thoughts on determinism

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A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

Acting For The Agency

Steward is an ‘agency incompatibilist’. She analyzes the concept of ‘agency’ – the idea that individual subjects originate physical causal effects (in other words, commence actions) – and she rejects all those interpretations of the idea that try to bring it under a determinist or quasi-determinist perspective.

So, am I an “agency incompatibilist” as well? And, if so, did my brain give me any “choice”, choice, “choice” in the matter? Then back we go up into the surreal clouds where Steward “analyzes” the concept of “agency” and the author notes this as though she might have opted not to analyze it. Thus, every discussion of these relationships seems basically the equivalent of a Flatlander grappling to understand the world we live in. We don’t fully understand the human brain as matter but it’s with this brain that we are forced to assess it.

She argues that reasons cause actions, if ‘cause’ is used vaguely; but she also argues that the further determinist step equating reasons with brain states that cause other brain states cannot be taken, because the agent disappears in such an account.

“Cause” of course can only be used vaguely given the gap between what each of us thinks we know about our own brains and all there is to be known about the human brain itself. From my frame of mind, an “agent” would be subsumed in the brain’s chemical and neurological “instructions”. Nature being the instructor but, unlike with God, there is no actual awareness from Nature that it is instructing anyone. The brain is just this anomalous – weird – matter that behaves like no other matter before it.

Thus she asserts her incompatibilism – the view that agency and determinism cannot be combined – and insists that agency is a higher level process which operates above the level of deterministic physical cause and effect.

Back again to imagining her insisting on something that she was never able to not insist on. The spooky imponderables embedded in any discussion of these interactions themselves.

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Human Freewill and Divine Predestination
Antony Flew untangles some confusion about David Hume, St Thomas Aquinas and the fiery fate of the damned.

So What is Free Will?

Helen Beebee and Alfred Mele are apparently unaware of the need to distinguish between the colloquial sense ‘of his or her or their own freewill’ and the artificial philosophical sense of ‘free will’. In the former sense, actions performed of an agent’s own free will are contrasted with those performed under some form of external coercion or constraint.

Colloquial: “(of language) used in ordinary or familiar conversation; not formal or literary.”

Or epistemological.

As for "the artificial philosophical sense of ‘free will’, you tell me. Given a particular context, how would they be distinguished?

Ever and always this emphasis on “external coercion and constraint” when, given the manner in which some comprehend determinism, there is no external component at all. There are only the laws of nature.

In this sense of the words Martin Luther was, most certainly and most emphatically, acting of his own free will when, for instance, standing before the Diet of Worms, he said: “Here I stand, I can no other. So help me God.” The fact that human beings often, in this sense, act of their own freewill is completely compatible with the doctrine of Divine predestination.

So they tell you. On the other hand, for me, it’s still just a hopelessly problematic and jumbled labyrinth of scientific, philosophical and theological speculation all wrapped up in what really may well be the only possible reality in the only possible world. God, like all the rest of us, is just along for the ride. The ride itself being utterly and profoundly mysterious. Not unlike the existence of existence itself.

Thus Luther in his Dialogue with Erasmus insisted that:

“… by ‘necessarily’ I do not mean compulsorily but by the necessity of immutability (as they say) and not of compulsion. That is to say, when man is without the Spirit of God he does not do evil against his will, as if he were taken by the scruff of his neck and forced to do it, like a thief or robber carried off against his will to punishment, but he does it of his own accord and with ready will.”

Right. Like he was himself ever able to actually demonstrate to the world that this is in fact true. Indeed, try to imagine historical figures like him being around today…dumbstruck at the progress science has made in understanding the world around us. What would they change regarding their own thinking, and what would stay exactly the same.

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A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

[Helen] Steward’s preferred term for the exercise of freedom is ‘settle’. An agent settles matters by taking action. She says that libertarians have tended to focus too much on deciding and choosing, whereas freedom is a broader concept, better conveyed through the term ‘settle’.

Okay, if the laws of nature are entirely responsible for what you decide and choose, how then are the actions you take – settling – as an inherent/necessary consequence of that not in turn wholly subsumed in the laws of matter? No matter how “broad” you construe freedom it is only as broadly as your brain compels you to construe it.

Ever and always back to the mind-boggling matter that is the one of a kind human brain itself. And what may well be the stupefying attempts to explain it with it.

Imagine God trying to explain Himself.

Bodily movement can count as action that settles matters. The advantage with this terminology is that animals can settle matters too. Even insects and spiders. Steward considers the case of Portia the jumping spider and concludes that its devious hunting technique is most simply explained by applying the concept of agency, to say that the future was open until Portia settled it by pursuing a course of action (and her victim).

Yes, what about those creatures that, like us, have brains but possess an “agency” that revolves almost entirely around instinct. What goes through the “mind” of a spider jumping to seize prey and how is it different from what goes through the mind of a robber “choosing”/choosing to jump someone for their wallet?

