Why free will cannot exist

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

As Wegner noticed “we feel as if we are uncaused causers” (Wegner
2002).
The problem with the logic of such a feeling is that it would mean
that our decision and/or behavior are not caused by a physical
mechanism either internal or external, as it should be according to
the physical laws.
Such an assertion is not acceptable scientifically speaking because:
- either, according to a deterministic approach, there are physical
causes explaining psychological (i.e. my decision) and/or physical
(i.e. my behavior) consequences. Then if the physical causes are the
true causes of my decision and/or behavior it is not possible to claim
that my free will is responsible for such a decision and/or behavior
as “there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support the
existence of causally effective processes in the mind or brain that
violate the laws of physics” (Wegner et al. 1994);
- or, according to a random approach, there is no identified physical
causes and my decision and/or behavior occurs by chance. In such a
situation it is not of course possible to speak of free will.

Then, to keep the notion of free will, it is necessary to envisage
metaphysical notions such as:
- the transcendence as considered by Kant : “is transcendental what is
or conveys an a priori condition from experience … cleared of all data
of experience either external or internal”;
- or the immanence: “what is contained in the nature of a being”;
- or a mystic approach, i.e. “a belief superior to reason;
- etc.

Besides, experimental studies show that (Wegner 1994):
- “the experience of conscious will is an illusion produced by the
perception of an apparent causal sequence relating one's conscious
thought to one's action. In reality, this may not be the causal
mechanism at all”;
- “the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in
consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation are unconscious
mechanisms of mind”;
- “although our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious
causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will
arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the
connections themselves. Believing that our conscious thoughts cause
our actions is an error based on the illusory experience of will—much
like believing that a rabbit has indeed popped out of an empty hat”.

Then “advances in neuroscience are likely to change the way people
think about human action and criminal responsibility by vividly
illustrating lessons that some people appreciated long ago. Free will
as we ordinarily understand it is an illusion generated by our
cognitive architecture. Retributivist notions of criminal
responsibility ultimately depend on this illusion, and, if we are
lucky, they will give way to consequentialist ones, thus radically
transforming our approach to criminal justice” (Green et al. 2004)..

References:
Green J, Cohen J. For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and
everything. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 2004;359:1775–1785.
Wegner DM, Wheatley T. Apparent Mental Causation (Sources of the
Experience of Will).
American Psychologist 1994;54:480-492.
Wegner DM. The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Uh oh! Syamsunami alert!

Great post. I downloaded Sam Harris' recent book _Free Will_ on my Nook
and it has helped me shatter my benign user illusion.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/free-will-sam-harris/1107873414

--
*Hemidactylus*

[wiki trix]

Retributivist notions will give way to consequentialist ones? Society
is made up of individuals, and individuals experience illusions, such
as free will. The result is that collectively, we have no choice but
to believe, to a large extent, in criminal responsibility, and act
accordingly. Thus, when we put a human in the electric chair, we have
no choice about it. The idea that free choice implies that criminals
are not responsible for their actions, and therefore ought not to be
punished is true, but misses this whole point that society and
authority are no better at the game than the individual is.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On 3 avr, 15:33, wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Retributivist notions will give way to consequentialist ones? Society
> is made up of individuals, and individuals experience illusions, such
> as free will. The result is that collectively, we have no choice but
> to believe, to a large extent, in criminal responsibility, and act
> accordingly. Thus, when we put a human in the electric chair, we have
> no choice about it. The idea that free choice implies that criminals
> are not responsible for their actions, and therefore ought not to be
> punished is true, but misses this whole point that society and
> authority are no better at the game than the individual is.

I recommend you to read Green's paper.
For example: "The retributive justification, by which the goal of
punishment is to give people what they really deserve, does depend on
this dubious notion of free will. However, the consequentialist
approach does not require a belief in free will at all. As
consequentialists, we can hold people responsible for crimes simply
because doing so has, on balance, beneficial effects through
deterrence, containment, etc. It is sometimes said that if we do not
believe in free will then we cannot legitimately punish anyone and
that society must dissolve into anarchy ... There are perfectly good,
forward-looking justifications for punishing criminals that do not
depend on metaphysical fictions".
And: "Finally, there is the worry that to reject free will is to
render all of life pointless: why would you bother with anything if it
has all long since been determined? The answer is that you will bother
because you are a human, and that is what humans do. Even if you
decide, as part of a little intellectual exercise, that you are going
to sit around and do nothing because you have concluded that you have
no free will, you are eventually going to get up and make yourself a
sandwich. And if you do not, you have got bigger problems than
philosophy can fix".

[Mark Isaak]

Note also that responsibility is different from fault or blame. If your
six-year-old son throws a rock that breaks my window, you are not to
blame, but you are still responsible for paying for the window.
Similarly, criminal responsibility may exist whether or not society
considers the crimes willful.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"It is certain, from experience, that the smallest grain of natural
honesty and benevolence has more effect on men's conduct, than the most
pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems." - D. Hume

[Mark Isaak]

On 4/3/12 6:54 AM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> On 3 avr, 15:33, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Retributivist notions will give way to consequentialist ones? Society
>> is made up of individuals, and individuals experience illusions, such
>> as free will. The result is that collectively, we have no choice but
>> to believe, to a large extent, in criminal responsibility, and act
>> accordingly. Thus, when we put a human in the electric chair, we have
>> no choice about it. The idea that free choice implies that criminals
>> are not responsible for their actions, and therefore ought not to be
>> punished is true, but misses this whole point that society and
>> authority are no better at the game than the individual is.
>
> I recommend you to read Green's paper.
> For example: "The retributive justification, by which the goal of
> punishment is to give people what they really deserve, does depend on

> this dubious notion of free will.[...]"

Believing that retributive justification depends on the dubious notion
of free will depends on the dubious notion of free will. Personally, I
believe retributive justification is an adaptive emotional response
evolved by social creatures in response to cheaters.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On 3 avr, 17:47, Mark Isaak <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

I am not sure to understand what you mean by "cheaters".
However I would say that, within the consequentialism approach, there
are no more "cheaters" because the society is no more asking the
offender to recognize his faults and will only punish him for the
consequences of his faults ("the consequentialist justification for
state punishment, according to which punishment is merely an
instrument for promoting future social welfare" while "the
retributivist justification for punishment, according to which the
principal aim of punishment is to give people what they deserve based
on their past actions").

[Kalkidas]

On 4/3/2012 5:10 AM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> As Wegner noticed “we feel as if we are uncaused causers” (Wegner
> 2002).
> The problem with the logic of such a feeling is that it would mean
> that our decision and/or behavior are not caused by a physical
> mechanism either internal or external, as it should be according to
> the physical laws.

But the claim that "according to physical laws, decisions and behavior
are caused by "physical mechanisms"...is begging the question.

Now, you may *assert* that all decisions and behavior are caused by
physical mechanisms, but that is an a priori assertion, not a conclusion
from any "physical laws".

The experiments do not show that the person's conscious will is not a
causal agent in the actions of the body. The experimenters erroneously
assumed that "conscious will" must be some kind of discrete,
instantaneous event. By this assumption they are able to interpret the
presence of physiological changes *prior* to the person's reporting of a
conscious volition as being not caused by the "instant of conscious will".

But what if a person's consciousness is a continuously evolving whole,
rather than a sequence of discrete states? Indeed, continuity, and not
discreteness, is confirmed by experience.

In that case, any line between "unconsciousness" and "consciousness" is
arbitrary, and so is an alleged "instant of conscious will". The body
may simply be "warming up", as an automobile engine has to be started
and put into gear before the driver can consciously will to step on the
gas and move the vehicle.

And there is the problem of the experimental subjects knowing before
hand what they are supposed to do when they experience the conscious
will. Here the problem of "don't think of a Hippopotamus" comes into
play. If you are told, "at some point decide to make a mark on a piece
of paper, do you think you would be able to remain totally
not-thinking-about making the mark on the paper, until the moment you
"decide to decide"? No way.

Wegner's conclusions are also question-begging. For example, in the last
paragraph of the cited paper, Wegner & Wheately say, "In fact,
unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought
about action and create action as well, and also produce the sense of
will we experience by perceiving the thought as the cause of action."

Now, if the alleged "mechanisms" are "unconscious and inscrutable", then
how can it be known that they are "mechanisms" at all?

[Burkhard]

On Apr 3, 7:58 pm, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:

There is a good analysis of Libet and Wegner's arguments by my
colleague Tillman Vierkant here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p836532300318847/fulltext.pdf

He too argues, convincingly I'd say, the the hype around their
experiments is unjustified and more an indicator of conceptual
confusion than any serious philosophical issue (to the extend that the
two are different ;o)).

[Kalkidas]

On 4/3/2012 12:21 PM, Burkhard wrote:
> On Apr 3, 7:58 pm, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:

[snip]

>> Wegner's conclusions are also question-begging. For example, in the last

>> paragraph of the cited paper, Wegner& Wheately say, "In fact,

>> unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought
>> about action and create action as well, and also produce the sense of
>> will we experience by perceiving the thought as the cause of action."
>>
>> Now, if the alleged "mechanisms" are "unconscious and inscrutable", then
>> how can it be known that they are "mechanisms" at all?
>>
>
> There is a good analysis of Libet and Wegner's arguments by my
> colleague Tillman Vierkant here:
> http://www.springerlink.com/content/p836532300318847/fulltext.pdf
>
> He too argues, convincingly I'd say, the the hype around their
> experiments is unjustified and more an indicator of conceptual
> confusion than any serious philosophical issue (to the extend that the
> two are different ;o)).

Alas, it's paywalled.... :-(

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

It would be kind of you if you could e-mail me the full paper by your
colleague Tillman Vierkant.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

"Now, you may *assert* that all decisions and behavior are caused by
physical mechanisms, but that is an a priori assertion, not a
conclusion from any "physical laws".

Then, if your hypothesis is that decisions and behaviors are NOT
caused by physico-chemical mechanisms, what is the alternative?

[Burkhard]

Ach, b.g..r. He has a much shorter version in our on-line journal
SCRIPTED, which I fight hard to keep open access, but there he does
not really discuss the experiments. it came out of a series of
workshops we had with neuroscience, which were quite fascinating. Not
the least due to the participation of people from the Church of
Scotland science and Society working group :o)

[UC]

Boy meets girl.

[wiki trix]

Physical/chemical/biological systems typically behave according to the
"known" rules only when you look at them with just the right hardness.
They go AWOL at all other times. Sometimes, when we sneak up on it, we
catch reality misbehaving, and that results in another round of
"discovery". Hence heliocentrism, RM/NS, SR, GR, WM, etc. Other times
we do not look at it at all, and you get religion, clairvoyance, free
will, and the like. Put any of these spooky things under scrutiny, and
poof.... gone!

[Craig Franck]

On 4/3/2012 2:58 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 5:10 AM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
>> As Wegner noticed “we feel as if we are uncaused causers” (Wegner
>> 2002).
>> The problem with the logic of such a feeling is that it would mean
>> that our decision and/or behavior are not caused by a physical
>> mechanism either internal or external, as it should be according to
>> the physical laws.
>
> But the claim that "according to physical laws, decisions and behavior
> are caused by "physical mechanisms"...is begging the question.
>
> Now, you may *assert* that all decisions and behavior are caused by
> physical mechanisms, but that is an a priori assertion, not a conclusion
> from any "physical laws".

It may be that physical mechanisms and the physical laws that
govern them are conceptually bound to one another. For example,
the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)

[...]

>> Besides, experimental studies show that (Wegner 1994):
>> - “the experience of conscious will is an illusion produced by the
>> perception of an apparent causal sequence relating one's conscious
>> thought to one's action. In reality, this may not be the causal
>> mechanism at all”;
>
> The experiments do not show that the person's conscious will is not a
> causal agent in the actions of the body.

Another possibility is free will is real and it is an illusion
that we have bodies. The problem is claims such as these only
make sense within a specific metaphysical framework.

> The experimenters erroneously
> assumed that "conscious will" must be some kind of discrete,
> instantaneous event. By this assumption they are able to interpret the
> presence of physiological changes *prior* to the person's reporting of a
> conscious volition as being not caused by the "instant of conscious will".
>
> But what if a person's consciousness is a continuously evolving whole,
> rather than a sequence of discrete states? Indeed, continuity, and not
> discreteness, is confirmed by experience.

But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
rather than free will.

Craig

[William Morse]

On 04/03/2012 08:10 AM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:

You really need to read Hofstadter on this. "Godel, Escher, & Bach" is
the classic, but "I am a Strange Loop" is more approachable, although it
is heavily influenced by the early death of his wife.

