I´m glad I discovered that while I still had time to edit my initial post. My suggestion is that Hawking was wrongly quoted and that Hawking originally was talking about those who believe in determinism. In that case the statement maybe has some credit?

rofl, bull****. someone can put a gun to your head and say "you dont have free will and you will be held responsible for your actions" and you cant do a thing about it, DUCY?

Context FAIL.

FWIW, the argument was merely a slight butchering of the "Standard argument against free will." I had that in the back of my mind, and I just conflated responsibility and free will (which are related, but obviously not the same thing).

http://www.informationphilosopher.co..._argument.html

I knew you would be angry at some point; I have seen you two battle out before.

Ryan has shown his tremendous acumen ITT (/sarcasm).

he does see why, he has realized that he meant to say "i would feel weally weally bad if you held me responsible for my actions if i dont have free will." good for you.

its pretty obvious that knowing you will be held responsible for your actions will determine your actions ...... doooooooooucy?

UBER CONTEXT FAIL!!!

...

+1

Translation: Here is a bad argument.

Translation: ZOMG! Aaron W. is a moran because that argument is junk.

Translation: I don't think you would passed a reading comprehension exam.

Translation: LOL! Look at Aaron trying to cover up his bad argument.

Translation: This demonstrates that you have no idea what's going on.

Translation:

...

Gentlemen, please get this amazing thread back on track, if possible.

So anyway:

Hi, I think I'm a determinist basically of the kind madnak has articulated. Can some of you who espouse a different view (be it libertarianism or whatever) or who are familiar with the issues help me think about "free will" under determinism?

I have no substantial philosophical training, so I'm hoping we can proceed colloquially for a bit.

Okay, so "free will:"

By "free," I refer to a political rather than materialistic concept. To me, the meaningful sense of the word "free" in "free will" is freedom from omnipresent compulsion or coercion that utterly overrules the "self" or the "will" and that emanates from entirely "external" sources.

And by "will," I'm designating a kind of coordinating center of action and executive power that arises in an individual.

So the view I'm adopting is that the "will" is causally determined by prior material states of the universe, which obviously include prior states of this "will" itself, and hence that the "will" -- once it's causally constituted -- has a centralized, ego-based capacity to participate, contribute causes, and be effectual in the reality it inhabits.

I feel this allows me to coherently retain and employ some version of concepts like "moral/personal responsibility" and "regret" and "guilt/culpability."

If I am caught cheating on an exam, I cannot, under the view outlined above, persuasively claim that the cheating behavior was deterministically fixed, inevitable, and fated to occur, and therefore is not my fault, but merely the fault of the state of the universe.

Why? Because the state of the universe includes all of the prior incarnations of my centralized "self" and "will," which plays a significant and humanly psychological and biological role in the manner that it experiences (or processes) causes from external sources and in the way it acts upon itself and the world in future states.

For a quick demonstration of this state of affairs (as I've sketched it), let's return to the cheating scenario. I cheat on a test, am caught, reprimanded, and punished. A plausible outcome is that I process and internalize the negative consequences my cheating entails. I feel shame, perhaps. I recalibrate my cost-benefit assessment of future cheating opportunities. I reassess my moral views. I suffer and struggle through what feels like social conditioning, without utterly losing my centralized, egoistic powers.

To sum up, then, the assignment of moral blame and punishment to me when I cheat in a deterministic universe is not a hollow, meaningless exercise. These social consequences have a real impact on the constitution and behavior of my "self" and "will" as they move into future states.

So can anyone help me begin to critique and problematize my take on determinism, free will, and responsibility?

If the universe is fully determined, how can you have this sense of free will? Do you think it's possible? How is it NOT omnipresent compulsion?

Oh, and no one cares about 'political' free will...whatever the hell that even means. We'ra doin metaphysics here bohy.

aaron,

re: there's only one choice (towards madnak)

did you read his post about the ice cream, or the job? he's saying he can wish he would have done something, or several things, to change what led to the choice he made regarding the issue. ultimately, there was only one choice. going back to the choice between job A and job B. he's regretting not looking into the situation more, which would have possibly allowed him to choose job B instead of job A.

can you please address this specific example and/or try and articulate what your position based on it?

I'm off to bed soon, but I want to at least give my initial reaction to your description of his position. I'll trust that it's an accurate rendering of it, so I'm not going to take the time right now to find the original post right now.

All you're doing is passing off the regret to some different point at which there is a sense that something could have been different. If it's not the actual decision, then it's something that is leading up to the decision. "He's regretting not looking into the situation more" but there's no way he could have looked into the situation more because the amount of "looking into" was the only amount that he could have "looked into" the question. There's no "possibly" that will "allow" something different to happen.

The underlying theme is that there is some sense that something *could* have been different. This sense runs contrary to the determinist thesis, which is that things *could NOT* have been different.