What does it mean for a spider to be devious if it merely jumps on cue autonomically to subsist. And how did matter manage to evolve such that it can create creatures like us who can think that they are being devious when they rob someone…when in fact their behaviors are completely on par with the spider’s.

How to wrap your mind around that…fully.

Steward also accepts that there are grey areas, where it is not clear whether we should see agency or behaviour as purely mechanistic. In the latter case we would expect that some complex algorithm would suffice to predict the behaviour of the organism. This is probably true of one-celled organisms. But if we have to imagine more complex organisms, any increase in complexity requires fantastically complex algorithms with more and more complex adjustments; then, Steward argues, it makes better sense to adopt an explanatory framework that employs the concept of agency.

No grey areas for the spiders, right? But what about these creatures: thoughtco.com/most-intellig … ls-4157712

Nature’s “fantastically complex algorithms” that we argue about here…philosophically?

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Human Freewill and Divine Predestination
Antony Flew untangles some confusion about David Hume, St Thomas Aquinas and the fiery fate of the damned.

The term ‘compatibilist’ was introduced into British philosophy during the first decade after World War II to describe the position of those (myself included) who contended that to assert that some action was performed of the agent’s own free will is completely consistent with insisting that the sense of that action was, whether by God or Nature, causally necessitated.

That sound you hear is iambiguous moaning incredulously as he pulls out his hair.

Whether by God or nature, our actions are “causally necessitated”. But that is still completely consistent with our being agents with fee will.

Click.

Obviously, in a philosophy venue, this can only revolve around how “epistemologically” we define/encompass the meaning of “causally” and “necessitated”. Define them one way and they are compatible, define them another way and they are not. And then [of course] merely assume that the action of defining them itself is wholly consistent with our own definition.

Then take that to Mary agonizing over whether to abort Jane. The taking of it as well wholly in sync with our definition.

You know, if only theoretically.

Against those contending that we human beings are all endowed with free will in some fresh sense of that term, which makes this endorsement inconsistent with the ultimate causal determination of the senses of all our choices, the compatibilists of that now-remote period requested to see the necessary demonstration.

Not unlike me requesting of the compatibilists much the same. Not unlike anyone here requesting of me that I provide this vital demonstration. Only here, of course, we are all in the same “gap”. And here the “gap” is particularly surreal because it revolves around using our brain to pin down what it mean to use our brain itself.

It’s just for some here [compelled or not] accepting this is easier to own up to than for others. Some here fall back on complex theoretical concoctions and author’s books to insist that they have in fact come at least the closest to demonstrating what all rational men and women are obligated to believe about free will.

One thing we can almost always count on though is that these assessments will more or less revolve around arguments like these:

To describe a view as Humean is of course not equivalent to saying that it was the view of Hume himself. But it is very strange, not to say perverse, to develop and describe as ‘Humean compatibilism’ a view different from the form of compatibilism which Hume himself accepted. Yet that is what Beebee and Mele do. In their version of Humean compatibilism we are free in the philosophical sense of ‘causally undetermined’. In Hume’s own version, we are free in the everyday sense of ‘free from external constraint’.

What’s missing here? Aside from Mary and Jane.

Okay, it’s been years since I read Hume. So, for those here who are reading him now, what are some specific examples of Hume intertwining compatibilism as a philosophical subject and the actions that we choose from day to day in our interactions with others. And how might he have made his own distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world here?

Then it can only get all the more convoluted when we factor in the Divine:

That is manifest in his acceptance of the conceptual consistency of the doctrine of Divine predestination. He was not able to describe that acceptance as such since neither the concept of ‘compatibilism’ nor the concept of ‘freewill’ as a causally undetermined characteristic had yet been introduced. I should myself like to know, and will be grateful to anyone who will reveal to me, when and by whom and in what form that sense of ‘freewill’ was first introduced.

Concept! Concept! Concept!

Vital of course in embracing philosophy as a discipline. But to what extent are they basically detached or not detached from the world of human social, political and economic relationships?

Given, for example, a particular context.

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A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

Because determinists like Honderich, Pinker and Dennett claim that theirs is the only properly scientific perspective, Steward goes on the offensive, examining this claim before rejecting it.

Note to Honderich, Pinker and Dennett:

Hear me out…

Given my own understanding of determinism, your claim could come from science or from philosophy or from God or from just pulling it out of thin air. All that matters in the end is that you were never able not to make the claim itself. And Steward going on the offense with her own claim is no less an inherent manifestation of the only possible reality as well.

Are we then compelled in turn to be in agreement or in disagreement about that?

She argues that it is mere speculation to say that a complete set of physical laws could even in theory predict all of the future. There is no scientific reason to either make or to accept that claim; to do so is rather a matter of faith.

