thoughts on determinism

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Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

There are philosophers who have promoted each of these three positions. One notable compatibilist philosopher is Daniel Dennett. He has written a book promoting compatibilism. In past ages, renowned philosophers such as David Hume and John Stuart Mill were also compatibilists. And Thomas Aquinas was essentially a compatibilist, even though he was living in a pre-scientific era. Meanwhile, George Berkeley (the namesake of UC Berkeley) promoted libertarian free will, and Immanuel Kant and William James both criticized compatibilism, although they did not necessarily endorse libertarian free will.

To the best of my knowledge, not a single one of these renowned intellectuals had anything to say about compatibilism did not flow almost entirely from a world of words. Scholarly, analytical, thoughtful assumptions no doubt. None however had ever conducted extensive experiments with actual brains, probing how “for all practical purposes” the chemical and neurological interactions came together enabling them to establish that in fact even though Mary could not have not aborted her unborn fetus, she was still morally responsible for doing so. Or, as well, in determining that in fact she did indeed have free will in making her choice.

And a philosopher named Gregg Caruso has promoted hard determinism. (How Gregg Caruso feels motivated to get up in the morning is beyond me.)

This is often where the free will advocates go. As though human motivation itself can’t be but an inherent manifestation of a wholly determined mind. It just depends on what someone insist they “just know” about their own motivation. Because they think they are choosing of their own volition, that makes it so.

(I should add that there is actually a fourth possible position, which is that there is some sort of inherent randomness in the universe which has nothing to do with a person’s choices. So under that view, determinism is false, but free will doesn’t exist either. There’s just randomness. However, that is not relevant here.)

Or, if someone here believes that it is relevant, let them explain to us how it would pertain to Mary’s decision to have the abortion.

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Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

I sometimes ask people if they believe in free will. Most of the time, the people in question are not familiar with philosophy. They almost always say that they believe in free will, and they justify this by saying something like, “I mean, I make choices every day …… yesterday, I had a choice about whether I wanted grilled cheese or a hamburger, and I chose grilled cheese. That was a free choice.” My response to them is: yes, but that’s only compatibilist free will. For all you know, it might have been pre-determined that you were going to select grilled cheese. Therefore, you have not demonstrated that true free will — libertarian free will — exists.

The sound you hear is me gnashing my teeth.

“Compatibilist free will”. You were predetermined to choose the grilled cheese. Okay, how then is that “for all practical purposes” different from saying that you were never able to choose the hamburger instead?

And if you were never able to not choose the grilled cheese, how than is compatibilist not the complete opposite of libertarian free will. The antithesis of it. How is it not completely ridiculous?

And how is either being familiar with or unfamiliar with philosophy make this any different?

This way…?

Thus, for people who aren’t familiar with philosophy, the concept of compatibilist free will is just a misunderstanding. They just don’t understand the subtle distinction between compatibilist free will and libertarian free will. However, I think that for people who do understand philosophy, the concept of compatibilist free will is not merely a misunderstanding; it is an excuse.

An excuse to hold people responsible for the things they do even though they were never able to not do what they can only do in the only possible material world?

For example, Daniel Dennett has written a book promoting compatibilism. In his view, even though our actions have been pre-determined by science, we don’t know what they are yet, and there’s no external force that stops us from doing what we want to do, so that means we have free will.

Does this work for you? Okay, then how do you differentiate predetermined action rooted in science from predetermined action rooted in the laws of matter? How do you explain chemically and neurologically how the fact that you don’t know what you are predetermined to do was not in turn something that you were never able to not know?

In other words, given Dennett’s own understanding of compatibilism, was he ever able to freely opt for full-blown determinism or libertarian autonomy instead? Or, in the only possible reality, is he just like all the rest of us…convinced that “somehow” our waking world reality is different from our dream world reality.

Or…

Now, Daniel Dennett is a talented thinker, and he certainly understands the distinction between the two conceptions of free will. And I’m sure that within himself, he knows that compatibilist free will isn’t really free will. But he knows that it is very bleak to say, “There is no free will,” and he doesn’t want to sound like a total pessimist, so he makes an excuse and claims that compatibilist free will is still free will ……… even though within himself, he knows it isn’t.

Bingo!!

That’s basically my own reaction to compatibilism. You somehow “trick” yourself into believing you are not in all respects a slave to nature, but you were never able not to.

And then of course I am back to “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”. Admitting that I might be completely wrong about all of this but not really having a clue as to how to determine that “once and for all”.

