thoughts on determinism

[iambiguous]

Did John Calvin Believe in Free Will?
MATTHEW BARRETT at the TGC website

The Verdict Is In

So did Calvin believe in free will? That all depends on the meaning. If by free will one means that the unbeliever is in no way necessitated by sin, but has it in his power to either do good or evil toward God, then the answer is no. But if one means that the unbeliever is in total bondage to sin, sinning willfully yet under necessity (not coercion), making him utterly dependent upon God’s irresistible grace to liberate him, then Calvin is your man.

Again, reflect on this particular intellectual/spiritual contraption and tell us specifically in terms of your own behaviors why you believe you either do or do not have free will in relationship to sin and to God. How does Original Sin play out in your own interactions with others…interactions in which conflicts arise as a result of differing moral convictions.

And how [given free will] using the tools of philosophy did you yourself arrive at the most logically and epistemologically sound meaning of free will. Again, given this:

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was “somehow” able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter “somehow” became living matter “somehow” became conscious matter “somehow” became self-conscious matter.

All that to say, next time you are eavesdropping on an enticing theological conversation you can add some insight into the mumbo jumbo, and, like a good reformer, take your listeners back to the source himself.

Exactly! Let’s scrap the “worlds of words” here and zero in precisely on your own behaviors. Connect the dots between what you think is true here and how that does impact on the behaviors you choose. And how that impacts on the fate of “I” – yours – on the other side of the grave.

[iambiguous]

Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.

The final and strongest position undermining human freedom could be termed ‘cosmic determinism’. The argument starts with the premises that every physical effect must have a physical cause, and that we humans, being physical, are subject to this rule. We cannot be exempted from the chains of cause and effect in the material world. Therefore, everything we do or think is the result of prior physical causes, themselves the effects of still earlier causes back to the beginning of time.

Two words:

1] human
2] brain

Then “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”.

How to even begin to explain the grand canyon that clearly exists between matter in a rock and matter in the human brain. And we are all stuck here, of course. It’s just that some will admit it and others won’t. Some will actually go on and on and on pontificating about free will, determinism and compatibilism as though what they believe about them in their own brain really is as indisputable as 1 + 1 = 2.

This is a deeply materialistic form of determinism, and it is perhaps the form which has traditionally most troubled philosophy. I happen to believe that Nietzsche subscribes to this last and strongest form. Despite his distaste for the vulgar ‘mechanistic’ vision of the cosmos that it entails and his criticisms of the very notions of cause and effect, he is ultimately a cosmic determinist.

Okay, imagine you’re Nietzsche. Imagine you do believe in this “deeply materialistic form of determinism”. There you are penning your aphorisms about God and the Uberman. And all the while you’re thinking, “I could never have not written what I am now writing. Absolutely everything that I think, feel, say and do, I think, feel, say and do in the only possible reality in the only possible world.”

But then it dawns on you: “Now, how do I actually demonstrate this?”

And how is it any different for us?

Which brings me to what I call the “free will determinists” here. They argue that we have no free will. Yet still insist that those who don’t agree with their own understanding of it are wrong. As wrong as those who do embrace free will would put it.

[iambiguous]

Sam Ruhmkorff
Hard Determinism

Hard determinists think that all human actions are causally determined by the laws of nature and initial conditions. At any moment, the state of your brain and your environment together with the principles that govern the behavior of matter necessitate the way that you will act.

Of course, the first thing that I would ask him is this: “Does hard determinism encompass the very point that you are making here about hard determinism?”

The truly, truly surreal assumption that it makes absolutely no difference at all what you say about free will and determinism because you were never able to say anything other than what you necessarily must say.

Then the part where there is really no way in which to confirm this because it is the human brain itself that would be tasked with doing so. We’re stuck in “the gap”…seemingly with no exit. We simply cannot provide ourselves with a definitive explanation for why the human brain is even around at all. And we don’t even know if the laws of matter are themselves behind the invention of God as the explanation.

In addition, hard determinists think that the causal determinism of all human actions means that no human actions are free. Your computer is a complicated machine, and you don’t think it’s free. You are much more complicated, but you too are a machine, and you lack freedom as well.

But then back [here] to those “free will determinists”. They insist over and again that human beings lack free will. But then in post after post after post…I challenge you to differentiate them from the libertarians among us. Or the compatibilists who claim that determinism can even be reconciled with moral responsibility. Only it’s all “explained” in a world of words that is never actually taken out of their heads and, in fact, demonstrated…scientifically? experientially? phenomenologically? experimentally? Instead, follow their “definitional logic” as, around and around and around, it goes.

I want to share with you two of my favorite quotes by hard determinists.

David Hume: “When [a prisoner] tries to escape, he chooses to work on the hardness of stone and iron rather than the inflexible nature of the jailer.”

Baron von Holbach: “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to inscribe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant.”

You tell me. Freely or not.

[iambiguous]

Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.