How about this: obviously!

Until we have a complete understanding of the human brain as matter evolving from matter going all the way back to why there is any matter at all, and why it is matter as it is and not some other kind, it’s always going to be nothing more and nothing less than naive or sophisticated conjecture.

Unless of course someone here like peacegirl’s author or one of pood’s regularity theorists is already in possession of a complete enough understanding of the physical laws that govern us. Enough to insist that, say, unless you agree with them [compelled or not] you are wrong.

As Steward writes, “We cannot just help ourselves to the assumption that everything that happens is inexorably necessitated by some prior state of the world”. Steward instead favours Nancy Cartwright’s ‘dappled world’, which replaces the old idea of a world of fixed, elegant, simple laws with a world that is patchy, regional and evolving. Steward further argues that physical laws do not dictate, they merely constrain.

Pick one:

1] the “patchy, regional and evolving world”
2] the patchy, regional and evolving world
3] the “patchy, regional and evolving world”

If only theoretically of course.

And we’ll need a context.

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A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

An essential ingredient of Steward’s philosophical position is ‘top-down causation’. Higher level, that is to say, more complex, entities (for example, animals or humans), can cause events and processes to happen in the realm of lower level entities (for example, chemicals and electric currents in brains). When a dog chases a fly, or when Joe moves in with his girlfriend, the complex agent controlling the action causes a vast sequence of events at the level of particles and electric fields, first in the brain, then in the rest of the physical world.

Of course, here we immediately come to the part where merely noting this in a “world of words” is far, far removed from neuroscientists and others actually taking us inside a functioning dog or human brain and pinning down chemically and neurologically why we are either compelled to believe it or have the option to not believe it…even though in fact it may well be true.

Will there ever be a way around this dilemma?

Reductionist determinists claim that everything can be described at the level of particles and fields, but again that is mere assertion.

Exactly my point in regard to exchanges like this. We all assert any number of things as though in asserting them that makes them true. Only in this debate everything asserted may well just be “nature’s way”. The whole discourse is brutally exasperating. But: only really exasperating if we do have free will.

Rather, current theoretical understanding requires the use of all the various different types and levels of explanation. Thus, in biology, organisms are treated as hierarchically organised, with the hierarchy ascending from cells, to tissues, to organs, to systems (visual, digestive, etc), and finally to agents – that is, to the whole organism. The higher levels are not reducible to the lower levels, and there is scope for top-down causation – that is to say, for agency.

And then the part where we take all of this to Mary, agonizing over whether to kill Jane in the womb. Assuring her perhaps that her agony is at least the real deal?

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A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

Revisionist Metaphysics

Prior to reading this book, I had long thought that language is a crucial factor in human freedom. Language enables us to describe future courses of action and outcomes, and so to choose between them.

Yes, but only by way of taking a leap of faith – with language in this particular article – to free will. If the language we “choose” is the only language we are ever able to choose then so is its use in discussing freedom. If our future actions are entirely subsumed in the laws of matter in however that came to be manifested in the human brain what’s that make our descriptions of them?

I now see things somewhat differently. Steward’s book has not made me relinquish my regard for the role of language in human freedom, but it has made me think again about agency, and extend its scope to include other animals. I now see that the freedom that language confers especially on us is a highly developed form of a widespread capacity for free action that we share with many other species.

Take that to the hard guys. To those scientists who are actually making attempts to go beyond language in probing the functioning human brain itself. And the general consensus here still seems to suggest that this reverence for language – in whatever manner that any particular one of us link it to freedom – is just nature’s way of programming us to toe its line.

Then the gap between what we think we know about it and all that there is to be known about it. And we don’t even have a clue as to how vast that gap might in fact be.

I would encourage all fellow libertarians to read this book and take heart from the range, power and coherence of the arguments presented. Those arguments are excellent ammunition for any future debates with determinists over free will and agency. Hoist the book aloft, I say, and let the challenge go out to all those determinists still desperately clinging to their clockwork model of reality: “Read this book and admit the error of your ways! Read it and be free!”

Of course, we have someone here who embraces an author who insisted that it is to your own greater satisfaction to admit that you are not free at all. Something that, given my own educated/wild ass guesses “here and now”, I “believe” as well.

Only in a way – click – I still have no clear understanding of at all, we are accused of sustaining the errors of our ways if we don’t “choose” to read it. And then keep reading it over and over and over until nature sees fit to compel us to embrace its conclusions.

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The brain-computer duel: Do we have free will?
Source: Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
At the Science Daily website

Summary:

Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point – the ‘point of no return’.

Unfortunately, however…

Most of us come upon information like this but we really have little or no capacity to react to it other than as men and women who are not neuroscientists or researchers with the education and background to study the brain in a far more sophisticated manner.