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Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

Compatibilist free will is like decaf coffee. Decaf coffee looks like coffee, tastes like coffee, smells like coffee, and has the word “coffee” in its name. But it won’t wake you up, because it has no caffeine. So in the end, it isn’t really coffee. In the same way, compatibilist free will has the phrase “free will” in its name, and it is presented as if it were free will. But under compatibilism, your choices have been pre-determined, so compatibilist free will is not really free will. It’s like decaf coffee. It’s like fool’s gold. It’s like an artificial Christmas tree. It’s just not the real thing.

Exactly!

Yet there they are: all those otherwise intelligent individuals still able to insist that Mary could not have not chosen to abort her unborn fetus…but is still morally responsible for doing so.

I just can’t figure out how anyone can actually come to conclude that other than because given the laws of nature being applicable to all of our brains, they were never able not to.

One further difference between compatibilism and libertarianism is that only compatibilist free will can be proven to exist. If you define free will as simply the absence of obstacles, then no one can doubt that free will exists. Since people make choices every day (recall my above made-up conversation about the grilled cheese and the hamburger), then the existence of compatibilist free will is obvious. However, no one will ever prove or disprove the existence of libertarian free will. Does this “ghost in the machine” really make free choices? Does it really have the power to decide our course of action? We will never know. It can’t be proven either way.

How does this not get back to mere mortals somehow figuring out everything that there possibly is to know about the human brain. How – why? – it evolved out of lifeless/mindless matter. How precisely the chemical and neurological interactions intertwine into human autonomy. How the human condition itself somehow fits into why things exist at all.

How are people making choices to nature not as computers making choices are to us?

Yes, you can define free will “as simply the absence of obstacles”, but how do you then demonstrate that you freely opted to define it that way?

Back again to how the choices we make in the waking world are just somehow different from the “choices” we make in our dreams. How do we prove that they are different…other than intuitively, viscerally insisting that we “just know” that they are.

As for proving or disproving the existence of a “ghost in the machine”, you tell me.

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Compatibilism: Can free will and determinism co-exist?
Stanford philosophy professor takes the side of a beleaguered theory – that predetermination and free will are not mutually exclusive.
BY MAX MCCLURE at Stanford News

William James said it was “a quagmire of evasion.” Immanuel Kant called it “wretched subterfuge” and “petty word-jugglery.”

Compatibilism – the belief that free will is compatible with a world where every action is determined by the events preceding it – has never been an easy sell.

Click.

I’ve struggled for the longest time myself trying at least to imagine an argument that might be made that isn’t completely nonsensical. And the closest I’ve come is in suggesting that given determinism as “here and now” “I” “think” I understand it, compatibilists are themselves unable to not make it.

And then, as with all the rest of us, regarding anything at all, they are ever and always off the hook.

“I started noticing that I teach students about compatibilism every year,” said John Perry, professor emeritus of philosophy at Stanford. “But every year more of them become incompatibilists instead.”

Nature’s way? Or if we really do have something to say about it instead does it just become increasingly obvious that the more you think about compatibilism in a determined universe the less defensible it becomes. Let alone attempt to argue for moral responsibility when you could never have not done something.

Again, however, assuming I am in possession of the free will necessary to understand of my own volition the compatibilist’s position at all.

He’s looking to change that. Perry is a host of the nationally syndicated radio show Philosophy Talk and the author of an upcoming book in defense of the controversial theory.

More to the point – his? – how does he encompass a universe where he is never able to not attempt to explain something – anything – with whatever the explanation he was never able to not make is?

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Compatibilism: Can free will and determinism co-exist?
Stanford philosophy professor takes the side of a beleaguered theory – that predetermination and free will are not mutually exclusive.
BY MAX MCCLURE at Stanford News

Incompatibilists appeal to what may seem to be a commonsense argument: Determinism holds that every event is caused in a predictable way by events before it. Free will means that we make choices from a variety of options. If those choices are actually caused by some other event beyond our control, where does freedom come in?

How about from an omniscient God that, in a leap of faith, we just assume is able to reconcile His own all-knowing frame of mind with human autonomy.

Or, as most advocates of free will here do, you “think up” an argument that makes sense to you based on a set of assumptions that makes sense to you even though you have no capacity to actually demonstrate that what you do think up “in your head” is entirely in sync with how thought itself is explained empirically given a comprehensive understanding of the human brain as but more physical matter.

Or back again to a God who provides us all with a “soul” at…at the point of conception itself? Though again, as with free will, it basically comes down you insisting that you “just know” that he does.

It’s a question that is particularly concerning when we try to assign people moral responsibility for their actions. If the actions of individuals are not free, it becomes more difficult to say that a criminal, for instance, is guilty of anything other than being composed of atoms, his actions predetermined by the laws of physics and a chain of events triggered eons ago.

And, other than for those criminals able to convince themselves that – presto! – this explains everything, how perturbing for most is it to accept that? No, you “just know” in turn that you are not a criminal because that is a path you refuse to go down because you freely choose to be one of the “good guys”.