Freedom is Dead and We Have Killed It

Let us assume that one of the following two situations obtains at some not-too-distant point in the future: either that definitive scientific proof is provided of the unreality of human choice or that although conclusive proof of this unreality is not yet attained, the balance of evidence suggests it.

What this points to for some however is just how surreal all of this is. Suppose the opposite occurs. One day it is announced that the scientific community is all in agreement that this…

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was “somehow” able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter “somehow” became living matter “somehow” became conscious matter “somehow” became self-conscious matter.

…has been cracked. The human species has acquired some measure of autonomy. On the other hand, that, in and of itself, might just be but another inherent manifestation of a wholly determined universe…the only possible reality.

But how to wrap our heads around human brains discovering that which human brains could never have not discovered: that we really are just nature’s dominoes toppling over onto each other on cue.

In either scenario, the ideas of human freedom and moral responsibility must be renounced by any honest and thoughtful individual who weighs the evidence.

Again: weighs the evidence only as it ever could have been weighed because human honesty and thoughtfulness themselves are no less psychological illusions.

Same with this…

Imagine next that this becomes the conventional wisdom, spreading irresistibly until the idea has taken hold of humanity, compelling a new and unprecedented reckoning with our nature.

Again, what am I missing? It’s as though the author here is suggesting a wholly determined “human condition” but is still asking us to imagine things just as a libertarian might? The whole point is that the “reckoning” is compelled.

So, sure, I’m thinking, “it must be me…I’m just not getting his point”. When his point [to me] seems to be that I was never able to freely opt to get it.

Then just more of the same…

Only in imagining this has one begun to contemplate the crisis which Nietzsche predicts, and with which he envisages his name being associated. A world in which deterministic ideas have become moral principles, really believed in and lived by the vast majority of humankind, defines the dimensions of the Nietzschean crisis.

A “crisis” that could never have been otherwise? How to encompass human brains discussing a crisis when the brains themselves could never have not discussed it other than as they are compelled to by the immutable laws of matter. Then me necessarily typing these words and you necessarily reading them.

Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself.

Same thing. A conviction that could have not been a conviction. Concepts that could never have been otherwise. Responsibility that is no less a psychological illusion “somehow” built into the human brain when matter acquired life here on planet Earth. Reasons that are neither good nor bad when all reasons are only as they must be.

Ultimate destruction only because there was never the possibility of no destruction. Just as ultimately Mary aborts Jane because there could never be a reality where she didn’t.

What then is to be done if humankind is to survive passing into this Nietzschean era where belief in the freedom of the will has been renounced?

What then is to be done?!!! Exactly as the libertarian would put it, right?

[iambiguous]

Sam Ruhmkorff
Hard Determinism

First, [hard determinism] does not make our choices meaningless. Hard determinists hold that what you do for the rest of your life is determined. But it is determined in part by the way you make choices.

If you sit on the couch and bemoan your fate as a line-follower, your life-line will not be very dynamic. If you try to make your life go well, you have a chance at a much more enjoyable fate.

This is always the part where [to me] the hard determinist reconfigures into the free will advocate. The lives that we lived are determined. But “somehow” that doesn’t include the way we make choices.

Huh?

The choices themselves can only be as they must be, but: “how” we make them allows for…for what exactly?

If you sit of the couch and bemoan your life [for whatever “reason”], you were never able not to. If you “try” to make your life better, you were still never able not to.

Again, Mary has an abortion. Meaning that, in a wholly determined world she was never free to opt not to. But the way she makes the choice to abort is, well, sort of free?

Explain that to me, Mr. Compatibilist. Given that – click – I am always willing to concede that I am the one misunderstanding all of this.

According to hard determinism, Jay-Z is just as determined in his actions as someone sitting on their couch in existential crisis. But, I’m assuming, it’s better to be Jay-Z. So hard determinism implies that you should still try whatever it is you think will make your life go best.

Back I go…

What we assume is in turn what we were never able not to assume. So, given my entirely compelled understanding of hard determinism, a better or worse life is inherently interchangeable. Your life might “seem” better or worse but it was never able to not seem that way. Why? Because you were never able not to behave as you did in order to make it “seem” one or the other. It’s always your brain calling all the shots.

Just like in your dreams.

[iambiguous]

Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.

The Future of Philosophy

There is no doubt that the renunciation of the idea of freedom would represent an irreversible debasement of humanity as traditionally understood, inducing a kind of vertigo in our species. That such a renunciation might be inevitable, and belief in freedom irrecoverable, is however not at all difficult to imagine. How might a person orient themselves in this vertiginous climate?

Again, however, how far is he going with Nietzsche and determinism?

To wit…

"Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself."

Think this through as I do…

If we cannot be held accountable for our actions, and our actions are a result of what we think and feel, then how is the task confronting humanity not the same thing? We carry out the task but we are not accountable – responsible – for doing that either. And did the author and Nietzsche bring determinism all the way back to themselves? The author wrote this article and Nietzsche wrote those aphorisms only because they were never able not to? And we are reading them because we were never able not to?

