Solve the Riddle of Compatibilism, Win Big Prize

[Nous]

Watch a rerun of your favorite sporting event.

The players you are watching are all making choices under their own free will

No, they're not engaging in (those) acts of free will when you are watching a rerun. They engaged in those acts in the past.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

No, they're not engaging in (those) acts of free will when you are watching a rerun. They engaged in those acts in the past.

Of course it goes without saying that anything we did with our free will in the past... we did with our free will in the past, it was free will all the same

 

[Nous]

Of course it goes without saying that anything we did with our free will in the past... we did with our free will in the past, it was free will all the same

So, you can't defend compatibilism? (That was the challenge of the OP.)

 

[Guy Threepwood]

So, you can't defend compatibilism? (That was the challenge of the OP.)

while complying with this new small print - that past events must be subject to change by free will? of course not.

That's like asking to show left and right can coexist (but must do so in one dimension only)

 

[Nous]

while complying with this new small print - that past events must be subject to change by free will? of course not.

That's like asking to show left and right can coexist (but must do so in one dimension only)

What does any of that mean? Are you saying that you can change the past? Prove it.

After that, see the questions I asked in the OP. Those are the questions I seek answers to.

 

[viole]

"Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism.” Is that a coherent thesis? I have often asked people who've ostensibly espoused compatibilism to explain it, but to no avail, and even philosophical works attempting to defend this thesis generally leave me with at least as many questions as I had to begin with.

The concept of determinism--

Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no other event.​

Determinism - Wikipedia

Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.​

Causal Determinism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

--does not entail multiple possible futures, such as where tomorrow I could and might choose black socks to wear or I could and might choose to wear multicolored argyle socks. In a world under sway of determinism, all of my pondering and deliberation over what socks to wear is an inexplicable waste of energy--I will wear whatever “natural law” determines (presumably has already determined) I will wear. As the definitions make clear, determinism cannot be true if in the universe there occurs even a single event that has not been fully determined by prior conditions.

Yet the brief Wikipedia article on compatibilism says that “compatibilists often define an instance of 'free will' as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to their own motivation.” But where and how does that “freedom” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects? Exactly how can one distinguish between an agent acting freely according to his/her own motivations and a thing that is acting not according to its motivations? Is there some physiological difference?

The SEP article provides a couple of definitions of free will, which, to my mind, can be understood as defining distinct abilities. In its initial paragraph, we are told, “As a theory-neutral point of departure . . . free will can be defined as the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility.” Subsequently, in the section “Freedom According to Classical Compatibilism,” a definition is given similar to the one in Wikipedia: “Free will . . . is the unencumbered ability of an agent to do what she wants.” Given that which color of socks I wear has zero moral gravitas, the first definition would seem to be irrelevant to these sorts of decisions. (Much of the article's discussion pertains to the issue of moral responsibility, and defenses of compatibilism are often largely defenses of moral responsibility in a deterministic world. In the context of discussion of free will and determinism, I find the issue of moral responsibility an unnecessary complication. Every day we make innumerable decisions, beyond choosing which socks to wear, that have no moral consequence.)

In any case, the same questions loom over the second SEP definition as left unanswered by the Wikipedia definition: How does an agent have an unencumbered ability to do what she wants in a deterministic world? Where does that “unencumbered ability to do what she wants” exist and how does it exert its effects in a deterministic world? Is there any observable difference between an agent acting with “unencumbered ability to do what she wants” and a robot that has no desires of any sort performing the same act? If not, what rescues compatibilism from vacuity?

The Wikipedia article even asserts the seemingly self-contradictory statement “A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors.” But if every decision a person makes is determined by “external factors,” where's the person's freedom?

Defining “free will” as merely an expression of what one wants or is motivated to do also fails to address two related (or not necessarily two distinct) facts: (1) People often do what they don't want to do--many young men who were drafted and went to fight in the Vietnam war did not actually want to go. Few people truly want to write that check every year to the IRS. To claim that people go to war and pay their income taxes because they prefer doing so rather than face the consequences of not doing so nevertheless doesn't imply that they are acting according to their primary wants or motivations--they are still doing something they don't want to do. (2) People often have divided or conflicting desires and motivations--e.g., the desire to lose weight and the desire to eat a large pizza. To assert that it is the strongest or biggest desire that eventually wins only kicks the can down the road. Who decides which is the strongest or biggest desire? The person with those conflicting desires. Regardless of what “external factors” might influence a person in such a decision, it is ultimately the person who weighs those factors, and thereby decides which path to take--except in a deterministic world (in which case, again it is inexplicable why there is this distracting and energy-sucking internal struggle between eating a 5,000-calorie pizza and being fit). Thus defining “free will” as doing what one wants doesn't make it any more congenial to determinism.

