thoughts on determinism

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

Why should we believe that the human mind contains the same determinism of celestial bodies? Why would we not believe that the human brain is an agent capable of making undeterminable random choices?

How does this relate to free will? Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. You’re making a decision, there are at least two options. Not only are you unimpeded on what to choose, you are unimpeded in what not to choose. According to hard determinism, free will is just an illusion. Any decision we make was already determined.

No, according to what the hard determinists claim to believe given the gap between this claim and a demonstrable proof that is verifiably true and not able to be falsified.

Similarly regarding the arguments that free-will advocates claim. Claiming free-will is not the same thing as providing demonstrable proof that it exists.

Instead, most of these discussions and debates take place in a world of words.

Our gender, parents, genes, cognitive ability, innate talents, time, place, and economic circumstances into which we happen to be born were not our decisions to make and yet provide enormous influence on who we are and how we think.

Do these factors influence our decision making? I don’t see how anyone can argue that they don’t. But do these factors not only influence, but determine every decision we make? I would argue no.

In my view, the part encompassing factors that influence our behaviors is embodied existentially in dasein. It then becomes a matter of 1] assuming some measure of autonomy and 2] recognizing “I” as an existential contraption confronted with conflicting goods and political economy in the is/ought world.

I believe that humans have free will. But let’s not think of this as an on-and-off switch. And let’s be clear on all that’s necessary to debunk determinism. Let’s suppose out of every 10,000 decisions you make, 9,999 are predetermined based on past events and one is based on choosing possible courses of action unimpeded. Hard determinism is dead, and every instance of the 100 word scenario has a different human civilization.

See what I mean? Has he demonstrated empirically, experimentally that this is so? Such that a prediction might be made as to which of those 10,000 decisions is the one made unimpeded?

As for, “hard determinism is dead, and every instance of the 100 word scenario has a different human civilization”, I’ll need that explained a bit further.

But would only a fraction of a fraction of free will make any significant difference? The answer is yes. A small decision can have an enormous rippling effect. Let’s suppose an ancestor 10,000 years ago that was female, instead of going with male A mated with male B. An entire lineage is changed. Generations expanding exponentially to other generations over 10,000 years are effected.

Yes, assuming that we are able to establish that she chose B instead of A in a manner that was not compelled by nature.

On the other hand, as always, I’m left with the feeling that [in an autonomous world of whatever measure] I am simply not understanding the point itself.

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

[Dennett] says we bootstrap our way to (self-)consciousness by a process of interactions between our brains/bodies and our social environments, with back-and-forth communication about reasons for actions, which develops the mind to think in such terms. He also cites a Harry Frankfurt essay, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ (1971), which says, “A person can want one thing but want to want something else – and act on that second-order desire” – like your desire to eat that chocolate cake versus your desire to lose weight.

Here though we always come back to the same predicament. Drawing conclusions based only on what science has been able to disclose so far regarding what it thinks is happening in the brain when we come to want something while in turn wanting something else. Where is the definitive evidence that clearly discloses if “I” here is unequivocally free or unequivocally compelled to opt for one set of actual behaviors rather than another?

Nothing, to my knowledge, has been decisively pinned down. Or, to your knowledge, has it been. Yes? Okay, link us to it.

Dennett says, Frankfurt writes. So, what can we, with all certainty, come to conclude about me typing these words and you reading them given the arguments posed by both the hard determinists and the libertarians.

Dennett argues that this capacity to reflect on and mediate among one’s desires is the essence of personhood. But this seems at odds with Schopenhauer’s saying that one can’t choose one’s desires. And what about the metaphor of crewmen fighting over the wheel, instead of a captain being in charge? In the end, Dennett insists that we can and do use deliberation to resolve such internal conflicts, and that there is somebody home – the self – after all, to take responsibility and be morally accountable.

In other words, Schopenhauer just takes it all back another step: “You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.”

I’m only pointing out the obvious: there may well be more steps.