So, for us, it’s still “maybe…maybe not”.

But that “point of no return” is always right at or near the top of all the considerations we must take into account in order to pin down whether you either “chose” or chose or “chose” to read these words.

And then, for some, the assumption that at this point, God is the fountainhead.

For me though here’s the thing…

Suppose neuroscientists, beyond “computer-based brain experiments”, are able to establish that there is a point reached where you and I really do have the capacity to choose which direction our brains take us?

We may not grasp how nature was able to bring this all about – God? – but there it is: actual human autonomy.

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A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked
For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.
By Bahar Gholipour at The Atlantic magazine

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

A whole lot different from the way in which most of us here go about deciding these things. Not having the education, the background or the experiences necessary to probe a functioning human brain re the “scientific method”, we often fall back merely on how we “think about it”.

Like peacegirl’s author or pood’s “regulatory theory”. Instead, the “hard guys” approach it all with considerably more sophistication. But: are they – will they ever be – sophisticated enough? After all, it may well be that the human brain itself is not equipped [biologically or otherwise] to “crack this nut”. Or, back up into the truly surreal clouds…scientists come to conclude that the human brain “somehow” has acquired autonomy. But even this is but another wholly determined component of the laws of nature.

Then: The brain probing the brain itself given “the gap” and Rummy’s Rule.

So, what is the equivalent of this…

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

…here?

Here, with us? At least we should admit to ourselves that our own conclusions are predicated almost entirely on these “intellectual” assumptions we make about what we “choose”, choose, “choose” to think, feel, say and do. And what we “believe”, believe, “believe” is true.

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Brains & Minds
Consciousness, Freewill and Language
Michael Langford talks about the language we use to talk about the mind and brain.

Rejections of freewill have been common in recent philosophical debate. The question is, are the choices we make really free, or are they predetermined consequences of the laws of physics? If I knew enough about you and your environment, could I in principle predict your choices? (And would this mean you had no freewill?) Increasingly the freewill argument has been linked to different philosophical views about the nature of the mind.

Need to grasp everything there possibly is to know about the nature of your own mind? Well, you could simply accept that everything peacegirl or peacegirl’s author or lyssa or pood know about their own minds is all that anyone needs to know about the ontological – teleological? – nature of minds themselves.

They “just know” they have pinned down once and for all if you were able to opt not to be reading these words.

Go ahead, “ask”, ask, “ask” them.

One frequent version of the anti-freewill argument goes like this: modern neuroscience shows us not only that thinking is accompanied by neurological activity, but that this activity should be understood as the sole cause or explanation of all thought. If all thought is caused by fixed physical laws, then it cannot be caused by something else, such as one’s choice of what to think. So freewill is an illusion.

Yep, that’s the “existential leap” that I take here and now. But I “just know” that unlike them I have no capacity to “really know” that this is the case.

Thus this: Click.

Click meaning that I am accepting the assumption that I do possess some measure of free will in these exchanges even while acknowledging I have absolutely no way in which to demonstrate this.

Thus, in my view, peacegirl, her author, lyssa, pood and others here don’t even possess the intellectual honesty and integrity needed to admit this to themselves.

That they “just know” what they do makes you inherently/necessarily wrong if you don’t “just know” the same.

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Brains & Minds
Consciousness, Freewill and Language
Michael Langford talks about the language we use to talk about the mind and brain.

Linguistic Difficulties

Let’s start by considering what may look like a merely semantic point. Suppose I decide to ask Jane to come on a date, and then plan a series of manoeuvres to get her to agree. This is a classic example of having an intention. Could our intentions be completely explained by neurological activity? If this means “Could language about neurons simply replace language about intentions?” some determinists would say “No.”

Given my own more or less educated and more or less wild-ass guess, I would be inclined to say “Yes”.

To wit:

How does one go about making this distinction if one is convinced that he or she is compelled by nature merely to be deluded into believing that there is an actual option to make a distinction here “of my own free will”? From my frame of mind, once you accept that the human brain is but the latest evolutionary component of those truly ubiquitous “laws of matter”, nothing is able to become an exception.

Not all physicalists are hard-line reductionists, and some allow us to speak about the ‘inside’ of mental processes; and to do this we need the language of, for example, intentions. However, let us note how different the language of intentions is from the language of neurological activity. In ordinary language, we would say that the cause of my manoeuvres was my intention to date Jane. Can we claim that the intention is itself totally explained or ‘caused’ by neurological activity? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then we have what I call ‘causal reductionism’.

Imagine explaining that to Jane if she brings up the question of your intentions herself? The language of this, the language of that. What possible difference can it make [to either you or Jane] if the words “chosen” were never able to not have been chosen?

Speaking from “inside” the mental processes of our intentions? How is the human brain to be understood than as “outside” the laws of matter? Isn’t that why many think God into existence so that He can make this all about our souls?

