separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
As many here might imagine, my own interest in determinism revolves fundamentally around the question that most interest me philosophically: How ought one to live?
And Kant would seem to be right in the bullseye in noting the clear connection between free will and moral responsibility. If you are not able to freely choose your own behaviors, then being held responsible for them by others is just another way of saying that they are not able to freely choose to hold you responsible.
Then for Kant [and philosophers of his ilk] it is merely a matter of concocting a God such that in a world where we do have autonomy, He becomes the ultimate arbiter on Judgment Day.
On the other hand, if this transcending font is omniscient, how is one able to reconcile human freedom with that?
But here [for me] things immediately get tricky. What does it mean “for all practical purposes” to refer to free will as “a mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness” and then to make a distinction between that and someone “pointing a gun at the agent’s head”?
How and when do the concocted concepts of free will make contact with the behaviors of conscious human beings choosing to point guns at the heads of others?
How are the laws of nature not compelling both one philosopher to define and describe free will conceptually and another philosopher to point a gun at another’s head?
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Let’s be honest: few of us possess in tandem both the mental capacity and the educational background needed to ponder all the balls lofted up into the air inside one or another intellectual contraption like this. Conjectures that attempt to come to grips with an actual choice being made by someone in a particular set of circumstances. And even the neuroscientists who do explore the functioning brain here, do so by and large in a very narrow context: probing the brain thinking and deciding inside one or another fMRI device.
Not only that, but the balls can bump into any number of “conditions” in which the brain is [at times] fiercely tugged and pulled autonomically in any number of directions: drug use, hypnosis, delusions, dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, clinical depression, psychosis; and many other physical and mental disorders.
And what of the dreams that we have? How is this particular “ball” to be grappled with [represented] other then as a classic example of how the brain itself creates these truly astonishing “realities” such that, while in the dream itself, “I” is convinced that it is calling the shots.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
Another point I seem to be entirely missing. If the future unfolds only in accordance with the laws of matter in the present, it will be different only in the sense that here and now we are not around then to note the difference. But it can still only be what it must be.
It’s like nature compels John to set up a million dominoes. And, as it turns out, given the laws of matter, John is compelled to set them up such that they all do [must] topple to form a design that depicts Trump and Putin in bed together.
Now, the dominoes before they topple do not look the same as toppled dominoes. But the present and the future are still no less necessarily intertwined given my own understanding of determinism.
Of course some things would be considerably more problematic in a free will world. On the other hand, other things would change only because in the either/or world the laws of matter are applicable to the past, the present and the future. Anything that we might deem to be “significant” or “better” is still embedded in nature.
On the other other hand, in the is/ought world, free will precipitates any number of conflicts regarding those things deemed by some to be “significant” or “better” that are not deemed that way at all by others.
I must be misunderstanding the point being made here.
Separate morality from free will by Phil Goetz
[from the lesswrong web site]
Of course my own problem here is that many who insist that they do have a “distinct concept of morality”, are very often not willing [or able] to connect the dots between their concept of morality and the manner in which the definition and meaning that they give to it is rendered more substantively/descriptively in regard to their day to day interactions with others.
And if one sees another’s conception of morality as “macro”, what on earth does that mean relating to their actual reaction to the behaviors of others which conflict with their own.
Likewise where are the examples that Kant notes which take this “general description” itself out into world he lived in? And, even in assuming free will, to what extent does he delve into the components of my own moral narrative: the self as the existential agglomeration of particular experiences and relationships; Barrett’s idea of “rival goods”; the role that political power can play in a community that either worships and adores a rival God, or a secular community embedded in a No God ideology like Communism; or one revolving around the nihilistic assumption that prevails among those who are more inclined to embrace a “show me the money” social and economic ethos.
And where is Kant’s deontological morality [for mere mortals] without the transcending font?
How is one to realistically intertwine the metaphysical concept of free will with the actual nitty gritty day to day conflicts that arise from different “one of us” communities insisting that, autonomously, being morally responsible involves behaviors that clearly clash?
Determinism on the other hand subsumes all of this in but the psychological illusion of free will. The clashes are real but they were never able to unfold other than as they must.
This is the part that is particularly problematic to me. Here I’m simply confused regarding the ability of language like this to be brought down to earth and intertwined in an examination, description and analysis of the choices we make.
What on earth is this supposed to mean with respect to the behaviors that we do opt for existentially?
