thoughts on determinism

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[b]From “The Information Philosopher” website:

From the earliest beginnings, the problem of “free will” has been intimately connected with the question of moral responsibility. Most of the ancient thinkers on the problem were trying to show that we humans have control over our decisions, that our actions “depend on us”, and that they are not pre-determined by fate, by arbitrary gods, by logical necessity, or by a natural causal determinism. [/b]

What often surprises me are the number of occasions I have stumbled on discussions of determinism online and the question of moral responsibility would hardly come up at all.

Personally, I cannot imagine a more important relationship. Whether we are free to choose behaviors pertaining to those things that must be chosen in order to be in alignment with the laws of nature would seem to pale in interest next to behaviors that we choose only because we perceive the world around us from a particular point of view.

And it is in choices of this nature [choices revolving around value judgments] that generate the most problematic consequences. Having or not having free will here cannot possibly be more important. On the other hand, having or not having free will is irrelevant to the objective reality of mathematics and nature and logic.

But to say that today “free will is understood as the control condition for moral responsibility” is to make a serious blunder in conceptual analysis and clear thinking. Free will is clearly a prerequisite for responsibility. Whether the responsibility is a moral responsibility depends on our ideas of morality.

Conceptual analysis. Perhaps that’s my problem. I may well be less concerned with getting this “conceptual analysis” right than in delving into how, for all practical purposes, determinism has actual existential applications with regard to our social, political and economic interactions.

It would surely seem that we cannot be held responsible [re blame and punishment] for doing something that we could not not freely choose to do.

But how does this relate then to moral responsibility being dependent “on our ideas of morality”?

The distinction here would seem to be just shifting gears from those behaviors we must do in order to be in alignment with existence/reality, to those behaviors that seem to be within our capacity to have a choice in. Behaviors, in other words, in which others might ask, “should she have done that?”

No one asks the doctor if she should perform an abortion by going down through the pregnant woman’s nose. Although they may ask if she freely choose to perform the abortion. With moral responsibility though we can ask if performing this particular behavior was the “right thing to do” beyond the extent to which it is in alignment with reality/existence. If, in fact, we have free will.

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[b]From “The Information Philosopher” website:

In recent years, "free will” has become what John Fischer calls an “umbrella-term” for a large range of phenomena. He says (in his recent 4-volume Routledge anthology “Free Will,” vol.I, p.xxiii):

The term is used differently by different philosophers, and I think that it is most helpful to think of it as an “umbrella-term” used to describe some sort of freedom that connects in important ways with moral responsibility, and, ultimately, person-hood. More specifically, the domain of free will includes various sorts of freedom (freedom of choice, of action, choosing and acting freely, and so forth), and the practices constitutive of moral responsibility (moral praise and blame, punishment and moral reward, and a set of distinctively moral attitudes, such as indignation, resentment, gratitude, respect, and so forth).[/b]

Which would seem to be just another way of noting that there may well be no definitive manner in which to denote what words like this can only mean.

And it would seem to be just common sense that when we take whatever particular meaning is most agreeable to us out into the world of actual decisions being made, the complications begin to multiply exponentially the more factors we include: historical, cultural, interpersonal. Nature and nurture. Identity. Emotional and psychological reactions. Etc.

And then with moral and political interactions we go beyond what can be established as either this or that and [over and again] get sucked down into the quagmire that is ought/ought not.

It still surprises me to bump into people who actually imagine they can untangle [or have untangled] all of this in order to assert the one objective truth. Sure, it may exist. But does anyone really imagine it has actually been discovered to date.

Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and “work back” to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, “freedom” refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.

How exactly would one go about making this distinction pertaining to actual human choices that precipitate conflicting behaviors? You can “work back” from one end of the continuum or the other end. But you will still find yourself making/taking leaps regarding which premises you use.

Where is the set of premises [assumptions] able to resolve it all once and for all?

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From “The Information Philosopher” website:
In the recent page on Free Will in the Stanford Encylopedia on Philosophy, Timothy O’Connor wrote:

Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one’s action.

The metaphysical requirement. Isn’t that where we all get tangled up in language here? To what extent can the human mind [employing language employing logic] create an argument that captures the relationship between free will and moral responsibility such that we can take this argument out into the world and intelligently discuss what exactly goes on when Mary chooses to have an abortion. Or, less the moral element, when Hillary Clinton chooses to run for president?