The quandary at the heart of it all?

It must first be said that, despair-inducing though this future scenario might seem, it is likely also, after some period of adjustment, to be a spur to liberation – from responsibility, from hierarchy, and from fear.

Yeah, it can always work both ways. Despair because we must. But because we must despair it comes back to the illusion of despair. The matter that is my brain compels me to despair. But it’s all embedded in the mystery of my mind itself. I despair in my dreams. It’s all a chemical and a neurological despair. I’m sound asleep, not really feeling despair at all as I might in the waking world. But what of that despair in the waking world? Is that too all just the brain doing its thing in a wholly, totally inevitable world?

That’s the part I can never untangle in my head. That’s the part I can never be absolutely certain is a bona fide option for me.

Unafraid, more willing to wager the self on an action, in this future many human beings will come by default into possession of those Nietzschean virtues of daring and honesty that mark them as ascending types. That no attitude or action will be accounted their own choice, or worthy of praise or merit, will only sharpen the sense of fearlessness and commitment.

Again, the part where the author imagines this somehow in sync with a world “where human beings cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions”…a world where “no longer would blame or merit be possible.”

Okay, an individual becomes one of the Übermensch…or an individual becomes one of the Last Men. So what? He can no longer embrace the merit of one or accept the blame for the other because merit and blame themselves are but inherent manifestations of the only possible world.

[iambiguous]

Sam Ruhmkorff
Hard Determinism

…hard determinism is consistent with blame, praise, and the criminal justice system. Even though people who do good or bad things couldn’t have done something differently, what they do is determined in part by what they perceive as incentives. If we want people to act in a certain way, we have a reason to create an incentive structure that will determine them to act in the ways that we want. We should reinforce behavior that we like and punish behavior that we don’t.

Hard determinism? Or, rather, free will determinism?

Or, okay, sure, it’s actually my own inability to wrap my head around compatibilism.

As though what people perceive as incentives they were free to opt not to perceive as incentives. After all, if “people who do good or bad things couldn’t have done something differently” than how do they manage to perceive things…other than as they must in turn? Aren’t our perceptions also compelled by brains wholly in sync with the laws of matter? We do what we do because of what we first perceive and then think about. But how are the reasons we come up with “to create an incentive structure that will determine [us] to act in the ways that we want” not embedded in Schopenhauer’s conjectures about wanting things being wholly in sync with wanting what we want. The brain sets up all of the dominoes such that everything that we think and feel and say and do topple over on cue. What we sense, what we perceive, what we reason, what we do.

A general theme behind these two observations is that even if we aren’t free, we still want things to be a certain way. So we have a reason to work towards things happening the way we want them, both by making decisions ourselves that will lead to what we want, and by praising and blaming others so that they are more likely to do what we want.

And around and around the free will determinists go. We’re not free but “somehow” when we want things we are. We’re not free but “somehow” we “work towards things happening the way we want them”. We’re not free but “somehow” when we make decisions and praise and blame others we are.

[iambiguous]

Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.

Under these conditions [above], the appropriate conception of life would be that of a game: a grand, ongoing, purposeless and all-encompassing piece of play, each person with no more agency than a cast die or caroming billiard ball. The cosmos as a game was a metaphor of which Nietzsche himself was fond. Seeing the cosmos as a game is precisely the kind of god’s-eye view appropriate to the philosopher, who looks down on creation from a standpoint beyond good and evil.

Yeah, that is basically the frame of mind that any number the sociopaths embody in their own day to day interactions with others. The “what’s in it for me?” game in which others are just a means to that end. And it’s beyond good and evil precisely because “in the absence of God all things are permitted.” Providing, of course, you don’t get caught. But that’s human justice. You might get tossed in jail. God and religion are then embraced in order to raise the stakes. Only even the sociopaths are as well wholly in sync with the only possible reality?

On the other hand, Nietzsche is often connected [philosophically or otherwise] to the Overman mentality. And here one chooses one’s behaviors with considerably more deliberation…sophistication. You are on the top and not the bottom because you deserve to be. You triumph because you are among the “masters of the universe”. It may be a game, but you are entitled to make up [and then enforce] the rules.

But then back to the part where Nietzsche is said to be…a determinist?

The idea, along with the thought that not truth but illusion sustains life, is prominent in Nietzsche’s early, unpublished writings from the 1870s (for example in the essay ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’ and the abandoned Philosophenbuch). Both sentiments also recur prominently in Nietzsche’s mature work, Beyond Good and Evil, which he calls ‘A prelude to a philosophy of the future’.

Or is this just one more attempt to make Nietzsche a compatibilist? The illusion of free will sustains life. But somehow Nietzsche’s own philosophy – his own thinking – is still more insightful than those who refuse to share it. How then is that explained?

It is less of a surprise than one might think that in ruminating on the philosopher’s possible role in the future freedom-free world, Nietzsche, the great anti-Christian, holds in high regard the most genuinely religious nature – the committed mythmaking instinct of the religious leader or founder. It is even less surprising that, against the traditional picture, the future philosopher is no slave to or even servant of truth, and is instead closer to the artist.

