Lets solve Free will once and for all!!

[Nimos]

Now, let's think about a bat used by an agent, Bob, to hit a baseball that breaks a window.

1) Bob broke the window with a bat.
2) Bob broke the window with a baseball.

Notice how sentence (1) would be an odd way to describe the event, but sentence (2) would not. When I say "odd", I don't mean impossible. You can think of contexts in which (1) might be used, but you have to put your mind to work to do that.

Im not sure I understand what you mean?

When you say sentence (1) would be an odd way to say it, but not impossible, what does that have to do with the event you described? When it is wrong.

"Let's think about a bat used by an agent, Bob, to hit a baseball that breaks a window."

I mean, sure it's not impossible, but I don't see anyone saying that, because it doesn't describe what happened, the only reason I can see why someone would do it, is if they are lying.

For instance, my brother once kicked a football through a window. If we should do the same with that, we could write it like this:

"My brother once broke a window with a kick"

It is a completely different event compared to what actually happened.

Normally, we would use (1), because instrumental noun phrases like with a baseball describe the proximal effect that caused the window to break.

We would use this if the action was different and Bob smashed the window with a bat, there is no mention of the baseball in sentences (1)

The bat is under Bob's control, and so is the ball.

The bat is under Bob's control, but it might have been a bad swing, causing the baseball to fly in the wrong direction. But also if it is baseball, there is a person pitching (I think it is called) why wouldn't he be under control of the baseball when he is the one throwing it at Bob?

Again I might misunderstand you, I understand the "chains of causation", but not sure what it has to do with linguistics and how that is related to free will?

 

[CorrectiveLens]

Im not sure I understand what you mean?

When you say sentence (1) would be an odd way to say it, but not impossible, what does that have to do with the event you described? When it is wrong.

"Let's think about a bat used by an agent, Bob, to hit a baseball that breaks a window."

I mean, sure it's not impossible, but I don't see anyone saying that, because it doesn't describe what happened, the only reason I can see why someone would do it, is if they are lying.

For instance, my brother once kicked a football through a window. If we should do the same with that, we could write it like this:

"My brother once broke a window with a kick"

It is a completely different event compared to what actually happened.


We would use this if the action was different and Bob smashed the window with a bat, there is no mention of the baseball in sentences (1)


The bat is under Bob's control, but it might have been a bad swing, causing the baseball to fly in the wrong direction. But also if it is baseball, there is a person pitching (I think it is called) why wouldn't he be under control of the baseball when he is the one throwing it at Bob?

Again I might misunderstand you, I understand the "chains of causation", but not sure what it has to do with linguistics and how that is related to free will?

According to the Christian Bible, man is given a free will and because of it, all mankind is headed towards damnation because the motivation for their free will is "self" first. If God condemns all, He would be merciless, which He is not. If He saves all, there would be disobedience, lawlessness, and sin in His kingdom and He would not have control. His only choice is to save a few, which He does throughout the timeline of humanity. Yes, believing and trusting in Jesus' death for the forgiveness of sins erases sins committed, but we still can't go to heaven because we are still sinners. How does God remedy the situation? The Father baptizes in His name when He chooses and grants repentance so that the sinner turns to Him in sorrow for forgiveness. The Son baptizes in His name when the repentant sinner trusts in Jesus death for the forgiveness of his sins. The Son than baptizes in the name of the Holy Spirit which is a gift from God the Father which acts as a portal through which both the Father through the Son can enter the mind, heart, and soul of the being indwelt to produce a new being full of love for God first and everyone else as we love ourselves.
So, do we have a free will? The answer is yes because the main purpose of our existence is self. God in His love and mercy erases the sins of those chosen and perfects them by changing their motivation from "self" to love for God and people. People who receive the Holy Spirit of the Father are glad and happy to do the Father's will because their bread, just like Jesus, is to do the Father's will. You can't know the Father's will unless you are filled with His Holy Spirit. Everyone else is still free to follow their own will.

 

[Copernicus]

Im not sure I understand what you mean?

When you say sentence (1) would be an odd way to say it, but not impossible, what does that have to do with the event you described? When it is wrong.

"Let's think about a bat used by an agent, Bob, to hit a baseball that breaks a window."

I mean, sure it's not impossible, but I don't see anyone saying that, because it doesn't describe what happened, the only reason I can see why someone would do it, is if they are lying.