O’C\onnor wants to deny free will to animals, who do not have moral responsibility, but may have freedom of action.

[b]On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.”.

One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be morally responsible agents. Such animals lack not only an awareness of the moral implications of their actions but also any capacity to reflect on their alternatives and their long-term consequences.[/b]

The minds of animals further down the evolutionary trunk are always fascinating to consider here. Somehow “nature” has programmed them to make choices in the manner in which I always imagine the human mind would make choices in a wholly determined world.

Only with non-human animals the element of morality is basically missing. The lion eats the man because the lion is basically on automatic pilot. Hunger is the only motivation. What it chooses revolves entirely around necessity. But how exactly is life here programmed by nature to actually accomplish this?

Consider:

An octopus has the capacity to camouflage its body [through both color and texture] to blend seamlessly into many different environments. How is it able to do this? If human beings had this capacity, it would be imagined that the mind would note the color/texture of the new environment and make the necessary adjustments. It would self-consciously choose the appropriate combination of colors and textures. But the octopus would not seem to be self-conscious in this sense at all. And yet it’s brain is able to make these crucial adjustments as though in some manner it were.

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[b]

From “The Information Philosopher” website:
The Separation of “Free” from “Will”

“Free Will” - in scare quotes - refers to the common but mistaken notion that the adjective “free” modifies the concept “will.” In particular, it indicates that the element of chance, one of the two requirements for free will, is present in the determination of the will itself.

Critics of “libertarian free will” usually adopt this meaning in order to attack the idea of randomness in our decisions, which clearly would not help to make us morally responsible.

Unfortunately, prominent defenders of libertarian free will (Robert Kane, for example) continue to add indeterminism into the decision itself, making such free will “unintelligible” by their own account.

Freedom of human action requires the randomness of absolute chance to break the causal chain of determinism, yet the conscious knowledge that we are adequately determined to be responsible for our choices.

Freedom requires some events that are not causally determined by immediately preceding events, events that are unpredictable by any agency, events involving quantum uncertainty. These random events create alternative possibilities for action.

[/b]

Scare quotes here are always tricky. And that is because the meaning of the words inside them can become rather convoluted when we try to pin down precisely what the person using them is trying to convey. Thus what is the precise distinction between “free” and “will” inside the quotes and free and will that stand alone?

And yet over and again in arguments/analyses like this the discussion will go on and on without once situating this distinction in actual human conflicts – disputations that result in behaviors chosen as a result of clashing value judgments. The part “down here” that result in moral judgments. That can then result in blame and punishment.

And the word “random”. It would seem that in a wholly determined world nothing is ever random. It might seem that way to some, but everything is always accounted for by the laws of matter. And by everything that would seem to include every mental, emotional and psychological variable that compels us to choose this rather than that – whether it is Mary “choosing” to abort her baby or Jack “choosing” to rape Jane. Once the scare quotes are employed the “choice” would seem to be only an illusion given the manner in which the libertarian above construes these things.

Something occurring “by chance” means only that any particular individual has but so much understanding of the world around her. And thus only so much control. Mary might have become pregnant “by chance”. But the pregnancy itself doesn’t just happen “out of the blue”. It just means that she had not intended to become pregnant but did. And now she has to decided [willfully or not] what to do about it.

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[b]In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.

Daniel Dennett[/b]

Back to this:

How, in a wholly determined world, are we really any different from the lightening bolts?

It would seem that how we perceive determinism is only how we ever could have perceived determinism.

And that would seem to be as predictable per the immutable laws of matter as the lightening strikes themselves.

Again, the only distinction being that unlike the lightning bolts the matter that has evolved into mind is able to delude itself into thinking that crossing or not crossing the field is something they can choose willfully.

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[i][b]

Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions

by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe

The dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists must be one of the most persistent and heated deadlocks in Western philosophy. Incompatibilists maintain that people are not fully morally responsible if determinism is true, i.e., if every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws. By contrast, compatibilists maintain that even if determinism is true our moral responsibility is not undermined in the slightest, for determinism and moral responsibility are perfectly consistent.