The philosopher. The artist. The atheist. The myth-making religionist. And all while interacting with others in a “freedom-free world”.

Or is this all really about word games? Making words mean what you want them to mean [in your head] so that they all fit snuggly into your own “thought up” “objective” assessment of both Nietzsche and the human condition itself? Past, present and future?

Then for all practical purposes whatever this means:

The future philosopher must move in a world where the deadliest knowledge has been disseminated and accepted; he is no longer the repository of dangerous or unendurable wisdom he traditionally was. He will be, says Nietzsche, a tempter and experimenter among humankind – and how indeed could he be otherwise, when the game is all?

The “no free will” game. He’ll move in the world…he’ll be a tempter and experimenter. He’ll do all of this while wholly in sync with the laws of matter…but not really. Only some of us are still rather confused regarding how exactly this “not really” works.

[iambiguous]

Defending Compatibilism
Bruce R. Reichenbach
at the Science, Religion and Culture website
[the focus here being on free will given an omniscient God]

It is a truism that where one starts from and the direction one goes determines where one ends up. This is no less true in philosophy than elsewhere, and certainly no less true in matters dealing with the relationship between God’s foreknowledge and human free actions.

Perhaps. But in regard to God where most of the faithful start is with the assumption that there is one. And that it is their God. And that their God is omniscient. Whereas while of course some philosophers start with the assumption that God installed an autonomous soul in them and that in living a righteous life they will end up in one or another rendition of Heaven, others do not.

In what follows I will argue that the incompatibilist view that [John Martin] Fischer and others stalwartly defend results from the particular starting point they choose, and that if one adopts a different starting point about divine knowledge the logical incompatibility they envision and philosophically anguish over evaporates.

Of course, that’s always my own point as well. Only, again, with God we are talking about a “starting point” pertaining to an entity that is alleged to exist, that is alleged to be omniscient, but that, to the best of my knowledge, has never actually been demonstrated to exist at all. Omniscient or otherwise. So, obviously, your starting point here can simply be something that you think up or others have thought up for you that “in your head” you believe. Anguish subsumed in more or less blind faith.

I will also argue that the path Fischer and others tread has critical ambiguities that lead to conclusions that can be avoided if one clarifies the critical ambiguities. The result will be that choosing a proper starting point and clarifying the ambiguities will show that God’s foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom.

We’ll see.

But what does not change is that the author’s conclusions are still predicated on premises that he may or may not be able to demonstrate to be true regarding that which he construes to be God “in his head”.

[iambiguous]

Here is an interesting article about the [at times] complex, problematic relationship between the human brain and the human mind. A mind that, among our own species, is able to generate a self-conscious “I” that thinks, feels and behaves in any number of different ways.

washingtonpost.com/wellness … -symptoms/

By Richard Sima, Kelyn Soong, Caitlin Gilbert and Marlene Cimons in the Washington Post

[b]Actor Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a rare type of dementia, his family announced Thursday. The disease, also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration, has no treatment or cure.

Willis’s family said in March that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a communication disorder, and was retiring. In their announcement Thursday, Willis’s family said his “condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia.”

“While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” said their statement posted on the website for the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration. “FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone.”[/b]

…

[b]Symptoms can vary and depend on where the abnormal proteins begin to accumulate — in the frontal or temporal lobe. It can take a few years for a patient to be diagnosed with FTD since the symptoms are varied and also may be seen in people with other diseases, the physicians said.

A patient with frontal lobe-focused abnormality would show behavioral issues of impulsivity and disinhibition. That’s called behavioral variant activity, which is the more common subvariant of FTD.

“For example, a polite person may become rude and a kind person may become self-centered,” said Andrew Budson, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology, associate chief of staff for education, and director of the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System. “There may also be a lack of self-control that sometimes causes overeating of foods, such as an entire jar of mayonnaise, which one of my patients ate.”

Social disinhibition is one symptom, said Ryan Darby, assistant professor of neurology and director of the Frontotemporal Dementia Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “They may even commit crimes because of their disinhibition and socially inappropriate behaviors,” he said. “They lose empathy and compassion toward others.”[/b]

I often come back to “I” in dreams. We think, feel, say and do things in dreams such that while dreaming it is as though we are not dreaming at all. Instead, we wake up often amazed that the “reality” we had just “experienced” – as we might have experienced in the waking world – was totally manufactured chemically and neurologically by our brains.

But for Bruce Willis and others with this affliction it is the waking world brain as well that can, through this condition, compel them to behave in ways that they never would have freely chosen themselves had they not been stricken. Assuming of course that we do live in a free will universe.

And, as noted, this can happen to any of us. The autonomous self is taken over more and more by a brain that is simply doing it’s thing biologically.

Some determinists merely suggest that everything that we think we are doing of our own volition is just a psychological illusion that “somehow” evolved along with consciousness once biological life itself “somehow” happened.