For instance, my brother once kicked a football through a window. If we should do the same with that, we could write it like this:

"My brother once broke a window with a kick"

It is a completely different event compared to what actually happened.


We would use this if the action was different and Bob smashed the window with a bat, there is no mention of the baseball in sentences (1)


The bat is under Bob's control, but it might have been a bad swing, causing the baseball to fly in the wrong direction. But also if it is baseball, there is a person pitching (I think it is called) why wouldn't he be under control of the baseball when he is the one throwing it at Bob?

Again I might misunderstand you, I understand the "chains of causation", but not sure what it has to do with linguistics and how that is related to free will?

Well, to answer the last question first, one needs to look at the study of syntax--how words clump together to form phrases, and phrases to form clauses (simple sentences), and clauses to form complex sentences. Simple sentences or clauses are minimally a subject noun phrase and a verb, although more than one noun phrase can cluster around a verb to form a clause. The thing about noun phrases is that they can play two types of roles--grammatical roles (subject, direct object, indirect object, prepositional phrases of various sorts that behave like adverbs, etc.) and thematic (or semantic) roles (agent, instrument, experiencer, object, place, time, goal, etc.). I've mentioned just two thematic roles--agent and instrument--without going into more complex details. The remarkable thing about phrase structure and these grammatical roles is that they are universal across all human societies, and they are acquired by every normal human being as a matter of instinct. IOW, all sentence structure in all languages have limited, characteristic ways of talking about agents and instruments, not to mention the other thematic roles. (And the oldest linguistic theory mentioning linguistics concepts such as thematic roles goes back to perhaps fourth century BCE India.)

Anyway, getting back to Bob, his bat, and his baseball, we were talking about a situation in which Bob hits a baseball with his bat and it subsequently flies off to make contact with a window, breaking it. There are a great many ways to talk about that situation in any language, but all of them are going to have agents, instruments, and concepts like control, intention, and responsibility. Every human being has such concepts and a need to talk about them. But we can take a sentence like (1) in my last post and come up with contexts where it would work with the scenario I described to make it sound natural instead of odd, even though the bat did not come into contact with the window, i.e. was not a proximate cause of the breaking.

1) Bob broke the window with a bat.

Imagine that the scenario included a detail such as Bob using different instruments to hit baseballs with--a bat, a club, a racket, etc. Someone says that Bob broke a wind with a baseball, and another person asks which instrument he used to break the window. A plausible answer might be sentence (1). A farfetched detail in the scenario, I admit, but I just wanted to make the point that discourse context can often have a strong affect on the intuitive appropriateness of an expression. I'm getting pretty far down in the linguistic weeds here, so I'll stop now.

 

[CorrectiveLens]

Well, to answer the last question first, one needs to look at the study of syntax--how words clump together to form phrases, and phrases to form clauses (simple sentences), and clauses to form complex sentences. Simple sentences or clauses are minimally a subject noun phrase and a verb, although more than one noun phrase can cluster around a verb to form a clause. The thing about noun phrases is that they can play two types of roles--grammatical roles (subject, direct object, indirect object, prepositional phrases of various sorts that behave like adverbs, etc.) and thematic (or semantic) roles (agent, instrument, experiencer, object, place, time, goal, etc.). I've mentioned just two thematic roles--agent and instrument--without going into more complex details. The remarkable thing about phrase structure and these grammatical roles is that they are universal across all human societies, and they are acquired by every normal human being as a matter of instinct. IOW, all sentence structure in all languages have limited, characteristic ways of talking about agents and instruments, not to mention the other thematic roles. (And the oldest linguistic theory mentioning linguistics concepts such as thematic roles goes back to perhaps fourth century BCE India.)

Anyway, getting back to Bob, his bat, and his baseball, we were talking about a situation in which Bob hits a baseball with his bat and it subsequently flies off to make contact with a window, breaking it. There are a great many ways to talk about that situation in any language, but all of them are going to have agents, instruments, and concepts like control, intention, and responsibility. Every human being has such concepts and a need to talk about them. But we can take a sentence like (1) in my last post and come up with contexts where it would work with the scenario I described to make it sound natural instead of odd, even though the bat did not come into contact with the window, i.e. was not a proximate cause of the breaking.