Here, as always, however, the intuitive hunch that maybe I’m just not “getting” this distinction correctly.

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Brains & Minds
Consciousness, Freewill and Language
Michael Langford talks about the language we use to talk about the mind and brain.

This form of reductionism [above] may seem plausible, so let us suppose the equally possible, although perhaps rarer case of my intending not to date Jane, despite my strong desire to do so, because if I were to do so I would endanger my relationship with my wife. Although it is possible to claim that this intention and its subsequent activity (say, avoiding Jane) should still be seen as totally caused by neurological activity, this way of thinking does violence to the ordinary way in which we think about our intentions as themselves the cause of our activities. Our intention determines our action, not the state of the brain which is the material cause of the intention’s existence. This does not by itself amount to a disproof of reductionism; but it does invite us to look for another account of intentions that avoids this tension.

On the contrary, until we can grasp the ontological – teleological? – relationship between the laws of matter, the human brain and human intention any “violence” that is done can never be pinned down as either originating in human autonomy or in the mere psychological illusion of human autonomy originating in the manner in which the “human condition” itself fits into what may or may not be an ontological – teleological? – reality.

A similar problem arose a few years ago with the ancient distinction between the mad and the bad. For instance, if someone commits a horrific murder because of their state of mind/brain, are they insane, or evil?

If they could never have not murdered someone, what difference does it make if we could never have not called it either mad or bad?How would insane and evil not be interchangeable in the only possible reality in the only possible world?

And yet, over and again, since this in and of itself is often never brought up in regard to examples like this I can only assume – click – that I am the one failing to “get” their point.

Here, I am bascially with Barbara:

Barbara Wootton notoriously denied the validity of the distinction, while my first philosophy tutor, H.L.A. Hart, defended it. However, Hart’s defence, in Punishment and Responsibility was essentially pragmatic, based on the dangers to human liberty of removing the distinctions between hospitals and prisons. I am seeking a more substantial ground for maintaining the distinction between intentions and neurological activity.

Again: if there is no human liberty then anything we do “for all practical purposes” in regard to distinctions made between hospitals and prisons, intentions and neurological/chemical activity is six of one half a dozen of the other.

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Brains & Minds
Consciousness, Freewill and Language
Michael Langford talks about the language we use to talk about the mind and brain.

An Alternative View

In Aristotle’s account, with the emergence of self-reproducing organisms, new kinds of being arrive in the world; beings that require new concepts to describe them – for example, ‘death’. I suggest that a comparable situation arises when nervous systems reach a certain level of complexity, and self-aware thought emerges.

On the other hand, in regard to determinism [and all of the other Really Big Questions] noting this hardly makes either “the gap” or “Rummy’s Rule” go away. We’re still stuck with all of the imponderables in regard to grasping whether this complexity “somehow” results in an awareness of things like “death” that are truly being proposed to others of our own volition.

Self-awareness does not of necessity amount to a capacity to opt to be aware of something else instead.

A new kind of language is required to adequately describe this new level of being. This language involves the introduction of a cluster of inter-related concepts, such as freedom, creativity, self-awareness, rational reflection, empathy, love. None of these – I am suggesting – can be fully understood without reference to the others. I am also suggesting that although no physical laws are broken, reflective thought cannot adequately be explained or described purely in terms of neurological activity.

Like the old and the new kind of language can’t be six of one, half dozen of the other to nature. If it’s “being” and not being, then every discussion about it is always back to square one. Instead, for me, it’s the arguments of those who suggest it is “being” that are most enigmatic.

We just have no way at present to pin down what it means ontologically to connect the dots between reflective thought and physical laws being broken. Other then – click – in the arguments we dispense here.

So, in the absence of actual ontological confirmation we simply make the assumption that in noting something like this…

The way in which the new level of being is related to what went before can be characterized by the notion of ‘transcendence’. Just as organic life ‘goes beyond’ or transcends the kind of being constituted by a pile of stones, so a reflective human person ‘goes beyond’ or transcends the vegetative and sentient (ie, merely sense-perceptive) levels of evolution.

…the evolution of lifeless matter “somehow” created a neurological and chemical capacity “in our brains” to “transcend” the mindless laws of matter applicable only to lifeless matter. It just happened and one day we will have the capacity to freely figure out how.

As for “why?”, get takes us in the teleological realm generally attributed to a Creator of some sort. So that, it would seem, the far more profound mystery would be a No God universe in which “somehow” nature itself accomplished this.

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Brains & Minds
Consciousness, Freewill and Language
Michael Langford talks about the language we use to talk about the mind and brain.