Although, sure, if you are desperate given circumstances beyond your control, you may have no other choice but to become a criminal.

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Compatibilism: Can free will and determinism co-exist?
Stanford philosophy professor takes the side of a beleaguered theory – that predetermination and free will are not mutually exclusive.
BY MAX MCCLURE at Stanford News

Drawing on the works of 18th-century British philosopher David Hume, Perry has set out two separate responses to the incompatibilists’ complaint. The key is to prove that “will not” is not the same as “cannot.”

Weak theory of laws

As Perry put it, “Hume thought the laws of nature were just generalizations that hadn’t been refuted.” In other words, Hume wouldn’t say a glass falls to the ground because some fundamental law requires it to. He’d point out that we only say gravity exists because we saw the glass fall.

And that’s basically where we still are today. There’s the law of gravity that appears to be applicable to all entities that have mass. But we don’t know how, going back to the existence of existence itself, it came to be what it is. And we certainly don’t know why it came to be what it is and not something else. Or why it even exists at all.

While the distinction may seem trivial, Hume’s view implies that the existence of gravity could be proved or disproved every time we drop something.

Or the distinction between determinism and compatibilism? Moral responsibility in a determined universe could be proved or disproved every time we choose a behavior? Only as with gravity there is still that gap between what we think we know about the human brain and all that there is to be known about it.

It also means that statements about future events are neither true nor false until they happen. “This glass will fall if I let go” is a sentence that will prove accurate or not only when I drop the glass. It’s an approach that means the laws of physics are potentially redefined with every moment of existence.

Or, here, Mary will be morally responsibility if she chooses to have that abortion tomorrow because, what, my brain is either compelled or not compelled to argue that? The laws of physics and the human brain potentially redefined for us too. Whatever that even actually means.

Perry calls Hume’s view the “weak theory of laws” and thinks it would satisfactorily resolve the incompatibilist question – by letting the “future events” tail wag the “universal physical laws” dog.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t agree with it. Hume didn’t really believe in causation, but I think you can see it happening around you.”

Fine. Would someone here be willing to explain how, given their own chosen behaviors from day to day, the past, present and future play themselves out in their own lives given the “weak theory of laws”.

The part where we go beyond theory.

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Compatibilism: Can free will and determinism co-exist?
Stanford philosophy professor takes the side of a beleaguered theory – that predetermination and free will are not mutually exclusive.
BY MAX MCCLURE at Stanford News

Weak theory of ability

Perry’s preferred position – also based on a suggestion from Hume – rests on a clarification of how the word “can” is used.

“If you want,” he said, “you can take that pen, turn it upside-down, jam it up your nose and bleed out all over the table.”

But I didn’t stick the pen in my nose – and an incompatibilist would say that, because of that, I can’t do it at all. If we rewind the universe and play through the scene again, I will continually refrain from injuring myself, in a way that suggests I have no choice in the matter.

This is sort of the nitty gritty of it all, isn’t it?

Right here, right now, I am typing these words. Then after I “submit” them in a post here, I can sit back and grapple with what I will do next. And the more I attempt to “think through” whether or not whatever I do choose to do I did or did not do of my own volition, I am never really able to feel anything along the lines of an absolute certainty. Or I feel absolutely certain about it but haven’t a clue as to how to actually demonstrate it to the world.

Is that just me, though? Do others feel this certainty that if they decide to make themselves a sandwich or to masturbate or to murder their much loathed next door neighbor, it was entirely their own option to choose this thing rather than another.

It’s sort of like looking at yourself in the mirror and trying to pin down I. Is it all embodied in the eyes? Is that where the “soul” resides too?

Perry, however, thinks that’s a strange way of using the word “can.” Here, the word should refer to the “repertoire of actions” that a person is physically able to perform.

“Assuming you’re a relatively normal individual, I’m virtually certain that you’re not going to do it. But there’s a difference between you and someone who can’t move their arms at all.”

Of course that goes without saying. Even if we do possess free will we can’t do things we are physically unable to do. Or, in regard to morality, we won’t do things we have been indoctrinated or taught ourselves are wrong to do. The bit about being hypnotized and refusing to do what is commanded if doing it is against your “moral code”. Our will and dasein.

In essence, Perry argues that having an ability “doesn’t mean as much as people think it does.” It simply means that a person could intentionally do something, even if her own desires prevent her from doing it.

“Why invent a notion of ‘can’ that includes what you ‘want’ to do?” he asked.

This approach, which he calls the “weak theory of abilities,” decouples “won’t” from “can’t” – and suggests that incompatibilism is “about the abuse of language by other philosophers.”