But basically the idea of "free" will is stupid - if we have will, it is
not free, it is our will. So the question is do we have choice, and the
answer is in many cases our choices are so constrained as to not be
choice, and in other cases our choices are so unconstrained and so
subject to chance that they are best considered as an actual choice. In
these latter cases there is no mathematical ability to determine the
choice - remember Godel - so the choice can be considered to be "will".

[Bill]

On Apr 4, 1:58 am, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:

First, I agree with you that Libet's experiments have been over-
interpreted.

I do not think, however, that the real point of determinism is that it
is physical determinism. Believing in a non-physical soul does not
solve the problem of free will at all.

By free will you presumably mean that in some situation you did one
thing, but you COULD HAVE done something else. What exactly does it
mean to say you could have done something else? Does it mean that the
identical *you* in identical circumstances could have chosen either to
embezzle a million dollars or not to do so? Leaving aside questions of
physical determinism, wouldn't the sort of *you* that would embezzle a
million dollars be a different sort of *you* than the *you* who
wouldn't steal it? You can argue, even with an immaterial soul
involved, that your choice simply depends on the nature of your soul.
It may be that you didn't know exactly what sort of soul you had until
you saw whether you embezzled the funds or not, but once you either do
it or don't you've simply revealed the sort of soul you had all along.

If you say that in identical circumstances and with an identical soul
you could either steal or not steal the funds, what exactly determines
your choice? Is it random and arbitrary? If what you do is arbitrary
and bears no relation to your character, it's hard to see how you
could be called free or held responsible for it. Or does your choice
flow from your soul's character. If it flows from your soul's
character then you really could not do anything other than what you
actually did, having the character that you have.

So I do not think that you gain anything in the free will debate by
saying that your actions are not determined by physical laws. They are
still determined by your character whether you call your character a
certain configuration of neurons and neurotransmitters or whether you
call your character a predisposition of your immaterial soul.

To my way of thinking, you are free to the extent that you are free
from *external compulsion*. If you are free from *internal*
compulsion, then your acts bear no relation to who you are, and it
seems a stretch either to call them freely willed actions or to hold
you responsible for them.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

> poof.... gone!- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

In other words the alternative is metaphysical: this is exactly what I
was saying (e.g. the transcendence or the immanence or a mystic
approach etc.)

[Eric Root]

On Apr 3, 11:38 am, Mark Isaak <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net>
wrote:

Once I told a child that a broken dish was her fault and therefore she
should clean it up. She became upset, say I had accused her of doing
it on purpose. I had trouble explaining to her that saying it is her
fault means she is the one who deliberately took an action that had a
bad result, but that is not saying she intended the bad result, in
other words, did it on purpose.

[Kalkidas]

On 4/3/2012 1:21 PM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> On 3 avr, 20:58, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:
>> The experiments do not show that the person's conscious will is not a
>> causal agent in the actions of the body. The experimenters erroneously
>> assumed that "conscious will" must be some kind of discrete,
>> instantaneous event. By this assumption they are able to interpret the
>> presence of physiological changes *prior* to the person's reporting of a
>> conscious volition as being not caused by the "instant of conscious will".
>>
>> But what if a person's consciousness is a continuously evolving whole,
>> rather than a sequence of discrete states? Indeed, continuity, and not
>> discreteness, is confirmed by experience.
>>
>> In that case, any line between "unconsciousness" and "consciousness" is
>> arbitrary, and so is an alleged "instant of conscious will". The body
>> may simply be "warming up", as an automobile engine has to be started
>> and put into gear before the driver can consciously will to step on the
>> gas and move the vehicle.
>>
>> And there is the problem of the experimental subjects knowing before
>> hand what they are supposed to do when they experience the conscious
>> will. Here the problem of "don't think of a Hippopotamus" comes into
>> play. If you are told, "at some point decide to make a mark on a piece
>> of paper, do you think you would be able to remain totally
>> not-thinking-about making the mark on the paper, until the moment you
>> "decide to decide"? No way.
>>
>> Wegner's conclusions are also question-begging. For example, in the last

>> paragraph of the cited paper, Wegner& Wheately say, "In fact,

That consciousness is not a physical mechanism, and that at least some
physical events have a cause which is beyond physics, i.e. which is
metaphysical. That is a valid alternative hypothesis which is not
contradicted by any known physical laws.

[Kalkidas]

On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 2:58 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
>> On 4/3/2012 5:10 AM, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
>>> As Wegner noticed “we feel as if we are uncaused causers” (Wegner
>>> 2002).
>>> The problem with the logic of such a feeling is that it would mean
>>> that our decision and/or behavior are not caused by a physical
>>> mechanism either internal or external, as it should be according to
>>> the physical laws.
>>
>> But the claim that "according to physical laws, decisions and behavior
>> are caused by "physical mechanisms"...is begging the question.
>>
>> Now, you may *assert* that all decisions and behavior are caused by
>> physical mechanisms, but that is an a priori assertion, not a conclusion
>> from any "physical laws".
>
> It may be that physical mechanisms and the physical laws that
> govern them are conceptually bound to one another.

I certainly agree that the idea of mechanism requires the idea of
physical law, and vice versa.

For example,
> the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
> implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
> some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
> is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
> why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
> at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)

Hume is wrong. The likelihood of an event having "no cause at all" is
exactly zero. The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.

Of course, you may call that an "opinion", but the hypothesis that you
and me are irreducible supernatural beings with power over matter
explains more than the hypothesis that you and me are nothing but
matter, since no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a
material process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future
such a material process will be found.

The existence of irreducible conscious beings should be accorded the
same validity as the existence of energy. Science doesn't try to explain
why it is that there should be any such thing as material energy.
Science just assumes it exists, examines it and works with it. The same
thing needs to be done with consciousness.

> [...]
>
>>> Besides, experimental studies show that (Wegner 1994):
>>> - “the experience of conscious will is an illusion produced by the
>>> perception of an apparent causal sequence relating one's conscious
>>> thought to one's action. In reality, this may not be the causal
>>> mechanism at all”;
>>
>> The experiments do not show that the person's conscious will is not a
>> causal agent in the actions of the body.
>
> Another possibility is free will is real and it is an illusion
> that we have bodies. The problem is claims such as these only
> make sense within a specific metaphysical framework.

I would say the illusion is not that we *have* material bodies, but that
we *are* material bodies.

>> The experimenters erroneously
>> assumed that "conscious will" must be some kind of discrete,
>> instantaneous event. By this assumption they are able to interpret the
>> presence of physiological changes *prior* to the person's reporting of a
>> conscious volition as being not caused by the "instant of conscious
>> will".
>>
>> But what if a person's consciousness is a continuously evolving whole,
>> rather than a sequence of discrete states? Indeed, continuity, and not
>> discreteness, is confirmed by experience.
>
> But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
> rather than free will.

I wouldn't really say that we are somehow in *direct* control over
matter via our "free will". I think there is another agency involved
which mediates between our will and its fulfillment. But that agency is
not a material mechanism.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On 4 avr, 19:19, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:
> > "Now, you may *assert* that all decisions and behavior are caused by
> > physical mechanisms, but that is an a priori assertion, not a
> > conclusion from any "physical laws".
> > Then, if your hypothesis is that decisions and behaviors are NOT
> > caused by physico-chemical mechanisms, what is the alternative?
>
> That consciousness is not a physical mechanism, and that at least some
> physical events have a cause which is beyond physics, i.e. which is
> metaphysical. That is a valid alternative hypothesis which is not
> contradicted by any known physical laws.

Then we agree that the alternative is metaphysical.
The issue with metaphysics is that it is not possible to falsify a
metaphysical hypothesis by any scientific experiments or observations,
Then, you are right, a metaphysical hypothesis is beyond physical
laws.
This is why I say the notion of "free will" cannot be scientifically
acceptable: scientifically speaking it does not exist.

[Kalkidas]

On 4/3/2012 8:29 PM, Bill wrote:
> On Apr 4, 1:58 am, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:

[snip]

>> Wegner's conclusions are also question-begging. For example, in the last

>> paragraph of the cited paper, Wegner& Wheately say, "In fact,

The question I ask is, what is the "you" in all these arguments? I think
it is necessary to have a grasp of who and what it is that is doing the
willing.

If we can't come up with a definition of a "who", i.e. a person, then
the discussion of "free will" will remain quite vague, and opposing
viewpoints will never be resolved.

For example, if "free will" means that in a given situation an entity
takes a course of action, but "could have" taken a different course,
then that definition applies to many more things than people. For
instance, a photon in a double-slit experiment goes through one slit,
but "could have" gone through the other. But we generally don't
attribute "free will" to photons. We attribute it to persons.

I think that when you say that "Believing in a non-physical soul does
not solve the problem of free will at all" you are being premature. It
appears to me that the process of defining what is meant by "person" --
and distinguishing that from other, impersonal entities (photons,
electrons, rocks, etc.) that also appear to "choose from multiple
options" -- will inevitably result in just such a non-physical soul.

[Kalkidas]

You are implying that only physical mechanisms are subject to
falsifiability, and that falsifiability is essential to the scientific
method, and therefore unless free will is a physical mechanism it cannot
be investigated by science.

First, it is not at all clear to me that falsifiability need be part of
the scientific method. For example, the existence of energy cannot be
falsified by any scientific experiments or observations, yet energy
exists "scientifically", and science deals with it.

Second, it is not true that only physical mechanisms are subject to
falsifiability. For example, hypocrisy can be detected when a person's
actions do not match his words, in which case his words are falsified.
Now, one can hardly say that his words are merely a physical mechanism,
since obviously they are a reflection of the inner conscious state that
prompted him to say them. So it is really his inner conscious state,
which is metaphysical, that is falsified by the inconsistency of his
physical actions.

So I disagree that falsifiability only applies to the physical. It also
applies to the metaphysical.

[Robert Camp]

On Apr 4, 10:42 am, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>
> > On 4/3/2012 2:58 PM, Kalkidas wrote:

Hume was not wrong, and not just because his argument wasn't stated as
you suggest. Hume's argument was probabilistic, based upon collective
human experience. The point is that miracles, as a phenomenon, are not
ascertainable by flawed human reason or observation because the burden
of evidence is so enormous. There is always a more likely explanation,
e.g., misperception, mendacity, etc.

On the other hand, I would say that the "likelihood of an event having
"no cause at all"" is exactly equal to the likelihood the cause was
miraculous.

> The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
> causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
> supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
> observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.

The persuasive force of this argument *is* "exactly zero," as it
assumes the truth of your religious convictions.

> Of course, you may call that an "opinion", but the hypothesis that you
> and me are irreducible supernatural beings with power over matter
> explains more than the hypothesis that you and me are nothing but
> matter, since no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a
> material process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future
> such a material process will be found.

Your hypothesis doesn't "explain" anything, it fills in a blank with a
tale full of sound and fury. For something to have explanatory power
it must elucidate causal mechanisms, enable verifiable predictions,
and account for observable data, not paper over these things with
comforting rhetoric.

Also the part which follows the "since no one..." in no way
substantiates the contention that went before. It is a non-sequitur.

> The existence of irreducible conscious beings should be accorded the
> same validity as the existence of energy. Science doesn't try to explain
> why it is that there should be any such thing as material energy.
> Science just assumes it exists, examines it and works with it. The same
> thing needs to be done with consciousness.

That is what *is* done with consciousness. Nothing in "exists,
examines it and works with it" obligates an inference to the
supernatural, nor could science operate if it did.

RLC

[Kalkidas]

Your utter hopelessness is truly uninspiring. Thank you very little.

[Kalkidas]

Thanks for the info. I've been looking over the SCRIPTED website and
your faculty page. What a busy fellow you are! :-)

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On 4 avr, 20:36, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:
> You are implying that only physical mechanisms are subject to
> falsifiability, and that falsifiability is essential to the scientific
> method, and therefore unless free will is a physical mechanism it cannot
> be investigated by science.
>
> First, it is not at all clear to me that falsifiability need be part of
> the scientific method. For example, the existence of energy cannot be
> falsified by any scientific experiments or observations, yet energy
> exists "scientifically", and science deals with it.
>
> Second, it is not true that only physical mechanisms are subject to
> falsifiability. For example, hypocrisy can be detected when a person's
> actions do not match his words, in which case his words are falsified.
> Now, one can hardly say that his words are merely a physical mechanism,
> since obviously they are a reflection of the inner conscious state that
> prompted him to say them. So it is really his inner conscious state,
> which is metaphysical, that is falsified by the inconsistency of his
> physical actions.
>
> So I disagree that falsifiability only applies to the physical. It also
> applies to the metaphysical.