The debate between these two positions has invoked many different resources, including quantum mechanics, social psychology, and basic metaphysics. But recent discussions have relied heavily on arguments that draw on people’s intuitions about particular cases. Some philosophers have claimed that people have incompatibilist intuitions; others have challenged this claim and suggested that people’s intuitions actually fit with compatibilism. But although philosophers have constructed increasingly sophisticated arguments about the implications of people’s intuitions, there has been remarkably little discussion about why people have the intuitions they do. That is to say, relatively little has been said about the specific psychological processes that generate or sustain people’s intuitions. And yet, it seems clear that questions about the sources of people’s intuitions could have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism. There is an obvious sense in which it is important to figure out whether people’s intuitions are being produced by a process that is generally reliable or whether they are distorted by a process that generally leads people astray.

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Intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”

Of course, just because you happen to have an intuition that such and such is true, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true. Instead, intuition is more like a frame of mind that somehow intertwines the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind into a more or less perceptive “hunch” that involves both the faculty of reason [it must figure in here somewhere] and the more deep-seated emotional reactions – the objective, the subjective and the subjunctive.

And then there is the role that the “id” plays here.

But: however this might “work” – work “in reality” – it would still seem [to me] that if we live in a wholly determined world that reality would/must include intuition as well.

How then could discussions into the nature of intuition “have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism”…if in fact the discussions themselves are only what they could ever have been in a determined world?

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From “Einstein’s Morality”
by Ching-Hung Woo

[b]

Now in the scientific framework favored by Einstein, where events unfold by deterministic laws, once an initial state of the world is completely specified, all subsequent phenomena are determined. Hence when a person faces multiple alternatives and makes a choice, the will of the decision-maker at the moment of decision was actually already fixed from the beginning of the universe. Hence the feeling of having a choice is only an illusion.

[/b]

This part I can understand. If all is governed by the immutable laws of nature, it certainly makes sense that this includes the phenomena embodied in human interaction.

As for the parts embedded in quantum interaction, Einstein suggested that what appears to be random is only a reflection of our lack of understanding of the deeper reality.

And that will, perhaps, always be there: the parts that we don’t even know that we don’t even know yet. Ultimately though, all philosophical quests come back to this.

But then comes the part about determinism and moral responsibility:

[b]

A correspondence between Einstein and his friend Otto Juliusburger on Hitler’s responsibility for the crimes of WWII illustrates how Einstein proposed to deal with the moral consequences of the absence of free will. He acknowledged that since everyone’s action are determined by prior factors, Hitler could not help but to do what he did, and so the moral arguments used for instance to exempt a madman from retributive punishment – that they couldn’t help or didn’t know what they were doing – could also be applied to Hitler. In other words, the distinction that lawyers make between a psychopath not knowing right from wrong and someone acting immorally but knowing that it’s wrong, appeared to Einstein unimportant, since both are doing what they must do from the confluence of events ultimately in their brains, which inexorably follow from previous causes. So instead of focusing on retributive punishment, legal action should be guided by the welfare of mankind; and the welfare of mankind justifies actions to prevent future would-be Hitlers from destroying other people’s lives, just as society might justifiably act to prevent a dangerous delusional schizophrenic from harming others. Einstein also took the non-existence of free will as a wake up call for us not to take our supposed autonomy too seriously: what we jealously protect and shrewdly promote as our autonomy is actually the result of myriads of factors of which we are only vaguely aware.

[/b]

This would seem to be just one more rendition of “compatibilism”. And I am still unable to “wrap my mind around it”. It just doesn’t make sense given the manner in which I think about these things.

Whether we focus on “retributive punishment” or are “guided by the welfare of mankind”, we are still doing [b]only that which we could not not have done[/b].

There does not seem to be a way in which to extract ourselves from that which, “for all practical purposes”, must be. Instead, some are able to “trick” themselves by creating this distinction between two different sorts of cause and effect that [to me] seem to be just a word game “in their heads”.

This in other words:

[b]

People who meet this logic for the first time tend to become alarmed – what happens to our vaunted freedom if we have no free will? There is actually no need to be alarmed if we distinguish between two kinds of freedoms: a freedom from prior causes, and a freedom from coercion. The idea of ‘absolute free will’ supposes that our choices are not determined by prior causes; but few of us actually think of freedom in that way. Rather, we feel a loss of freedom when we are coerced, that is, when we are forced to do something or be in a certain state against our values. There are certain likes and dislikes that a person regards as characterizing him. This set of values may change with time, but they are stable in the immediate term. Hence it makes sense to redefine ‘free choice’ as a choice compatible with a person’s self-affirmed set of values.