Human consciousness certainly seems able to think up [autonomously or not] an abstraction like a “mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness”. But how “for all practical purposes” is this applicable to someone who does point a gun at another’s head?
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Really well put, right?
To think that “I”, given all of the extraordinary ways in which we are able to experience and express it, can have somehow just evolved “mechanically” from matter that consisted basically of the elements hydrogen and helium just after the Big Bang, seems, well, preposterous.
And yet, come on, who has ever really been able to pin down this “real me”? And look what the brute facticity of the human brain can construct in the way of “I” in dreams. How are “you” then not just a chemical and neurological “contraption”? How are dreams themselves not just the brains very own SIM worlds or Matrix perceptions?
Yet it is here again that I am unable to “think through” speculations of this sort and decide if they are an explanation enough. How might Dennett’s “atmosphere of free will” not be just another manifestation of a brain able to “produce” thinking like this in sync with the psychology [illusion] of free will in sync with a metaphysical determinism?
What on earth can really be demonstrated to be “independent” of a wholly determined universe? Even the “thought experiment” above could be seen as but another necessary manifestation of that which can only ever be.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery
But: Is not a determinist compelled by nature to recognize everything only as he or she was ever able to?
And being a nihilist in a determined universe doesn’t make these recognitions any less compelled. And, sure, there might be hundreds of different types of nihilists…but what they would all seem to share in common is their inability to choose to be anything other than what the laws of matter propel them towards.
I’m always perplexed by this sort of thinking. In a determined universe as I understand it, nihilists would seem to be interchangeable with Platonists or Christians or Communists or anarchists or hedonists or sociopaths. No one actually has the free will to choose to be these things. No more so then I have the free will to choose to type these words.
And would not ethical nihilists [like me] necessarily follow along our determined paths?
How could they not?
Instead, there’s a part of me unable to actually believe there isn’t a part of me able to actually choose freely among alternative options. If only, in particular contexts, as an existential contraption.
But this always takes me back to the extraordinary dreams that I have. It simply boggles my mind how convinced I am “in the dream” that it is not a dream at all. That “I” am real, choosing freely to do this instead of that. Then, waking up, I immediately realize that none of it was real. It was al a virtual reality “world” that my brain created out of…what exactly?
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
From my frame of mind, morality in a wholly determined universe is just another example of nature manifesting itself as it does in, say, the unfolding of a natural disaster.
Only unlike the mindless matter interacting in, say, a tornado, the matter in the human brain is able to delude itself into believing that human interactions are qualitatively different. Why? Because, through human consciousness, matter “chooses” to unfold only as it must.
Always and ever the mystery of mind.
An ignorant [but autonomous] alien would note human interactions as seemingly predicated on the free will of the men and women they are observing. But a more sophisticated [and autonomous] alien would point out that nothing they “choose” to do in interacting was ever really of their own volition. Just as we understand that when we see characters in a film, we know they are not “in the moment” up on the screen choosing to do what they do. And, besides, the director and the screen writer are choreographing “the action”. But that too is only another manifestation of nature. They are no less compelled to do only what they must.
But even if our species does in fact interact as autonomous beings, morality [as I understand it] is still not something that can be pinned down essentially.
The problem I have with Kant [in an autonomous universe] is the extent to which he failed to take into account the components of my own moral narrative. Through his own rendition of God, he provided us with a font that enabled him to argue that moral interactions can be embedded categorically and imperatively in rational moral obligations.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
This is basically what I keep coming back to. Are the laws of matter compelling nature to compel my brain to compel my fingers to types these words…or is there some facet of “I” here that does in fact participate in “changing the outcome” such that my posting these words and your reading them might possibly have been other then what in fact it turns out to be?
Sans the demon or God.
Can we somehow choose to duck and not be hit by the ball? Or does the autonomous alien note that we did in fact duck, but recognizes that our “choice” to duck was only embedded in the psychological illusion of free will embedded ontologically in the immutable laws of matter?
And this gets us to the nitty gritty for many in regard to the correct answer here. If the swing is only as a result of “a million little deterministic factors” [going back presumably to the Big Bang or to whatever else explains Existence] then the golfer who believes this can insist that he missed the putt only because there was never a chance of him making it.
Whereas the golfer who refuses to believe in a determined putt, makes it, and then insists this revolves solely around his great skill as a golfer
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery
Here however I make the distinction between existential and essential meaning. Having free will would certainly seem to permit us to ascribe particular meaning to particular things, interactions, relationships. But in the is/ought world the ascriptions relating to conflicting goods would be embedded more in existential contraptions than in essential truths rooted in Gods or deontological philosophical concoctions or nature or political ideology.