1) Bob broke the window with a bat.

Imagine that the scenario included a detail such as Bob using different instruments to hit baseballs with--a bat, a club, a racket, etc. Someone says that Bob broke a wind with a baseball, and another person asks which instrument he used to break the window. A plausible answer might be sentence (1). A farfetched detail in the scenario, I admit, but I just wanted to make the point that discourse context can often have a strong affect on the intuitive appropriateness of an expression. I'm getting pretty far down in the linguistic weeds here, so I'll stop now.

Thank you! How does any of this answer the question of whether or not we have a free will?

 

[Copernicus]

Thank you! How does any of this answer the question of whether or not we have a free will?

I'm a compatibilist, which means that I accept the fact that reality is deterministic--at least in the sense of how we interact with it. However, the meaning of "free will" depends on actual linguistic usage, and that can only be discovered by looking at the language people use to describe it. My contribution here was primarily to point out that actual linguistic structure--the grammatical rules that define usage--are universally configured to identify agentive actions and instruments that agents use in controlling events around them.

Free will is about imagining future outcomes and having choices available that can control outcomes. Although we don't choose the desires that govern behavior, we do have desires that conflict and interfere with each other. In other words, we have conflicting goals and an estimation of what will happen if we choose one option over another. When we ask ourselves why we made a choice in the past to take an action, our future at that point was undetermined--purely imaginary. So we were free to choose one of several actions to take. However, we describe our motivations in terms of what we had control over and what we did not. If we made a bad choice, then we learn from that experience and use it to modify future behavior. At any given point in time, our future is always undetermined, even though a godlike omnipotent being might know exactly what choice physical brain activity will make us decide, after it computes all our options and weighs desires and goals. Linguistic analysis gives us insight into how we think and choose to behave. How we justify our actions. That's why philosophers have spent so much time analyzing language. There is a whole branch of philosophy called "linguistic philosophy" with a long history and body of literature going back into the early 20th century.

Note that tense and time reference is universally stamped on just about every sentence that comes out of our mouths. We live in a reality of determined past experiences, undetermined imaginary futures, and choices to make in the present moment. It doesn't matter whether all of our choices are fixed according to the deterministic chaos that our brains and bodies are a part of. Very little of that is known to us. So exercising free will is a fully determined process if you are standing outside and looking at it from a godlike perspective. But from the the limited perspective of the agent, the future is always undetermined and choices are made on the basis of calculation that goes on in our physical brain activity.

In this sense, we are really automatons in something like the same sense that robots are automatons. Robots make decisions all the time. Given some task to perform, they have conflicting goals that are programmed in and those goals are prioritized so that, faced with some unpredictable situation, they make a determined choice on how to act. I have seen walking robots actually navigate through mazes that they have never seen before, and they stop to ponder their actions before choosing to execute a strategy to overcome an obstacle. That is just how animals like us behave, but our brains are far more complex and sophisticated than the simple-minded robots that we construct. One big difference is that we learn and change our own "programming" on the basis of past experiences, but our robots aren't actually yet very good at doing that. Perhaps someday they will get there, but they don't have "free will" in the sense that we do, because they still aren't very good at learning to modify their strategies for operating under uncertain future conditions.

 

[CorrectiveLens]

Ve

I'm a compatibilist, which means that I accept the fact that reality is deterministic--at least in the sense of how we interact with it. However, the meaning of "free will" depends on actual linguistic usage, and that can only be discovered by looking at the language people use to describe it. My contribution here was primarily to point out that actual linguistic structure--the grammatical rules that define usage--are universally configured to identify agentive actions and instruments that agents use in controlling events around them.

Free will is about imagining future outcomes and having choices available that can control outcomes. Although we don't choose the desires that govern behavior, we do have desires that conflict and interfere with each other. In other words, we have conflicting goals and an estimation of what will happen if we choose one option over another. When we ask ourselves why we made a choice in the past to take an action, our future at that point was undetermined--purely imaginary. So we were free to choose one of several actions to take. However, we describe our motivations in terms of what we had control over and what we did not. If we made a bad choice, then we learn from that experience and use it to modify future behavior. At any given point in time, our future is always undetermined, even though a godlike omnipotent being might know exactly what choice physical brain activity will make us decide, after it computes all our options and weighs desires and goals. Linguistic analysis gives us insight into how we think and choose to behave. How we justify our actions. That's why philosophers have spent so much time analyzing language. There is a whole branch of philosophy called "linguistic philosophy" with a long history and body of literature going back into the early 20th century.