[/b]

This distinction seems like bullshit to me. Whether we call the laws of matter a manifestation of “prior causes” or “coercion”, we still do only that which we have always been “determined” to do.

As for so-called “self-affirmed” values, what the fuck can that really mean if the “self” itself is only as it could ever be?

Again, the compatibilists may be on to something here, but it has never seemed reasonable to me. So, I am back to either accepting or not accepting that it could never have seemed reasonable to me – in order that “I” be in sync with the immutable laws of matter. At least here and now.

[b]

In line with this view of freedom as the ability to fulfil individual values, Einstein urged society to give ample room for each individual to explore a particular idea to its rational fulfilment: “Whether it be a work of art or a significant scientific achievement, that which is great and noble comes from the solitary personality,” he said.

[/b]

But what here [including the words I am typing and the words you are reading] has anything to do with “ability”? As though what turns out to be could ever have turned out any other way. We “choose” for it to happen, but we really didn’t choose for it to happen.

But then I can see how a belief in this sort of deterministic approach to reality can be comforting for some. After all, they can’t really be held responsible for their fucked up, miserable lives because, well, because.

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“Compatibilism”

Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

Some believe that humans have free will; others that each of our actions and choices is caused by prior events. Compatibilism is the theory that we can be both caused and free.

Try as I might I am unable to wrap my head around this. Even as a “theory” it doesn’t make sense to me. If prior events caused me to invent the theory, how can it be argued in turn that I was free to invent it? I was never able to not invent it but I still “willed” it’s invention.

Hobbes famously said that man was as free as an unimpeded river. A river that flows down a hill necessarily follows a channel, but it is also at liberty to flow within the channel. The voluntary actions of people are similar. They are free because their actions follow from their will; but the actions are also necessary because they spring from chains of causes and effects which could in principle be traced back to the first mover of the universe, generally called God.

The river is mindless. It chooses nothing. It volunteers nothing. It flows wholly in accordance with the laws of nature. A thing doing only what it must do. Period.

Or “period” to the extent this can be understood given the gap between what I think I know here and now and all that can be known about existence itself.

If my will is also wholly in sync with a brain wholly in sync with the laws of nature then my choosing to swim in the river is actually my “choosing” to swim in the river. A psychological concoction that is no less wholly determined.

No one forced me to go into the river but I was still never able to not go into the river.

That’s the part about being “free” that won’t sink in.

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“Compatibilism”

Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

…as individuals when we undertake an action from some motive we imagine that in the exactly the same circumstances we could have chosen to do something else. We do not think we act of necessity. But, as Hume notes, if we try to prove our absolute liberty by doing something ‘unpredictable’ then we are still acting from a straightforward motive: our motive is the desire not to be seen to be acting from predictable motives. When we look at other people and fail to predict their behaviour, particularly someone we know well, then we assume that we are ignorant about some fact, and that their behaviour is in principle intelligible and predictable, rather than that the person has suddenly become incomprehensible. For Hume and other compatibilists, liberty means being free to act as we will, but this does not mean that our actions come from nowhere: our passions, motives and desires provide us with the impulse which our reason (prudence) tries to satisfy. To be at liberty cannot mean acting without a motive, because that’s the definition of madness.

Here is [once again] where I get stuck.

If our “passions, motives and desires” do not come out of nowhere but are integral to a brain/mind wholly in sync with the laws of matter, how is what we “will” not just another manifestation of that in turn? Always wholly in sync as well with our “reason [prudence]” to produce choices/behaviors that could only ever have been what they were, are and will be?

Dennett defends this broad thesis of motivated freedom with a range of interesting arguments. Consider for example the difference between a human being and the Sphex wasp. If this wasp is repeatedly disturbed during its egg laying it will simply continue its instinctive behaviour, apparently unaware of the source of the interruption or the likely futility of continuing with the egg laying. Yet humans can respond flexibly and imaginatively to equivalent difficulties, which indicates that we have a kind of freedom that a simple creature like the wasp does not have.

Okay, the wasp is at a point in the evolution of life on earth where its brain is not nearly as sophisticated as our own. It is not “self-conscious” in the manner that we are. There are no historical or cultural or experiential memes complicating what is basically instinctual behavior. Biological imperatives propel it from moment to moment.