“I think there are certain properties that have been recognized by human beings and animals long before language,” he explained. “The idea of ‘can’ is one of them.” Animals are able to intuitively base their behaviors on what they can or can’t physically do, Perry said.

“And then philosophers came along and decided to define ‘can’ in terms of ‘possible,’” he said. “That just doesn’t follow.”

So, compelled or not, think through how this is all applicable to your own life. Things you are capable of doing physically but won’t. Things you aren’t capable of doing physically but want to. Things you are capable of doing and do. But than others insist that you ought not to have done them.

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

Why do you act the way that you do? If it is because you feel you ought to do something, you probably recognize there is little free will involved. You are being “coerced” by society or family, or influenced by concerns over what might happen if you don’t act in that way. On the other hand, if you do something because you want to, then perhaps you believe you are exercising free will. But is this true even when you trace the source of your desire? For example, you see a cream cake in the window of a shop, and the thought arises, “I would like some cake.” Did you freely choose to have that thought? Indeed, can you choose to have any thought? Do they not simply “arise”?

Now all you need do is make this applicable to, say, anything that you do at all? A living body and brain composed of approximately 37.2 trillion cells composed of molecules and atoms and subatomic particles all interacting among others chemically and neurologically in the staggering vastness of a very, very big world intertwined in the staggering mystery of a very, very small world trying to decide if it is trying to decide to do it of its own volition.

And not just the thought of wanting some cake, but, for some, the thought of stealing it because they can’t afford to pay for it.

And that’s before we get to the part where those approximately 37.2 trillion cells – containing around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms – are reconciled with…God?

Anyone who has thought deeply about spiritual matters knows that one of the fundamental problems is how to reconcile our day-to-day experience with claims about God or a nondual reality. The first level seems concrete and demonstrable while the second is speculative, to say the least.

To say the least? That barely comes close to the gap in our knowledge here. God creating those 37.2 trillion cells in precisely the manner in which they attempt to think through conundrums such as this. And try to imagine how many cells God consists of.

Still, any number of us here seem rather emphatic that their own assessment of all this is anything but merely speculative. They’ll even write a book laying it all out for us: amazon.com/Decline-Fall-All … B00ONA7JVQ

A book that, in lacking free will, we read in pursuit of our greater satisfaction. And if enough of us “do”, a book that will create a world someday in which no one would ever steal a cake because there would be no Evil.

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

One extreme view is that thoughts arise outside our conscious control, automatically triggering other thoughts until an action eventually results, all in a totally mechanistic way. This indicates a complete absence of free will and is what Western philosophy labels “universal determinism,” the belief that anything that happens does so necessarily as a result of the causes that precede it.

Of course there are no extreme views in a universe where all views unfold like clockwork. Instead there is only the mystery of matter – us – able to become aware of what it means for everything to unfold like clockwork. How nature actually brought that about without, say, a God around to bring nature itself about. And, of course, whatever was able to bring God about.

We may feel that we have to act in a certain way, that we are subconsciously coerced by family or society and are thus unable to act freely according to our desires. Nevertheless, the opposite view of “indeterminism,” wherein all that we do is effectively random, scarcely seems plausible and is equally incompatible with free will.

A random universe is just as incomprehensible to me as one in which compatibilism prevails. What exactly does it mean for the laws of matter as we know them in the either/or world to be “random”? What, they popped into existence out of the blue? And even though physics and chemistry and biology seem to follow very, very, very predictable directives from nature…we just never know when, again, out of the blue, that will all change?

Instead, randomness seems to revolve more around the is/ought world. But even then only for matter such as ourselves able to become aware of all the countless variables and factors in our lives that can come at us from all directions. We never really know what exactly is around that next corner. And we certainly can’t and/or don’t control much of it.

Unless, of course, as with compatibilism, I am simply not understanding an “indeterminist” universe…given, of course, that I do have the capacity to understand it of my own free will.

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

According to the traditional teaching of Advaita, our ability to choose is restricted by what has happened in the past. This is one element in the theory of karma. Edward de Bono’s metaphor of pouring hot water onto jelly explains how this element operates. The first time that we do this, the water will make faint channels in the surface of the jelly. The next time, there will be a tendency for the water to flow into the same channels. With repetition, over time the channels will become deep and it will be very difficult to get the water to flow anywhere else. This is how habitual modes of behavior come into being. We can employ willpower to overcome these habits and forge a new path, but it is not easy.

Karma…theoretically? But what is karma in a wholly determined universe but just one more manifestation of the only possible reality. Only with karma matter here is truly miraculous. It is matter compelled by physical laws to acquire the capacity to “think up” a theory of karma itself. Habits being just another manifestation of this as well.

And is “our ability to choose restricted by what has happened in the past” far, far more than just restricted? Is the past and the present and the future instead all of but one seamless reality?