1) "the existence of energy cannot be falsified by any scientific
experiments or observations".
All mathematical equations which tend to model the physical world, use
this quantity, in particular when dealing with transformations from a
form of energy (e.g. thermal energy) to another one (e.g. work).
As an example, thermal energy can be measured by a mercury
thermometer.
Thus I don't understand your assertion that energy is not
scientifically sound.

2) "it is not true that only physical mechanisms are subject to

falsifiability. For example, hypocrisy can be detected when a person's
actions do not match his words, in which case his words are
falsified."

Psychology is the science which deals with such problems: there are a
lot of psychological hypotheses which can be falsified by scientific
experiments and/or observations.
The situation of someone who is lying can probably be studied within a
scientific appropriate methodology. As you say it, "obviously his lies

are a reflection of the inner conscious state that prompted him to say

them" and I would add that his brain is the physical support of such a
specific inner conscious state.

[Craig Franck]

On 4/4/2012 1:42 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:

>> For example,
>> the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
>> implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
>> some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
>> is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
>> why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
>> at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)
>
> Hume is wrong. The likelihood of an event having "no cause at all" is
> exactly zero. The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
> causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
> supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
> observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.

I think you are conflating two different arguments:

1) It seems intuitively true that I am a being with non-physical
attributes, such as consciousness and free will; nothing about
physicalism seems close to approaching this level of certainty;
therefore, I am personally justified in rejecting physicalism.

2) Because folk psychology seems much more true than physicalism,
physicalism is almost certainly false, and this somehow pulls in
supernatural agency.

The first argument seems sound, the second does not.

> Of course, you may call that an "opinion", but the hypothesis that you
> and me are irreducible supernatural beings with power over matter
> explains more than the hypothesis that you and me are nothing but
> matter, since no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a
> material process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future
> such a material process will be found.

It could be that phenomenal attributes are irreducibly basic to
certain physical systems. That is, we may need expand the concept
of a naturalistic property.

> The existence of irreducible conscious beings should be accorded the
> same validity as the existence of energy. Science doesn't try to explain
> why it is that there should be any such thing as material energy.
> Science just assumes it exists, examines it and works with it. The same
> thing needs to be done with consciousness.

That would be consistent with my last comment.

>> But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
>> rather than free will.
>
> I wouldn't really say that we are somehow in *direct* control over
> matter via our "free will". I think there is another agency involved
> which mediates between our will and its fulfillment. But that agency is
> not a material mechanism.

I see don't how adding another level helps the situation.

Craig

[Kalkidas]

That was your assertion, not mine. You implied that what cannot be
falsified is not within the realm of science. The existence of energy
cannot be falsified, therefore, by your criterion, the existence of
energy is not within the realm of science.

>
> 2) "it is not true that only physical mechanisms are subject to
> falsifiability. For example, hypocrisy can be detected when a person's
> actions do not match his words, in which case his words are
> falsified."
> Psychology is the science which deals with such problems: there are a
> lot of psychological hypotheses which can be falsified by scientific
> experiments and/or observations.
> The situation of someone who is lying can probably be studied within a
> scientific appropriate methodology. As you say it, "obviously his lies
> are a reflection of the inner conscious state that prompted him to say
> them" and I would add that his brain is the physical support of such a
> specific inner conscious state.

Again, you may *assert* that consciousness is a product of the brain,
but that does not follow from any physical law.

Since the existence of consciousness does not follow from any physical
law, it is not contrary to physical law to propose that it is a
metaphysical entity. And I have given an example of a metaphysical
entity which can indeed be falsified, and therefore should, by your
criterion, be included within science, not as a physical mechanism, but
as a metaphysical object.

So metaphysical objects are not "invisible to science" as you claimed.

[Kalkidas]

On 4/4/2012 12:44 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
> On 4/4/2012 1:42 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
>> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>
>>> For example,
>>> the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
>>> implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
>>> some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
>>> is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
>>> why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
>>> at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)
>>
>> Hume is wrong. The likelihood of an event having "no cause at all" is
>> exactly zero. The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
>> causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
>> supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
>> observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.
>
> I think you are conflating two different arguments:
>
> 1) It seems intuitively true that I am a being with non-physical
> attributes, such as consciousness and free will; nothing about
> physicalism seems close to approaching this level of certainty;
> therefore, I am personally justified in rejecting physicalism.

But in the case of personal consciousness, doesn't "seems intuitively
true" really mean "is part of our experience of the world"? Then how
would the existence of non-physical entities such as consciousness be
any less empirically verified than any other scientific fact? After all,
science is nothing but an attempt to order experience.

> 2) Because folk psychology seems much more true than physicalism,
> physicalism is almost certainly false, and this somehow pulls in
> supernatural agency.

I'm not sure what you mean by "folk psychology". You seem to mean
something trivial and cheap, like a collection of Reader's Digest
truisms. I don't think you mean reports by practitioners of any rigorous
psychological discipline such as yoga, the spiritual exercises of
Loyala, etc. Such reports are the farthest thing from something trivial
and cheap.

[Kalkidas]

On 4/4/2012 12:44 PM, Craig Franck wrote:

That is certainly a possibility

>
>> The existence of irreducible conscious beings should be accorded the
>> same validity as the existence of energy. Science doesn't try to explain
>> why it is that there should be any such thing as material energy.
>> Science just assumes it exists, examines it and works with it. The same
>> thing needs to be done with consciousness.
>
> That would be consistent with my last comment.
>
>>> But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
>>> rather than free will.
>>
>> I wouldn't really say that we are somehow in *direct* control over
>> matter via our "free will". I think there is another agency involved
>> which mediates between our will and its fulfillment. But that agency is
>> not a material mechanism.
>
> I see don't how adding another level helps the situation.

Because if you think about it, although superficially we seem to be
controlling our bodies, we are really just desiring our bodies to do
certain things, and, as if by magic, they do them. The details of the
physiology is beyond our conscious awareness, so something else is
making it happen in accordance with our will.

If the "something else" is the body itself, then we come back to the
question of how the body "knows" that the person is desiring something.
For the body to "know" what we are thinking, there would presumably have
to be a mechanistic link between the material body and the non-material
consciousness. If the body is able to "detect" our conscious will so
that it can act accordingly, how is this done? As I pointed out above,

"no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a material
process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future such a
material process will be found."

So if *we* aren't in direct control of the body, and if the body itself
is inadequate to respond directly to our conscious will, then someone or
something else must be controlling our body at a level beneath our
conscious awareness, but in response to it, and this something must be
able to know our thoughts, abd to directly control matter. Thus it must
itself be conscious.

[wiki trix]

On Apr 4, 11:36 am, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:

Energy cannot be falsified? What does that mean? Would you say that
money cannot be falsified? Food? Fur? Fungus?
The scientific method is based on a few things, including the
falsifiability of hypothesis. Energy is not a hypothesis, it is a
definition.

[Kalkidas]

"Energy exists" is not an hypothesis?

[wiki trix]

Nope.

[Kalkidas]

Sure sounds like one to me. What makes it not an hypothesis, other than
the fact that it can't be falsified?

[wiki trix]

"Water exists" is not a hypothesis. It's an observational definition.
"Energy exists" is not a hypothesis. "Energy is conserved in all
processes" is a hypothesis. Get it?

[Bill]

On Apr 5, 12:57 am, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 8:29 PM, Bill wrote:
>
> > On Apr 4, 1:58 am, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub>  wrote:

>

That is an excellent point. As Daniel Dennett says, if you make
yourself small enough, you can exclude just about anything. There are
certainly formulations of *you* under which a *you* is terribly
constrained by outside forces and seems to have very little freedom.

>
> If we can't come up with a definition of a "who", i.e. a person, then
> the discussion of "free will" will remain quite vague, and opposing
> viewpoints will never be resolved.

I think that perhaps we do not need a specific definition of you so
much as a set of characteristics which you think *you* must have in
order for there to be a meaningful discussion of whether *you* can be
free.

>
> For example, if "free will" means that in a given situation an entity
> takes a course of action, but "could have" taken a different course,
> then that definition applies to many more things than people. For
> instance, a photon in a double-slit experiment goes through one slit,
> but "could have" gone through the other. But we generally don't
> attribute "free will" to photons. We attribute it to persons.

Good point. I do not think that a person is something so small that
quantum uncertainty is responsible for their choices. If "freedom"
came from quantum randomness, it would be an odd sort of freedom. You
could hardly hold someone responsible for their decisions if they were
due to random, quantum events.

>
> I think that when you say that "Believing in a non-physical soul does
> not solve the problem of free will at all" you are being premature.

Well, OK. I did provide an argument, beyond the mere claim, though.
Where do you disagree with the argument?

>It
> appears to me that the process of defining what is meant by "person" --
> and distinguishing that from other, impersonal entities (photons,
> electrons, rocks, etc.) that also appear to "choose from multiple
> options" -- will inevitably result in just such a non-physical soul.

That's fine. I am perfectly willing to stipulate a non-physical soul
for the purposes of this argument about free will. I explained in my
previous post why I do not think that having a non-physical soul
solves the problem of free will. To recapitulate:

If you make a decision, embezzle the million dollars or not, what
causes the decision? Surely it is your character, whether you take
your character to be simply physical, simply spiritual, or a
combination of the two. Therefore, what sense does it make to say that
you COULD HAVE done something else? If you had done something else,
you would not be the person you are, with the character you have. That
will be true whether you think a person is purely physical, purely
spiritual, or a hybrid.

Now you might say, "Well, your character is not defined until you make
the choice to embezzle that money or not." But that just pushes the
question back a little bit. If you choose what sort of character to
have, what is it that determines THAT choice? Presumably it must be
determined by whatever your character was BEFORE making that choice,
but then your character before the choice must have been one way or
the other. So I think you are stuck.

You might say that, just like a photon, your character is such that in
the identical situation with the million before you, you might either
choose to steal or not to steal randomly, and independent of the
character that you happen to have. That would make you free in the
sense that you really could go either way. The big drawback would be
that in such a case the choice would not proceed from your character
at all. So in what sense could it be YOUR choice, and how could anyone
hold you responsible for it.

So my argument here is that in order to be free a choice must be
determined by your character, which, you being who you are, means that
the choice could not have gone any other way than the way it actually
went.

Of course, in real life, choices are determined both by external
constraints (you can't embezzle a million dollars if nobody gives you
the opportunity) and by your own character. I would say that you are
more free to the extent that your choices are more determined by your
character and less by external constraints. But given a fixed set of
external constraints, you can only choose one way, for if you chose
the other way you'd have been a different person, with a different
character, than the one you actually are.

I do not see anything in my argument above that depends on whether we
define a person as a physical thing, a spiritual thing, or a mixture.
I am quite content to exclude rocks and photons from the category of
persons.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 5:08 am, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So my argument here is that in order to be free a choice must be
> determined by your character, which, you being who you are, means that
> the choice could not have gone any other way than the way it actually
> went.
> Of course, in real life, choices are determined both by external
> constraints (you can't embezzle a million dollars if nobody gives you
> the opportunity) and by your own character. I would say that you are
> more free to the extent that your choices are more determined by your
> character and less by external constraints. But given a fixed set of
> external constraints, you can only choose one way, for if you chose
> the other way you'd have been a different person, with a different
> character, than the one you actually are.
>
> I do not see anything in my argument above that depends on whether we
> define a person as a physical thing, a spiritual thing, or a mixture.
> I am quite content to exclude rocks and photons from the category of

> persons.-

"I would say that you are more free to the extent that your choices
are more determined by your character and less by external
constraints."

The character of a given person is what can be called internal
constraints, i.e. internal causes.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 2:59 am, Kalkidas <e...@joes.pub> wrote:
> Sure sounds like one to me. What makes it not an hypothesis, other than

> the fact that it can't be falsified?- Hide quoted text -


As all mathematical equations, which tend to model the physical world,
use the quantity "energy" whenever you do an experiment or make an
observation based on these equations you falsify energy as a
scientifically relevant notion.

"Again, you may *assert* that consciousness is a product of the brain,
but that does not follow from any physical law."

Of course consciousness is a product of the brain according to the
rules of the physico-chemical world: for instance consciousness exists
in animals (Griffin 2004; Kornell 2009; Smith 2009).

References:
Griffin DR. New evidence of animal consciousness. Anim Cogn
2004;7:5-18.
Kornell N. Metacognition in Humans and Animals. Currents Directions in
Psychological Science 2009;14:11-15.
Smith JD. The study of animal metacognition. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 2009;13:389-396.