Note that tense and time reference is universally stamped on just about every sentence that comes out of our mouths. We live in a reality of determined past experiences, undetermined imaginary futures, and choices to make in the present moment. It doesn't matter whether all of our choices are fixed according to the deterministic chaos that our brains and bodies are a part of. Very little of that is known to us. So exercising free will is a fully determined process if you are standing outside and looking at it from a godlike perspective. But from the the limited perspective of the agent, the future is always undetermined and choices are made on the basis of calculation that goes on in our physical brain activity.

In this sense, we are really automatons in something like the same sense that robots are automatons. Robots make decisions all the time. Given some task to perform, they have conflicting goals that are programmed in and those goals are prioritized so that, faced with some unpredictable situation, they make a determined choice on how to act. I have seen walking robots actually navigate through mazes that they have never seen before, and they stop to ponder their actions before choosing to execute a strategy to overcome an obstacle. That is just how animals like us behave, but our brains are far more complex and sophisticated than the simple-minded robots that we construct. One big difference is that we learn and change our own "programming" on the basis of past experiences, but our robots aren't actually yet very good at doing that. Perhaps someday they will get there, but they don't have "free will" in the sense that we do, because they still aren't very good at learning to modify their strategies for operating under uncertain future conditions.

What would you say is the most common motivation in our decision making?

 

[Bear Wild]

It is true that determined means that there is no free will. But where I think it can give room maybe not for free will, but at least agency and choices is, if our ability to evaluate them is an emergent property, meaning that choices and agency in themselves are not a property of atoms as far as we know, but might only emerge in lifeforms.

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, so maybe the structures of the Universe can be deterministic, while we have to make choices, based on past experiences/influences etc. and given we have limited knowledge and make mistakes maybe that is enough for us to at least achieve agency and a will, even though it might not be free.

What I mean is, if we take a simple example. You might have a pile of bricks (atoms), but unless they are organized in a certain pattern they have limited functionality, stacked in the correct way and a house emerges. But each brick in itself is not a house and doesn't have this functionality, and you can heat or cool the house, it offers shelter, security, comfort etc. (consciousness), which doesn't really have anything to do with the house, except it has space inside that allows for it and walls etc.

Obviously, that is highly speculative

Well you and your hamster, if that is what your avatar is, may be close on this subject. At least we agree that despite the fact that we are not in control of most of our lives which are determined we still have that capacity for possibility by what we do. And who knows according to chaos theory even what seems to be a small contribution can lead to significant change. Thanks for listening to me.

 

[Nimos]

Free will is about imagining future outcomes and having choices available that can control outcomes. Although we don't choose the desires that govern behavior, we do have desires that conflict and interfere with each other. In other words, we have conflicting goals and an estimation of what will happen if we choose one option over another. When we ask ourselves why we made a choice in the past to take an action, our future at that point was undetermined--purely imaginary. So we were free to choose one of several actions to take.

This depends on the view

"When we ask ourselves why we made a choice in the past to take an action, our future at that point was undetermined--purely imaginary. So we were free to choose one of several actions to take."

I agree that the future might not be known to us, simply because we can't include all the things that are required to predict the future, but can apply probability to it.

A simple example could be you thinking:

"I'm going to go buy groceries"

The probability that if you do this, that you will be in the grocery store in 15 minutes is pretty high. Obviously, you can't know if you get hit by a car on your way there so you end up in the hospital instead.

The question is whether you decide to go buy groceries are free. Because even if you think that you will put it to the test it could be argued to be the very cause for you doing it in the first place.

So if we look at it like that, then the future is purely our estimation of the probability of it happening, and the more complex (influences, time, etc.) the less certain we are.