Thus conclusions such as this…

“According to Advaita metaphysics, Brahman—the ultimate, transcendent and immanent God of the latter Vedas—appears as the world because of its creative energy (māyā). The world has no separate existence apart from Brahman.”

…are, what, entirely interchangeable with conclusions derived from the Christian Bible?

Both being merely inherent, necessary components of the only possible reality in the only possible world?

Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy. As though nature itself somehow just dreamed them up. Two more dominos going all the way back to the Big Bang.

And before that?

Karma is really just the law of cause and effect operating at the level of matter. The real Self is not affected and simply witnesses the actions, but, in our ignorance, we mistakenly think “we” are acting.

Okay, what “on Earth” does that mean? To you for example. How would you intertwine your own real Self in your interactions with the mindless and mindful matter all around you? Here for example?

Determinism. Talk about detachment!

How obscure and abstruse can this all get?

You tell me:

The Bhagavad Gita says: “Whether seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, or breathing, the knower of truth should think ‘I do nothing at all.’” This also means, of course, that I do not have free will, because “choosing” is itself an action. But we must remember that as soon as we speak of the “real Self,” we are adopting the absolute, or para-marthika, viewpoint.

Would could be clearer?

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

Most people believe that they are the body and mind and those are affected by our actions. A diabetic, eating sweets without careful consideration, may end up in a coma. Someone who argues with everybody and openly insults others is likely, eventually, to receive a punch in the nose. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that, as we act, so we become—a person doing good becomes good, one doing evil becomes evil. This is all from the empirical, or vyavaharika, viewpoint.

Yes, but, again, the issue here is not whether these things are reasonable to note, but whether we were able to note something other than what we did note because we thought about them some more and changed our minds of our own volition. It’s not that someone argues with others precipitating consequences but whether both the decision to argue and the consequences are or are not together as one in the only possible reality given the only possible world.

That’s what can’t be pinned down here. Or if it has been pinned down definitively, link us to the argument and the evidence backing it up such that you can demonstrate that in so doing you did so while in possession of free will.

That folks from the West might think about all of this differently from folks in the East doesn’t make that go away.

Or, rather, it doesn’t for me.

Traditional Advaita explains this using the concept of samskara. Whenever someone performs an action with the desire for a specific result (whether for oneself or another), a samskara is created for that person. These accumulate and determine the situations we will be presented with in the future. Our samskaras will influence the scope of our future actions and also the tendencies that we have to act in a particular way (vasana). Any samskara that is not exhausted in this life will carry forward to determine the nature of our birth in the next.

Same thing. How does one go about addressing this given Schopenhauer’s conjecture that while you can do what you desire, you cannot desire what you desire. Ever and always back to the profound mystery embedded in the reality of mindful matter emanating from brain matter either wholly in sync with the laws of matter or not. This going all the way back to what can only be the profoundest mystery of all: existence itself.

Why this existence and not no existence at all? Why this existence and not another? Then those who interject at this point and insist it all goes back to God.

I also suggest that given some measure of free will, how is the samskara – “mental impressions, recollections, or psychological imprints” – not just another manifestation of dasein.

Why does someone perform this action given this desire when others in the same situation perform different actions derived from different desires?

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

Science tends to support claims that we don’t have free will. The experiments of Benjamin Libet (reported in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1985) and Daniel Wegner (American Psychologist, 1999) demonstrate that what we feel to be a conscious decision to act actually takes place in the brain after the action has already been initiated as a result of mechanical cause-effect processes. It is as though, after the initial input X, there are two separate neurological paths. There is a subconscious process whereby X directly causes the action A. Quite separately, X gives rise to the conscious thought Y, which is followed by the decision to act D. Because D occurs before A, we imagine that D causes A, and thus have the illusion of free will.

X.Y.A.D.

Of course, all of us here no doubt have our own subjective understanding of how they become intertwined in our own head when something out in the world comes to our own attention and we choose, “choose”, or “choose” a reaction…a behavior.

Only I suspect that none of us are brain scientists. We don’t actually conduct our own experiments on brains using fMIR technology to probe the brain “in action”. So, we are forced to Google it. Or to read about it in scientific publications. Noting the experiments conducted and the conclusions reached by those who are neuroscientists.

google.com/search?q=neurosc … nt=gws-wiz

Dozens and dozens and dozens of links to go to.

Same with videos on youtube: google.com/search?q=neurosc … nt=gws-wiz

So, take some time and explore them. Get back to us on what the “scientific consensus” seems to be.

Practically speaking, this does not change anything (few people are even aware of these experiments).