Eventually, everything has to be taken back to an understanding of existence itself. And we don’t even know for certain if that is not as well but another manifestation of nature unfolding only as it must. Or, if “I” does have some measure of freedom not yet explained by science, whether it is even capable of understanding something like this at all.

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“Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will”
Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
Kerri Smith in Nature magazine.

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes’s outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

Forget the results for a moment.

What is of fundamental significance/importance to me here is that these folks are not just exploring/examining the determinism/free will debate in a world of words. Which is basically what you and I are engaged in here.

Instead, they are using sophisticated technology coupled with the scientific method to explore actual brains making actual choices.

And, I suspect, one day this sophisticated technology will be reduced down to a device that can be held in one’s hand. That way decisions made in the course of actually interacting with others from day to day can be probed “in real time” to explore the extent to which the choices are more likely to be compelled than free.

Bottom line: Telling us here what you believe about the behaviors that you choose is not the same as demonstrating that what you believe proves that you either chose them of your own volition or were in fact not able to not choose them.

“The first thought we had was ‘we have to check if this is real’,” says Haynes. “We came up with more sanity checks than I’ve ever seen in any other study before.”

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

Uh-oh?

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

The Selfish Illusion?

Dennett argued in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained that the common metaphor of your self as a captain at the helm of your mind is wrong: it’s really more like a gaggle of crewmen fighting over the wheel. In other words, there really isn’t a ‘self-contained’ self, but rather, a lot of neurons sparking all over the brain. They’re not acting with any intentions; but the effect of their interaction is that at any given moment one neuronal activity has shoved its way to the forefront of the neuronal processing. And that, says Dennett in Freedom Evolves, is how mental contents become conscious – “by winning the competitions against other mental contents for control of behavior.”

The difficulty most have with an assessment like this is rather obvious: It’s one thing to describe what is going on in the brain figuratively and another thing altogether to note how step by step the chemical and neurological interactions involved in making a choice translate into a literal understanding of how the brain “I” and the mind “I” become intertwined from moment to moment such that the choice being made is clearly shown to be either volitional or compelled.

After all, it’s not like “I” am inside my brain with a baton conducting this tangle of biological interactions to insure that the choice that I really and true want prevails. Thus “I” itself here remains no less enigmatic.

So what still makes you feel that there’s a you in there? Dennett would reply that asking this question echoes Cartesian dualism, which conceives of the ‘you’ as something in addition to all the brain and body activity. On the contrary, what you are, he asserts, “just is this organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that your body has developed” – which you ‘automatically’ know about because it’s your body.

Of course, it may well be that what makes you feel is no less compelled than what makes you think. Just as the brain is autonomically intertwined with the rest of the body organs such that “I” merely goes along for the ride. You may be having a heart attack but it’s not like you actually chose to. The body does its thing in so many ways that are beyond your control.

But: Do you have some measure of control in choosing to eat healthy foods and exercise and practice stress reduction techniques aimed at reducing the possibility of a heart attack? Is that an actual autonomous contribution of “I”?

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

…an amoeba has a body without ‘knowing’ anything, especially not in the self-reflective way you do. I think the answer to the mystery of our selves instead lies in our layering of representations – unlike an amoeba, not merely knowing things, but knowing we know them.

Still, we don’t really know for certain if what we know we know is not just another manifestation of nature unfolding only as it does…only as it can…only as it must.

The amoeba is just further down the line when – somehow! – mindless matter became living matter became self-conscious living matter became you and I.

How, exactly, on a biological, genetic, chemical and neurological level did this “layering of representations” tumble over into having actual options to act on this…freely?

And then part where all the memes come in.

But there’s more to Dennett’s thesis. He says we bootstrap our way to (self-)consciousness by a process of interactions between our brains/bodies and our social environments, with back-and-forth communication about reasons for actions, which develops the mind to think in such terms.

Sure, those autonomous aliens could look down at us and describe this communication by noting the things that we choose to do. But then noting in turn that we only think that we are choosing freely to do what we do because nature/matter has evolved into a human brain able to create the psychological illusion of actual volition.

But: How would they go about communicating that to us?

