as a mechanical chain of causes and effects. Evidence suggests quite another view and one we are still coming to terms with. Considering the ubiquitousness of causeless effects fundamental to physical existence for which we already have evidence I don't think it's too much to ask that we keep an open mind about the possibility of causeless effects in nature which we have yet to discover.


PairTheBoard

I assume you're referring to the Libet experiments and others like it. Help me understand what I am missing, because I cannot understand how you, Libet and others draw the conclusions you do.

From what I understand, in these experiments a subject is asked to randomly push a button with his left or right hand, or something similar, and report the time he believes he made the decision. The experiments prove the action was planned unconsciously before the subject was consciously aware. So this is the basis for debunking free will? Or is there more to it than this?

Even though the phrase "free will" was used, this has nothing to do with free will. It is an argument against strict behaviorism. No one (other than the few remaining strict behaviorists) disputes that internal states are proximal causes of behavior.

You are describing voluntary action (acting in accordance to your desires without external force), changing desire, thought process and agency.

No one is denying any of this.

So you would probably argue that I chose the steak by acting in accordance with my desires, and therefore I had no free will since those desires are beyond my control?

If so, what about the fact I desired to eat McDonalds and kebobs as well. Do I have no control over how I prioritize my desires with respect to each other, such as the desire not to cook my own food, the desire not to let the steak spoil, the desire to be frugal, the desire to eat healthy, etc. etc. Can we really assume I will always have come to the same decision given the same set of circumstances and desires?

No. I was just describing what you were saying as having nothing to do at all with free will.

I wouldn't simplify humans down to just a pile of competing desires. We are a bit more complex than that.

Nonetheless, some of what you say below is interesting...

You are the agent that does such weighing of desires (amongst other things). How the weighing process proceeds is a combination of who you are at that precise time along with external circumstances.

Assuming absolutely everything precisely the same (everything about you and your circumstance), why would you think you would have acted differently?

don't know if there's a more appropriate low-content thread in SMP but POG is running a future-based sheep game that is interesting and related to many topics discussed here.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59...sheep-1166932/

It would seem that is exactly what most determinists do when denying free will. Not that anyone claims we aren't complex, but that we can in theory be boiled down to just that, leaving no room for free will.

I don't know if I would or not. But given exactly the same set of circumstances and desires, why could I not choose differently? What would stop me?

Hint: what would prevent me from weighing those desires differently? I can change my mind immediately after I make a decision. In that case, perhaps nothing had changed except I decided to reprioritize one desire over the other.

I doubt anybody today thinks that it's clear that we live in a universe in which every event has a cause. It's an important possibility, but any competent philosopher sits on the fence regarding it. If determinism is false, there's still an argument against free will that randomness is insufficient or irrelevant.

What are you saying here, that we should keep an open mind about libertarian free will? How does that follow from the ubiquity of apparently causeless events?

Putatively, the reprioritization of your desires is an event in the world. Either this event had a sufficient cause antecedent in time (ie you could not have reprioritized any differently than you did) or it did not. If it did not, please explain how you were responsible for the outcome of a random event.

Yes, and we generally also leave no room for fairies, souls and homunculi.

Plenty of room for thought, consideration, decision making processes, emotion, awareness, perception, instinct, problem solving, imagination, etc.

The exact set of circumstances and desires isn't what you think it is. It is absolutely everything being the same, including every bit of your past, including your previous thoughts, including the particular pair of sunglasses you are wearing, etc.

So, you are claiming that you change over time? I couldn't agree more, but that has nothing to do with free will.

The point of the discussion was that if the same set of circumstances and desires were repeated, there is no way to know I would reach the same decision. Since we are not able to reproduce this exact case, the closest we could come would be if I changed my mind immediately after making a decision (which everyone has done).

In that case, all the same sets of circumstances and desires could remain exactly as they were; however, I prioritized one thought or desire differently leading to a different decision. So what is the sufficient cause for this repriortization? Wouldn't it simply be my own conscious judgement?

Ok then, we really probably don't disagree about anything. This goes back to what another poster mentioned that nobody seems to be talking about the same definition of free will. The only definition that matters is the one that leaves us responsible for our own actions. If you leave plenty of room for decision making processes, awareness, etc. then you would likely agree we are responsible for our own actions, no?

It's not that relevant if you can reproduce the exact case, it's not about knowing in particular what you would or wouldn't do differently. Either you reach the same decision or you do not. If you reach the same decision because the decision was a necessary consequence of some chain of prior events, then the story is you weren't really free. If you reach a different decision given that same chain of prior events, the story is your will is outsourced to some mysterious random mechanism.