But again, the key element as I see it, is how influenced the initial choice was. And if it is deterministic then there wasn't a choice, we did it because it was determined. This is why I said that one could potentially get around it if will and agency are emergent properties, as they wouldn't necessarily as I see it, have to be deterministic simply because the Universe is. (Again speculative )

In this sense, we are really automatons in something like the same sense that robots are automatons. Robots make decisions all the time. Given some task to perform, they have conflicting goals that are programmed in and those goals are prioritized so that, faced with some unpredictable situation, they make a determined choice on how to act. I have seen walking robots actually navigate through mazes that they have never seen before, and they stop to ponder their actions before choosing to execute a strategy to overcome an obstacle. That is just how animals like us behave, but our brains are far more complex and sophisticated than the simple-minded robots that we construct. One big difference is that we learn and change our own "programming" on the basis of past experiences, but our robots aren't actually yet very good at doing that. Perhaps someday they will get there, but they don't have "free will" in the sense that we do, because they still aren't very good at learning to modify their strategies for operating under uncertain future conditions.

I don't think this is about free will, but rather about being able to analyze the environment you are in. And robots are limited by humans' abilities to "equip" them with good enough tools to do this. But if we imagine we could make a robot that could analyze all environments on the fly much better than any human could, meaning it could analyze the air for toxic gasses etc. and combine it with an AI, it could still not have free will.

Free will and AI are also an interesting topic, assuming we have as humans have it, would AI fall under that category as well? or maybe AGI is required? Which probably isn't that many years away anyway.

 

[Nimos]

Well you and your hamster, if that is what your avatar is, may be close on this subject. At least we agree that despite the fact that we are not in control of most of our lives which are determined we still have that capacity for possibility by what we do. And who knows according to chaos theory even what seems to be a small contribution can lead to significant change. Thanks for listening to me.

Sure. I think it is an interesting topic, even though we might not solve it or it might not even ultimately matter

 

[Nimos]

According to the Christian Bible, man is given a free will and because of it, all mankind is headed towards damnation because the motivation for their free will is "self" first. If God condemns all, He would be merciless, which He is not. If He saves all, there would be disobedience, lawlessness, and sin in His kingdom and He would not have control. His only choice is to save a few, which He does throughout the timeline of humanity. Yes, believing and trusting in Jesus' death for the forgiveness of sins erases sins committed, but we still can't go to heaven because we are still sinners. How does God remedy the situation? The Father baptizes in His name when He chooses and grants repentance so that the sinner turns to Him in sorrow for forgiveness. The Son baptizes in His name when the repentant sinner trusts in Jesus death for the forgiveness of his sins. The Son than baptizes in the name of the Holy Spirit which is a gift from God the Father which acts as a portal through which both the Father through the Son can enter the mind, heart, and soul of the being indwelt to produce a new being full of love for God first and everyone else as we love ourselves.
So, do we have a free will? The answer is yes because the main purpose of our existence is self. God in His love and mercy erases the sins of those chosen and perfects them by changing their motivation from "self" to love for God and people. People who receive the Holy Spirit of the Father are glad and happy to do the Father's will because their bread, just like Jesus, is to do the Father's will. You can't know the Father's will unless you are filled with His Holy Spirit. Everyone else is still free to follow their own will.

Again, as stated in the OP. I appreciate your input, but I don't prefer to bring in the supernatural in this particular case.

 

[PureX]

Lets solve Free will once and for all!!​

Let's not!


....Ups! I think we just did!

 

[CorrectiveLens]

Again, as stated in the OP. I appreciate your input, but I don't prefer to bring in the supernatural in this particular case.

Without the supernatural, what we are left with is a mental exercise in irrelevance.

 

[Copernicus]

This depends on the view

"When we ask ourselves why we made a choice in the past to take an action, our future at that point was undetermined--purely imaginary. So we were free to choose one of several actions to take."

I agree that the future might not be known to us, simply because we can't include all the things that are required to predict the future, but can apply probability to it.

The future is never known, always indeterminate at the point in time when a choice is made. Probability is a mathematical calculation, but people don't technically rely on anything like a probability calculation when they imagine future outcomes. Brains create complex webs of associations formed from past experiences. Outcomes are estimated in terms of accumulated experiences encoded in episodic memory among other things. Some experiences leave stronger impressions than others, but the point is that priorities change over time. The emotional priorities that determine our choices change over time, and that is part of the process of learning from experience.