[Bill]

Yes, you could call it internal constraints. But then what is it that
is being constrained? It's clear for external constraints. For
internal constraints it seems almost trivial to say that I am
constrained by being who I am to be who I am.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 9:31 am, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, you could call it internal constraints. But then what is it that
> is being constrained? It's clear for external constraints. For
> internal constraints it seems almost trivial to say that I am

> constrained by being who I am to be who I am.-

Biologically speaking everybody is constrained at least by his genes,
the way his neuron network formed during the embryonic, foetal and
child development etc.

[Bill]

On 5 Apr, 14:55, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> On Apr 5, 9:31 am, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes, you could call it internal constraints. But then what is it that
> > is being constrained? It's clear for external constraints. For
> > internal constraints it seems almost trivial to say that I am
> > constrained by being who I am to be who I am.-

.

>
> Biologically speaking everybody is constrained at least by his genes,
> the way his neuron network formed during the embryonic, foetal and
> child development etc.

I think we are disagreeing only about the clearest way to say
something about which we basically agree. External constraints are
easy. They are not me; they are something outside of me. It seems odd,
to me, to call what I am at present a constraint upon what I am at
present. The historical, developmental things you mention could either
be considered external to my present self and constraining it, or
simply part of my self, if you include in myself my history. In
neither case does calling an internal constraint versus calling it
"character" or "who I am" affect the argument about free will that I
was having with Kalkidas.

I am deliberately trying to avoid the question of materialism versus
dualism, because I do not think that where you come down on that
question affects the argument about free will, as I tried to argue in
the two earlier posts to Kalkidas. I am a materialist, myself, but I
do not think that dualism or spiritualism can rescue free will, if you
consider free will incompatible with determinism.

[Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc talk-origins@moderators.isc.org]

I was leaving this one for proper philosophers
to comment on, but it seems to me that a reasonable
and meaningful definition of "free will", even in
a materialist world-view, is the range of your
possible actions that are not determined absolutely
by factors external to yourself. I think this also
works reasonably well for questions of "responsibility".

Incidentally, it seems to me that if you have
an involuntary abnormal urge to commit some
particular kind of anti-social behaviour, any
penalty imposed for that upon the common man
should be not less heavily applied to you
(on grounds that it isn't your fault) but
more heavily (on grounds that it's going to be
harder to discourage you). But I admit this
is a simplistic analysis, and you may be able
quickly to think of counter-examples which I
would have to acknowledge. And, of course,
this model assumes that punishing the offender
is the only remedy available. But you could
also be sent on some kind of course.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 12:05 pm, "Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc talk-

I agree with you and recommend you to read Green's paper.
For example: "The retributive justification, by which the goal of
punishment is to give people what they really deserve, does depend on
this dubious notion of free will.
However, the consequentialist approach does not require a belief in
free will at all.
As consequentialists, we can hold people responsible for crimes simply
because doing so has, on balance, beneficial effects through
deterrence, containment, etc.
It is sometimes said that if we do not believe in free will then we
cannot legitimately punish anyone and that society must dissolve into
anarchy ... There are perfectly good,
forward-looking justifications for punishing criminals that do not
depend on metaphysical fictions".

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

I cannot follow you on this slippery slope in the context of a
scientific debate.
If you begin to agree to discuss metaphysical notions such as "soul"
in the debate about the scientific existence or not of "free will"
you're screwed.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Sam Harris (in _Free Will_) seemed to say, for argument's sake, that
even having a immaterial soul wouldn't grant a free will. It could come
down to being unaware of the *immaterial* prior causes of your thoughts
and misattributing them to your "self" post hoc. So a ghost in the
machine is no "get out of jail free" card for the volitionists.
Spiritually speaking, people have no free will either. They are shackled
to their constraining soul.

--
*Hemidactylus*

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 04/05/2012 06:05 AM, Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc

talk-o...@moderators.isc.org wrote:
> I was leaving this one for proper philosophers
> to comment on, but it seems to me that a reasonable
> and meaningful definition of "free will", even in
> a materialist world-view, is the range of your
> possible actions that are not determined absolutely
> by factors external to yourself. I think this also
> works reasonably well for questions of "responsibility".

Free will crumbles upon the weight of prior causes that are outside the
realm of conscious awareness. Accounts of free will rely on making up
personal narratives to account for thoughts and behaviors that bubbled
forth like carbonation bubbles into a head of beer. Does the head of
beer cause itself? Or does it stem from the depths beneath?

> Incidentally, it seems to me that if you have
> an involuntary abnormal urge to commit some
> particular kind of anti-social behaviour, any
> penalty imposed for that upon the common man
> should be not less heavily applied to you
> (on grounds that it isn't your fault) but
> more heavily (on grounds that it's going to be
> harder to discourage you). But I admit this
> is a simplistic analysis, and you may be able
> quickly to think of counter-examples which I
> would have to acknowledge. And, of course,
> this model assumes that punishing the offender
> is the only remedy available. But you could
> also be sent on some kind of course.

Justice would be rehabilitative instead of retributive, kinda like an
automotive garage. If your car breaks down and leaves you, are you going
to punish it or have it fixed? That's the most difficult part of
accepting the arguments of people like Sam Harris, as concepts of
justice are so deeply engrained and the assumption of freewill is so
difficult to shake off.



--
*Hemidactylus*

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 1:00 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I think that metaphysical-like notions (such as "soul") ought to be
banned from any scientific debate.
On the contrary, these can be interesting in a philosophical debate
but, personally, I am not interested in a philosophical debate on
"free will".

[Ron O]

SNIP:

Free You! The Establishment has kept You down long enough. You will
never bow down to the Man.

Ron Okimoto

[Bill]

Then why did you enter my philosophical debate about free will with
Kalkidas?

[nick_keigh...@hotmail.com]

On Tuesday, April 3, 2012 1:10:21 PM UTC+1, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:

> As Wegner noticed “we feel as if we are uncaused causers” (Wegner
> 2002).
> The problem with the logic of such a feeling is that it would mean
> that our decision and/or behavior are not caused by a physical
> mechanism either internal or external, as it should be according to
> the physical laws.

which ones?

> Such an assertion is not acceptable scientifically speaking because:
> - either, according to a deterministic approach, there are physical
> causes explaining psychological (i.e. my decision) and/or physical
> (i.e. my behavior) consequences. Then if the physical causes are the
> true causes of my decision and/or behavior it is not possible to claim
> that my free will is responsible for such a decision and/or behavior
> as “there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support the
> existence of causally effective processes in the mind or brain that
> violate the laws of physics” (Wegner et al. 1994);
> - or, according to a random approach, there is no identified physical
> causes and my decision and/or behavior occurs by chance. In such a
> situation it is not of course possible to speak of free will.

was it Wilkins who described free will as a measure of our ignorance (though he likely phrased it better). The fact remains that the ability to predict human behaviour based on the laws of physics is very far from practical reality. And likely to remain so. The human mind is pretty opaque to any of our available tools. "Free Will" is as good a label to hang on to this as any other.

<snip>

> Besides, experimental studies show that (Wegner 1994):
> - “the experience of conscious will is an illusion produced by the
> perception of an apparent causal sequence relating one's conscious
> thought to one's action. In reality, this may not be the causal
> mechanism at all”;

I don't think he showed what he claimed to show.

> - “the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in
> consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation are unconscious
> mechanisms of mind”;

so?

> - “although our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious
> causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will
> arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the
> connections themselves. Believing that our conscious thoughts cause
> our actions is an error based on the illusory experience of will—much
> like believing that a rabbit has indeed popped out of an empty hat”.
>
> Then “advances in neuroscience are likely to change the way people
> think about human action and criminal responsibility by vividly
> illustrating lessons that some people appreciated long ago.

I keep hearing this but I'm not convinced.

> Free will
> as we ordinarily understand it is an illusion generated by our
> cognitive architecture. Retributivist notions of criminal
> responsibility ultimately depend on this illusion, and, if we are
> lucky, they will give way to consequentialist ones, thus radically
> transforming our approach to criminal justice” (Green et al. 2004)..

I always wonder at the feelings of superiority these people must have. Criminals are puppets of their circumstances so must not be punished. Whilst psychologists and neurologists aren't. Maybe we punish criminals because we're programmed to. Perhaps the fear of punishments reduces the crime level and allows us to lead safer lives. seems pretty rational to me.

> References:
> Green J, Cohen J. For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and
> everything. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 2004;359:1775–1785.
> Wegner DM, Wheatley T. Apparent Mental Causation (Sources of the
> Experience of Will).
> American Psychologist 1994;54:480-492.
> Wegner DM. The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

[Bill]

On 5 Apr, 18:00, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Exactly, perhaps you said it more clearly than I had managed to say it.

[Bill]

It's not a scientific debate. It's a philosophical debate.

> If you begin to agree to discuss metaphysical notions such as "soul"
> in the debate about the scientific existence or not of "free will"
> you're screwed.

Science, to me, does not particularly address the question of free
will. It's clear enough to me that all events, including our choices
and actions, have purely physical causes. Whether you want to say that
that physical determinism eliminates free will is a philosophical or
linguistic question about what you want to call free will.

In other words, what would it mean for free will to "exist
scientifically or not,"? It is a question of definitions, mostly, and
what you feel like calling things. You might call it a metaphysical
question, root and branch.

[nick_keigh...@hotmail.com]

On Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:54:47 PM UTC+1, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> On 3 avr, 15:33, wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Retributivist notions will give way to consequentialist ones? Society
> > is made up of individuals, and individuals experience illusions, such
> > as free will. The result is that collectively, we have no choice but
> > to believe, to a large extent, in criminal responsibility, and act
> > accordingly. Thus, when we put a human in the electric chair, we have
> > no choice about it. The idea that free choice implies that criminals
> > are not responsible for their actions, and therefore ought not to be
> > punished is true, but misses this whole point that society and
> > authority are no better at the game than the individual is.
>
> I recommend you to read Green's paper.

> For example: "The retributive justification, by which the goal of
> punishment is to give people what they really deserve, does depend on
> this dubious notion of free will. However, the consequentialist
> approach does not require a belief in free will at all. As
> consequentialists, we can hold people responsible for crimes simply
> because doing so has, on balance, beneficial effects through
> deterrence, containment, etc.

yes but what actual difference does it make?

> It is sometimes said that if we do not
> believe in free will then we cannot legitimately punish anyone and
> that society must dissolve into anarchy ... There are perfectly good,
> forward-looking justifications for punishing criminals that do not
> depend on metaphysical fictions".

it's also a fiction that we can disentangle the causes of anyone's behaviour

> And: "Finally, there is the worry that to reject free will is to
> render all of life pointless: why would you bother with anything if it
> has all long since been determined? The answer is that you will bother
> because you are a human, and that is what humans do. Even if you
> decide, as part of a little intellectual exercise, that you are going
> to sit around and do nothing because you have concluded that you have
> no free will, you are eventually going to get up and make yourself a
> sandwich. And if you do not, you have got bigger problems than
> philosophy can fix".

so what is the operational difference between these two positions?

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 2:05 pm, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not a scientific debate. It's a philosophical debate.
>
> > If you begin to agree to discuss metaphysical notions such as "soul"
> > in the debate about the scientific existence or not of "free will"
> > you're screwed.
>
> Science, to me, does not particularly address the question of free
> will. It's clear enough to me that all events, including our choices
> and actions, have purely physical causes. Whether you want to say that
> that physical determinism eliminates free will is a philosophical or
> linguistic question about what you want to call free will.
>
> In other words, what would it mean for free will to "exist
> scientifically or not,"? It is a question of definitions, mostly, and
> what you feel like calling things. You might call it a metaphysical

> question, root and branch.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

"In other words, what would it mean for free will to "exist

scientifically or not,"? It is a question of definitions."
I agree with you that it is a question of definition: so, what is
yours?
Most of time, however, people consider the notion of "free will" as
the possibility for human beings to make a choice independently of any
external or internal physico-chemical causes, i.e. as "uncaused
causers" (according to J. Greene and J. Cohen's very good
expression!). With such a definition it is trully a scientific
question and, I think, crucial, particularly regarding the
consequences for the law.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 2:03 pm, nick_keighley_nos...@hotmail.com wrote:
> it's also a fiction that we can disentangle the causes of anyone's behaviour
>
> > And: "Finally, there is the worry that to reject free will is to
> > render all of life pointless: why would you bother with anything if it
> > has all long since been determined? The answer is that you will bother
> > because you are a human, and that is what humans do. Even if you
> > decide, as part of a little intellectual exercise, that you are going
> > to sit around and do nothing because you have concluded that you have
> > no free will, you are eventually going to get up and make yourself a
> > sandwich. And if you do not, you have got bigger problems than
> > philosophy can fix".
>
> so what is the operational difference between these two positions?