[iambiguous]

Slavoj Zizek and the Case for Compatibilism
Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis

Compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett have an elegant solution to the incompatibilists’ complaints about determinism: when incompatibilists complain that our freedom cannot be combined with the fact that all our acts are part of the great chain of natural determinism, they secretly make an unwarranted ontological assumption: first, they assume that we (the Self, the free agent) somehow stand outside reality, then they go on to complain about how they feel oppressed by the notion that reality in its determinism controls them totally.

“Incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism. Incompatibilists divide into libertarianians, who deny that determinism is true and hard determinists who deny that we have free will.” PhilPapershttps://philpapers.org

The “thesis”. Of course.

What on earth does it mean to “secretly make an unwarranted ontological assumption” when all of the assumptions that you do make you make only because you were never able not to?

We become entangled here because once you assume that everything we think, feel, say and do, we think, feel, say and do because we were never able not to think, feel, say and do them, nothing gets excluded. Nothing stands outside the entirely necessary reality embedded in the laws of matter. You may feel oppressed by this, but you were never able to freely opt not to.

But: the fact that matter evolved into human brains able to actually bring this up is easily one of the most profound mysteries of all pertaining to existence itself.

As though Dennett is himself the exception here?

This is what is wrong with the notion of us being “imprisoned” by the chains of natural determinism: we thereby obfuscate the fact that we are part of reality, that the (possible, local) conflict between our “free” striving and the external reality that resists it is a conflict inherent in reality itself.

For the hardcore determinists, how can anything at all be wrong if it was never able to be anything other than what it must be? Facts may be obfuscated by some but only because they were never able not to obfuscate them. One speaks of striving “freely” because the relationship between “I” and the world around me is but an inherent manifestation of nature itself.

It’s just that no other matter that we are familiar with is even close to being as peculiar as brain matter. And most exasperating of all is that it is brain matter itself that has to explain it. Which explains why so many turn to God. The ultimate source for explaining…everything.

That is to say, there is nothing “oppressive” or “constraining” about the fact that our innermost strivings are (pre)determined: when we feel thwarted in our freedom by the pressure of external reality, there must be something in us, some desire or striving, which is thus thwarted, but where do such strivings come from if not this same reality?

Exactly. In a free will world we may not be able to accomplish a task or reach a goal because there are things in the external world thwarting us. We can feel oppressed and constrained by this. But in a wholly determined world 1] the obstacles were never not going to be there and 2] our feelings of “oppression” and “constraint” when confronting them are right on cue.

But [of course] all of this is explored up in the intellectual clouds:

Our “free will” does not in some mysterious way “disturb the natural course of things,” it is part and parcel of this course. For us to be “truly” and “radically” free would entail that there be no positive content involved in our free act—if we want nothing “external” and particular or given to determine our behavior, then “this would involve being free of every part of ourselves.”

Got that?

Okay, explain it to Mary above.

When a determinist claims that our free choice is “determined,” this does not mean that our free will is somehow constrained, that we are forced to act against our will—what is “determined” is the very thing that we want to do “freely,” that is, without being thwarted by external obstacles.

But what of those determinists who claim that our “free will” is but a psychological illusion emanating from a brain that compels us to think, feel, speak and act ever and always in accordance with the laws of matter. There is no internal and external reality. There is only the one ontological reality of what can ever only be.

Whatever “for all practical purposes” that means.

[iambiguous]

Defending Compatibilism
Bruce R. Reichenbach
at the Science, Religion and Culture website
[the focus here being on free will given an omniscient God]

Fischer’s Incompatibilist Argument

We begin with Fischer’s version of the conditional argument for incompatibility between God’s knowledge and human freedom.

1. God exists and is essentially omniscient.
   Omniscience might be characterized in two ways. One is that God knows all the facts that can be known (where facts are states of affairs that were, are, or will be the case). This is a claim about what God knows, not how he knows it.

Does it really matter how God became omniscient if in fact He is omniscient? We may as well ask how God came to exist at all. So, for me, it’s not how an omniscient God knew that I would be typing these words but how I can be typing them of my own volition if what I do is to be squared with an omniscient God.

The other is that God knows all true propositions that can be known, leaving open how God knows them. Since facts can be expressed by tensed propositions, for our purposes we will treat for the time being the two as equivalent, though the significance of this distinction is important, for some deny that propositional formulation of knowledge is appropriate to God.

And there you go. No God to the best of my own not omniscient knowledge, has even been demonstrated to exist. So we mere mortals with our mere mortal limitations regarding knowledge of this sort are tasked with suggesting “propositions” about the existential relationship between our behaviors down here and an alleged omniscient God up there.

See the problem?

It’s just the theological rendition of the fact that neither scientists nor philosophers know how or why mindless matter evolved in living matter evolved into us in a No God world.