But having some measure of autonomy is clearly of fundamental importance.
After all, any meaning we ascribed to anything in a determined universe is only meaning we were never able not to ascribe.
Over and again: I must be missing something here. In our waking hours, the entirety of our coherent thought in a determined world would be the equivalent of the entirety of our coherent thought in our dreams: wholly compelled by a brain wholly compelled by the laws of matter.
The difference is merely embedded in all that we are yet to grasp about the physiological relationship between the brain, the mind and “I”.
From my perspective, he seems to make his argument as though he is somehow able to insert “I” into it in much the same manner as someone who believed in free will would.
The fact of the matter. Exactly. How is that not the fact of the matter here?
“Causality and consistency” as it is applicable in determining “what matters” and what is “important” to us, regarding the behaviors we choose, is determined by nature.
Nature has merely evolved into brains evolving into minds evolving into an “I” that is able to delude itself into thinking that what matters and what is important to “me” is because that’s what “I” was able to freely discern for myself.
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
If there is no free will then whatever we call human interactions [inside or outside the law] is in turn necessarily embedded in the laws of matter. So, what difference [ultimately] does it make regarding discussions and debates like this, if they are determined/fated/inexorably compelled by nature to unfold only as they must.
All “practical questions” would seem to be interchangeable with all “practical answers” here: wholly determined.
You can never choose autonomously to do either the right or the wrong thing in a determined universe. Why? Because “right” and “wrong” are just words that were compelled to be invented by those compelled to speak the English language embedded in the psychological illusion of free will. Which is then embedded ontologically in whatever brought into existence nature and its material laws.
If, again, that, in and of itself, can ever actually be known for sure.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
This just takes us to the part where we try to explain where the rider ends and the elephant begins…given our current understanding of how the brain itself functions as a wholly integrated component of nature. Just one more natural manifestation of existence no less compelled to be in sync with the laws of nature than any other matter.
It’s always back to human minds attempting to explain human minds…minds that in some profoundly problematic way have somehow acquired the capacity to actually do this.
We are “inside” a “reality” that we would seem only able to encompass if we could get “outside” of it.
Instead, we become entangled in all the convoluted ways there are in which to think about it:
I still recall an experience I once had in which I was completely absorbed in thinking about a woman while driving nearly 10 miles on “autopilot”. Out of the blue I realized I had driven from Iona Terrace to Kenwood Avenue without [seemingly] doing so consciously. I simply didn’t remember accelerating of braking or turning the car in a new direction.
Or the times I would read the same book to my daughter over and over again and somehow my mind was able to go to other things while continuing to read the words as though in a trance.
And then those extraordinary dreams I have in which “I” am doing all manner of amazing things that I am not really doing at all.
The mind as matter is really something we are just scratching the surface in understanding.
A Compatibilism / Incompatibilism Transformation
By Trick Slattery
From the “Breaking the Free Will Illusion” web site
Here’s where I always get stuck. Beyond definitions – definitions it would seem all of us are compelled by nature to give to these words – the act of clumping these defined words together to make arguments like this one would in turn seem to be just another manifestation of nature. Only this time embodied in brain matter that compels these exchanges to unfold only as they ever can.
There is no real “revisionism” here. Why? Because the one compelled by nature to revise the definition is interchangeable with the one compelled by nature to react to that revision only as he must.
Nothing would seem to escape the inexorable toppling of all matter over onto other matter as nature itself unfolds necessarily in sync with its own laws. The fact that this matter has now become conscious of itself as matter able to be self-conscious of itself as matter embedded in nature…well…how does that change things?
What earthly difference can it make if the compatibilist says one thing and not another if it was the only thing he/she was ever able to say? Just as we are compelled to react to what we hear being said as our own brain-matter compels us.
Instead, I can only assume that there are important points being made here that I keep missing. But, given how I understand determinism, others are then either compelled or not compelled to point them out.
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
But: Even if both sides agree that moral behavior revolves around intention, what do they agree about regarding the extent to which intention itself does or does not revolve around the laws of matter?
If our brains/minds autonomically precipitate neurological and chemical interactions that become our intentions then how are “both sides” not wholly in sync with the only behaviors they are able to choose in their interactions with others?
How are all “cognitive agents” not just more of nature’s “living, breathing…thinking” dominoes? Or, if you prefer, nature’s own computers?