And far, far, far fewer are actually conducting them. Which means that most of us here are approaching the free will conundrum “philosophically”. We attempt to “think up” – deduce – what seems reasonable to us based on [by and large] the part where, in our gut, we “just know” that we have free will. And when those like me note that we “just know” that we do in our dreams as well, the argument then switches to I “just know” that the wide-awake Self is different.

And, sure, no doubt about it, that may well be the case. But then back to the gap between the folks probing to explain this scientifically and us philosophers with our own less tangible “intellectual” leaps of faith.

Some of them of course are more…spiritual.

But the implications are quite significant and highlight the fundamental tenets of Advaita philosophy. We believe we are these bodies and minds, but we are not. They carry on quite happily without interference. They are simply waves, rising and falling on the ocean of consciousness. The problems arise when we identify with them. Although already free, perfect, complete, and unlimited, we then believe ourselves to be suffering individuals trapped in imperfect and mortal frames. From the absolute viewpoint of Advaita, there is no duality. There is therefore no “actual” creation: there are no people, no objects, and no action. Consequently, there are also no concepts, including that of free will.

Got that?

Okay, explain it to Mary in the throes of agony…pondering whether to abort or not to abort her unborn baby. Explain to her how she is making this choice but she is not.

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The Paradox of Free Will
Dennis Waite at the Yoga International website

Another helpful way to think about it is in terms of the extent that we are in the present and directing our attention. If we are miles away, we inevitably do things in a habitual mechanical manner. On the other hand, if we are alert, there is an opportunity for the discriminating faculty of the mind to choose between various possible courses of action, depending on which action we perceive as most appropriate.

Once again another “distinction” made in regard to what we do and what we are more or less conscious of doing. I still recall the extraordinary experience I once had driving from the apartment of I woman was falling head over heels in love with near the Pimlico Racetrack and my own apartment in Lauraville. For almost the whole trip I was thinking only about her…and yet another part of me was driving the car! When I finally clicked into the real world, I was simply dumbfounded. Or the times I would read library books to my young daughter. Books I’d read many, many, many times. At times I’d experience a part of my brain thinking about something altogether different while another part was reading to her.

Human consciousness is nothing if not mindboggling. Thus in a wholly determined world, these distinctions either are or are not no less just inherent manifestations of that truly mysterious “only possible reality”.

Certainly no less mysterious than “God’s will”.

Although this act of choosing may still be mechanical in the sense that it is determined by what we have learned in the past, the nature of the action is clearly quite different.

And why would that be? If matter is matter is matter than it’s laws are its laws are its laws. Non-living matter, living matter…what’s the difference? Clearly there is one. But if, in the end, all matter truly is mechanical how is that not like noting the difference between an engine in a moped and an engine in a jet?

In stillness, other factors, such as morality, can also influence the outcome. Discrimination, as opposed to habit, becomes the driving force. Therefore, the guidance of karma yoga is that we should be in the present, with a still mind, so that discrimination (viveka) may operate and make the correct “free” choice.

Exactly: “free” choice. Karma yoga being just another mind-boggling example of all that we still do not grasp about human consciousness itself. Given that we understand only that which is itself wholly in sync with the only possible reality.

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Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It
Andrea Lavazza at the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience website

Introduction—Free Will as a Problem (Not Only) for Science

The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life.

Here we go again. Making it all [or almost all] about how we define free will when we have no way of knowing for sure if any definition we give to it is or is not the only definition that we were ever able to give to it. I suspect we’ll all go to the grave living with this conundrum.

Free will can be the reason why someone is not sent to jail during a trial upon appealing to insanity: the subject was not “free” when they committed the crime, not because someone was pointing a gun to their head, but because a psychiatric illness prevented them from controlling their actions.

Sure, if your definition of free will accommodates that. Or, if your definition of determinism revolves around the [compelled] assumption that your brain is no less inherently/necessarily propelled by the laws of matter, insanity itself [like sanity] is just another fated/destined manifestation of the only possible reality in the only possible world.

Nothing is not a domino toppling over as it must onto the next domino in line going back to…the Big Bang?

Or cue God? A miracle?

According to a long-standing philosophical tradition, if someone was not “free” when they did something, they cannot be held responsible for their deed. And the freedom in question is both “social” freedom (linked to constraints imposed by our peers or by external factors), and the one indicated by the term free will.

Sigh…

Those pesky compatibilists insisting that even without free will we are still responsible for what we do. Free and “free” somehow being interchangeable “in their heads”.

Though [of course] no less off the hook than all the rest of us.

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Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It
Andrea Lavazza at the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience website

Free will can be defined by three conditions. The first one is the “ability to do otherwise.” This is an intuitive concept: to be free, one has to have at least two alternatives or courses of action between which to choose. If one has an involuntary spasm of the mouth, for example, one is not in the position to choose whether to twist one’s mouth or not.