Operationally speaking, I agree with you that it doesn't change so
much.
However, as the consequentialist justification for punishment is
merely an instrument for promoting future social welfare, there is no
more need to blame the offender and ask absolutly his forced and most
often hypocritical regrets.
I think the notion of "free will" came from the judeo-chistian
religion with the invention of the notion of sin: it was necessary to
make human beings guilty for wanting to be as learned as God.

[Bill]

My definition? You are free to the extent that you are not constrained
by external forces. You are more free if you are out of jail than in
jail, more free if you are healthy than if you are bed-ridden and
incapacitated. I do not think it is meaningful to say that you are
free from internal physico-chemical causes. You ARE nothing but
internal physico-chemical causes. If you were free from them you'd be
free from yourself. As I said to Kalkidas, if being free means your
actions are uncaused, and specifically uncaused by any aspect of
yourself, then how could they be your actions?

[John S. Wilkins]

Sort of. Indeterminacy of outcomes is, to a degree (at the macrolevel
that is, not the quantum level) a matter of ignorance and inability to
predict what nervous systems will deliver.

However there's another sense of "free" that has more moral import and
that is "uncoerced". I have no problem reconciling causal determinacy
with a lack of moral coercion. I act according to my nature, but I am
morally responsible so long as my actions are not unduly forced by
another (or by a deficit of my mind).

I think we punish noncooperators because if we do not the social
structure will eventually become overly competitive and nasty. That is,
it is consequentialist. What stories we tell ourselves to make us feel
better about it (reform, retribution, etc.) are after that fact.

>
> > References:
> > Green J, Cohen J. For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and
> > everything. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 2004;359:1775–1785.
> > Wegner DM, Wheatley T. Apparent Mental Causation (Sources of the
> > Experience of Will).
> > American Psychologist 1994;54:480-492.
> > Wegner DM. The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

--
John S. Wilkins, Associate, Philosophy, University of Sydney
http://evolvingthoughts.net
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre

[Arkalen]

No, because it depends on how you define "energy". "According to our
definition of energy, objects should behave this way" *is* falsifiable.

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

> yourself, then how could they be your actions?- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -

Your definition is the definition of freedom, particularly political
freeedom, and I am happy with it.
But, usually the definition of "free will" corresponds to: "being free
means your actions are not caused by any external or internal physico-
chemical processes but by your "free will" (!).

[Bill]

.

>
> Your definition is the definition of freedom, particularly political
> freeedom, and I am happy with it.
> But, usually the definition of "free will" corresponds to: "being free
> means your actions are not caused by any external or internal physico-
> chemical processes but by your "free will" (!).

I don't know about "usually," but the definition of free will I gave
you is a pretty standard compatibilist definition of free will. You
can read about it on-line in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
in more detail than you may care to.

[Arkalen]

On 04/04/12 23:24, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 4/4/2012 12:44 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>> On 4/4/2012 1:42 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
>>> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>>
>>>> For example,
>>>> the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
>>>> implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
>>>> some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
>>>> is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
>>>> why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
>>>> at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)
>>>
>>> Hume is wrong. The likelihood of an event having "no cause at all" is
>>> exactly zero. The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
>>> causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
>>> supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
>>> observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.
>>
>> I think you are conflating two different arguments:
>>
>> 1) It seems intuitively true that I am a being with non-physical
>> attributes, such as consciousness and free will; nothing about
>> physicalism seems close to approaching this level of certainty;
>> therefore, I am personally justified in rejecting physicalism.
>>
>> 2) Because folk psychology seems much more true than physicalism,
>> physicalism is almost certainly false, and this somehow pulls in
>> supernatural agency.
>>
>> The first argument seems sound, the second does not.
>>
>>> Of course, you may call that an "opinion", but the hypothesis that you
>>> and me are irreducible supernatural beings with power over matter
>>> explains more than the hypothesis that you and me are nothing but
>>> matter, since no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a
>>> material process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future
>>> such a material process will be found.
>>
>> It could be that phenomenal attributes are irreducibly basic to
>> certain physical systems. That is, we may need expand the concept
>> of a naturalistic property.
>
> That is certainly a possibility
>
>>
>>> The existence of irreducible conscious beings should be accorded the
>>> same validity as the existence of energy. Science doesn't try to explain
>>> why it is that there should be any such thing as material energy.
>>> Science just assumes it exists, examines it and works with it. The same
>>> thing needs to be done with consciousness.
>>
>> That would be consistent with my last comment.
>>
>>>> But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
>>>> rather than free will.
>>>
>>> I wouldn't really say that we are somehow in *direct* control over
>>> matter via our "free will". I think there is another agency involved
>>> which mediates between our will and its fulfillment. But that agency is
>>> not a material mechanism.
>>
>> I see don't how adding another level helps the situation.
>
> Because if you think about it, although superficially we seem to be
> controlling our bodies, we are really just desiring our bodies to do
> certain things, and, as if by magic, they do them. The details of the
> physiology is beyond our conscious awareness, so something else is
> making it happen in accordance with our will.
>
> If the "something else" is the body itself, then we come back to the
> question of how the body "knows" that the person is desiring something.
> For the body to "know" what we are thinking, there would presumably have
> to be a mechanistic link between the material body and the non-material
> consciousness. If the body is able to "detect" our conscious will so
> that it can act accordingly, how is this done? As I pointed out above,
> "no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a material
> process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future such a
> material process will be found."
>
> So if *we* aren't in direct control of the body, and if the body itself
> is inadequate to respond directly to our conscious will, then someone or
> something else must be controlling our body at a level beneath our
> conscious awareness, but in response to it, and this something must be
> able to know our thoughts, abd to directly control matter. Thus it must
> itself be conscious.
>
That's interesting. Is that conscious intermediary itself physical or
non-physical ? How does it control the body ?

[marc.t...@wanadoo.fr]

On Apr 5, 4:20 pm, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > My definition? You are free to the extent that you are not constrained
> > > by external forces. You are more free if you are out of jail than in
> > > jail, more free if you are healthy than if you are bed-ridden and
> > > incapacitated. I do not think it is meaningful to say that you are
> > > free from internal physico-chemical causes. You ARE nothing but
> > > internal physico-chemical causes. If you were free from them you'd be
> > > free from yourself. As I said to Kalkidas, if being free means your
> > > actions are uncaused, and specifically uncaused by any aspect of
> > > yourself, then how could they be your actions?
>

> > Your definition is the definition of freedom, particularly political
> > freeedom, and I am happy with it.
> > But, usually the definition of "free will" corresponds to: "being free
> > means your actions are not caused by any external or internal physico-
> > chemical processes but by your "free will" (!).
>
> I don't know about "usually," but the definition of free will I gave
> you is a pretty standard compatibilist definition of free will. You
> can read about it on-line in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
> in more detail than you may care to.

After looking at the item "Free Will" of the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy I can quote the following:
- "Many accounts of free will are constructed against the backdrop
possibility (whether accepted as actual or not) that each stage of the
world is determined by what preceded it by impersonal natural law".
- "A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture,
as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free
action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a
fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of
free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or
at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom
2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which
there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’
and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is
indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide
concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)"
For me it emerges that "free will" is "constructed against the
backdrop possibility (whether accepted as actual or not) that each
stage of the world is determined by what preceded it by impersonal
natural law" and thus is "indeed incoherent or at least inconsistent
with a world very much like our own".

[Kalkidas]

On 4/4/2012 6:36 PM, wiki trix wrote:
> On Apr 4, 5:59 pm, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:
>> On 4/4/2012 5:33 PM, wiki trix wrote:

>>> Nope.

>>
>> Sure sounds like one to me. What makes it not an hypothesis, other than
>> the fact that it can't be falsified?
>

> "Water exists" is not a hypothesis. It's an observational definition.
> "Energy exists" is not a hypothesis. "Energy is conserved in all
> processes" is a hypothesis. Get it?

Rubbish. "Energy exists" is an hypothesis, because it may or may not be
true, and its truth is empirically confirmed, i.e. by experiment,
although it cannot be falsified.

Now if you want to get back to the actual discussion, I'm all ears.

[Kalkidas]

By that reasoning, there are no hypotheses at all, since one can always
demand a definition, and a definition of a definition, etc.

No. The fact is that an hypothesis is a simple assertion of the
existence of something, whether it be an object or a relation between
objects. Falsifiability need not enter into it at all, as the example I
gave shows.

The scientific method requires only hypotheses and real experiments
which confirm or contradict the hypothesis. It does not require that
there be a "thought experiment" which would contradict the hypothesis,
but which cannot actually be performed. Thus the assertion that "energy
exists" is an hypothesis which is confirmed by experience, i.e.
empirical observation, i.e. experiment. No experiment that can actually
be carried out could contradict the hypothesis. It is, therefore, not
falsifiable, although it is an hypothesis.

[Arkalen]

But whether it's true or not depends completely on *what energy is*.
AFAIK it isn't a word with a single all-encompassing definition.

Also, something that can be confirmed by experiment can be falsified by
experiment. That's what an experiment is : something that might have
different outcomes, and some of those outcomes would confirm a
hypothesis while others would falsify it.

It's easy to confuse "falsifiable" with "falsified", and to think that
if something is always confirmed under every circumstance then it isn't
falsifiable. I think it's always useful to keep in mind that the point
of science is to find out what's true (or to understand reality, if the
word "true" scares you). If your definition of "falsifiable" means that
true things are unfalsifiable, then your definition is problematic.

[Arkalen]

It is always appropriate to ask for a definition if one doesn't know how
a word is defined; science relies on people agreeing on what they're
talking about.

But there's no infinite regress there. I don't know what you mean by "a
definition of a definition", but even if there were more steps than
"define X", they'd naturally end when people understand what the others
mean well enough to go forward.

>
> No. The fact is that an hypothesis is a simple assertion of the
> existence of something, whether it be an object or a relation between
> objects. Falsifiability need not enter into it at all, as the example I
> gave shows.
>
> The scientific method requires only hypotheses and real experiments
> which confirm or contradict the hypothesis.

... which is equivalent to falsifiability, for any useful definition of
the word. "Falsifiable" means "there are experiments (or observations)
we can make, certain outcomes of which would contradict the hypothesis".

> It does not require that
> there be a "thought experiment" which would contradict the hypothesis,
> but which cannot actually be performed. Thus the assertion that "energy
> exists" is an hypothesis which is confirmed by experience, i.e.
> empirical observation, i.e. experiment. No experiment that can actually
> be carried out could contradict the hypothesis. It is, therefore, not
> falsifiable, although it is an hypothesis.

What experiment would you say can confirm the existence of energy ? If
that experiment had a different outcome, would it contradict the
existence of energy ?

[Craig Franck]

On 4/4/2012 6:10 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 4/4/2012 12:44 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>> On 4/4/2012 1:42 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
>>> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>>
>>>> For example,
>>>> the claim that one "performed" a miracle is puzzling because it
>>>> implies an action caused a miracle to occur in, at a minimum,
>>>> some probabilistic fashion; if not, one wonders what the relation
>>>> is between the act and the resulting miracle. (IIRC, this is
>>>> why Hume claimed it was at least as likely miracles had no cause
>>>> at all as they were the result of supernatural agents.)
>>>
>>> Hume is wrong. The likelihood of an event having "no cause at all" is
>>> exactly zero. The likelihood that supernatural agents exist and possess
>>> causal power over matter is arbitrarily close to 100%, since
>>> supernatural agents (you and me as conscious beings, for example) are
>>> observed to exist, and to exercise power over matter.
>>
>> I think you are conflating two different arguments:
>>
>> 1) It seems intuitively true that I am a being with non-physical
>> attributes, such as consciousness and free will; nothing about
>> physicalism seems close to approaching this level of certainty;
>> therefore, I am personally justified in rejecting physicalism.
>

> But in the case of personal consciousness, doesn't "seems intuitively
> true" really mean "is part of our experience of the world"? Then how
> would the existence of non-physical entities such as consciousness be
> any less empirically verified than any other scientific fact? After all,
> science is nothing but an attempt to order experience.

That works as a phenomenological description of experience. But,
however simplifying, there is no reason to suppose the world is
fundamentally similar to our experiences. In fact, there are very
good reasons for believing it is not.