Why do I use the term ‘question-begging’ for some of the arguments which want to reduce the mind to the brain’s activity? If I was a hard-line determinist, and I was describing the activity known as ‘choice’, I might compare the act of choosing with the balancing of weights on a scale, until one side or the other (one option or the other) inevitably goes lower, in accordance with strictly physical laws. On this model, human motives are analogous to weights hanging on the balancing bar. However, the very employment of this model ensures the determinist’s conclusion, because the model already assumes a mechanistic form of determination. Here, if one asks, ‘On what basis is this choice made?’ anything that would count as an answer would only indicate a cause that was ultimately neurological.

And how has this changed? My assumptions, my conclusions…your assumptions, your conclusions. On and on and on we go here exchanging them in what certainly seems to be a futile effort to “choose” words in order to form arguments that are said to be closer to the objective truth. Mine may be, yours may be. And then if not all the way to the grave.

Or, sure, let’s call them “biases”…

The bias in this way of framing the issue can be illuminated by examining analogous defences of psychological hedonism – the theory that we are so constituted that we can only choose what is in our apparent best interests. (This is the explicit position of both Hobbes and Bentham.

Why should hedonism be any different? There are clearly psychological tendencies embodied here in all of us. Some revolving around genes more or less than around memes. Some clearly more or less dangerous to others. After all, we are not all sociopaths in this regard. But we still have no set of assumptions that bring us to the definitive conclusion that we have any real capacity to opt not to be a sociopath. Any more than we can know for certain that how we react to sociopaths is as a result of carefully weighing the pros and the cons.

All I do here is to suggest that, given free will, there does not appear to be a philosophical argument that enables to pin down whether one either ought or ought not to be a sociopathic hedonist. Instead, that’s all buried deeply – ineffably – in dasein.

However, Hobbes includes some observations that sit uneasily with his purely egoistic account, for example, in his account of friendship in De Homine, and of justice as a virtue in Leviathan. I do not think that neurological determinists’ account of causation and the theory of psychological hedonism are identical. It is possible to expound a neurological theory of intellectual causation that allows, or even demands, that some actions are purely altruistic.

On the other hand, if Hobbes was never able not to include these observations…?

You tell me. Someone feels “uneasy” about them. Another does not. Which “account” appeals more to you? Again, what on earth does it mean to demand anything of any account here when we can never be certain if that “demand” is not in turn but a psychological illusion “somehow” sprung on us by nature when mindless matter evolved into what has got to be the most mysterious matter of all – the human brain.

Perhaps only the matter that may or may not be God is further out of reach. Assuming we have the capacity to pin that down of our own free will.

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From Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue by Clifford Williams.

[b]Frederick [Mr. Free Will]: Can you explain why in your sense a person can be both free and determined?

Carolyn [Ms. Compatibilist]: Yes. A person can be free and determined because what he does can be caused by something that goes on inside him even though he is not forced by some circumstances outside of him to act as he does. If he is not forced by circumstances outside of himself to act as he does, then he acts freely. Yet his action could nonetheless be caused by something inside him, such as an unconscious motive or a brain state.

Frederick: …a person could have freedom in your sense even though he had no control over anything he does. Let me explain. If everything a person does is caused by unconscious motives, as you say, then he would have no control over anything that he does. Unknown to him, he would be buffeted about by the workings of his unconscious mind. Yet such a person would have freedom in your sense of freedom because no external circumstances would prevent him from doing what he consciously wants to do. That means your conception of freedom is a sham — a person who has freedom in your sense does not have control over what he does.[/b]

Yep, that is basically my own reaction to compatibilism. We have “conceptual”/“theoretical” freedom, but, for all practical purposes, we have no control over what we do because “internal” and “external” are seamlessly intertwined re the laws of matter.

As Frederick notes…

“You can call that freedom if you want to, but it is a psuedofreedom.”

And that, in my view, is often where the compatibilists go: letting it all revolve around what you call something, name something, define something. As though the inner “I” here was not the equivalent of all that is out in the world able to compel you to “choose” this instead of that.

Here I always come back to “I” in our dreams. The “freedom” we are convinced we have all the way up to the point when we wake up. The waking “I” no less a manifestation of the laws of matter. Only, far, far, far more inexplicably.

[iambiguous]

How about this rendition of determinism…

nytimes.com/2022/01/26/opin … ation.html

[b]"For these reasons, I’ve sat out many of the debates about the simulation hypothesis that have been bubbling through tech communities since the early 2000s, when Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, floated the idea in a widely cited essay.

"But a brain-bending new book by the philosopher David Chalmers — “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” — has turned me into a hard-core simulationist.

"After reading and talking to Chalmers, I’ve come to believe that the coming world of virtual reality might one day be regarded as every bit as real as real reality. If that happens, our current reality will instantly be cast into doubt; after all, if we could invent meaningful virtual worlds, isn’t it plausible that some other civilization somewhere else in the universe might have done so, too? Yet if that’s possible, how could we know that we’re not already in its simulation?

