I’ve never heard someone suggest freedom comes from quantum mechanics without suggesting it comes from the randomness in quantum mechanics.
I just bought the book so I can’t tell you what if any role quantum randomness plays in his theory. There’s no index and none of the chapter heads mention it.
“Note…that the existence of free will requires the extraordinary property of quantum entanglement which makes it possible to have a becoming universe whose future is not determined a priori by laws, but by the free will and creativity of the interacting seities. Within QIP, the free will of each seity can cause quantum-to-classical and classical-to-quantum transformations that maintain the purity of their state. Viewed by an external observer, these are irreversible probabilistic transformations unspecified by the theory. These have been called the collapse of the wave function. Entanglement produces instantaneous nonlocal correlations between two distant entangled systems such that no signal traveling at the speed of light could cause them. These acausal correlations demonstrate that, before a measurement, we cannot attribute preexisting objective values to the systems’ variables. It is as if the two systems were connected “from within.” And this happens regardless of their distance. There is no “local realistic” explanation for entanglement.”
Sounds like he’s talking about randomness without using the word “randomness”.
Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
Okay, then what? Human psychology is but another phenomenological manifestation of matter having evolved from the Big Bang into us. At least – click – in a No God universe. But we are still grappling to discover just how different the human brain really is from other matter. And just because atheists are convinced there is no Supreme Being “out there”, doesn’t mean that settles it.
In other words, what isn’t natural regarding human psychology if human psychology itself is an inherent part of nature? Thus, the more some of us think about all of this the spookier it gets. “It’s all God”, many then conclude. That’s the only explanation, they argue, that intertwines everything into that crucial teleological component of “I”.
Why does any of this require free will, however? Instead, might it not all come back to establishing just how the human species does fit into the natural world going back to, to…uh, oh…we don’t know what it all comes back to. We just know that “somehow” the human brain acquired it.
One suspects that, perhaps, it is this psycho-somatic mystery that most intrigues us. We know that when we choose a behavior, our brain is capable of grasping certain things rationally, objectively. Then our emotional and psychological reactions to what we think is reasonable. Then the part where both become entangled in our sub-conscious and unconscious reactions. All of which must then be intertwined as well with the “reptilian” components of “I”: id, instinct, libido, drives.
“I” myself merely complicates it all the more by suggesting that, even given free will, dasein and the Benjamin Button Syndrome confront us over and again with all the variables in our lives that were beyond our full understanding of or control over.
Okay, let’s bring this set of “philosophical” assumptions down to Earth and explore the actual existential implications of them given Mary and her abortion. How do you imagine Strawson would go about explaining to her that she is still morally responsible for doing something she was never able not to do. How would he explain how his own explanation is not as well an inherent component of the only possible reality?
greenfuse:
And how does he not just assume here that “somehow” human emotions are different from human thoughts? That “somehow” they “transcend” the laws of matter and allow us our own autonomous “attitude”.
greenfuse:
And who’s rendition of that is applicable here…his own?
greenfuse:
Lots of folks seem to make this distinction between external factors in our lives which might compel our behaviors – the laws of nature, God, biological imperatives, rewards and punishments, etc., – and human emotional and psychological reactions “inside” our brains that allow us to “just know” we have free will. As though this need be as far as we go to make it true.
greenfuse:
Or those here who basically agree with Strawson can bring his assumptions about human autonomy “down to Earth” and, given a particular behavior that they chose of late, make that crucial distinction themselves. What variables were beyond fully grasping and controlling.
greenfuse:
More to point [mine], how so in such a way that after you construct a philosophical argument pertaining to determinism and moral responsibility, you are then able to back it up with an assessment of how chemically, neurologically and electrically this all does unfold in the brain.
greenfuse:
Again, the hardcore determinists [as I understand them] will contend that if the universe exists as they do understand it, what I think, and you think, and he thinks are just more dominoes toppling over given whatever is behind the existence of existence itself.
greenfuse:
And, perhaps, as astrophysicists reveal one startling new discovery after another about the universe, it will get harder and harder still.
greenfuse:
Click.