[iambiguous]

Slavoj Zizek and the Case for Compatibilism
Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis

A couple weeks ago, I wrote something here debunking Sam Harris’s arguments against free will. I put my own (compatibilist) cards on the table, but my overall point was a narrow one—that Harris’s arguments don’t touch the most plausible compatibilist or incompatibilist accounts of free will.

With those like Sam Harris, I would ask the same thing: how far do they take determinism? Does it encompass the fact that even their own beliefs…their books, their articles, their YouTube videos, etc… could only have been as they were? And that those who react either for or against their own points of view are equally included in the assumption that all human brains compel all human beings to think, feel, say and do things that are fated, destined. How do they make the distinction between fated, destined and determined?

When that essay came out, a reliably well-read informant—Matthew Rice, to give the man his due shout-out—sent me the compatibilism quote from Less Than Nothing [the excerpt above]. The more I’ve thought about that passage since then, the more it seems to me that there’s an important insight there that can help us make sense of one of the most frustrating things about the free will debate—that compatibilism (a) follows in a straightforward way from some widely and deeply held intuitions about control and responsibility, but (b) seems when looked at from a different angle to be not only false but obviously false and even absurd.

Of course, most here know what I construe to be the most frustrating thing about the free will debate. The fact that the brains debating it still have no full understanding of how or why living, biological matter came to acquire consciousness evolving eventually into us. How the extraordinary matter that is a brain itself – matter able to be conscious of itself as self-conscious matter – could exist at all. Which, as I note, is why many simply assume it can only be explained through God.

To “resolve” it by way of intuition – “I ‘just know’ deep down inside me that I have free will” – works for some. But it can hardly be counted as actual proof of autonomy.

Or, again, so it seems to me “here and now”.

[iambiguous]

Moral Responsibility Without Libertarianism
Lynne Rudder Baker

After centuries of reflection, philosophers still cannot seem to put to rest the matter of free will.

That’s often my point as well. And it’s the same with science. And, until theologians actually produce a God, the same with religion. Centuries go by and the quandary – antinomy – continues. So, I’m always the first to acknowledge that my own conclusions here are no less hopelessly problematic…sheer conjecture.

The issue of free will remains vital largely because of its connection to moral responsibility. What features are required for moral responsibility? Do we have those features?

This, too, is also of most importance to me. No free will and no moral responsibility. That seems entirely reasonable to me. And I continue to struggle with grasping those who somehow manage to convince themselves that the two are reconcilable. And, in particular, “for all practical purposes”.

Thus…

Questions about moral responsibility are intimately connected to questions about social policy and justice; so, the issue of moral responsibility—of whether or not anyone is ever really praiseworthy or blameworthy—has practical as well as theoretical significance.

That’s me again, isn’t it? Okay, you go up into the intellectual stratosphere and, philosophically, you concoct a theoretical argument revolving around brains and minds and dualism. A world of words as I like to call them. Meanwhile down here on the ground the words we have concocted relating to moral and political value judgments continue to sustain all manner of actual conflicting human behaviors. The part that produces actual consequences.

Moreover, recent work on free will opens the gate for progress on moral responsibility.

Okay, we’ll see…

There are two familiar main camps: one of compatibilists and the other of incompatibilists. Compatibilists take the conditions for moral responsibility to be compatible with determinism—where determinism is the thesis that the future is completely determined by the laws of nature together with antecedent conditions. Incompatibilists take the conditions for moral responsibility to be incompatible with determinism. Incompatibilists divide into two further groups: those who take us to meet the conditions for moral responsibility (called ‘libertarians’), and those who do not (called ‘hard determinists’). My interest here is mainly with the compatibilists and the libertarians, who agree that we are (at times) morally responsible for what we do, although they differ in what they require for moral responsibility.

In other words, truly familiar camps are delineated. Intellectually, philosophically, theoretically. Now, what do those in the various camps here have to say to Mary when she asks if she is in fact morally responsible for killing Jane?

Only, again, it seems to me, we must first assume that in bringing this up, we ourselves are not compelled by our brains to do so. Yet we seemingly have no way in which to establish that this is not the case. We’re in our own rendition of Flatland instead.

[iambiguous]

Moral Responsibility Without Libertarianism
Lynne Rudder Baker

The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘libertarianism’ standardly refer to positions on the question of free will. However, compatibilist vs. libertarian accounts of free will lead to compatibilist vs. libertarian conditions of moral responsibility. Since, as I said, my concern here is with the conditions for moral responsibility, I’ll use the terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘libertarianism’ to distinguish two positions on what is required for moral responsibility. As we shall see, what libertarians insist on, and what compatibilists deny, is that moral responsibility for an action requires that the agent be the source or originator of the action in a way that precludes determinism.

So, both embrace moral responsibility. But they disagree regarding the nature of the “agent”? The libertarian agent “somehow” acquired free will when the human brain itself “somehow” acquired it. Free will here being the way most of us imagine it. I do what I do because of my own volition I opted to do it. End of story. Whereas the compatibilist agent is a still a determinist but “somehow” the laws of matter encompassing his or her brain resulted in the agent being the source or originator of an action in a way that precludes determinism?