"The conclusion seems inescapable: We may not be able to prove that we are in a simulation, but at the very least, it will be a possibility that we can’t rule out. But it could be more than that. Chalmers argues that if we’re in a simulation, there’d be no reason to think it’s the only simulation; in the same way that lots of different computers today are running Microsoft Excel, lots of different machines might be running an instance of the simulation. If that was the case, simulated worlds would vastly outnumber non-sim worlds — meaning that, just as a matter of statistics, it would be not just possible that our world is one of the many simulations but likely. Chalmers writes that “the chance we are sims is at least 25 percent or so.

"Chalmers is a professor of philosophy at New York University, and he has spent much of his career thinking about the mystery of consciousness. He is best known for coining the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness,” which, roughly, is a description of the difficulty of explaining why a certain experience feels like that experience to the being experiencing it. (Don’t worry if this hurts your head; it’s not called the hard problem for nothing.)

"Chalmers says that he began thinking deeply about the nature of simulated reality after using V.R. headsets like Oculus Quest 2 and realizing that the technology is already good enough to create situations that feel viscerally real.

"Virtual reality is now advancing so quickly that it seems quite reasonable to guess that the world inside V.R. could one day be indistinguishable from the world outside it. Chalmers says this could happen within a century; I wouldn’t be surprised if we passed that mark within a few decades.

“Whenever it happens, the development of realistic V.R. will be earthshaking, for reasons both practical and profound. The practical ones are obvious: If people can easily flit between the physical world and virtual ones that feel exactly like the physical world, which one should we regard as real?”[/b]

So, if we are in some extraterrestrial alien’s “sim world”, how would that be the same or different from hard determinism as the embodiment of nature itself?

Well, in part, I suppose, it would depend on whether this alien civilization was no less the embodiment of the laws of matter. Nature “programed” them to “program” us. And then going back to how it all fits into the ontological – teleological? – understanding of existence itself.

[iambiguous]

Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

The concept of free will is subtle and is easily misunderstood. One major cause of the confusion is that people often conflate two different conceptions of free will: compatibilist free will and libertarian free will. One of these, libertarian free will, is truly free will, while the other, compatibilist free will, can be thought of as either a misunderstanding or an excuse. But either way, it is not actually free will.

That’s basically the assumption that I start with. Only I am immediately confronted with what may or may not be the fact that I was never able to not make that assumption. And that libertarian free will and compatibilist free will are just two sides of the same six of one, half a dozen of the other coin. Nature flips it autonomically going back to whatever brought into existence nature itself.

Whatever that means.

Then the part where all of this is discussed in “concepts”. What are concepts but “worlds of words” in which words define and defend the meaning of other words. Definitional logic as it were.

In other words, it is not likely to get around to Mary above with a bun in the oven that she is undecided about getting rid of.

Oh, well…

Click.

Let me explain that. “Click” in the sense I am assuming that I do have at least some measure of free will here. I am opting to conclude what I do but only because in thinking it through to the best of my ability I did not opt toward a different, conflicting conclusion.

In order to understand the distinction between the two, one must first understand the concept of determinism. Since antiquity, people have been wondering whether or not the course of history is pre-determined. Determinism says yes, it is. According to a determinist, once the initial conditions of the world were set up, it was pre-determined that everything would happen exactly as it did. It was pre-determined that the Roman Empire would fall in 476 AD. It was pre-determined that the Spanish Armada would sink in 1588. It was pre-determined that the coronavirus pandemic would happen in 2020. You get the idea. There was only ever one possibility for the history of the world. And likewise, there’s only one possibility for the future.

Here perhaps what may well be the biggest conundrum of them all. Since we don’t have access to an understanding of what the “initial conditions” were when matter first came into existence, what can we possibly know for certain about it now?

All we do seem certain of is that lifeless matter evolved into living matter evolved into us. And we are actually able to be cognizant of the past, the present and the future. But cognizant in what sense?

And that’s before we get to solipsism, sim worlds, dream words and the Matrix.

[iambiguous]

Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

The word “compatibilist” in compatibilist free will comes from this argument that the idea of free will is compatible with determinism.

Yes, the arguments. After all, what are arguments here but words defining and defending other words. So, sure, if words like “compatibilism” are thought by you to mean what they do “in your head” then you merely have to connect the dots intellectually between the premises you think up and a conclusion that is derived “by definition” from them.

We all do that here. Instead, where things inevitably become problematic is when we are faced with the task of demonstrating to others how “for all practical purposes” this is applicable to the actual behaviors we choose.

According to compatibilism, free will can be defined as a situation in which there is no external force that prevents you from doing what you want. (By “external”, they mean outside your own body, outside your own brain.) For example, there is no external force that is preventing me from going outside right now. So according to a compatibilist, I am free to go outside right now …… even though, in the philosophical sense, my future behavior has already been determined.