He also cites a Harry Frankfurt essay, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ (1971), which says, “A person can want one thing but want to want something else – and act on that second-order desire” – like your desire to eat that chocolate cake versus your desire to lose weight. Dennett argues that this capacity to reflect on and mediate among one’s desires is the essence of personhood. But this seems at odds with Schopenhauer’s saying that one can’t choose one’s desires.

Which merely demonstrates that very, very intelligent people grapple with this and come to differing conclusions. Conflicting wants and desires seem to suggest [if only “intuitively”] that “I” am there as more than just another mechanical component ever in sync with the laws of matter. But how is that then established as in fact true? Or that the establishing of this itself is just another manifestation of nature’s inevitable march into the future.

In the end, Dennett insists that we can and do use deliberation to resolve such internal conflicts, and that there is somebody home – the self – after all, to take responsibility and be morally accountable.

Dennett insists!

Well, I guess that settles it then. Unless, of course, other very, very smart folks insist that it is something else entirely.

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

In all the discussions about free will, what should be included is freedom. If all you have to eat is rice, guess what you’re going to have for diner. Let’s suppose you have money and traveled to Chicago, New York, or Paris. You go out to eat, but haven’t decided what. You go out the door and start walking around a place you’ve never been to. Where will the journey take you?

All this reflects of course is the fact that our brain is able to come up with things like this in order to “prove” we have free will.

As though we can’t have a dream in which the same scenario unfolds. You walk out the door and go looking for a place to eat. Now, in the dream you think you are doing it freely. Or I certainly do in my dreams.

But, of course, that’s just a dream! In the waking world it’s all different. Why? Because we can think up scenarios like the one above and that proves it.

No one can predict what you’ll wind up eating. You can’t predict what you’ll wind up eating. You pass 20 restaurants, back up five, and wind up at restaurant number fifteen. There are 100 things on the menu. You narrow it down to two choices, and you can go either way. You wind up with A instead of B, but you could have gone with B instead of A.

Quite the contrary insist those who believe in an omniscient God. He can predict what you’ll wind up eating.

Even Wall’s conviction that he chose to become an atheist is only based on the assumption that he might have freely opted instead to become a Christian.

And that you have thought yourself into believing that you are freely choosing what to pick from the menu is really as far as you can go by way of “demonstrating” it.

On and on folks like Hall go creating arguments out of words and then using the arguments themselves as the intellectual’s equivalent of the scientific method.

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“Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will”
Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
Kerri Smith in Nature magazine.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person’s actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it. For Haynes, this is unsettling. “I’ll be very honest, I find it very difficult to deal with this,” he says. “How can I call a will ‘mine’ if I don’t even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?”

This is really what it comes down to for many. We may never know beyond all doubt whether the behaviors that we choose involve at least some element of freedom. But since we don’t seem to know this unequivocally now, this leaves open the possibility that we don’t.

But: the implications of that can be either very, very disturbing or very, very comforting.

It depends in large part on how many achievements you can claim to take credit for and how many failures you can claim are “beyond my control”.

And how do you wrap your head around the idea that in choosing coffee instead of tea you are merely in sync with the laws of matter going back [so far] 13.8 billion years.

Yet even given some measure of free will, our reactions to this are in turn but a reflection of all the existential variables in our lives that predispose some to think about it deeply and others not to think about it at all.

It all just gets tangled up in/with all of the other human-all-too-human factors that prompt us to go in so many different directions in the course of choosing either this or that.

We simply make up our minds one way or the other and carry on. We’re all basically stuck here.

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

Let me offer my own thoughts on this issue. When the crewmen battle over the wheel, it’s not a chaotic process where one outcome is as likely as another, like rolling dice. Saying the outcome is deterministically governed by a long string of preceding causes is also far too simplistic. Viewed more holistically, everything about those battles is a reflection of who you are, your personality and character, constructed over years. This is shaped by many factors beyond your control, yes – your genetic endowment, how your parents raised you, and a host of other environmental influences; but also, importantly, by all the choices and decisions you made along the way. Many of those past choices and decisions were influenced by past battles over the wheel by various gangs of crewmen. But in all those, too, personality/character factors came into play.