Okay, start here. But that doesn’t mean that any conditions we do come up with we unequivocally had the capacity to opt for another place to start instead. From my frame of mind there is just no way of getting around the fact that we still have no definitive understanding of how the human brain functions here. And until we do we will all continue to exchange conclusions that we “just know” are true instead. Even more problematic in that few of us here are actually involved in exploring the human brain experimentally using the scientific method. Instead, as philosophers, many here start with their own definitions and deductions and insist that all others must start with the same.

The second condition is the “control over one’s choices.” The person who acts must be the same who decides what to do. To be granted free will, one must be the author of one’s choices, without the interference of people and of mechanisms outside of one’s reach. This is what we call agency, that is, being and feeling like the “owner” of one’s decisions and actions.

Of course, it gets trickly here when you attempt to pin down if your brain itself does in fact allow you to have this control…or creates only the illusion of control given that the matter that is the brain is no less wholly in sync with those mysterious laws of nature. God works in mysterious ways, right? So why not nature in turn?

I merely muddy the waters all the more in suggesting that, even given human brain matter “somehow” resulting in free will, our choices and actions out in the is/ought world are still no less profoundly problematic leaps of faith rooted subjectively and existentially in dasein.

The third condition is the “responsiveness to reasons”: a decision can’t be free if it is the effect of a random choice, but it must be rationally motivated. If I roll a [die] to decide whom to marry, my choice cannot be said to be free, even though I will freely choose to say “I do”. On the contrary, if I choose to marry a specific person for their ideas and my deep love for them, then my decision will be free.

Come on, it still comes back to whether you freely chose to roll the die in order to let “fate” decide. And then the part where our reaction to their ideas and our deep love for them is in turn merely the illusion of freedom built into human psychology…no less a manifestation of the only possible reality in the only possible world.

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Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It
Andrea Lavazza at the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience website

Thus defined [see post above], free will is a kind of freedom that we are willing to attribute to all human beings as a default condition. Of course there are exceptions: people suffering from mental illness and people under psychotropic substances.

Of course, this gets tricky because in a wholly determined universe as some understand it, mental health and mental illness are themselves interchangeable. Brains are brains are brains. And if they act in ways that we construe to be examples of mental illness they are construed that way by us only because we were never able to not construe them in that manner. If someone believes that they are Napoleon their beliefs are actually on par with Napoleon believing it himself.

That’s how surreal it gets once you go all the way out on the limb here. Meanwhile going out there itself may well be no less a manifestation of the only possible reality.

Nevertheless, the attribution of free will as a general trend does not imply that all decisions are always taken in full freedom, as outlined by the three conditions illustrated above: “We often act on impulse, against our interests, without being fully aware of what we are doing. But this does not imply that we are not potentially able to act freely. Ethics and law have incorporated these notions, adopting the belief that usually people are free to act or not to act in a certain way and that, as a result, they are responsible for what they do, with the exceptions mentioned above”

Of course, when the discussion gets around to this, at times, considerably more opaque “reality”, I shift gears from the either/or to the is/ought world. Even granting some measure of autonomy, there does not appear to be an objective reality that we can fall back on in order to establish what free men and women ought to think and feel and say and do. There we are all on our own as individuals. In other words, re dasein, with all of the many, many different and conflicting assumptions we make about right and wrong and good and evil.

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Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It
Andrea Lavazza at the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience website

Throughout the centuries, despite its conceptual progress, philosophy hasn’t been able to solve this dilemma. As a result, today there are different irreconcilable positions about human free will: determinism is not absolute and free will exists; free will does not exist for a number of reasons, first of all (but not only) determinism; free will can exist even if determinism is true.

Exactly my point! If there really was a definitive argument able to solve this profound conundrum, wouldn’t it be well accepted by now? Let alone one derived from an accumulation of experiential and/or experimental evidence.

On the other hand, come on, even if we all did agree on one and only one argument how exactly would we go about determining for certain that this in and of itself was not but the only possible reality in the only possible world?

Suppose nature itself can play God?

A little more than 30 years ago, neuroscience and empirical psychology came into play. Although biological processes cannot be considered strictly deterministic on the observable level of brain functioning (nerve signal transmission), new methods of investigation of the brain, more and more precise, have established that the cerebral base is a necessary condition of behavior and even of mental phenomena. On the basis of these acquisitions, neuroscience has begun to provide experimental contributions to the debate on free will.

Strictly deterministic. And how to pin that down even among brain scientists themselves. What definitively does it mean to speak of “the cerebral base is a necessary condition of behavior and even of mental phenomena”. Is the mental phenomena I am using now to point this out also included in the cerebral base? Might not the experimental contributions be as well?