But how can we pin down definitively whether our own brain has evolved to the point where biological imperatives give way to an “I” actually able to will behaviors freely, autonomously?

To call that a “kind of freedom” is one thing. But it may well be just a complex “psychological freedom” that our brain has somehow come to trick us into believing is the real thing.

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“Compatibilism”

Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

For Dennett there is also a meaningful distinction between determinism and inevitability. The Earth, for example, has undergone a recent explosion of ‘evitability’. Once it might have been in evitable that the Earth should be struck by an asteroid. But the planet has, perhaps deterministically, evolved human beings, who may conceivably destroy an incoming rock. It is no longer inevitable, so it is evitable. In the same way it is not inevitable that those disposed to heart disease will go on to develop it. We have, perhaps deterministically, produced an understanding of the causes of heart disease, and we can modify our behaviour on this basis. Again, what was once inevitable is no longer so.

This is interesting. Had matter not evolved into life evolving into mammals evolving into self-conscious human beings, it seemingly was inevitable that the Big One would smash into earth precipitating another extinction event for all other life forms.

But instead it did evolve into us and we are matter able to actually attempt to avoid that collision.

And while it seems that sooner or later an asteroid big enough to wipe us out is inevitable there may be strikes that we can prevent.

But how do we wrap our minds around that? Besides, whether we do or do not put a dent in the inevitable part with any particular asteroid, that would not seem to change the fact that, in a wholly determined universe, what does unfold could only ever have unfolded as it did.

Isn’t that inevitable?

Same with heart disease. We may one day all but eliminate it. But only because nature “willed” that to be only as it could be. We just don’t know if there is any measure of teleology “behind” nature itself. God or No God.

So we may not have what Dennett calls ‘behavioural choice’, the absolute and unimpeded God-like ability to choose out of nothing – but we can flexibly respond to and change our environment, an environment that among other things contains knowledge of how other people have acted and thought.

How flexible can any response be that can only be the embodiment of inflexible laws of matter.

If these laws are inflexible. And how do we determine that? By choosing freely among alternatives or not?

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“Compatibilism”

Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

Why Compatibilism Is Mistaken.

There are some major difficulties in compatibilism, which I think damage it irreparably.

Take Hobbes’ claim, largely accepted by Hume, that freedom is to act at will while coercion is to be compelled to act by others. This does not give us a sure reason to choose this ‘freedom’.

Imagine that you were a free-floating spirit, equal to God in your capacity to choose. God gives you the unwelcome news that shortly you are to be placed on Earth, and that you will be endowed with a range of fundamental passions, chosen entirely at the caprice of God. Would you choose to be free, in Hobbes’ sense of acting at will, or might you consent to being coerced?

This is precisely the sort of speculation I am not able to grapple with effectively. In other words, in a way that allows me to grasp what the compatibilists are telling us about the alleged “freedom” embodied in fact that while rocks don’t choose to tumble down a mountain in a landslide, human beings do choose to ski down a mountain.

Just as the rocks could not not tumble down the mountain in a landslide, skiers could not not choose to go down the slope.

In either context, different configurations of matter are doing only that which matter obeying immutable laws [if this is the case] could have done.

No other human being coerced you to choose to ski but your “will” to choose is merely another inherent manifestation of nature.

With God the coercion would seem to revolve around that fact that nothing you will ever do is not already known by God. The only question that pops into my mind here is that, in a wholly determined universe, could God Himself have ever not placed you on Earth? Is God in turn inherently capricious? And thus only seemingly capricious in an existence where everything that even He does is only as it ever could have been.

Unless, of course, there is some crucial factor here that I keep missing.

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“Compatibilism”

Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

Imagine that…one had a disposition for random acts of extreme violence. Is one better off by having the wit to see that the .357 Magnum is overrated and that the 9mm is similarly effective, but with more shots? If one had the murderous impulses of an Eichmann or a Himmler, is one’s situation necessarily improved by being able to flexibly respond to the logistical problems of machine-gunning large numbers of people? Is the murderous intelligence involved in industrialising genocide ever a gain? Similarly, if we knew that we were going to have passions that we have not chosen, is it obvious that we would ask for the ability to pursue these passions flexibly and imaginatively? Perhaps if we knew that we were to have unknown passions and be held responsible for our actions, we would choose to be incompetent. Perhaps the priority would be first to do no harm: one could not risk being good at being bad.