So, what have we here? Isn’t it basically a “thought experiment” provided to us as “proof” that on some admittedly complex level, the crewmen each possess in their own way the capacity to choose their behaviors?

Is he actually able to describe what goes on in the brain of the crewmen such that he reaches this crucial point, amidst entirely natural chemical and neurological interactions, where each individual “I” here is freely opting toward the wheel of his own volition?

Close enough to the science of free will?

Here’s a good illustration of the practical reality of free will. Few actions are more deterministically caused than a smoker’s lighting up – a consequence of physical addiction on top of psychological and behavioral conditioning, all creating a powerful craving. Seemingly a textbook case of B.F. Skinner’s deterministic behaviorism. Yet smokers quit! If that’s not free will, I don’t know what could be.

Again, only to the extent that he could probe the brain of someone who did quit smoking and note how, empirically, “I” here is not compelled by the laws of nature, would he be able to establish definitively that the quitter’s will was free.

Until then, how is it not just another rendition of what Kerri Smith noted above:

“The conscious decision to [quit smoking] was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.”

Dennett invokes Dumbo, the elephant who flies by flapping his ears. At first Dumbo is scared of launching himself off the cliff. But his bird friend has a bright idea. He hands Dumbo a feather, saying it’s a magic feather, and as long as Dumbo holds it, he can fly. It works. Of course he doesn’t really need the feather, and in the end he learns that. Dennett says we too don’t need the feather of magical ideas. But we do have minds with vast capabilities. And, like Dumbo, we should recognize those capabilities – including our free will to run our lives.

Huh?!!!
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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

Sam Harris believes that free will is an illusion, it doesn’t exist…[He] cannot say that science has proven free will doesn’t exist. He wrote a book and gave lectures based on a conclusion from an inconclusive experiment. That is one heck of a blunder!

This is where from my frame of mind the arguments get rather unreal, strange…even bizarre.

If Harris doesn’t believe in free will given the manner in which I have come to understand a determined universe then he could not have not been an atheist any more than religious folks could not have not believed in God. Yet his reactions to religion is precisely the reaction that one would expect from someone who believes that one is able [obligated] to freely choose atheism because it is more rational.

On the other hand, if Harris doesn’t say that science has proven that free will doesn’t exist, can Hall say that science has proven it does exist? How are both points of view not clearly embedded in all that is still yet to be learned by science here?

In matters of randomness, Harris argues that random choices do exist but doesn’t mean free will. Why? He argues that unless you can explain why you picked one option over the other at random, like the two choices in the restaurant scenario, that’s not free will. I would argue that Sam Harris is wrong. You don’t need to explain why, you simply need to make the choice, understand the choice, and accept the consequences.

All any of us can explain about why we choose one selection from the menu rather than another is what we think “here and now” we know about what is happening “in our head” then. When in fact none of us do know everything that we must know in order to answer the question definitively.

That’s the part both sides seem unwilling to accept. The part that [to me] revolves more around a human psychology [compelled or not] ever and always inclined to believe that having an answer is far, far better than being unsure that there is an answer.

Besides, there must be an answer. Why? Because they have already found it!

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

I found it interesting that Harris injected this “you need to understand why” into the definition of free will. Seems like an attempt to move the goal post. My statement that free will is simply an illusion rests on shaky ground, therefore I’ll attempt to redefine the term rather than admit my logic may have been a bit faulty.

Okay, but what I keep coming back to here is how interesting it might be to point out to Mr. Harris that in a wholly determined universe, i.e. a universe in which all matter [including brain matter] is governed by natural laws, what any of us come to understand about the definition of free will is the only thing we were ever able to come to understand about it.

In other words, over and again I’m confronted with the prospect that I must be missing something really important here about the manner in which folks like this discuss these relationships.