Or how about the “soul”…God’s own contribution?

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An Examination of Free Will and Buddhism
Barbara O’Brien

The term “free will” signifies the belief that rational people have the capacity to make their own life choices. That may not sound terribly controversial, but, in fact, the nature of free will, how it is exercised, and whether it exists at all, have been argued about fiercely in western philosophy and religion for centuries.

Exactly.

And what does this tell us? That if, after centuries, some of the greatest minds around could not come up with the definitive argument for or against free will, it’s either because there is no free will and these minds came up with only that which they were never able not to come up with or there is free will and this is a very, very, very tough nut to crack. Both scientifically and philosophically.

And applied to Buddhism, “free will” has an additional hurdle – if there’s no self, who is it that wills?

That again. Those who claim that with Buddhism there is no self. As though Buddhists, just like all the rest of us, don’t know perfectly well that in their interactions with others in the either/or world, of course there is a reasonably objective Me.

Am I [and not you] typing these words in my own here and now? Are you [and not me] reading them in your own here and now. Unless of course at the very moment you read them I go back and read them again myself. But here whether someone is a Buddhist or not, the laws of matter seemingly don’t change.

No, again, for me, the far more problematic quandary revolves around “I” in the is/ought world. Are we free to opt among alternative points of views and behaviors? Because if we are not what does it really mean to speak of moral responsibility.

Other than as we were never able not to.

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An Examination of Free Will and Buddhism
Barbara O’Brien

No Determinism, No Indeterminism, No Self

The question is, where does Buddhism stand on the question of free will? And the short answer is, it doesn’t, exactly. But neither does it propose that we have nothing to say about the course of our lives.

No, the question [as always] is how do Buddhists demonstrate [even to themselves] that their stand on the question of free will is in fact a stand that they opted for of their own volition or “opted” for given the illusion of human volition. Or however the compatibilists encompass it “opting” to do things.

In an article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Author and Buddhist practitioner B. Alan Wallace said that the Buddha rejected both the indeterministic and deterministic theories of his day. Our lives are deeply conditioned by cause and effect, or karma, refuting indeterminism. And we are personally responsible for our lives and actions, refuting determinism.

Refuting it? Right. Like the Buddha wasn’t just as all the rest of us here are. What if our lives were not “deeply conditioned” by cause and effect but wholly intertwined in it going back to however the laws of matter came into existence in the first place.

And he certainly wouldn’t be the first [nor the last] to “think up” the conclusion that we are personally responsible for our lives. Why? Because “somehow”, even though our lives are deeply conditioned by cause and effect, the human brain is considerably less conditioned than rocks and oceans and the atmosphere.

Then [of course] this part:

[quote]
But the Buddha also rejected the idea that there is an independent, autonomous self either apart from or within the skandhas. Wallace wrote:

“Thus, the sense that each of us is an autonomous, non-physical subject who exercises ultimate control over the body and mind without being influenced by prior physical or psychological conditions is an illusion.”

That pretty much refutes the western notion of free will.

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An Examination of Free Will and Buddhism
Barbara O’Brien

The western “free will” perspective is that we humans have free, rational minds with which to make decisions. The Buddha taught that most of us are not free at all but are being perpetually jerked around – by attractions and aversions; by our conditioned, conceptual thinking; and most of all by karma. But through the practice of the Eightfold Path, we may be freed of our backward thinking and be liberated from karmic effects.

Think of it like this: The Buddha’s rendition of dasein. Only he “thinks up” a spiritual cure.

Anyone here practice the Eightfold Path? Okay, let’s bring that down to Earth in regard to determinism and free will and Mary agonizing over an unwanted pregnancy. Or a context of your own choosing.

But this doesn’t settle the basic question – if there is no self, who is it that wills? Who is it that is personally responsible? This is not easily answered and may be the sort of doubt that requires enlightenment itself to clarify.

Any Buddhists here who deem themselves enlightened? Okay, let’s bring your own clarification down to Earth. In particular in regard to the distinction I make between the clarity that prevails in the is/ought world and the confounding ambiguities that abound in the world of conflicting value judgments.

Wallace’s answer is that although we may be empty of an autonomous self, we function in the phenomenal world as autonomous beings. And as long as that is so, we are responsible for what we do.

Got that? Then please explain it me. How, given examples like a woman agonizing over an unwanted pregnancy, are we to make sense of this?

We are empty of an autonomous self in a world that is not phenomenal? But then “somehow” in the phenomenal world – presto! – we become responsible for what we do.

Is this a Buddhist thing such that for those of us who remain unenlightened are simply unable to figure it out?

Again, the whole thing seems profoundly “mystical” to me. Like something some are able to think themselves into believing because it soothes the soul not to think of the human condition as…I do?