How is having a “disposition for random acts of extreme violence” different from having a “predisposition” for the same? How wide is the gap here between them given this particular tendency? In a universe where human autonomy was actually able to be measured, a disposition/predisposition for acts of violence would be construed by me as an “existential contraption”.

But in a wholly determined universe there would seem to be no existential contraptions in the manner in which I construe them. There is only the contraption that is existence itself unfolding in its entirety only as it ever can.

In other words, anything that we come to know about the passions that we have is only that which we were ever going to know.

So, all of this speculation would in turn seem to be but one more necessary component of that.

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“Compatibilism”
Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

It is interesting to note that a compatibilist would presumably have to accept that the Terminator as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger is free, in that it has a desire (to kill John Connor) which it pursues with flexibility, insight and intelligence. It is certainly hard to see why the Terminator is un-free simply because it was given its (programmed) passion by an identifiable individual, as opposed to taking pot luck from God or genetics.

One can imagine that, down the road, as we get more and more sophisticated in creating cyborgs, that line between real and artificial intelligence will become more and more blurred.

Is the Terminator free or unfree? Is there anything that he thinks or feels or says or does that is not entirely programmed by machines programmed by human beings?

Is there anything that you and I do that is not entirely programmed by nature?

Is there anything that nature does that is not entirely programmed by God?

How do we go about determining with any real precision where one component of existence ends and the other parts begins?

When we interact the closest we seem able to get to the “I” of others, is in making eye contact. You can stare into your own eyes while looking in the mirror. But: are you really seeing your “self” there?

That just doesn’t seem to be the end of it. But where else can we go until someone, someday can show us?

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“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now Magazine

In 2012, Sam Harris, one of the famed ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, published a book called Free Will, arguing that it doesn’t exist. He’s a neuroscientist, and he contends that the more science learns how our brains work, the less plausible is a self with free will. He calls them ‘illusions’. By contrast, in his 2003 book Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett, another of the horsemen, argued for a concept of free will that is “an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs” and is compatible with causal determinism. Who is right, if either of them?

This is basically where I get stuck. Sam Harris the neuroscientist argues that the more we know about the human brain the less we seem to be free to know this of our own volition. Then others like Dennett weigh in with opposing points of view.

How then does Harris not see this debate itself as but in turn wholly determined? He takes on the theists as well as though their exchanges with him could ever have been other than what they were.

Think about it. When he gets miffed at a God world or a free will advocate doesn’t he step back and accept that his reaction is only as it must be? Doesn’t that make the gist of his argument but another bunch of nature’s dominoes toppling over like the dominoes that topple over when the Pope reacts to pedophiles in the ranks of the Catholic Church preying on children because they were never able not to prey on them?

What do I keep missing then when the so-called “compatibilist” weigh in and attempt to “reconcile” the two?

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“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

Determinism is the nub of the matter. Dennett defines it by reference to ‘Laplace’s demon’. Two centuries ago the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace said that if an all-knowing demon could know perfectly the state of every particle in the universe at any given moment, it could predict their state in the next, and the next, and so on to eternity. The operation of cause and effect means that what happens next is determined by what has come before, and the future of the universe down to its tiniest details is predestined until the end of time.

This is basically how I view “the immutable laws of matter” in a determined universe. Cause and effect is synonymous with the only possible reality. “Perfection” would be encompassed in the “brute facticity” of existence itself.

Only without that component we call a teleology. Matter has evolved into minds able to invent the word teleology but that too is only a “mechanism” embedded necessarily in nature unfolding like clockwork.

Just with [from my frame of mind] no clockmaker.

Then “I” fall over the edge into the “for all practical purposes” surreal attempts to make sense of that.

At least with a demon [or, more likely, a God] we’d have something to take it all back to. But in not having that here and now myself “I” am just completely baffled.

Which I presume is a frame of mind that I will take with me to the grave.

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“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

Dennett questions such certainty, proposing an element of chance within causality, due to quantum mechanics.

But: Was Dennett ever able to not question such certainty? And how is the “element of chance” understood as the same or different from “randomness” in the universe?

Instead, from my point of view, what is seen as “chance” or “randomness” is merely a reflection of the gap between what we think we know about reality here and now and all that needs to be known such that in a wholly determined universe even interactions in the quantum world would be entirely predictable. Either by God or by a mere mortal able actually to grasp both the theory and the practice of everything.