The part that still makes no sense to me. Although, again, I’m always willing to admit that it does make sense and – click – I am simply unable to grasp it.

On the other hand, neither one is actually able to explain how the human brain did evolve biologically into whatever it is that “in their head” they think it is when we do this instead of doing that.

And just once I’d like the author of an article like this [one defending compatibilism] to tackle head on the question of whether what they write about they themselves were the source or originator of in a way that includes determinism. Given how their brain actually functions here while they are writing it, what for all practical purposes does that mean?

I shall defend compatibilism in two steps: First, I shall argue that libertarianism is false: no one has libertarian freedom. So, if moral responsibility entails libertarianism, then we are never morally responsible for anything that we do.

Here, of course, I suggest that, even given libertarian freedom as many understand it in the is/ought world, this often revolves around dasein. We are free to opt for particular behaviors, but…but the behaviors that we do opt for are rooted existentially [more or less] in our indoctrination as children and in the historical and cultural contexts in which we acquire experiences as adults.

And, even in the either/or world, the Benjamin Button Syndrome can have a profound impact on how our lives unfolds.

Second, since I do believe that we are morally responsible for certain of our actions, I shall propose nonlibertarian (i.e., compatibilist) conditions for moral responsibility—a Reflective­Endorsement view. I shall add to Harry Frankfurt’s compatibilist conditions to make them sufficient for moral responsibility. Then, I shall defend compatibilism against a recent sustained attack by Derk Pereboom. Finally, I shall comment on the pervasiveness of luck. Along the way, I shall show how compatibilism can accommodate certain libertarian intuitions.

Okay, but given particular contexts?

[iambiguous]

Freedom: An Impossible Reality by Raymond Tallis
This issue we consider ultimate human realities as Raymond Tallis has the intention of proving free will.
Book Review
Jonathan Head

In the subtitle of his highly intriguing new book, Prof. Raymond Tallis calls free will ‘an impossible reality’. Though presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, this phrase is appropriate in capturing something of what has fascinated philosophers about free will over the centuries: it seems it cannot be, and yet nevertheless it must be.

Exactly.

Or, rather, if it actually is.

But isn’t that how many of us react to it? Deep down inside, intuitively, viscerally we “just know” that we have free will. There is no way I can really believe that I am not choosing these words to type here and now. That, instead, it’s all just my brain doing its thing such that there was never a possibility I could have opted to choose different words. Or chose to do something other than to read and react to the author’s words above. I’m convinced that “as I decide” I can stop typing here and go fix myself a sandwich or drive to the grocery store or watch a movie. Or plan something for a tomorrow that is still hours and hours away. How can the laws of matter possibly come to grasp a thing like “the future”?

On the other hand…

Given that all events in the natural world seem to follow the unbreakable patterns which we call ‘laws of nature’, it might appear that our actions could not be free, at least in the significant sense of having genuine alternative options for action available to us. If all natural events follow natural laws without exception, our actions could never have been otherwise, and thus cannot be freely chosen.

Now, of course, there is how we struggle to reconcile this with autonomy “philosophically” and how those in the scientific community actually attempt to explore the human brain experientially/experimentally in the act of actually choosing/“choosing” itself. Here we tell each other what the words we use in our arguments mean and then combine them into “theoretical” deductions regarding what we think is true. There, however, it’s approached more, well, scientifically.

But, either way, nothing has been pinned down yet. From neither community has there actually come the definitive conclusion. Or, rather, not that I am aware of.

Then back to this…

Such a conclusion, though, is antithetical to our cherished self-image as beings with genuine agency, and thus it seems to many to be unacceptable. If philosophy declares human beings to be unfree, then so much the worse for philosophy.

Yes, we cherish our autonomy, our genuine agency. Determinism is clearly deemed unacceptable. Particularly by those who are sustaining a successful and rewarding life filled with great accomplishments. No one is more responsible for that outcome than they themselves.

As though this too cannot be a wholly determined outcome. Simply because we don’t want it to be doesn’t make it an autonomous frame of mind. Not if we can’t want what we want.

[iambiguous]

The Dogmatic Determinism of Daniel Dennett
Eyal Mozes
BOOK REVIEW: Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves.
at The Atlas Society

When it comes to free will, the Ayn Randoid Objectivists are Libertarians on steroids. Not only are they fanatical about it, they make no distinction whatsoever between human autonomy in the either/or world and human autonomy in the is/ought world. Providing, of course, you agree entirely with Ayn Rand regarding what is good and what is evil. You do? Then you too are necessarily Rational and Virtuous.

The “virtue of selfishness” Rand called it.

And here they go after the “dogged determinist” Daniel Dennett.

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher known for advocating a reductionistic view of consciousness, and for promoting the theory of evolution as of central importance to understanding man and his place in the universe. His most recent book is devoted to the issue of whether free will can be integrated with evolution.