I really found this statement of Harris interesting as I’ve heard the exact opposite. If you understand why you made a decision it was not free will. Why? Because there were obviously pre-existing reasons that determined the choice. So people arguing that there’s no free will seem to be saying that if you know why you made the choice, it’s not free will, and if you don’t know why you made the choice, it’s not free will. How convenient.

Same for the author here. How is he able to demonstrate that what he understands about these relationships is beyond all doubt the embodiment of his own free will? However circumscribed and/or circumvented it will be by any number of actual existential variables.

His leap to free will is no less an intellectual contraption in my view. We’re all stuck trying to pin the tail on this donkey going all the way back to why something rather than nothing exists at all. And why this something and not another something altogether.

In other words, why and how does the human brain do what it does such that this can be traced back to God or to nature or to some component embedded in the chemical and neurological interactions inside the brain that can be pinpointed to explain how this living matter became autonomous.

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“Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will”
Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
Kerri Smith in Nature magazine.

Philosophers aren’t convinced that brain scans can demolish free will so easily. Some have questioned the neuroscientists’ results and interpretations, arguing that the researchers have not quite grasped the concept that they say they are debunking. Many more don’t engage with scientists at all. “Neuroscientists and philosophers talk past each other,” says Walter Glannon, a philosopher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has interests in neuroscience, ethics and free will.

Here we have the classic example of how different people using the same words are not able to agree on how to understand the meaning of these words in any particular context.

Still, in talking about the “concept of free will”, how can philosophers explain this to the neuroscientists so as to enable them to test for it in their experiments with actual functioning brains making choices?

Sure, in a world of words, “free will” can be encompassed in many, many different ways. But sooner or later these “thought up” and “thought out” ideas have to be reconfigured into ways to probe both their use value and their exchange value when the focus shifts to an actual behavior being chosen in an actual context.

So, what we we need here are the latest reports from the scientific community in which the arguments of particular philosophers have been explored “for all practical purposes” given specific experiments conducted with actual functioning brains.

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

When it comes to analyzing a decision and finding out why it was made, here’s the problem. No matter what decision was made, it can be analyzed and reasoning can be made. If out of 1,000 choices someone went with #937, we can examine the reasoning as to why. But if they went with choice #47, we could also examine the reasoning as to why. For a hard determinist, reasoning why a decision was made becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it must have been made.

Yes, and this is the part that, in a rather visceral, gut manner, seems very, very difficult for many to accept. Is our brain really pre-programed mechanically by the laws of matter to have chosen #937 instead of #47 because, going back to the very creation of matter itself, it could only have ever been that way?

We take our own leap here in accepting a particular set of assumptions that, in my view, are as a result of having [existentially] come into contact with sources that were predisposed existentially themselves to think this instead of that. Accepting that the overwhelming preponderance of us do not have either the education or training as actual brain scientists to fathom the human mind here systemically.

A big criticism of hard determinism is that if people aren’t free to choose their options, nobody can be accountable for them. Criminals were going to do bad things, it’s not like they had any control. We should feel sorry for them. Why should we punish people that couldn’t help what they were doing?

Here we go again: taking that leap from hard determinism in the either/or world [which most of us just take for granted] to no free will in the is/ought world [which most of us reject].

Here [for some] free will becomes like religion: even if it doesn’t actually exist, we’d still feel the need to invent it. Only here the need to invent it is, in and of itself, no less compelled by nature.

So shouldn’t we change our justice system if we have determined free will doesn’t exist? The answer is no. Not that we should never make changes to our system, but not based on determinism.

I’ll probably never grasp this frame of mind. In a determined universe [as I understand it] we could only determine if free will doesn’t exist because we were never able not to determine that it doesn’t exist. There is no yes or no answer here other than as the only answer we could have come to. And if we live in a wholly determined universe, we would ask ourselves if we should change our system of justice only because we were never able not to ask ourselves that. And certainly Change or No Change is but another inherent, necessary component of this determined universe

What the fuck do I keep missing here?

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “there’s a new sheriff in town.” Where did this expression come from? When European settlers in the U.S. headed west, remote towns were established. Without organized law enforcement, these towns were lawless. People didn’t feel safe walking the streets.