>> 2) Because folk psychology seems much more true than physicalism,
>> physicalism is almost certainly false, and this somehow pulls in
>> supernatural agency.
>

> I'm not sure what you mean by "folk psychology". You seem to mean
> something trivial and cheap, like a collection of Reader's Digest
> truisms.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology

> I don't think you mean reports by practitioners of any rigorous
> psychological discipline such as yoga, the spiritual exercises of
> Loyala, etc. Such reports are the farthest thing from something trivial
> and cheap.

Folk psychology is not necessarily a derogatory term.

Craig

[Kalkidas]

If energy didn't exist, then no experiment could confirm its
nonexistence, since all experimental apparatus, including our own
senses, is constructed of energy. In this way the existence of energy is
not falsifiable. There is no conceivable way to disconfirm the existence
of energy.

But energy exists, and the existence of experimental apparatus, and our
own senses, confirms it. Thus "energy exists" is an hypothesis which is
confirmed by the scientific method.

[Craig Franck]

On 4/4/2012 6:24 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 4/4/2012 12:44 PM, Craig Franck wrote:
>> On 4/4/2012 1:42 PM, Kalkidas wrote:
>>> On 4/3/2012 6:11 PM, Craig Franck wrote:

[...]

>>>> But this might simply result in some other kind of determinism
>>>> rather than free will.
>>>
>>> I wouldn't really say that we are somehow in *direct* control over
>>> matter via our "free will". I think there is another agency involved
>>> which mediates between our will and its fulfillment. But that agency is
>>> not a material mechanism.
>>
>> I see don't how adding another level helps the situation.
>
> Because if you think about it, although superficially we seem to be
> controlling our bodies, we are really just desiring our bodies to do
> certain things, and, as if by magic, they do them. The details of the
> physiology is beyond our conscious awareness, so something else is
> making it happen in accordance with our will.
>
> If the "something else" is the body itself, then we come back to the
> question of how the body "knows" that the person is desiring something.
> For the body to "know" what we are thinking, there would presumably have
> to be a mechanistic link between the material body and the non-material
> consciousness. If the body is able to "detect" our conscious will so
> that it can act accordingly, how is this done?

Through unconscious mental processes.

> As I pointed out above,
> "no one knows how to get from matter to consciousness via a material
> process, nor is there any indication at all that in the future such a
> material process will be found."

This is indeed a major difficulty for physicalism. But I would
say you are turning the problem on its head. Not having direct
access to most mental states or processes is to be expected; that
we have access to *any* is the real puzzle.

> So if *we* aren't in direct control of the body, and if the body itself
> is inadequate to respond directly to our conscious will, then someone or
> something else must be controlling our body at a level beneath our
> conscious awareness, but in response to it, and this something must be
> able to know our thoughts, abd to directly control matter. Thus it must
> itself be conscious.

All I think this means is nature is some kind of information
processing system.

Eastern mysticism has had some profound insights into the nature
of reality, but it's mostly just another system of speculative
metaphysics.

Craig

[Craig Franck]

IIUC, what Kalkidas means is time/space/energy are fundamental
aspects of physical reality that cannot be described in terms of
anything more basic. Panpsychism considers consciousness basic as
well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Craig

[Arkalen]

That is self-contradictory. If energy didn't exist then no experimental
apparatus or sense would be constructed of energy, nor would anything
else. Because energy wouldn't exist.

Would the world be at all different if energy didn't exist ? Insofar as
the answer is "yes" then energy is falsifiable. Insofar as the answer is
"no" it isn't.

> In this way the existence of energy is
> not falsifiable. There is no conceivable way to disconfirm the existence
> of energy.

But is this because the existence of energy is unfalsifiable, or is it
because energy does in fact exist ?

Is the existence of something that actually exists falsifiable, in your
view ?

>
> But energy exists, and the existence of experimental apparatus, and our
> own senses, confirms it. Thus "energy exists" is an hypothesis which is
> confirmed by the scientific method.
>

"Confirmed" and "falsified" are two sides of the same coin. You can't
confirm something that isn't falsifiable.

How does the existence of our own senses confirm the existence of energy
? Presumably, because if energy didn't exist then our senses wouldn't
exist either. And there's your falsifiability.

Of course when you're actually setting up your experiment or preparing
to make observations you can't use outcomes you already know to confirm
or falsify a hypothesis, because the outcomes you already know probably
went into the elaboration of your hypothesis in the first place. But
that's a practical issue, not an example of unfalsifiability.

[wiki trix]

"Energy exists" is not a hypothesis. It may or may not be true,
depending on how you define it, as it is purely definitional. We
observe physical processes where there seem to be certain properties
that consistently add up and that are conserved, or accounted for.
Mass, momentum and energy are terms that are used to discuss these
sorts of things that seem to follow simple accounting practices. These
tend to catch our attention, and have practical predictive powers, so
we give them these nice names. But although they tend to be consistent
with observation and allow for calculations that tend to work out
nicely, that by no means that they exist outside of our contrived
conceptualization of reality. How exactly do you verify that energy
exists in reality?

[Kalkidas]

But our experience is all we have, other than revealed knowledge. So if
there is a world which is different from our experience, we cannot
possibly know it is there unless we receive the knowledge from "on
high". And if we receive such knowledge, it will become part of our
experience.

Science cannot investigate anything beyond our experience, because all
the tools of science are constructed according to rules that are within
our experience, and are made out of materials that are within our
experience, and all the observations and measurements of all scientific
instruments, whether supercolliders, scanning electron microscopes,
spectroscopes, or radio telescopes, are part of our experience. Looking
at a meter is experience, examining a printout is experience, etc.
Developing a theory that there is a world that isn't similar to our
experience is an experience.

So to me, you seem to be trying to use experience to minimize the
evidentiary power of experience!

[Arkalen]

Experience tells us that our experiences aren't consistent with each
other. Some senses will tell us something is there when other senses, or
our memories (which can also be considered a sense in this context) tell
us it isn't.

What science finds however is that there is a significant subset of our
experiences which *are* consistent with each other, and even more : we
can explain the inconsistent experiences in terms of the consistent
ones. (for example, we can study how mirages and illusions work).

The more advanced science is, the higher the level of precision it
reaches for that consistent subset of all our experiences (which you
could refer to as "scientific knowledge), and the more experiences it
makes it possible for us to accumulate.

I expect what Craig Franck means is that there is no reason to suppose
the world is fundamentally similar to our everyday, intuitive
experiences. We do expect it's probably similar to the "advanced"
experiences we derive through science, mostly because those experiences
make so much sense and are consistent to such high levels. But one thing
those experiences do is drive home the point that our everyday intuitive
experiences are indeed NOT consistent to a deep level - and thus may not
match the fundamental level of reality.

[Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc talk-origins@moderators.isc.org]

On Thursday, April 5, 2012 4:58:42 PM UTC+1, marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
> After looking at the item "Free Will" of the Stanford Encyclopedia of
> Philosophy I can quote the following:
> - "Many accounts of free will are constructed against the backdrop
> possibility (whether accepted as actual or not) that each stage of the
> world is determined by what preceded it by impersonal natural law".
> - "A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture,
> as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free
> action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a
> fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of
> free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or
> at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom
> 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which
> there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’
> and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is
> indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide
> concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)"
> For me it emerges that "free will" is "constructed against the
> backdrop possibility (whether accepted as actual or not) that each
> stage of the world is determined by what preceded it by impersonal
> natural law" and thus is "indeed incoherent or at least inconsistent
> with a world very much like our own".

I would say rather that one source of our
belief that "free will" is important - besides
the matter of "consequentialism" that seems
to be shared with other large primates, who
presumably aren't worrying about the philosophy -
is the logical problem of how the sort of God
that knows everything and can bring about anything
that he chooses can have anything happen in the
world that isn't just what he wanted to have happen,
or that displeases him, or that he can justly
punish his creatures for. Why is the stuff in
the bible not God's fault, but ours?

/That's/ what free will is about. With complications
such as cheerful assertions that God has /already/
decided which sinners he's going to forgive, before
they are even born to do their sinning! Even if
they try to use their free will to not sin!

Which I now think is nonsense.

[wiki trix]

On Apr 5, 12:11 pm, "Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc talk-

God made you say that...

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 04/05/2012 08:00 AM, Bill wrote:
> On 5 Apr, 18:00, *Hemidactylus*<ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On 04/05/2012 03:55 AM, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:> On Apr 5, 9:31 am, Bill<brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Yes, you could call it internal constraints. But then what is it that
>>>> is being constrained? It's clear for external constraints. For
>>>> internal constraints it seems almost trivial to say that I am
>>>> constrained by being who I am to be who I am.-
>>
>>> Biologically speaking everybody is constrained at least by his genes,
>>> the way his neuron network formed during the embryonic, foetal and
>>> child development etc.
>>
>> Sam Harris (in _Free Will_) seemed to say, for argument's sake, that
>> even having a immaterial soul wouldn't grant a free will. It could come
>> down to being unaware of the *immaterial* prior causes of your thoughts
>> and misattributing them to your "self" post hoc. So a ghost in the
>> machine is no "get out of jail free" card for the volitionists.
>> Spiritually speaking, people have no free will either. They are shackled
>> to their constraining soul.
>>
>> --
>> *Hemidactylus*
>
> Exactly, perhaps you said it more clearly than I had managed to say it.

Too bad it was too philosophical for this thread ;-)


--
*Hemidactylus*

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 04/05/2012 07:59 AM, Bill wrote:
> On 5 Apr, 18:12, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:

>> On Apr 5, 1:00 pm, *Hemidactylus*<ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 04/05/2012 03:55 AM, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:> On Apr 5, 9:31 am, Bill<brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Yes, you could call it internal constraints. But then what is it that
>>>>> is being constrained? It's clear for external constraints. For
>>>>> internal constraints it seems almost trivial to say that I am
>>>>> constrained by being who I am to be who I am.-
>>
>>>> Biologically speaking everybody is constrained at least by his genes,
>>>> the way his neuron network formed during the embryonic, foetal and
>>>> child development etc.
>>
>>> Sam Harris (in _Free Will_) seemed to say, for argument's sake, that
>>> even having a immaterial soul wouldn't grant a free will. It could come
>>> down to being unaware of the *immaterial* prior causes of your thoughts
>>> and misattributing them to your "self" post hoc. So a ghost in the
>>> machine is no "get out of jail free" card for the volitionists.
>>> Spiritually speaking, people have no free will either. They are shackled
>>> to their constraining soul.
>>
>>> --
>>> *Hemidactylus*
>>

>> I think that metaphysical-like notions (such as "soul") ought to be
>> banned from any scientific debate.
>> On the contrary, these can be interesting in a philosophical debate
>> but, personally, I am not interested in a philosophical debate on
>> "free will".
>
> Then why did you enter my philosophical debate about free will with
> Kalkidas?
>
His was the parent post so he's claiming dominion over all child
processes spawned downstream.

--
*Hemidactylus*

[Craig Franck]

What I meant was the entities that populate the theories of
modern science are mostly inferred. So (for example) our
knowledge of electrons are based on our experiences, but no one
believes that electrons themselves are like our experiences.
They are exhaustively described by quantum numbers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number

> Science cannot investigate anything beyond our experience, because all
> the tools of science are constructed according to rules that are within
> our experience, and are made out of materials that are within our
> experience, and all the observations and measurements of all scientific
> instruments, whether supercolliders, scanning electron microscopes,
> spectroscopes, or radio telescopes, are part of our experience.Looking
> at a meter is experience, examining a printout is experience, etc.

This is what caused many to believe that logical positivism
ultimately results in some form of idealism. Russell responded
that because what we perceive are qualities of things ("red
ball"), rather than the things themselves ("swarm of subatomic
particles"), matter was a logical reconstruction based on
principals of scientific inference ("our experiences are caused
by objects in the environment, but are not identical with them").

> Developing a theory that there is a world that isn't similar to our
> experience is an experience.

But it doesn't tell us what the world is like.

> So to me, you seem to be trying to use experience to minimize the
> evidentiary power of experience!

But what happens when we have contradictory experiences? A pencil
cannot be straight and bent at the same time. So we invoke the laws
of optics.

Craig

[Bill]

I think you are saying that you assess free will on the "ultimate
level" and find it incoherent. I assess it on the "compatibilist
level", and find it entirely coherent and consistent with physical
determinism. But only as I defined it above, as relative freedom from
external constraint.

If you want to be free from internal constraint, then you are indeed
incoherent, I think. As a physicalist, how would I conceive of an *I*
separate from my brain which could somehow be constrained *by* my
brain? It would be a sort of crypto-dualism. So I think that when I
make a choice, the physical *I* that I am, integrates signals from the
outside world and my own physical state and produces an output. For me
that is a free decision, because it flows from *my* response to the
outside world and is determined by *my* characteristics. That's pretty
much a straight compatibilist account squaring physical determinism
with free will.