I disagree. What could be more crucial than grasping ontologically – teleologically? – whether the destruction of an unborn human being by way of abortion either is or is not immoral? And whether or not, in choosing to have or to perform one, it can be established that you were in fact able to of your own free will.
Pin that down and all the other conflicting goods ought be a piece of cake.
And, given your own example, isn’t it the same thing?
It is to me.
felix dakat
First of all, unlike any number of objectivists here [God or No God], I myself note time and again that my own answers to questions pertaining to either morality or to metaphysics are largely existential conjectures rooted existentially in dasein.
On the other hand, as some determinists seem to argue, all answers to any question are interchangeable in regard to responsibility. If you could never have opted to provide any other answer than the one your brain compels you to then why is that not also applicable regarding another’s reaction to the conflicting answers he or she hears?
I haven’t read the article, but he doesn’t say anything like that in what you quoted. He seems to be arguing that our emotions are natural reactions - not that they are free from determinism. From your post…
It seems to me he is saying that the ascribing of responsibility is a natural (and naturally caused phenomenon), quite the opposite of saying it is somehow free. I have a sense of where he might be going, but again I see nothing in what you quote indicating he is arguing emotions are free, for example, and thoughts are not. Please quote some part of his text that argues this.
So, not Strawson, others…?
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It has already been explained to you that that’s not what compatibilists generally think. You’ve read and written more words about compatibilism than just about any other philosophy forum member and you still don’t know the basic ideas about compatibilism. What’s going so wrong for you that this is still a struggle?
Compatibilists do not believe that human beings or human decision making needs to be an exception to determinism, or transcend laws of matter. If you haven’t understood this already, I recommend you take a break from writing about compatibilism until you do.
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It’s not a matter of importance, it is a matter of clarity. If we use the abortion issue, precisely as I said in my post but which you did not respond to, we are complicating the test case. We have the issue of responsibility in relation to determinism AND we have all the conflicts about whether abortion is immoral. For that reason I chose an example where, hopefully, there is vastly less over whether the act is wrong or not for most people.
We can go on later and see how this works out in relation to abortion, once the less controversial issue is dealt with. The focus is responsibility if determinism is the case. My example, allows us to look at that.
I put some time and effort into my response showing that if determinism is the case, people can still be held responsible. Could you please respond to that argument?
I promise to then move on to abortion, if you want.
There are two issues here. Can we hold someone responsible for their actions in a determinist universe and then what do we do in relation to conflicting goods. I am happy to tackle the second issue one we look at the first one regarding a less contentious example.
He’s only choosing this example because he wishes to make the conversation more difficult, not more clear. I’m sure he has the intelligence to realize that a conversation that’s JUST about moral reponsibility in determinism is simpler and clearer than a conversation that’s simultaneously about reponsibility in determinism AND ALSO whether or not abortion is immoral. He only focuses on this because he doesn’t wish for clarity, he wishes for confusion.
It should be mentioned that there is an empirically adequate deterministic interpretation of QM, so (ontological) quantum indeterminism is not an indubitable fact.
“In Bohmian mechanics, everything is pre-established as in classical physics: in order to achieve this, one is obliged to postulate the existence of an all-pervasive ‘quantum potential’, a sort of wave that carries no energy and has to change instantaneously everywhere when a measurement is made – this is a strongly non-local hidden variable, the non-locality being needed to justify the violation of Bell’s inequality and similar phenomena. In Bohmian mechanics, measurement is not a problem because everything is deterministic.”