Interestingly and oddly, the SEP article makes a decisive comment upfront, in the section “Compatibilism's Competitors,” noting the obvious fact that the “compatibilists' main adversaries are incompatibilists . . .” Incompatibilists, of course, come in two different flavors: libertarians (who deny that determinism is true, and hold that at least some people have free will) and hard determinists (who claim that determinism is true and that no one is free to choose their actions). The article then informs us, “In recent times, hard determinism has fallen out of fashion, largely because our best sciences suggest that determinism is probably false.” Indeed, there is no rational reason to believe that determinism is true, which leaves compatibilism equally unnecessary and irrelevant as hard determinism. We don't need a jiggery-pokery thesis that tries to reconcile free will with determinism just like we don't need one that tries to reconcile dinosaur fossil evidence with a 6,000-year-old earth.

But if you can defend compatibilism as a coherent idea, and answer the questions above, here is your opportunity.

I don't see any obvious defeater of the thesis.

It is actually common to effectively use paradigms that do not precisely match with the underlying reality. A typical example is to use probability theory for something which is not random at all, for instance a game of roulette. If we knew the perfect details of the roulette, the ball, initial spin, initial speed, angle, etc. etc. then we would not need probability theory. But we do, and it works. So, we can treat deterministic physical systems as they were random without any obvious problem, as the owners of Casino or any student of thermodynamics can witness.

So, why not do the same with the mechanisms that operate inside our brain?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Nous]

I don't see any obvious defeater of the thesis.

Then why didn't you answer any of the questions asked in the OP?

Notice that this is my last sentence in the OP:

But if you can defend compatibilism as a coherent idea, and answer the questions above, here is your opportunity.​

The questions are those sentences with this symbol at the end: "?"

It is actually common to effectively use paradigms that do not precisely match with the underlying reality. A typical example is to use probability theory for something which is not random at all, for instance a game of roulette. If we knew the perfect details of the roulette, the ball, initial spin, initial speed, angle, etc. etc. then we would not need probability theory. But we do, and it works. So, we can treat deterministic physical systems as they were random without any obvious problem, as the owners of Casino or any student of thermodynamics can witness.

So, why not do the same with the mechanisms that operate inside our brain?

You don't know of any rational reason to believe that the thesis of determinism is true, do you?

 

[viole]

You don't know of any rational reason to believe that the thesis of determinism is true, do you?

Oh yeah, plenty of them. Why? Do you prefer inherently random things, the main competitors against determinism that some outdated interpretations of QM hold? OK, but I don't see how that helps you.

I am sure that stating that our free will is actually inherently random will, is very cozy.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Nous]

Oh yeah, plenty of them. Why? Do you prefer inherently random things, the main competitors against determinism that some outdated interpretations of QM hold? OK, but I don't see how that helps you.I am sure that stating that our free will is actually inherently random will, is very cozy.

So you can't answer any of the questions of the OP? Such as:

But where and how does that “freedom” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects? Exactly how can one distinguish between an agent acting freely according to his/her own motivations and a thing that is acting not according to its motivations? Is there some physiological difference?
​

Are you planning on arguing from any evidence that the thesis of determinism is true?

 

[viole]

So you can't answer any of the questions of the OP? Such as:

But where and how does that “freedom” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects? Exactly how can one distinguish between an agent acting freely according to his/her own motivations and a thing that is acting not according to its motivations? Is there some physiological difference?
​

I told you. We can treat systems not deterministically even if the underlying mechanisms, they reduce to, are strictly deterministic, without committing a category error. At least when we consider macroscopic systems as a whole. And our brain is a macroscopic system. Well, at least most of brains.

Take for instance a box of gas and the statistical analysis we use to study it:

But where and how does that “random” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects? Exactly how can one distinguish between macroscopic systems behaving randomly according to the laws of probability and a macroscopic system whose constituents behave perfectly deterministically? Is there some physical difference?

Your answer is my answer. Mutatis mutandis.
​

Are you planning on arguing from any evidence that the thesis of determinism is true?

Nope. That would derail the thread. But do you have some alternative candidates that could be the artifices of our will? I can only think of inherent randomness.

Do you have something else in mind?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Nous]

But where and how does that “random” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects?

What the hell are you talking about?

Does it require too much honesty to just acknowledge that you can't answer even a single question the OP asks in an attempt to defend compatibilism?

Why did you decide to post on this thread, given that you apparently do not want to even address the questions asked in the OP?

 

[viole]

What the hell are you talking about?