...
But again, the key element as I see it, is how influenced the initial choice was. And if it is deterministic then there wasn't a choice, we did it because it was determined. This is why I said that one could potentially get around it if will and agency are emergent properties, as they wouldn't necessarily as I see it, have to be deterministic simply because the Universe is. (Again speculative )

But the whole point is that there are real choices even in a fully deterministic universe. We just need to weigh the consequences and make a decision on the basis of what our priorities are. That isn't apparent until we have an array of options and projected outcomes to choose from. We make those decisions--no one else. Just bear in mind that we are programmed beings. Our environment shapes and programs us, but we can always examine the results of our choices and change the way we behave when given similar choices in the future. IOW, free will is a fully determined process that adapts to changing circumstances. The reason for that is that we never know for certain what the outcomes of our decisions will be. The future is always uncertain.

I don't think this is about free will, but rather about being able to analyze the environment you are in. And robots are limited by humans' abilities to "equip" them with good enough tools to do this. But if we imagine we could make a robot that could analyze all environments on the fly much better than any human could, meaning it could analyze the air for toxic gasses etc. and combine it with an AI, it could still not have free will.

Yes it would, if it could analyze its environment in the way that animals and humans designed by evolution analyze theirs. We just don't have millions of years of trial and error to design our robots. We design them to overcome errors that we notice them making, but our current technology only gives them a very limited ability to learn from their mistakes. What you don't know about robotics is that the name of the game is operating under uncertainty. So programmers use techniques that are actually described as "nondeterministic" in the following sense. They are strategies for addressing obstacles and accidents that we imagine the robots might encounter. For example, what happens if a walking robot trips? How does it get up? If you design a walking robot, you have to program it to address that unforeseen circumstance, since you don't know if or when it will trip. Human children, of course, fall down all the time. So they learn to get up when that happens. A robot has to be programmed to do the same thing, because we only have rudimentary techniques for getting them to learn from new experiences of that sort.

Free will and AI are also an interesting topic, assuming we have as humans have it, would AI fall under that category as well? or maybe AGI is required? Which probably isn't that many years away anyway.

Actually, free will is a hot topic for research in robotics. If we end up sending robots out to celestial bodies in our solar system, they cannot be teleoperated from Earth because the distances create a time lapse that makes it impossible for them to respond to immediate circumstances. Hence, their degree of autonomy has to be very high--closer to animal or human autonomy. So free will in the human sense becomes necessary for advanced autonomous intelligent machines.

 

[PureX]

The whole 'no free will' thing is based on the idea that our thought choices and reasoning are not our own. That they are all being determined by some force outside and beyond ourselves. But for this to be true, there can be no "ourselves". Because a great many of our choices are being determined by forces that exist within "us". Muscle memory, biological cravings, brain structures: these are all either "us" or they aren't. And if they aren't there is no "us" anymore. Which would render the whole question of free will meaningless.

So that if we accept that there is an "us", then we must also accept that the choices we make are being made by "us" and not by some force that is not us, acting within us. And if we do not accept this, then there is no "us" to apply any will, too. And no "us" to then condemn for having expressed a will.

Logically, the pre-destiny argument does not work.

 

[ChieftheCef]

Sorry to hear that.

But please explain. When I say binary, it's simply that either we can make free will choices or we can't. If we can make them (Again ignoring biological limitations) then I can't see why we couldn't make all types of choices?

I think it's more nebulous than that like everything else in the universe. I think we choose things, yes, but ultimately what we choose is continually predetermined.

 

[Copernicus]

The whole 'no free will' thing is based on the idea that our thought choices and reasoning are not our own. That they are all being determined by some force outside and beyond ourselves. But for this to be true, there can be no "ourselves". Because a great many of our choices are being determined by forces that exist within "us". Muscle memory, biological cravings, brain structures: these are all either "us" or they aren't. And if they aren't there is no "us" anymore. Which would render the whole question of free will meaningless.

So that if we accept that there is an "us", then we must also accept that the choices we make are being made by "us" and not by some force that is not us, acting within us. And if we do not accept this, then there is no "us" to apply any will, too. And no "us" to then condemn for having expressed a will.

Logically, the pre-destiny argument does not work.

The philosophical stance you are talking about here is often referred to as eliminative materialism.