(Scarani, Valerio, Chua Lynn, and Liu Shi Yang. Six Quantum Pieces: A First Course in Quantum Physics. London: World Scientific Publishing, 2010. p. 104)
“It is widely believed that quantum mechanics is starkly opposed to classical physics, because quantum mechanics claims that the world is governed by fundamentally indeterministic laws. As it happens, this common belief oversimplifies somewhat. Quantum mechanics is a theory that is formulated in relatively mathematical terms, quite removed from concepts of directly observable physical entities. Consequently, there is a great deal of room for interpretation of the meaning of the mathematics. Indeed, there are at least three interpretations of quantum mechanics which are serious candidates for giving an adequate account of how the mathematics relates to reality.
Of these three interpretations, one of them – Bohmian mechanics – is completely deterministic. The other two interpretations each involve probability, but in rather different ways. So there is no straightforward answer to the question, ‘What is the role of probability in quantum mechanics?’”(Handfield, Toby. A Philosophical Guide to Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 146)
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I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, which poses a tough challenge for “free-willers”. He endorses incompatibilist determinism aka hard incompatibilism: “The world is deterministic and there’s no free will…and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong.”
"I’m going to be discussing some of the common attitudes held by people writing about free will. These come in four basic flavors:
The world is deterministic and there’s no free will. In this view, if the former is the case, the latter has to be as well; determinism and free will are not compatible. I am coming from this perspective of “hard incompatibilism.”
The world is deterministic and there is free will. These folks are emphatic that the world is made of stuff like atoms, and life, in the elegant words of psychologist Roy Baumeister (currently at the University of Queensland in Australia), “is based on the immutability and relentlessness of the laws of nature.” No magic or fairy dust involved, no substance dualism, the view where brain and mind are separate entities. Instead, this deterministic world is viewed as compatible with free will. This is roughly 90 percent of philosophers and legal scholars, and the book will most often be taking on these “compatibilists.”
The world is not deterministic; there’s no free will. This is an oddball view that everything important in the world runs on randomness, a supposed basis of free will.…
The world is not deterministic; there is free will. These are folks who believe, like I do, that a deterministic world is not compatible with free will—however, no problem, the world isn’t deterministic in their view, opening a door for free-will belief. These “libertarian incompatibilists” are a rarity, and I’ll only occasionally touch on their views."
(Sapolsky, Robert M. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. New York: Penguin, 2023. pp. 10-1)
"There’s a related quartet of views concerning the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. The last word obviously carries a lot of baggage with it, and the sense in which it is used by people debating free will typically calls forth the concept of basic desert, where someone can deserve to be treated in a particular way, where the world is a morally acceptable place in its recognition that one person can deserve a particular reward, another a particular punishment. As such, these views are:
There’s no free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong. Where I sit. (And as will be covered in chapter 14, this is completely separate from forward-looking issues of punishment for deterrent value.)
There’s no free will, but it is okay to hold people morally responsible for their actions. This is another type of compatibilism—an absence of free will and moral responsibility coexist without invoking the supernatural.
There’s free will, and people should be held morally responsible. This is probably the most common stance out there.
There’s free will, but moral responsibility isn’t justified. This is a minority view; typically, when you look closely, the supposed free will exists in a very narrow sense and is certainly not worth executing people about."
(Sapolsky, Robert M. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. New York: Penguin, 2023. pp. 11-2)
“[W]e are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
(Sapolsky, Robert M. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. New York: Penguin, 2023. p. 4)
"What Do I Mean by Free Will?
People define free will differently. Many focus on agency, whether a person can control their actions, act with intent. Other definitions concern whether, when a behavior occurs, the person knows that there are alternatives available. Others are less concerned with what you do than with vetoing what you don’t want to do. Here’s my take.
Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun. Mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e., being in a particularly excited state). That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream. Which had its own action potential because of the next neuron upstream. And so on.
Here’s the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life-changing event in recent months or years. And show me that this neuron’s supposedly freely willed functioning wasn’t affected by the man’s genes, or by the lifelong changes in regulation of those genes caused by experiences during his childhood. Nor by levels of hormones he was exposed to as a fetus, when that brain was being constructed. Nor by the centuries of history and ecology that shaped the invention of the culture in which he was raised. Show me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense. The prominent compatibilist philosopher Alfred Mele of Florida State University emphatically feels that requiring something like that of free will is setting the bar “absurdly high.” But this bar is neither absurd nor too high. Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown."