Okay, but what if you define free will as a situation in which the “internal” brain/mind components of a choice just “somehow” permit you to opt among alternative behaviors…even though neither science nor philosophy is able to explain how this came about when matter evolved into us.

But then [to me] this part…

“I am free to go outside right now…even though, in the philosophical sense, my future behavior has already been determined.”

…continues to stymie me. What “on Earth” does “in the philosophical sense” mean here in regard to my future behavior? To me it just comes back to what you have come to believe – re dasein – these words mean “in your head”.

When [for me] “in my head” here and now “for all practical purposes”, my future behaviors will be what they can only be because the external and the internal factors are inextricably intertwined in the laws of matter.

This also goes for situations where someone chooses between multiple options. For example, let’s say you ask a little child whether they would rather go to Wendy’s or Dunkin Donuts. There is no external force preventing the kid from choosing either of those options. So according to a compatibilist, that child has free will and is making a free choice ……… even though a compatibilist would also say that the child’s choice has already been determined (we just don’t know what it is yet).

Thus, compatibilists claim that we are free to do what we want, even though our future behaviors have already been determined. They think of freedom as simply the absence of obstacles.

Or…

Their brain compels them to think this given that their idea of an obstacle itself was hard-wired into them by the laws of nature.

Or think of yourself dreaming that you ask a child whether they would rather go to Wendy’s or to Dunkin Doughnut. The child tells you she’d rather go to Taco Bell. And there you are at Taco Bell ordering a Big Mac on your way to a great adventure.

Just nothing more than your brain doing its thing.

[iambiguous]

Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

The other conception of free will is libertarian free will (libertarianism). Libertarianism is the idea that there is a “ghost in the machine” inside our brains that makes decisions independently of all science and all circumstances.

Just as some tell us there’s a God “up there” who set it all in motion? Maybe. But, so far, to the best of my knowledge, no scientist, philosopher or theologian has been able to actually introduce either one to the world. The ghost may well just be a machine going back to whatever brought existence itself into existence.

To be sure, the science and the circumstances matter, but the “ghost” has the final say. A compatibilist would hold that science — specifically neuroscience — could fully explain the process by which a person makes a decision and does something. But libertarianism says no: science isn’t everything. There is a ghost in the machine, and the ghost has the power to make decisions, and there is no scientific process that could explain what the ghost is going to do or how the ghost works.

But if science ever does fully explain the process, was science ever not able to fully explain it by rote? The ghost being the machine, it explains itself. That’s the mystery. Matter becoming conscious of itself as matter becoming conscious of itself. Some then insist that “somehow” the ghost is more than the sum of the brain’s part. An “I” emerges that transcends the machine…an “I” that shapes and molds the machine [the body] in order to carry out its own commands.

We simply haven’t pinned down exactly how or why yet. And, until we do, we just have to accept that whatever “leap of faith” we take to free will “in our head”, that will have to do.

(By the way, this “ghost in the machine” is often associated with some of the more traditional terms for a person’s source of identity, such as a soul, a self, an Atman, or a spirit.)

All of which may or may not be intertwined in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. Compelled to or not.

[iambiguous]

Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

Instead of proposing that free will is somehow compatible with determinism, libertarianism posits that determinism is false: the future is not pre-determined, not even by neuroscience, because the ghost in the machine has the freedom to decide our course of action.

This might be true. This might not be true. Neuroscience may one day finally arrive at the correct conclusion. Neuroscience may not ever arrive at the correct conclusion.

Then the part where some go completely off the deep end and insist there really isn’t even a way for any of us to determine which. Squabble over what the human brain is and how it got there. But, even if we determine that the human brain is capable of at least attempting to explain itself, we don’t actually know for sure if the human brain itself is capable of explaining itself. Then we can go to intelligent lifeforms “out there” that may well be considerable closer to that than we are. Or, sure, we can go to God.

Thus, there are three major positions that a philosopher could take with regard to free will and determinism:

1. Compatibilism: Determinism and free will are compatible with each other. Determinism is true and free will exists [but in my opinion, that’s not true free will].
2. Libertarianism: Determinism and free will are incompatible. Determinism is false and free will exists. The ghost in the machine makes free choices.
3. Hard determinism: Determinism and free will are incompatible. Determinism is true, and there is no free will.

But: Of his or her own free will, can a philosopher then opt for which position to land on?

Which makes all of this truly mind-boggling to say the least. We are trying to pin down how the human brain functions in the context of “all there is” but all that there is available to us to accomplish this is the human brain itself.

And here I am arguing for determinism only because “intuitively” it seems like the most reasonable frame of mind. But not anymore than “intuitively” it seems like I clearly do have some measure of autonomy.

Then down the “philosophical” rabbit hole we go:
untrammeledmind.com/2017/03 … l-paradox/