So some tough son-of-a-gun comes into town, takes the badge, and makes their presence known. I’m the new sheriff in these parts and everyone will obey the law. If they don’t I will hunt them down and string them up. Not wanting any part of that, people who were causing problems are now walking the straight and narrow. Crime goes down significantly and people now feel safe to walk the streets.

What if the sheriff came in and said, “All your actions are determined, and since everyone is going to do what they’re going to do anyway, no one can be blamed for anything.” What would happen? Crime would continue.

Over and over again: As though if Wall was only ever able to note this in a wholly determined universe, crime would only ever have been able to continue or not continue back in that old west town wholly in sync in turn with the immutable laws of matter.

For me, it’s not a question of what the sheriff says, but of whether, given what he says, he was able to freely opt to say something else. The sheriff, the criminals and the law-abiding folks in that town at that time and in that place would be at one with any and all human interactions over all of time and across all of space.

The actions of the sheriff establishing law and order immediately became a past action that directly impacted future actions. Even if these actions were determined, they still made a positive and significant impact. Fatalism is the belief that none of our actions mean anything. That doesn’t make any sense at all.

If the actions of the sheriff were entirely determined then the consequences of his actions precipitated a positive and significant impact that was also only what could ever have been.

Then [for me] we are back to the part where people like peacegirl make this distinction “in their head” between human brains “choosing” rather than choosing what they do. As though anything would have been other than what it must have been when the new sheriff came to town.

The bottom line is that a society must establish law and order. Good arms and good laws as Machiavelli would say. This means people need to be made accountable for their actions in order to guide others in making constructive decisions. Actions to help determine future actions.

No, the bottom line [mine] is that if, given nature’s laws of matter encompassing human brains/interaction, law and order is established, it is only because there was never any possibility of it not being established. And if people are made accountable it is only because they were never able to not be made accountable. Constructive and destructive decisions become interchangeable in determined universe. Actions here and now compelled necessarily to beget actions there and then.

Unless of course I’m wrong.

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

Hard determinists will often throw out extreme examples where people didn’t have free will. A brain tumor or schizophrenia caused someone to be violent. How can you punish people in those instances? But our justice system already has ways to address those uncommon scenarios. Reasons of insanity or temporary insanity, if proven to the court, receive a different sentence than those determined to have control, meaning free will.

Actually, the hardest determinist of all would seem to throw out the most extreme example of all: That having or not having a brain tumor or schizophrenia does not make someone violent. They will be violent solely because they were never able not to be violent.

Just as the author here was never able not to make his point. Just as you were never able not to be reading mine.

Isn’t that basically the consequence of living in a universe in which the human brain is no less entirely in sync with the laws of matter?

Over and again though I can’t help but assume I must be misunderstanding his point. But: given how I have come to understand determinism there was never any possibility of my not missing it.

What about someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol? They are made accountable for taking the drugs or alcohol. We don’t let off drunk drivers because their judgement was impaired.

Same thing. What difference does it make if we “choose” to let them off or “choose” not to let them off when we did not really choose anything as an autonomous human being?

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“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

Sam Harris seems to argue that when people hurt people, we should feel the same way as if the damage was done by a lower animal or weather event. We shouldn’t hate the people that hurt people and we shouldn’t want vengeance upon them. To me, that ideology is naïve, incoherent, and self-destructive.

This is where determinism can get downright spooky. Someone hurts you. But you have thought yourself into believing that they could never have not hurt you. And, furthermore, whether or not you hurt them back is also entirely compelled by nature.

In other words…

The idea of determinism may belong in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, but outside of academia, it doesn’t appear to have practical applications. So keep doing what you’re doing, even if you don’t have a choice.

Yeah, that is basically what it comes down to until we are able to actually ascertain for certain 1] whether we do possess some measure of free will and 2] what for all practical purposes that actually means.

We go back and forth here with our own assessments. But we have no capacity to go beyond the assessments themselves and link them definitively to philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

How is this not the case?