Does it require too much honesty to just acknowledge that you can't answer even a single question the OP asks in an attempt to defend compatibilism?

Why did you decide to post on this thread, given that you apparently do not want to even address the questions asked in the OP?

You don't understand, apparently.

I told you: we can treat macroscopic systems not deterministically, even if the underlying mechanisms are fully deterministic, without committing a category error. The compatibilism between statistical analysis of a macroscopic system whose constituents do not follow random paths should be illuminating enough. And our brains are macroscopic systems. Well, most of them .

So if statistics is compatible in treating systems whose constituents are not random at all, why on earth should freedom of will not be applicable for biological systems whose constituents are ultimately not free at all? It is actually probably a category error to insist that this cannot be the case. It would be like insisting that only the laws of Newton can give us useful information about the state of a bottle full of gas.

Is that really so difficult? It is quite obvious that you are not a physicist, but that analogy should be easy enough to grasp.

So, do you have alternatives? Is freedom = randomness? I ask because I am not aware of viable non deterministic processes which are not inherently random. Are you?

Or do you maybe believe that our brains have an interface to a magical metaphysical world?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Nous]

The compatibilism between statistical analysis of a macroscopic system whose constituents do not follow random paths should be illuminating enough.

What the hell are you talking about? What "statistical analysis" are you referring to? Give it.

So if statistics is compatible in treating systems . . .

"Statistics is compatible in treating systems . . ."? That's gibberish. But if it weren't gibberish, it would be irrelevant to solving the problem of reconciling free will with determinism. A statistical analysis of a deterministic machine does not provide of solution to the incompatibility between free will and determinism. Right?

 

[LukeS]

I destructure the history of freedom, as Heidegger might have, as argue it comes from the etymological "priya" meaning beloved. Free acts are loved ones, involving oxytocin, they're stress free. Say a free marriage in the olden days, it would be one where people love the choice. Rather than a forced one which raises cortisol levels. At least here we have a half decent definition of freedom of the will. I'd argue that talk of God determinisn, divine foreknowledge etc are syncretic - a bolt on to a more primordial concept.

 

[Nous]

I destructure the history of freedom, as Heidegger might have, as argue it comes from the etymological "priya" meaning beloved. Free acts are loved ones, involving oxytocin, they're stress free.

Wow, I hardly ever get a woody when I choose which pair of socks to put on.

Anyway, we actually do know what the concepts are that we are referring to as free will and determinism. The only problem is reconciling them as being compatible. I don't see that you have done that. No one else was on this thread was able to do so. As I said, since the thesis of determinism is dead, we actually don't need to try to reconcile free will with it.

 

[Mrpasserby]

“A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors.” But if every decision a person makes is determined by “external factors,” where's the person's freedom?"
Which pair of socks to put on?
The mind is bantered about by the cognitive forces, as the known quantities are focused on while determining the possibilities that are prevalent to the external situation. The random factor, augmented by the #conjugations of personal desires forms the juxtaposition of beingness that is shown here inviolate as 'free will', when it determines to go bare foot.

 

[blü 2]

I can't rationalize compatibilism because I've never understood the theoretical basis for freewill.

Our brains work by evolution-shaped responses to stimuli, and the workings behind that consistently appear to be multiple simultaneous chains of cause&effect; which is to say what everyone knows, the brain is an exquisitely complex engine.

It's possible that these chains of cause&effect are sometimes affected by random quantum events, but that doesn't help freewill. It simply broadens the possible explanations from cause&effect to cause&effect + possible randomness.

How could a brain, a mind. make decisions otherwise?

Indeed, how could god make decisions otherwise?

(Incidentally, as I noted recently in another post, those who believe in an omnipotent omniscient god are stuck with determinism too. They can never think do or say anything, or have anything happen to them, that their god didn't know down to the most trivial detail long before they were born. They have not the slightest power, ever, to take god by surprise.)

 

[idav]

"Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism.” Is that a coherent thesis? I have often asked people who've ostensibly espoused compatibilism to explain it, but to no avail, and even philosophical works attempting to defend this thesis generally leave me with at least as many questions as I had to begin with.

The concept of determinism--

Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no other event.​

Determinism - Wikipedia

Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.​

Causal Determinism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

--does not entail multiple possible futures, such as where tomorrow I could and might choose black socks to wear or I could and might choose to wear multicolored argyle socks. In a world under sway of determinism, all of my pondering and deliberation over what socks to wear is an inexplicable waste of energy--I will wear whatever “natural law” determines (presumably has already determined) I will wear. As the definitions make clear, determinism cannot be true if in the universe there occurs even a single event that has not been fully determined by prior conditions.