Whether free will can be integrated into the evolution of biological life here on planet Earth? Is there anyone here [other than the Creationists] who would deny that “somehow” human consciousness did come into existence as a result of the biological evolution of living matter here on Earth? True, we don’t know how or why this matter became self-conscious of itself as matter. And we can’t pin down how or why it acquired the capacity to invent philosophy and the internet. But “somehow” it did.

The idea of free will, as normally understood, means that man generally has more than one action possible to him, with his actual action the result, directly or indirectly, of his own choices. Man is in some cases free to choose between several alternatives, all of which are possible, with the choice between them directly under his control and his actions, directly or indirectly, the result of these choices.

On the other hand, how do we pin down definitively that the ideas we do think up in our brain, we were free to think up? How do we know beyond all doubt whatsoever that the brain itself did not evolve to create the psychological illusion of autonomy here?

Well, because Ayn Rand thought otherwise.

And then the part where – click – any Libertarians or Objectivists among us confront the points I raise in this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529

In regard to the role that dasein plays in our acquiring subjective, rooted existentially in the life we lived/live value judgments.

[iambiguous]

Daniel Dennett is Wrong About Free Will
by Daniel Miessler

I am exceedingly frustrated by Daniel Dennett’s response to Sam Harris’ recent book on free will.

It serves as the most elaborate, learned, and desperate hand-waving I’ve ever witnessed. It was such a weak argument that it looked more like an example that a brilliant philosophy professor, like Daniel Dennett, might use to highlight poor arguments to his students. Sadly it wasn’t a strawman used for instruction—it was his real position.

Clearly, not all folks are on the same page here regarding Dennett. But that hardly surprises me because assessments of this sort are, in my view, rooted existentially in dasein.

Well, click, of course.

What I would be inclined to explore with Dennett is the manner in which he himself construed the meaning of determinism. Did his own understanding of it encompass the belief that even his own understanding of it itself was determined by his brain wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

Here’s what he basically said:

It seems like we make choices, so we do. It’s useful to hold people responsible for their actions, so moral responsibility is real.

In other words, intuitively, viscerally, deep down in our gut, we “just know” that we have free will. So, we must have it. And who can deny that that it is useful for society to punish the bad guys. So, our feeling that it is useful must be the real deal.

[iambiguous]

The Dogmatic Determinism of Daniel Dennett
Eyal Mozes
BOOK REVIEW: Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves.
at The Atlas Society

Historically, free will has been opposed by two different kinds of ideas: divine fatalism, which holds that while there often is more than one possible action that man could take, the choice is not made by man himself but by God or the gods; and determinism, holding that at any time there is exactly one possible action that a person can take consistently with the operation of the laws of nature, so there is no choice among alternatives.

Yes, but in regard to both there are many different [and ofttimes conflicting] assessments. There are the God World folks who do bring everything back to God. And the God World folks who manage to reconcile an omniscient God with human autonomy. Or the Deists who posit a God who created us…but then just left it at that.

Same with the No God folks. There are the hardcore determinists and then the compatibilists. And all of the many profoundly problematic ways in which the function of human brain matter can be construed in regard to both the “internal” components of the self and the “external” components. Where does one end and the other begin?

And even Ayn Rand herself was in the dark in regard to this quandary:

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was “somehow” able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter “somehow” became living matter “somehow” became conscious matter “somehow” became self-conscious matter.

Although she would never have admitted it, I suppose.

Just out of curiosity, any Objectivists here care to take a stab at what she might have opined? The first John Galt invented matter?

In modern, scientifically informed discussion, divine fatalism is no longer taken seriously, and so determinism stands as the main alternative to free will.

Right, like science itself has an explanation regarding how biological matter came into existence here on planet Earth in order to “somehow” evolve into us.

It still doesn’t, right?

[iambiguous]

Daniel Dennett is Wrong About Free Will
by Daniel Miessler

Ask someone why a murderer deserves to die. Ask 1,000 people in a scientifically valid poll. You’ll find that most people believe the following: The murderer had a choice. That means that despite their bad upbringing, despite their drugged out mom, despite whatever hardships, they had the concrete, tangible, and available option to not commit that murder.

So they are 100% guilty. Period.

The part where things that are already tricky get trickier still. We don’t know – can’t know? – if the murderers’ brains compel them to murder “beyond their control”. That depends on whether our own brains wholly compel us to think about determinism only as we must.

But if – click – we do have free will, what about the part where it is clearly the case that, existentially, some of us will live lives making it far more likely that at least in some respects we will be less able to control ourselves in regard to harming others.

Instead, the legal system often just sweeps that part under the rug. Think Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

That’s the resolution that most people have in this country when it comes to considering free will. Not everyone, but most. Go ahead. Try the poll. I’m happy to be proven wrong.

How about all of us here? Can we finally agree on the precise philosophical definition/meaning of free will so that there will be no more confusion regarding what we are talking about when confronting thinks like Mary aborting Jane.

By all means, someone create a poll comprised of all the different ways in which to understand free will.

We’ll just assume that in creating it, you had free will.