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The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

If we found out next week that neuroscientists had conclusively demonstrated that free will does not exist and that our so-called ‘choices’ are purely the result of automatic brain functions, I think we would be right to take this news badly.

Here we go again. The part I must be missing. It would seem ultimately pointless to speculate about how we would react to something like this because we could only ever react as we must.

The news would only be construed by particular individuals as good or bad if it was determined that we do in fact possess some measure of free will. In other words, if you want to be convinced that your own generally exhilarating life was of your own making, it’s good news. But if you want to be convinced that your own generally miserable life is beyond your control, it’s bad news.

Right?

But imagine further that, as we continue to develop new ways to alter human brain chemistry and so on, we found a way to design a ‘free will pill’ – something like Prozac or Adderall – which alters our brains so that we can act freely.

Same thing. If we live in a wholly determined universe, developing new ways to alter brain chemistry and designing a “free will pill” could only unfold solely in accordance with the laws of matter.

Then we would be confronted with the mind-boggling reality of nature’s laws having evolved into actual free-will. Which is basically what many free will advocates today suggest has in fact already happened.

Sans God in other words.

And, no, I have no way of demonstrating that this is not in fact the case. But where is the demonstration that it is the case. Where is the definitive proof regarding how the brain [through the evolution of life on Earth] has accomplished this? Again, from my frame of mind, we just don’t know.

It turns out that some recent work on free will makes this speculation more plausible than you might think. And this brings up all sorts of bizarre questions, such as whether we can freely choose to take a free will drug; whether we should take a free will drug; and what kind of effects such a drug would have on us, individually and socially.

Bizarre, exactly. But then the existence of existence itself can be seen as bizarre. Just as the evolution of mindless matter into mindful matter into human consciousness into “I” can be equally beyond being pinned down once and for all.

The crucial fact here still being that until science gets considerably closer to making this thought experiment a reality, you and I are left with taking a “leap of faith” to one set of assumptions or another.

[iambiguous]

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

When we’re torn about what to do, when we’ve weighed the pros and cons and need to make a choice between two courses of action, we want the choice to be solely the product of our decision. We want to have been able to have chosen differently, if we could go back in time. This ability to have chosen differently is what I’ll be referring to as ‘free will’.

Bingo!

Right?

Here however [over and over again] I always come back to my dream reality. I no less want any number of things in my dreams. And I no less either get them or do not get them. And “in the moment” [fast asleep in my recliner] the reality – a very, very vivid reality – seems no less real to me then the reality I am experiencing now. Either that or my dreams are very different from the dreams of others.

So, if the brain is creating one reality why not both?

The clear initial challenge to free will is determinism, the idea that the laws of physics establish chains of cause and effect where every event (including a brain event such as a choice) is decided by preceding ones, and those by still earlier ones, beginning with the Big Bang.

Only here I subsume the Big Bang itself in whatever the explanation is for Existence itself. Scientists are no less stumped in resolving how and why, if the Big Bang exploded into existence out of nothing at all, this can actually happen. And then the part where an infinite number of additional universes are intertwined in an infinite number of additional Big Bangs. And then the part about God.

[iambiguous]

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

…anyone familiar with the standard or Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics will tell you that things are undetermined at the very small level.

On the other hand, anyone familiar with the advancement of scientific knowledge down through the ages knows in turn there is still an enormous gap between what is known, what is still be known and all that there actually is to be known.

And how is this any less the case in regard to QM?

Here I ever and always come back to this:

[i]It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.[/i]

This from NASA.

The debate rages on about how to make sense of measurement, superpositions, and the other aspects of quantum mechanics; but at least one way to understand it is that the laws of physics are ultimately not deterministic, but rather, probabilistic.

How on Earth can he possibly assert something like this to be true as anything other than that which “here and now” he merely believes to be true in his head?

Whether an electron is discovered to be at one position or another, for example, is uncaused. This brings up the other clear problem for free will, which is randomness. If at the fundamental level of physical reality things are just a matter of chance, then how can we be said to be in control of our choices?

Right, like he grasps ontologically the relationship between cause and effect going all the way back to how this is to be understood in regard to the existence of existence itself.