That you can change your mind shortly after making a decision doesn't solve the problem one way or the other. If determinism is true, you changed your mind because to do so was the necessary consequence of some chain of prior events. If determinism is false, you changed your mind for a reason that's supposed to be both free (such that you could have not changed your mind) and purposive (such that it's not the outcome of a random process). And this bit is incoherent.

No, there's not more to it. This is strong objective evidence against free will, yes. There is also other strong objective evidence and, although surprising to most people, rather convincing subjective evidence as well.

I'll admit that the entire debate is a bit incoherent. In fact, I'll bet there is nothing in this world you could claim to be real that I couldn't claim is an illusion, and no matter how hard you tried to explain it, in some sense it would be incoherent.

I guess it's just the nature of this particular notion that people can't seem to agree on it for thousands of years. It's still fun to think about though.

The argument is being made here repeatedly that acts of free will amount to causeless events and therefore violate a basic principle of our physical universe. My post argues against that view by pointing out how evidence indicates causeless effects are ubiquitous in our physical universe at a fundamental level.


My post specifically points out that the randomness in quantum effects may not provide the kind of freedom posited by free will. I certainly don't suggest that quantum events are the source of free will. There's also a problem in that it may be impossible to objectively differentiate free will effects - assuming they exist - from random effects, regardless of their origin. And this theoretical hypothetical objective appearance of randomness in acts of free will provides input for an argument that such apparantly random causeless effects are insufficient or irrelevant to what we think free will ought to be. In other words, free will can't be what we think it ought to be because if it were it would appear random to us and therefore could not be what we think it ought to be. I agreee there's an argument there. However there are also counter arguments which I think durka has explained at length in this thread.

Not being any kind of expert, I don't really know what competent philosophers think. What I see posted here by a lot of people are ideas that seem strongly shaped by an outdated clockwork universe view in which high level concepts are routinely discarded when they aren't suggested by or apparently reducible to the workings of all the little gears. In my opinion, that approach is naive.


PairTheBoard

Good. I thought there could be something I was missing. While the Libet experiments (maybe I'll comment on Sam Harris later) are interesting in that they show we make some decisions unconsciously, only realizing them later, why is that a big surprise and how does it interfere with the notion that we can consciously make decisions as well?

So far, all of these Libet type experiments I've read about involve very simple and random choices. Press a button with the right hand or left. In other words, flip a coin. We already know our brain unconsciously controls many of our actions: our breathing, heart rate, etc. But there are also probably thousands of decisions throughout the day we make unconsciously, like which foot to extend first when walking, which direction to look first before crossing the street, etc.

Perhaps when initially learning a process we had to think about these types of decisions, but then we quickly learned to delegate them to our unconscious mind. These decisions were of little consequence, many requiring nothing more than a "mental coinflip." If we had to stop and consciously think about each one our day would be quite mentally exhausting, would it not? So how are the decisions in these experiments any different?

Wouldn't the experiments be more interesting if they attached some kind of goal to the decision? That way, the subject would need to rationally work out which button to push. This would require some conscious thought and an actual conscious decision. I can remember playing Super Mario Bros. 2 as a kid, and between levels there was this slot machine thing where if you got the right sequence you won an extra life. I got really good a timing it so that I could usually hit the right sequence, but it wasn't easy. I'm pretty sure it involved a lot more conscious brain activity than the experiments we have discussed. It would be interesting to see Libet results of that type of decision making process.

That's not the argument though. The (pessimist's) argument is that if an act of free will is a causeless event, then in principle it's not something that a person can be responsible for. It would be rare for a philosopher to deny that it's at least possible that our physical universe has indeterministic properties. Some philosophers may think that the indeterminism cancels out by the time you get to the cognitive layer, but that's not inconsistent with the picture of the universe you describe. Compatibilists usually argue that some kind of macro-determinism is necessary for free will.

Put a smile on my face and link me one post that rises to the level of a counter argument (rather than assertion or invocation of imaginary fallacies). There are indeed some counter arguments out there, but they never deliver.

If you're interested in what philosophers think, here are some good articles on SEP about causal determinism (specific to your concerns), compatibilism & incompatibilism. Competent philosophy is not abundant itt. Consider also that the debate over free will is thousands of years old, and it has always been tethered to a conception of the universe; as the conception changed, the means of providing a physical context for determinism changed also, as well as the means of carving out a special place for free will. I imagine for example that the clockwork picture you describe was dominant in the modern/Enlightenment period but slowly eroded with the science, lagging perhaps by a few decades.