Nevertheless, he says the deterministic argument against free will remains that all outputs from your brain – including all your so-called ‘choices’ – are entirely products of physical causes beyond your conscious control. If you pick chocolate over vanilla ice-cream, that’s a consequence of something that happened among your neurons, due to the structure of your neural network, and this was shaped by everything that happened in your life till then, and indeed everything causally linked to your brain all the way back to the Big Bang. That’s causal determinism. It’s as if you’re a computer program doing what it does because it’s programmed to, and can’t choose to do different; like a chess computer that, faced with the same board configuration, will make the same move every time. Most of Dennett’s book is about how and in what sense we could have free will anyway.

So: Does he pull it off? Or is his own argument in and of itself just another inherent, necessary manifestation of what could only ever be?

Then we head in the direction that peacegirl always seems to go:

Someone might point out that we’re acting on our desires, which a computer doesn’t have. But as Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “a man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.” In other words, you might choose chocolate over vanilla, but you can’t choose to prefer chocolate over vanilla.

Which is basically my point here as well. But she somehow sees this point as missing her point. And even though I am not able to not miss her point, I still seem to be “responsible” for missing it. In a way I am simply unable to grasp.

Moreover, as Daniel Gilbert’s 2007 book Stumbling on Happiness showed, not only do we not choose our desires, we don’t even know what they truly are. You can misjudge what you think you want, and also how its fulfillment will affect you. As George Bernard Shaw once quipped, there are two big disappointments in life: not getting what you want and getting it.

So, “for all practical purposes” in groping to grapple with why we choose the things that we do from moment to moment, what am “I” to really make of all this?

Are the words I am typing here just another more complex [and currently ineffable] manifestation of those dominoes toppling over mindlessly, or does the part about human minds/consciousness “choosing”/choosing in a way the dominoes do not make all the difference in the world?

[iambiguous]

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

What does the word ‘you’ really mean anyway? This is the problem of the self, which is entwined with the problem of free will. We all know what selfhood feels like. But David Hume said that no amount of gazing inwards enabled him to perceive his own self. I have repeated his experiment with the same result. As hard as I try to grasp the true essence of being me, it slithers away. One cannot use the self to seek the self, it seems. I can’t wrap my head around my head.

In other words, the arguments here get us coming and going. We can never quite pin down “I”, let alone connect this “self” to a “will” able to be examined in a definitive manner.

Or are there people here who have managed to convince themselves that folks like Hume weren’t successful because they hadn’t “thought it all through” in the right way. Like they have. They’re absolutely positive they’re in touch with the one and only “me”. And that this one and only me is calling the shots when thinking, feeling, saying and doing things. Or at least the really, really important stuff.

And the irony here is that so much that does go on inside our bodies is on automatic pilot. All those parts and pieces going about the business of interacting, doing their thing, as though “I” weren’t even around at all.

Parts like this:

Let’s consider how we experience vision. Photons hit your retina, and as a result electricity pulses along the optic nerves into your brain. All of the electrical signalling between your neurons might be encoded into 1s and 0s – zillions of them – somewhat like in a computer. But even if so, how does the brain turn that information back into a picture, seen by you? And the problems of making sense of what we see are huge. The brain has to collate two different images (one from each eye), gauge distance, adjust for perspective, parse rapid motion and interpret patches of color as objects. And we not only see what’s before us, but in our minds we can also see things we remember, or only imagine.

We see things. We interpret what we think they mean. We react to what we think they mean. And yet there is not a one of us here who has a sophisticated enough grasp on all this to note a detailed distinction between the brain doing its thing and us taking over.

We just know it’s in there somewhere. And the thought that we could never know anything other than what we are compelled to know by brains as mindful matter having evolved along with life itself on planet Earth is just too…

Well, we don’t know exactly what that means.

Not counting those here who bundle up their words into an intellectual contraption and call that the answer.

[iambiguous]

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

We might imagine a ‘Cartesian theatre’ in our heads, with a projection screen, with what we see being viewed by a little person in there – a homunculus. But how does the homunculus see? Is there another smaller homunculus inside his brain? And so on, endlessly…

This is basically what it comes down to. What we see can only be grappled with by making particular assumptions about the relationship between matter as mind and mind as matter. But going back how far? To an understanding of life itself and its evolution on planet Earth? To an understanding of planet earth going back to the birth of the solar system…then going back to the Milky Way galaxy’s birth…then going back to the Big Bang…then going back to God…then going back to, well, what exactly?