Yet the brief Wikipedia article on compatibilism says that “compatibilists often define an instance of 'free will' as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to their own motivation.” But where and how does that “freedom” raise its head in determinism's relentless machinery of causes and effects? Exactly how can one distinguish between an agent acting freely according to his/her own motivations and a thing that is acting not according to its motivations? Is there some physiological difference?

The SEP article provides a couple of definitions of free will, which, to my mind, can be understood as defining distinct abilities. In its initial paragraph, we are told, “As a theory-neutral point of departure . . . free will can be defined as the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility.” Subsequently, in the section “Freedom According to Classical Compatibilism,” a definition is given similar to the one in Wikipedia: “Free will . . . is the unencumbered ability of an agent to do what she wants.” Given that which color of socks I wear has zero moral gravitas, the first definition would seem to be irrelevant to these sorts of decisions. (Much of the article's discussion pertains to the issue of moral responsibility, and defenses of compatibilism are often largely defenses of moral responsibility in a deterministic world. In the context of discussion of free will and determinism, I find the issue of moral responsibility an unnecessary complication. Every day we make innumerable decisions, beyond choosing which socks to wear, that have no moral consequence.)

In any case, the same questions loom over the second SEP definition as left unanswered by the Wikipedia definition: How does an agent have an unencumbered ability to do what she wants in a deterministic world? Where does that “unencumbered ability to do what she wants” exist and how does it exert its effects in a deterministic world? Is there any observable difference between an agent acting with “unencumbered ability to do what she wants” and a robot that has no desires of any sort performing the same act? If not, what rescues compatibilism from vacuity?

The Wikipedia article even asserts the seemingly self-contradictory statement “A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors.” But if every decision a person makes is determined by “external factors,” where's the person's freedom?

Defining “free will” as merely an expression of what one wants or is motivated to do also fails to address two related (or not necessarily two distinct) facts: (1) People often do what they don't want to do--many young men who were drafted and went to fight in the Vietnam war did not actually want to go. Few people truly want to write that check every year to the IRS. To claim that people go to war and pay their income taxes because they prefer doing so rather than face the consequences of not doing so nevertheless doesn't imply that they are acting according to their primary wants or motivations--they are still doing something they don't want to do. (2) People often have divided or conflicting desires and motivations--e.g., the desire to lose weight and the desire to eat a large pizza. To assert that it is the strongest or biggest desire that eventually wins only kicks the can down the road. Who decides which is the strongest or biggest desire? The person with those conflicting desires. Regardless of what “external factors” might influence a person in such a decision, it is ultimately the person who weighs those factors, and thereby decides which path to take--except in a deterministic world (in which case, again it is inexplicable why there is this distracting and energy-sucking internal struggle between eating a 5,000-calorie pizza and being fit). Thus defining “free will” as doing what one wants doesn't make it any more congenial to determinism.

Interestingly and oddly, the SEP article makes a decisive comment upfront, in the section “Compatibilism's Competitors,” noting the obvious fact that the “compatibilists' main adversaries are incompatibilists . . .” Incompatibilists, of course, come in two different flavors: libertarians (who deny that determinism is true, and hold that at least some people have free will) and hard determinists (who claim that determinism is true and that no one is free to choose their actions). The article then informs us, “In recent times, hard determinism has fallen out of fashion, largely because our best sciences suggest that determinism is probably false.” Indeed, there is no rational reason to believe that determinism is true, which leaves compatibilism equally unnecessary and irrelevant as hard determinism. We don't need a jiggery-pokery thesis that tries to reconcile free will with determinism just like we don't need one that tries to reconcile dinosaur fossil evidence with a 6,000-year-old earth.

But if you can defend compatibilism as a coherent idea, and answer the questions above, here is your opportunity.

I have heard a lot of arguments that it is either deterministic or random, but it's incomplete. With QM we have the possibility of compatabilism type theories where things have simultaneous potentialities, not random.

 

[Nous]

I can't rationalize compatibilism because I've never understood the theoretical basis for freewill.

Our brains work by evolution-shaped responses to stimuli, and the workings behind that consistently appear to be multiple simultaneous chains of cause&effect; which is to say what everyone knows, the brain is an exquisitely complex engine.

So apparently what you're saying that you lack the ability to choose between stating, say, a true proposition and a false one. Like Epiphenomenalism, Denial of Free Will is Self-Stultifying

 

[Nous]

I have heard a lot of arguments that it is either deterministic or random, but it's incomplete. With QM we have the possibility of compatabilism type theories where things have simultaneous potentialities, not random.

Why don't you provide a link to whatever argument you are referring to? It doesn't sound like it's an argument that solves the riddle of compatibilism.