(Sapolsky, Robert M. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. New York: Penguin, 2023. pp. 14-5)
Reading on confirms your hunch:
“…the nature of the probability used in quantum physics is very different from the one used in classical physics. Classical probability represents the lack of knowledge of a classical state that already exists because it has probability 1 of occurring. Quantum probability describes instead the probability of a state that does not yet exist prior to the measurement because it is due to the free-will choice of a seity. This is the deep reason why no algorithm can determine which state will manifest, and also why quantum randomness cannot be algorithmic. Not even One (Faggin’s term for the absolute) can know the state that will show up, unless it has probability 1 of manifesting. Only the syntactical laws agreed by the seities can predict which events will happen with certainty.”
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Greenfuse:
Natural reactions are precisely what some hardcore determinists attribute to everything that we think or feel or say or do. Though, sure, if someone here is able to note a demonstrable proof encompassing how our emotions “somehow” transcend the laws of matter…
Though, again, I readily acknowledge this: that I may not be understanding the author’s point, Strawson’s point or your point.
I must be missing something here.
Greenfuse:
Nurana Rajabova:
Iambiguous:
Greenfuse:
On the other hand, given how I understand determinism “here and now”, if the brain is but more matter, then the fact that it thinks or emotes or embodies various psychological states, etc., is no less attributable to the “laws of matter”. At least until one or another Jesus Christ returns to anchor all of this in God. Or physicists using the scientific method are finally able to pin down the final resolution.
Unless, of course, even then they were no less compelled by their own brains to reach what could only be reached in the only possible reality.
Really, the deeper down we go here the more surreal it all becomes. We are using our brains to grapple with the brain itself. We don’t even know for sure how any of this fits into the existence of existence itself.
Greenfuse:
I disagree. What could be more crucial than grasping ontologically – teleologically? – whether the destruction of an unborn human being by way of abortion either is or is not immoral?
Greenfuse:
I still disagree. On the other hand, given my own understanding of determinism “here and now”, I was never able not to disagree.
From my own frame of mind, if Mary is compelled to abort her unborn baby/clump of cells, then the only way it makes sense [to me] to hold her morally responsible is because one is never able not to hold her morally responsible. In other words, not only are our behaviors compelled but our reactions to the behaviors of other are compelled.
Greenfuse:
[quote] We can go on later and see how this works out in relation to abortion, once the less controversial issue is dealt with. The focus is responsibility if determinism is the case. My example, allows us to look at that.
I put some time and effort into my response showing that if determinism is the case, people can still be held responsible. Could you please respond to that argument? [/quote]
Okay.
Greenfuse:
Okay.
Again, he didn’t assert that they transcend the laws of matter. He said nothing about emotions being free from determinism. At least not in what you’ve quoted.
What did he write that makes you think he thinks emotions transcend the laws of matter?
Inevitable is hardly indicating that that it’s transcending the determinist laws of matter.
Again, he seems to be saying that it is inevitable and natural. What about those words lead to you thinking our reaction outside of determinism?
You wrote OK, twice. But opted not to respond to the main part of the post, which was a direct response to your request. Of course one could look at the abortion issue, but since I do not judge abortion morally wrong, I don’t know who to respond to that issue. Why isn’t another moral issue where I do feel like what someone did was wrong - the getting hit by a stranger in the street with a hammer - a good one for the issue. Can’t you respond to that? I understand that the abortion issue is a moral issue and one can mount an argument for why someone should or should not be held responsible given deteminism. But certainly it’s not the only one, and any argument holding someone responsible for a different action, would be the same kind of argument, and thus useful for the issue of holding people responsible for their actions in a deterministic universe.
Or maybe when you said OK, you meant you will respond to this post…