That’s the part that [to me] is particularly exasperating. Our “will” – free or not – would seem to be only a more or less significant component of existence itself. Then the part that our own individual “I” plays in it all. How much more “infinitesimally insignificant” can that be?

And then there are so many different ways in which to approach it…

Closer to the truth, I think, and applicable to all mental processing, is the concept of representation. Sensory perceptions (or as philosophers say, qualia) cannot themselves be empirically detected in the brain. If it’s raining it won’t consequently be wet inside your brain. This is also true of bodily sensations – if you have a stomach ache, you can’t have a stomach ache in your brain. And what does it mean to experience something — like eating a cookie, or smelling a flower? The experiences themselves are not in the mouth or nose, or the brain, but in the mind. In all such phenomena, it’s a matter of the brain constructing a mental representation of the stomach ache, rain shower, the taste of the cookie, or the flower’s smell.

Always it seems to come back to that most extraordinary of nature’s inventions: the mind. Matter able to probe itself as matter intertwined in this particular something groping to understand if “I” itself is able to grope about autonomously.

The part in other words where the matter in the mind and the matter in all the rest of the body coordinate their “things” into producing someone like me typing these words on a laptop computer. Here and now.

And then “I” trying to determine if what I am going to do next – go grocery shopping – is only that which I am ever able to do next.

[iambiguous]

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website

Time and time again people express to me their feeling that if determinism is true and the “future is inevitable” due to this, that everything is “pointless”. That for some reason us being able to freely will a change in the future implies some sort of meaningfulness that an entirely causal universe doesn’t have.

This, however, is what is called a “non-sequitur” in philosophical terms. That means the conclusion (e.g. “everything is pointless”) doesn’t follow from the premises (e.g. the universe is deterministic, the future state is a causally inevitable, etc.).

Again, the part [in my view] where everything in this debate seems to get all tangled up in what we either are or are not able to fully encompass using language.

Assuming for the moment that in using it we do have some measure of free will.

In other words, for all practical purposes, if we do live in a wholly determined universe, it would seem that however we frame the meaning of the word “pointless” and its relationship to the meaning that we give to the word “determined”, the “point” of the future doesn’t make the actual future itself any different than it seemingly must be given that the point of nature is to unfold solely in accordance with the immutable laws of matter.

Just because the universe is deterministic, doesn’t mean that what we do is futile.

And here the word “futile”. Since we are inherently/necessarily a part of nature unfolding as it must [for whatever reason], the only way that futile makes any sense to me is in discovering the reason why existence unfolds at all; and then determining that the existence of existence itself is futile. That any reason is as ultimately futile as any other.

Here we are back to the distinction that peacegirl and I seem to make between “choosing” and choosing.

Because we at least “choose” to do only what we are able to “choose” to do. This our part in it all must surely be less futile than the parts played by mindless matter.

[iambiguous]

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website

“If the future is inevitable, what we do doesn’t matter.”

This non-sequitur often stems from the false equivocation of determinism with fatalism. The process of how the future is inevitable is an important factor that is left out. If “what we do” is part of the process that causally leads to that “inevitable future”, then it certainly doesn’t follow that what we do “doesn’t matter” (as the infographic explains). If, on the other hand, fatalism applies, it does follow that what we do doesn’t matter. This is why it’s important when educating people on the lack of free will that we explain the distinction between these things.

I’ll be the first to admit that the distinction some make between determinism and fatalism is lost on me.

If the laws of nature determine what the future will be, why is it not reasonable to argue that the future is fated to be what the laws of nature inexorably make it?

Thus what we are compelled to “choose” to do is to participate in the interactions that will unfold into a future that necessarily encompasses these choices.

It’s not a question of mattering but of what we do mattering because in an autonomous world we might have chosen to do something that resulted in an entirely different future.

If, however, the future unfolds only as it must, what we choose to do matters only in the sense that it would matter how the dominoes are set up if in the future they are all to topple.

They would seem to be fated to all topple only if we are fated by nature to set them up so that they will all topple.

How then do others see this distinction between determinism and fatalism?