In other words, even in the seemingly either/or world it is more important to convince yourself that you know what is true than to actually demonstrate how it can only be true. And then from that another gigantic leap to the assumption that the human brain itself must possess at least some measure of “uncaused” freedom.

Therefore the most common philosophical gripe about free will is that the concept is not even coherent.

Well, my gripe of course is that until we do have a comprehensive understanding of existence itself, who is to say what either does or does not constitute a coherent argument? In other words as long as the conclusion itself is supported only by the assumptions that are made regarding that 5% of the universe comprised of “normal matter”.

[iambiguous]

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

Let’s assume Mark Balaguer is right, and the question of whether we have free will or not will eventually be discovered by neuroscientists. They’ll either find that we have free will, or that we don’t, or perhaps that we have some degree of freedom that is generally unsatisfying. Recall that on Balaguer’s model, in order for us to have free will, those torn decision events need a 50/50 chance of going one way or the other. This would require a very particular orchestration of brain processes. And while the question is still entirely open as to what is going on during torn decision events, it seems overly optimistic that in many cases we are making a free choice on Balaguer’s terms. It might not require an exact balance though. A 60/40 probability split on a decision, for instance, might mean a 3:2 likelihood of choosing one option over another. But perhaps 50/50 is required for absolute freedom of choice at any given moment.

Some no doubt will read this and be torn 50/50 as to whether or not they agree with it. Or torn 50/50 as to whether or not they were free to make this as opposed to that assessment at all.

Now, if neuroscience is one day able to definitively determine that we do not have any capacity to choose freely [in any context] then that would seem to suggest that it is also able to grasp the ontological nature of existence itself. Going back to why there is an existence rather than no existence at all.

Then going all the way back to a definitive account of existence in relationship to God or to No God.

Right?

Let’s make the pessimistic assumption that neuroscientists discover either that we don’t have free will, or that we don’t have a satisfying degree of freedom over our choices. Couldn’t we in principle develop a drug able to manipulate brain function in order to achieve that 50/50 probability of the brain state going one way or the other at the moment of choice? It’s not so hard to imagine that, if we learn enough about the brain to figure out what’s involved during a decision, we’ll have a decent enough grasp on what it might take to alter the brain in order to manufacture free will in Balaguer’s sort of way.

How on earth would we encompass “for all practical purposes” what it means not to have a “satisfying degree of freedom over our choices”?

Let’s try to imagine how this might work given our interactions with others from day to day. And, in the either/or world, excluding the part about dasein and conflicting goods in the is/ought world. After all, even if you reach the 50/50 mark in opting freely for one or another behavior who is to say which behavior [morally] is the right one?

So, here, what would constitute a free choice? What would constitute a determined choice?

What here “in principle” would constitute developing a free will pill? As opposed to in fact developing one?

How could we not be dissatisfied unless we were able to pin everything down as either this or that?

[iambiguous]

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

…if truly free choices can only be made once the [free will pill] is taken, that would make the choice to take the drug either determined or random. It seems strange to think either that we might be determined to become free, or that we might randomly become free. And if we can manage to wrap our heads around that paradoxical prospect, we are left with the question of whether or not we ought to take the free will pill.

What this denotes of course is how tricky it can be for philosophers in grappling with human autonomy. You choose words to assess this but you don’t have any substantive capacity to demonstrate that you could have chosen other words instead. You choose to take the free will pill only because somehow the laws of matter were able to reconfigure the human brain into creating a pill that reconfigures the laws of matter themselves into actual volition.

Then the part where we move beyond these thought experiments into an accumulation of actual experiential data we can use to pin down a definitive conclusion.

We always seem to get stumped here because sooner or later the assumptions we make about the assumptions we make themselves can only be anchored to the definition and the meaning we give to words that we are unable to demonstrate we opted for of our own free will. We profess our own subjective accounts here in a world of words that we can never actually attach to a comprehensive empirical understanding of how the brain functions as matter apart from how mindless matter functions given the laws of matter.