“I” and my “environment” would seem to be of one and only one inherent reality. The only reality possible given the laws of matters.
Which would necessarily take us back to wondering if we are in possession of just enough free will to explain mind as matter of our own volition. As a species on this planet in the vastness of all there is going back to an explanation for existence itself.
So, how is it finally to be determined/demonstrated once and for all what is really going on “in our head” when we choose one behavior over another in any particular context?
The problem embedded in what some note to be the ambiguities that revolve around “the timing”.
Who is able to show beyond all doubt what plays out when, say, someone enters the voting booth and pulls the lever for candidate X instead of candidate Y or candidate Z.
Is everything already scripted in our brain by the laws of matter, or, instead, is there some “variable” that in fact, does allow for a choice – a real choice – predicated on actual human volition.
In other words, was it nature that ultimately compelled the Russians to hack the 2016 elections in America? Was the outcome already rigged going back to, say, the Big Bang?
A Compatibilism / Incompatibilism Transformation
By Trick Slattery
From the “Breaking the Free Will Illusion” web site
This is just an example of how far down these discussions can go in introducing complex elements into the debate that can only really be understood to the extent that everyone is in sync regarding what the words themselves mean.
To date no one is able to bring a good reductionist and a greedy reductionist into the lab, perform a set of experiments with/on them, and demonstrate why one rather than the other is closer to the whole truth regarding determinism and free will.
Besides, why can’t it simply be argued that whatever you consider yourself to be here in regard to “reductionism”, it is only that which nature compelled your brain matter to espouse?
If everything does reduce down to brain matter wholly in sync with the inexorable march of nature into a necessary future nothing noted in discussions like this changes that.
Thus “cranes” and “skyhooks” were “destined” to become a part of our universe going all the way back to whatever set in motion the laws of matter themselves.
We just [still] have no idea what the hell that could possibly have been.
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
This sort of thinking continues to baffle me. In order to confront “the already-difficult-enough problem of what actions and values are moral”, we would first have to determine if the confrontation itself is embedded in at least some measure of autonomy. Otherwise we will never really know if that which we do “choose” to confront is not only that which we were never able not to choose to confront.
So, I might suggest here that we can only take a subjective leap to autonomy. But: never really knowing if I was never able not to suggest that. Why? Because what I think is subjective here is but another necessary component of the objective reality embedded ever and always in matter unfolding only as it ever can and must and does.
First and foremost, I need a way to determine if “I” have any capacity to choose freely. Otherwise, I have no way in which to be certain that this very post is not but another inherent component of the very fabric of reality itself.
But only to the extent that it can be determined definitively that, of his own volition, Kant might have come to a different conclusion can we determine if Goetz in turn might have opted freely to argue the opposite.
Again, as though even our reaction to this may not be the only reaction that nature accords us.
Then it’s just going around and around in circles depending on which set of assumptions you either were or were not free to choose.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
So, the human brain evolves to be in sync with what matter had already evolved into before. But how to explain this “extra layer of cognition” going all the way back to the time when the universe is described by the folks at CERN by noting that…
“It took 380,000 years for electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. These were mainly helium and hydrogen, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the universe. 1.6 million years later, gravity began to form stars and galaxies from clouds of gas.”
So, in a determined universe, we go from matter that is just electrons trapped in orbits around nuclei, to atoms, to mostly hydrogen and helium, to clouds of gas, to stars, to super novas exploding and producing all of the heavier elements that managed to become living matter that has evolved on planet earth into a species compelled to have this extra layer of cognition.
And this extra layer now includes a human psychology that, in having the capacity to choose among alternatives, is also able to delude itself into thinking that it can do this of its own free will.
What’s wrong with this picture? Or, more to the point, how do we demonstrate what’s right with it? Other than in the manner in which over time nature compels us to. If nature doesn’t compel us to destroy ourselves first. Or if nature doesn’t compel one or another aggregation of mindless matter to commence the next “extinction event” here on earth. One that this time includes us.
Freedom evolves. That’s a good way to put it. We just don’t know if it was ever able not to evolve as it did. Or to evolve as it did because we had an actual say in in choosing the direction.
But: Sans God there would be no advantages or disadvantages in the evolution of matter. That would imply some manifestation of teleology. Matter evolving one way rather than another in order to achieve some purpose or a goal.