What I think is interesting is that many dualists seem to think that
introducing an immaterial soul changes the argument about free will.
And the point of my arguments earlier in the thread (and I guess of
Sam Harris' argument cited by Hemidactylus) is that simply positing an
immaterial soul doesn't resolve any of the philosophical problems of
free will. Unless your internal state determines your choice (given a
particular set of external circumstances), how can you call it *your*
choice? And that question does not depend on whether you imagine your
internal state to be a "predisposition of the soul" or a neural state.

[Syamsu]

On Apr 6, 2:40 am, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I think is interesting is that many dualists seem to think that
> introducing an immaterial soul changes the argument about free will.
> And the point of my arguments earlier in the thread (and I guess of
> Sam Harris' argument cited by Hemidactylus) is that simply positing an
> immaterial soul doesn't resolve any of the philosophical problems of
> free will. Unless your internal state determines your choice (given a
> particular set of external circumstances), how can you call it *your*
> choice? And that question does not depend on whether you imagine your

> internal state to be a "predisposition of the soul" or a neural state.- Hide quoted text -

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and
physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the
events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not
have an entirely physical explanation, which requires that the world
is not closed under physics. Such dualists believe that some non-
physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality. In the dual
categories the physical is established to exist by objective
measurement, and the non-physical agency is identified through
subjective opinion, requiring a choice on the part of the observer
(samelike beauty is categoricaly a matter of subjective opinion).

'''Dualism'''
The agency in a choice, such as love, hate, God, is subjectively
identified resulting in an opinion.
What is chosen, such as the body, is objectively measured resulting in
a fact.

! agency in a choice !! what is chosen
|-
| subjectively identified || objectively measured
|-
| non-physical || physical
|-
| spiritual || material
|-
| soul || body
|-
| opinion || fact
|-
| God love hate self etc. ||
|-
| creator || creation

William of Ockham
http://www.philosophos.com/philosophical_connections/profile_050.html#ocksec2|
"we can have no knowledge of an immaterial soul; nor can we prove its
existence philosophically. Instead we must rely on revealed truth and
faith"

Thomas Reid
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reid/
"Reid staunchly refuses to speculate on the substance of the
self,...he describes souls as beings of a quite different Nature than
material bodies.

[Syamsu]

On Apr 6, 2:40 am, Bill <brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I think is interesting is that many dualists seem to think that
> introducing an immaterial soul changes the argument about free will.
> And the point of my arguments earlier in the thread (and I guess of
> Sam Harris' argument cited by Hemidactylus) is that simply positing an
> immaterial soul doesn't resolve any of the philosophical problems of
> free will. Unless your internal state determines your choice (given a
> particular set of external circumstances), how can you call it *your*
> choice? And that question does not depend on whether you imagine your

> internal state to be a "predisposition of the soul" or a neural state.-

[Walter Bushell]

In article <1ki3rmn.1m8wfgd1hzgxn6N%jo...@wilkins.id.au>,
jo...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:

> I think we punish noncooperators because if we do not the social
> structure will eventually become overly competitive and nasty. That is,
> it is consequentialist. What stories we tell ourselves to make us feel
> better about it (reform, retribution, etc.) are after that fact.
> >

Minus the theological language. Groups that didn't punish
noncooperators fell to groups that did. I think your explanation came
way after people started punishing noncooperators and after the
stories even.

Hmm, punishing the noncooperators appears in non hominoids so much
earlier.

Behavior first, then reasons, finally explanation.

--
This space unintentionally left blank.

[Walter Bushell]

In article
<eb90aa27-65b7-4df0...@i18g2000vbx.googlegroups.com>,
marc.t...@wanadoo.fr wrote:

> Even if you
> decide, as part of a little intellectual exercise, that you are going
> to sit around and do nothing because you have concluded that you have
> no free will, you are eventually going to get up and make yourself a
> sandwich. And if you do not, you have got bigger problems than
> philosophy can fix".

Pretty much a total lack of dopamine or dopamine receptors. Big
problem.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 04/06/2012 05:16 AM, Syamsu wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2:40 am, Bill<brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What I think is interesting is that many dualists seem to think that
>> introducing an immaterial soul changes the argument about free will.
>> And the point of my arguments earlier in the thread (and I guess of
>> Sam Harris' argument cited by Hemidactylus) is that simply positing an
>> immaterial soul doesn't resolve any of the philosophical problems of
>> free will. Unless your internal state determines your choice (given a
>> particular set of external circumstances), how can you call it *your*
>> choice? And that question does not depend on whether you imagine your
>> internal state to be a "predisposition of the soul" or a neural state.- Hide quoted text -
>
> Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and
> physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the
> events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not
> have an entirely physical explanation, which requires that the world
> is not closed under physics. Such dualists believe that some non-
> physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality. In the dual
> categories the physical is established to exist by objective
> measurement, and the non-physical agency is identified through
> subjective opinion, requiring a choice on the part of the observer
> (samelike beauty is categoricaly a matter of subjective opinion).

I fail to see how an immaterial soul would grant you any more freedom of
will than a set of neurons. But you are the freedom rock guy, so your
insistence on this should be expected. It is what is called an idee fixe
and it has latched itself onto you like a parasite.


--
*Hemidactylus*

[*Hemidactylus*]

Here is the guru (Sam Harris):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g


--
*Hemidactylus*

[Kalkidas]

On 4/4/2012 8:08 PM, Bill wrote:
> On Apr 5, 12:57 am, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:
>> On 4/3/2012 8:29 PM, Bill wrote:
>>
>>> On Apr 4, 1:58 am, Kalkidas<e...@joes.pub> wrote:
>
>>
>>> First, I agree with you that Libet's experiments have been over-
>>> interpreted.
>>
>>> I do not think, however, that the real point of determinism is that it
>>> is physical determinism. Believing in a non-physical soul does not
>>> solve the problem of free will at all.
>>
>>> By free will you presumably mean that in some situation you did one
>>> thing, but you COULD HAVE done something else. What exactly does it
>>> mean to say you could have done something else? Does it mean that the
>>> identical *you* in identical circumstances could have chosen either to
>>> embezzle a million dollars or not to do so? Leaving aside questions of
>>> physical determinism, wouldn't the sort of *you* that would embezzle a
>>> million dollars be a different sort of *you* than the *you* who
>>> wouldn't steal it? You can argue, even with an immaterial soul
>>> involved, that your choice simply depends on the nature of your soul.
>>> It may be that you didn't know exactly what sort of soul you had until
>>> you saw whether you embezzled the funds or not, but once you either do
>>> it or don't you've simply revealed the sort of soul you had all along.
>>
>>> If you say that in identical circumstances and with an identical soul
>>> you could either steal or not steal the funds, what exactly determines
>>> your choice? Is it random and arbitrary? If what you do is arbitrary
>>> and bears no relation to your character, it's hard to see how you
>>> could be called free or held responsible for it. Or does your choice
>>> flow from your soul's character. If it flows from your soul's
>>> character then you really could not do anything other than what you
>>> actually did, having the character that you have.
>>
>>> So I do not think that you gain anything in the free will debate by
>>> saying that your actions are not determined by physical laws. They are
>>> still determined by your character whether you call your character a
>>> certain configuration of neurons and neurotransmitters or whether you
>>> call your character a predisposition of your immaterial soul.
>>
>>> To my way of thinking, you are free to the extent that you are free
>>> from *external compulsion*. If you are free from *internal*
>>> compulsion, then your acts bear no relation to who you are, and it
>>> seems a stretch either to call them freely willed actions or to hold
>>> you responsible for them.
>>
>> The question I ask is, what is the "you" in all these arguments? I think
>> it is necessary to have a grasp of who and what it is that is doing the
>> willing.
>
> That is an excellent point. As Daniel Dennett says, if you make
> yourself small enough, you can exclude just about anything. There are
> certainly formulations of *you* under which a *you* is terribly
> constrained by outside forces and seems to have very little freedom.
>
>>
>> If we can't come up with a definition of a "who", i.e. a person, then
>> the discussion of "free will" will remain quite vague, and opposing
>> viewpoints will never be resolved.
>
> I think that perhaps we do not need a specific definition of you so
> much as a set of characteristics which you think *you* must have in
> order for there to be a meaningful discussion of whether *you* can be
> free.
>
>>
>> For example, if "free will" means that in a given situation an entity
>> takes a course of action, but "could have" taken a different course,
>> then that definition applies to many more things than people. For
>> instance, a photon in a double-slit experiment goes through one slit,
>> but "could have" gone through the other. But we generally don't
>> attribute "free will" to photons. We attribute it to persons.
>
> Good point. I do not think that a person is something so small that
> quantum uncertainty is responsible for their choices. If "freedom"
> came from quantum randomness, it would be an odd sort of freedom. You
> could hardly hold someone responsible for their decisions if they were
> due to random, quantum events.
>
>>
>> I think that when you say that "Believing in a non-physical soul does
>> not solve the problem of free will at all" you are being premature.
>
> Well, OK. I did provide an argument, beyond the mere claim, though.
> Where do you disagree with the argument?
>
>> It
>> appears to me that the process of defining what is meant by "person" --
>> and distinguishing that from other, impersonal entities (photons,
>> electrons, rocks, etc.) that also appear to "choose from multiple
>> options" -- will inevitably result in just such a non-physical soul.
>
> That's fine. I am perfectly willing to stipulate a non-physical soul
> for the purposes of this argument about free will. I explained in my
> previous post why I do not think that having a non-physical soul
> solves the problem of free will. To recapitulate:
>
> If you make a decision, embezzle the million dollars or not, what
> causes the decision? Surely it is your character, whether you take
> your character to be simply physical, simply spiritual, or a
> combination of the two. Therefore, what sense does it make to say that
> you COULD HAVE done something else? If you had done something else,
> you would not be the person you are, with the character you have. That
> will be true whether you think a person is purely physical, purely
> spiritual, or a hybrid.

I believe that your questions and objections are proliferating because
there has been no serious attempt at a definition of "person". We need
to establish that definition, or we will be talking past each other.

You say "If you had done something else, you would not be the person you
are". But that depends on what "you" are. If you are an eternal
individual spiritual being, then you are always "the person you are",
and no matter what choices you make, you will never become another
person. In fact, that is what it means to be an "eternal individual
spiritual being".

On the other hand, if you are merely a biochemical robot, then at every
Planck instant you are changing your identity. In other words, you are
*never* "the person you are", and whether you "freely choose" or not,
chemical choices are continually being made that make you "not the
person you are". (and what does "freely choose" even mean to a chemical
robot?)

And finally, if you are an eternal individual spiritual being
temporarily inhabiting a biochemical robot body, and falsely identifying
yourself with that body, then you will, because of that
misidentification, think that you can become a different person by
making certain choices and not others, etc. But in reality, since all
your choices pertain to the body, which you are not, even under these
circumstances you are not really becoming a different person.

The definition I hold is that the actual "person" is the eternal
individual spiritual being, not the chemical robot body, although some
persons do become entangled with chemical robot bodies, i.e. they take
birth in this material world and misidentify themselves as the chemical
body and forget who and what they really are. Other persons, however, do
not come to the material world. They do not forget who and what they
really are. In both cases the "person" is really the spiritual being,
but those who are materially embodied have forgotten this, and thus they
are puzzled about everything, and engage in endless, perpetually
unresolved, back-and-forth disputes about whether or not they have free
will, etc., etc., etc...

To an eternal individual spiritual being, any apparent "cause" of an
action is only a secondary cause, which is itself an effect of prior
secondary causes, and so on, in a chain of causality which has literally
no beginning. It is pointless to ask of such a being what is the "cause"
of his actions. At every instant such a being is all of himself, and is
as free as his inherent capacity permits.