Because although the universe is deterministic [can we leave aside quantum indeterminacy for the purposes of this conversation?] and all of its states are causally (inter)related, I recognize that the "self" and the "will" are a highly organized and specifically human subset of said universe. The causes that mentally (and biologically) impact and affect a human being must do so through the material structure of this intricate organization. It seems to me that we can almost speak of human minds "processing" the exterior material events that impinge upon them -- as much as we speak of them being caused or affected by these events. And as regards the deterministic proceedings in the brain's interior, I envision that they are subject to special internal modes and principles of causation that are ultimately physical, but whose character is neuro-psychological.

I think "will" is possible, or some rough psychological equivalent. Or at any rate a centralized, coordinating agency in the self that possesses executive power, access to rationality, memory, and experience, and that sort of thing. We can call it "will" to keep things manageable.

So then how can such a "will" be considered "free" in a deterministic universe?

By having the capacity to be humanly effectual upon the world and upon itself, and by reacting to causes humanly. And when the human will acts or reacts, causes or receives effects, I think it's reasonable to claim that it is a special kind of (re)actor amidst the causal entities in the universe. And recall that even if how the will acts in a given instance is wholly determined by prior material causes, the bulk of these causes flow from previous incarnations of the will itself, as well as other sources that can only exist in the organized structures of the human self. That is part of why a human being can multifariously respond to the universe and to the self over time in ways not available to a billiard ball.

So our will is relatively free. It is not free to act or exist outside the webs of material causality -- which strikes me as an absolute and supernatural conception of the term "free" -- but unlike inanimate objects, our will is capable of being a highly specialized, humanly complex, self-influencing, and opened-up node of causality in a deterministic universe.

Cliff notes?

This is exactly where I think compatibilists (or soft determinists) are spouting gibberish.

There's no difference between a human and a tree in a deterministic universe: the "self" adds nothing to the picture. The "self" is just a convenient way of drawing a circle around part of the universe and saying "this" is the human "self"...but this self has zero causal efficacy.

It's no different than a red domino in a long line of black ones. Its "redness" adds nothing to its causal efficacy to do anything other than what it was determined to do. You're basically saying that humans are like the red domino but that the redness ("self" "consciousness" or whatever) matters somehow. It doesn't.

Haven't read this whole epic, but tend to agree with this sentiment.

If you say the universe is deterministic except for free will, then it seems weird to still try to argue that the universe is fully deterministic.

That's not what's weird (because libertarians sort of think something similar to this...but perhaps importantly different); what's weird is that they think that their sense of "free will" has any meaning if they're just another domino in the line with no ability to add anything to the system that wasn't already in it well before their birth.

I'd like them to respond to the domino/redness analogy.

I went back and found the post this morning. This is the one where he started with

I think this is a blatant mis-characterization of the entire debate. It's not a matter of the existence of things that can influence the decision (ie, cause-and-effect), but rather that the things that influence the decision "force" the person to decide a certain way so that he could not have chosen any other way PERIOD.

It has nothing to do with "reasons" for making the decision (as some sort of cognitive process that is somehow running independently of the rest of the system). Even that reasoning was determined to go a certain way.

The decision was a function of the state of the universe before the decision. There's no statement about what things in the universe can and cannot affect the decision. It could be that the neighbor's dog was outside taking a poop, and that this (somehow) enters into the calculation that leads to the decision. It's as meaningful to say that the dog pooping led to the decision as it is to say that the level of "looking into" the situation led to the decision.

Ah... so their argument is that they have free will but what they are going to do next was determined by the big bang or god or something like that?

Yes. Weird.

I don't think you'll get a direct response on your red domino.

What is "importantly different" from the libertarian perspective about believing in both free will and a fully determined universe?

I have not had a chance to respond to Madnak recent long post to me, but what you are saying is basically the same thing that I was saying with my "complicated rock falling down a hill" analogy. Adding to the complexity of a deterministic process does not change anything.

I don't see that any of this is a necessary or common component of regret. Regret can, and I would argue, is mostly just that at that time the person wished the just would have done differently. Obviously knowing something different at that time would could effect the outcome, but most commonly people just wish that at that point they would have just made a different choice. This is of course hard for me to prove, as is your assertion.


What do you mean "due to my free will?"

Again, "kicked in", what does that even mean? Do you deny that given information X decision Y is made, and that it is impossible that information X could have lead to decision Z? This again goes to the idea of a formulaic approach to life. I don't think that given information X I am now some how forced to make decision Y, but that the exact same information could have lead to decision Z.

What does it even mean to be "in the mood" in a deterministic universe? What if I am "in the mood" for Mcdonalds, am I forced to then eat Mcdonalds? If not, then how am I able to over power that "mood" and eat healthy? If I do eat healthy, does that mean that I was not actually "in the mood" for Mcdonalds?

I wish that given the exact same information I would have just come to a different conclusion. I don't wish that I was smarter, because I know that at that time I could not have been any smarter than I was.

What about my above question? If I was in the mood for ice cream, even though on a diet, and ate that ice cream, I don't think anyone would say "I wish that I was never in the mood for ice cream", but that they wish despite being in the mood they would have chosen differently.

I think God every day that I don't always do things inside my preferences. When my boss is bollocking me, my preference is to tell him to **** off, but thankfully I am not forced to do everything within my preferences.