From my frame of mind, it seems that compatibilism was compelled by nature [re human psychology] because this extra layer of cognition allows “I” to make that crucial peacegirlian distinction between participating in the evolution of matter in a way that mindless matters [like dominoes] cannot. Even though nothing at all could or would ever be other than what it must be.
After all, it’s not like Mother Nature actually does exist as an entity pondering the advantages and disadvantages of a big brain and then freely opting herself to choose the one we’ve got.
“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page
In a way, this encompasses just how absurd it seems to believe in a truly “hard determinist” assessment of human reality.
Something exist. Either out of nothing at all or because there was never not something. And if somehow we can unravel all the pieces that encompass all there is, we’ll find that nothing in it could ever have been other than what it only could have been.
Right up to me typing these words and you reading them.
And yet from somewhere deep down inside our “hearts and souls” we just know that this is completely preposterous. “Prove it” is the obvious reaction. But then those who argue for it can always come back with “prove that it’s not”.
Then what? Where’s the definitive argument coupled with the definitive evidence that finally resolves it beyond all doubt?
But, in my view, most folks can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge it has not been pinned down yet. They merely assume that their own point of view need be as far as they go. They become objectivists. Why? Because, psychologically, convincing yourself that you have the answer is more important than whatever the answer might possibly be.
In other words, “I” being but another “celestial body” on a celestial body that we call Earth.
Only, for all mindless celestial bodies, there does indeed seem to be a set of laws – the either/or world – that they must obey going all the way back to the Big Bang.
It’s mindful bodies that throw everything for a loop. Surely they must be an exception somehow. Either through God or through some extraordinary component embedded in the evolution of mindless matter into minds into “I”.
Something we will just have to wait for science to figure out so that one day in the future it will be confirmed that, yes, we do indeed have at least some capacity to freely shape our own lives.
Still, folks like me then go on to suggest that, even to the extent our will is free, “I” in the is/ought world is no less an existential contraption rooted in dasein. That, in the is/ought world, the subjective/subjunctive “I” still appears to prevail.
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
I actually do make an effort to make sense of arguments like this. And it either does not make sense or I am simply unable [up to now] to make sense of it myself.
From my own perspective [compelled or not], without free will any objections raised by any of us about anything at all – as with anything that might interest any of us at all – are necessarily embedded in the only possible reality.
Seriously, if morality does not require free will, would that not make morality as embodied in human interactions just another set of nature’s dominoes toppling over only as they must.
Those hypothetical autonomous aliens really do choose of their own free will to make note of human existential interactions in which morality comes up…but it is only to note how we are not aware that these interactions are not really of our own choosing as autonomous beings. And that’s because they know that we are not autonomous being.
Thus any terms that we “choose” to use in discussions like this are no less wholly in sync with the laws of matter.
And yet if Kant was unable to freely choose his view then any problems that are derived by anyone of us in regard to the value judgments that we are in turn not free to choose gets subsumed in whatever is finally discovered to be true about the human brain/mind/consciousness by those scientists who are actually grappling with that experientially/experimentally even as I, compelled or not, post this.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Think about that. All the crewmen are fighting over the wheel. But the fight itself cannot be reduced down to any particular one of them. There is no crewman # 1 ultimately calling the shots. Instead the crewmen are physiological interactions – chemical, neurological – that, in and of themselves, unfold in sync with the laws of nature. So the “winner” is merely the transaction that, naturally, could only have won. Unless, of course, there is an element of randomness that even nature itself is not entirely in command of.
The quantum world certainly hints at that. But how then, given some element of autonomy, does that randomness impact the choices that we do have some control over? Is this randomness able to mutate into chaos – a helter-skelter, hit or miss world such that, in any particular context, no one and no thing is the final arbiter? Involving perhaps dimensions of reality intertwined in parallel universes that become intertwined in ways that we can’t even yet imagine?
Then cue God?
Okay, as an intellectual contraption, this way well be closer to reality than any of the ones that we encounter here. But if you are interacting with someone and he asks you to explain your behavior, how do you suppose he will react when you tell them that your behaviors reflect an “organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that my body has developed”?
Let alone be able to convince him that this settles the question of whether those behaviors were only ever what they could have been — given the relationship between this competitive activity in a human brain that has to confront dualism as one possible explanation. That or God.
If neither, than what does explain it?
Another example of “sheer speculation”. Does knowing we know something prove that we could have freely chosen to know something else instead?
Use the “layering of representation” conjecture to walk us through the behaviors that you choose.