> Now you might say, "Well, your character is not defined until you make
> the choice to embezzle that money or not." But that just pushes the
> question back a little bit. If you choose what sort of character to
> have, what is it that determines THAT choice? Presumably it must be
> determined by whatever your character was BEFORE making that choice,
> but then your character before the choice must have been one way or
> the other. So I think you are stuck.
>
> You might say that, just like a photon, your character is such that in
> the identical situation with the million before you, you might either
> choose to steal or not to steal randomly, and independent of the
> character that you happen to have. That would make you free in the
> sense that you really could go either way. The big drawback would be
> that in such a case the choice would not proceed from your character
> at all. So in what sense could it be YOUR choice, and how could anyone
> hold you responsible for it.
>
> So my argument here is that in order to be free a choice must be
> determined by your character, which, you being who you are, means that
> the choice could not have gone any other way than the way it actually
> went.
>
> Of course, in real life, choices are determined both by external
> constraints (you can't embezzle a million dollars if nobody gives you
> the opportunity) and by your own character. I would say that you are
> more free to the extent that your choices are more determined by your
> character and less by external constraints. But given a fixed set of
> external constraints, you can only choose one way, for if you chose
> the other way you'd have been a different person, with a different
> character, than the one you actually are.
>
> I do not see anything in my argument above that depends on whether we
> define a person as a physical thing, a spiritual thing, or a mixture.
> I am quite content to exclude rocks and photons from the category of
> persons.
>
>

[*Hemidactylus*]

Egads! Paging Heraclitus. The fact that things change over time refutes
this eternal individual of yours. The ectype is real. Your archetype is
imaginary and stems from perhaps your belief in reincarnation.

> On the other hand, if you are merely a biochemical robot, then at every
> Planck instant you are changing your identity. In other words, you are
> *never* "the person you are", and whether you "freely choose" or not,
> chemical choices are continually being made that make you "not the
> person you are". (and what does "freely choose" even mean to a chemical
> robot?)

Makes sense to me. I am not the same as I was a week ago. Depending on
my mood, I may not be the same later today. I am in flux. I can never
step into the same cognitive river twice. There might be things about me
that persist, but the fact of flux means that I am not isomorphic to a
previous instant of me. Two fragmentary memories coalescing to form a
new thought changes me forever, as would forgetting what that thought
was in the future, but I would abide by some sort on internalized
Dollo's law whereby I can never truly revert to a previous state.

> And finally, if you are an eternal individual spiritual being
> temporarily inhabiting a biochemical robot body, and falsely identifying
> yourself with that body, then you will, because of that
> misidentification, think that you can become a different person by
> making certain choices and not others, etc. But in reality, since all
> your choices pertain to the body, which you are not, even under these
> circumstances you are not really becoming a different person.

Your are bound by your mindbrain. To postulate some unchanging eternal
being is nonsense. Why is this eternal being beset by a brain tumor,
alcoholic inebriation, or the cognitive effects of low blood sugar,
unless this eternal ghost is subservient to the body it inhabits.

> The definition I hold is that the actual "person" is the eternal
> individual spiritual being, not the chemical robot body, although some
> persons do become entangled with chemical robot bodies, i.e. they take
> birth in this material world and misidentify themselves as the chemical
> body and forget who and what they really are. Other persons, however, do
> not come to the material world. They do not forget who and what they
> really are. In both cases the "person" is really the spiritual being,
> but those who are materially embodied have forgotten this, and thus they
> are puzzled about everything, and engage in endless, perpetually
> unresolved, back-and-forth disputes about whether or not they have free
> will, etc., etc., etc...

An eternal personhood would lack free will as they would not be able to
get behind the prior causes that spiritually determine their next
thought and behavior. Even given your eternal being, you would be
retrospectively attributing agency to yourself as determiner of your
actions.

> To an eternal individual spiritual being, any apparent "cause" of an
> action is only a secondary cause, which is itself an effect of prior
> secondary causes, and so on, in a chain of causality which has literally
> no beginning. It is pointless to ask of such a being what is the "cause"
> of his actions. At every instant such a being is all of himself, and is
> as free as his inherent capacity permits.

So did these eternal beings spring forth from the big bang? Are your
actions set in stone previous to the existence of Earth when human
bodies came forth for the ghosts to haunt?

My most reasonable guess is that we are biocermical automatons with
assumptions of cognitive autonomy.

--
*Hemidactylus*

[Kalkidas]

[Kalkidas]

On 4/6/2012 11:37 AM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:

If you are the determiner of your actions, that's free will.

>> To an eternal individual spiritual being, any apparent "cause" of an
>> action is only a secondary cause, which is itself an effect of prior
>> secondary causes, and so on, in a chain of causality which has literally
>> no beginning. It is pointless to ask of such a being what is the "cause"
>> of his actions. At every instant such a being is all of himself, and is
>> as free as his inherent capacity permits.
>
> So did these eternal beings spring forth from the big bang? Are your
> actions set in stone previous to the existence of Earth when human
> bodies came forth for the ghosts to haunt?
>
> My most reasonable guess is that we are biocermical automatons with
> assumptions of cognitive autonomy.

I think that's a most unreasonable guess. Who is doing the "assuming"?
An assumption is something only a conscious being makes, but it has not
been established whether, or how, a purely biochemical automaton can be
conscious.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Did you or your eternal spirit choose to hit the send button without
formulating a reply? If there was a reply, from where did the thoughts
that came together to form the reply come from? Where did the word
choices and sentence structure come from? The nuances of language? The
underlying worldview?


--
*Hemidactylus*

[*Hemidactylus*]

Sidestep of prior cause noted.

>>> To an eternal individual spiritual being, any apparent "cause" of an
>>> action is only a secondary cause, which is itself an effect of prior
>>> secondary causes, and so on, in a chain of causality which has literally
>>> no beginning. It is pointless to ask of such a being what is the "cause"
>>> of his actions. At every instant such a being is all of himself, and is
>>> as free as his inherent capacity permits.
>>
>> So did these eternal beings spring forth from the big bang? Are your
>> actions set in stone previous to the existence of Earth when human
>> bodies came forth for the ghosts to haunt?
>>
>> My most reasonable guess is that we are biocermical automatons with
>> assumptions of cognitive autonomy.
>
> I think that's a most unreasonable guess. Who is doing the "assuming"?
> An assumption is something only a conscious being makes, but it has not
> been established whether, or how, a purely biochemical automaton can be
> conscious.

Well free will or not there's an internally generated awareness, and a
imperfectly retrievable mneme-store of great magnitude that somewhat
gives a misperception of self based on past experience. I don't think
the annihilation of free will necessarily negates consciousness. But
that's a separate issue that would involve untold spilling of digital ink.


--
*Hemidactylus*

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 04/05/2012 10:20 AM, Bill wrote:
> On 5 Apr, 21:08, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
>> On Apr 5, 3:37 pm, Bill<brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 5 Apr, 20:07, marc.tess...@wanadoo.fr wrote:
>>
>>>> On Apr 5, 2:05 pm, Bill<brogers31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>> It's not a scientific debate. It's a philosophical debate.
>>
>>>>>> If you begin to agree to discuss metaphysical notions such as "soul"
>>>>>> in the debate about the scientific existence or not of "free will"
>>>>>> you're screwed.
>>
>>>>> Science, to me, does not particularly address the question of free
>>>>> will. It's clear enough to me that all events, including our choices
>>>>> and actions, have purely physical causes. Whether you want to say that
>>>>> that physical determinism eliminates free will is a philosophical or
>>>>> linguistic question about what you want to call free will.
>>
>>>>> In other words, what would it mean for free will to "exist
>>>>> scientifically or not,"? It is a question of definitions, mostly, and
>>>>> what you feel like calling things. You might call it a metaphysical
>>>>> question, root and branch.- Hide quoted text -
>>
>>>>> - Show quoted text -
>>
>>>> "In other words, what would it mean for free will to "exist
>>>> scientifically or not,"? It is a question of definitions."
>>>> I agree with you that it is a question of definition: so, what is
>>>> yours?
>>>> Most of time, however, people consider the notion of "free will" as
>>>> the possibility for human beings to make a choice independently of any
>>>> external or internal physico-chemical causes, i.e. as "uncaused
>>>> causers" (according to J. Greene and J. Cohen's very good
>>>> expression!). With such a definition it is trully a scientific
>>>> question and, I think, crucial, particularly regarding the
>>>> consequences for the law.

>>
>>> My definition? You are free to the extent that you are not constrained
>>> by external forces. You are more free if you are out of jail than in
>>> jail, more free if you are healthy than if you are bed-ridden and
>>> incapacitated. I do not think it is meaningful to say that you are
>>> free from internal physico-chemical causes. You ARE nothing but
>>> internal physico-chemical causes. If you were free from them you'd be
>>> free from yourself. As I said to Kalkidas, if being free means your
>>> actions are uncaused, and specifically uncaused by any aspect of

>>> yourself, then how could they be your actions?- Hide quoted text -
>>
>>> - Show quoted text -
> .

>>
>> Your definition is the definition of freedom, particularly political
>> freeedom, and I am happy with it.
>> But, usually the definition of "free will" corresponds to: "being free
>> means your actions are not caused by any external or internal physico-
>> chemical processes but by your "free will" (!).
>
> I don't know about "usually," but the definition of free will I gave
> you is a pretty standard compatibilist definition of free will. You
> can read about it on-line in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
> in more detail than you may care to.

Sam Harris takes issue with Dan Dannett's views on free will here...
Maybe the two will have a cogent Youtube debate sometime to hash it out:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-and-free-will

I think it apt this thread starts in coincidence with Harris' book
coming out. Maybe synchronicity ;-)


--
*Hemidactylus*

[Kalkidas]

If only I were a biochemical robot I wouldn't make mistakes like that.

OTOH if we were all biochemical robots, who would notice?

[Bill]

That's fine. I'll work with your definition below.

>
> You say "If you had done something else, you would not be the person you
> are". But that depends on what "you" are. If you are an eternal
> individual spiritual being, then you are always "the person you are",
> and no matter what choices you make, you will never become another
> person. In fact, that is what it means to be an "eternal individual
> spiritual being".

Perfectly fine. Then I think you would agree that your choices are
inevitable. If you are a spiritual person with an eternally defined
nature, then given a permanently fixed and specific eternal nature and
some particular set of circumstances in the world, the only choice you
can possibly make is the one you actually do make.

>
> On the other hand, if you are merely a biochemical robot, then at every
> Planck instant you are changing your identity. In other words, you are
> *never* "the person you are", and whether you "freely choose" or not,
> chemical choices are continually being made that make you "not the
> person you are". (and what does "freely choose" even mean to a chemical
> robot?)

To a chemical robot, to freely choose means to integrate inputs from
the outside world and its internal state and generate an output.
That's a free choice by my definition of a person, but I fully
understand that you are not happy with that definition. And I agree
100% that "who you are" as a biochemical robot, changes constantly.

>
> And finally, if you are an eternal individual spiritual being
> temporarily inhabiting a biochemical robot body, and falsely identifying
> yourself with that body, then you will, because of that
> misidentification, think that you can become a different person by
> making certain choices and not others, etc. But in reality, since all
> your choices pertain to the body, which you are not, even under these
> circumstances you are not really becoming a different person.
>
> The definition I hold is that the actual "person" is the eternal
> individual spiritual being, not the chemical robot body, although some
> persons do become entangled with chemical robot bodies, i.e. they take
> birth in this material world and misidentify themselves as the chemical
> body and forget who and what they really are. Other persons, however, do
> not come to the material world. They do not forget who and what they
> really are. In both cases the "person" is really the spiritual being,
> but those who are materially embodied have forgotten this, and thus they
> are puzzled about everything, and engage in endless, perpetually
> unresolved, back-and-forth disputes about whether or not they have free
> will, etc., etc., etc...

I really do not think that we disagree much at all. You hold, unless I
misunderstand you (certainly possible) that each person has a fixed,
eternal spiritual nature. Since the only things that can affect a
decision are the external circumstances that give rise to the
situation in the first place, and the nature of the person doing the
deciding, then an eternal spiritual person with a fixed constant
nature can only make the choice he actually makes. There was never
"really" an option. Some people find that sort of determinism or
predestination contrary to the idea of free will, but I don't. And you
don't seem to. As long as a decision flows reflects who you are, then
from my point of view it is as free as it can be.

>
> To an eternal individual spiritual being, any apparent "cause" of an
> action is only a secondary cause, which is itself an effect of prior
> secondary causes, and so on, in a chain of causality which has literally
> no beginning. It is pointless to ask of such a being what is the "cause"
> of his actions. At every instant such a being is all of himself, and is
> as free as his inherent capacity permits.

As I say, we may disagree about whether you are an eternal spiritual
being or an ephemeral biochemical robot, but I think we agree that you
are as free as is possible.

[Bill]

I think where I disagree with Harris a bit is that I do not think that
the idea of free will really underlies our tendency to make moral
judgements. When we make them, we use ideas about free will to justify
them, certainly. But I think that those are largely post hoc
rationalizations of moral sentiments we cannot reason ourselves into
or out of.

And I also agree with Harris that he agrees with Dennett about many
more aspects of the arguments about free will than not.