Eliminative materialism is a revisionary view in the philosophy of mind and of cognitive science, according to which our ordinary, folk psychological notions and categories of mental states are empty, that is, they do not stand for anything in objective reality. Ordinary categories of mental states include propositional attitudes (such as belief, desire, fear) and phenomenal states (such as the subjective aspect of pain, pleasure, colour perception, etc.). The main point of eliminative materialism is that categorization of mental states according to our ordinary, everyday understanding is illegitimate, because it is not supported by the best scientific taxonomies that deal with mental life, such as neuroscience. Some eliminative materialist authors add the further claim that future neuroscience will in fact eliminate all non-scientific vocabulary related to the domain of mental states.

The problem with eliminative materialism is that everything we experience can ultimately be declared nonexistent with this type of reductionist argument, because it can always theoretically be reduced to more fundamental components of a system of material interactions that give rise to the systemic behavior. If we never needed to describe the patterns we observe in complex systemic behavior (for example, the weather), then it would make sense to deny the existence of those patterns. Reality for us is defined in terms of how our bodies interact with it, not just the individual components that make up our bodies and the things they interact with. You don't need a physicist or a neurophysiologist to explain to you why you need an umbrella to keep from getting wet in a rainstorm.

 

[PureX]

The philosophical stance you are talking about here is often referred to as eliminative materialism.



The problem with eliminative materialism is that everything we experience can ultimately be declared nonexistent with this type of reductionist argument, because it can always theoretically be reduced to more fundamental components of a system of material interactions that give rise to the systemic behavior. If we never needed to describe the patterns we observe in complex systemic behavior (for example, the weather), then it would make sense to deny the existence of those patterns. Reality for us is defined in terms of how our bodies interact with it, not just the individual components that make up our bodies and the things they interact with. You don't need a physicist or a neurophysiologist to explain to you why you need an umbrella to keep from getting wet in a rainstorm.

I am not denying the mechanisms. I am pointing out that they either are "of us", or they aren't. If they are, then we are determining our own will. If they are not, then there is no "us", there are only these non-us mechanisms. And in either case, pre-destiny becomes irrelevant.

 

[Copernicus]

I am not denying the mechanisms. I am pointing out that they either are "of us", or they aren't. If they are, then we are determining our own will. If they are not, then there is no "us", there are only these non-us mechanisms. And in either case, pre-destiny becomes irrelevant.

Then it appears we are in violent agreement. All I was saying was that the attempt to deny free will is a part of a broader spectrum of reductionist arguments that is called eliminative materialism. If you pursue it to its logical limits, everything in reality that we experience gets eliminated, even personal responsibility for our actions.

 

[PureX]

Then it appears we are in violent agreement. All I was saying was that the attempt to deny free will is a part of a broader spectrum of reductionist arguments that is called eliminative materialism. If you pursue it to its logical limits, everything in reality that we experience gets eliminated, even personal responsibility for our actions.

Looks to me like we agree, rather than disagree.

"I think therefor I am" endows us with free will by designating us an "I". To reject the endowment of free will by claiming everything including our thoughts are mechanically predestined is to reject the axiom; "I think therefor I am". As there is no designated "I" anymore. In which case free will becomes an irrelevant question.

 

[Copernicus]

Looks to me like we agree, rather than disagree.

"I think therefor I am" endows us with free will by designating us an "I". To reject the endowment of free will by claiming everything including our thoughts are mechanically predestined is to reject the axiom; "I think therefor I am". As there is no designated "I" anymore. In which case free will becomes an irrelevant question.

We still have some small opportunity for disagreement in that I think everything, including our thoughts, are mechanically predestined, because it is physical brain activity that gives rise to our thoughts. However, determinism is irrelevant when it comes to defining the nature of free will, since we lack knowledge of the future. We can only imagine it, and that is what allows us to survive threats and take advantage of opportunities. But it is not only our environment and external forces that program our behavior. Animals like us have brains that are self-programming, so to speak. That's the whole point of being able to think--to weigh alternative futures and choose to behave in a way that brings about the future we most want. Just as robots in a more limited way are programmed to weigh their options and choose actions that achieve more limited goals.

We don't normally think of robots as having "free will", or the freedom to choose different behaviors, but, in fact, that is how we program them. To the extent that we don't, they are less useful to us, but we still need to place limits on their behavior. Otherwise, they could become a danger to us. Hence, Asimov's famous Three Laws--as a set of moral restrictions on the behavior of his fictional robots. Humans are way more complex than engineered robots, and they program themselves to have a vastly more complex set of moral restrictions on social interactions with each other than Asimov imagined that sentient robots would need.