The question of free will...

I recently made a video:

For those that don't feel like listening to me..

I’m going to open up with a quote from philosopher A.C. Grayling. When asked if we have free will, Grayling responded not with yes, not with no, not with in depth analysis of the current and historical philosophical underpinnings of the question, instead he responded, “I think we ought to act like we do.” Simple, straight, and to the point.

Now why is this a good answer? Because it sums up the current debate about the question. What is free will in the first place? Well that’s actually a fairly interesting question. Libertarian free will, for instance, is the question of whether or not we have the ability to choose from various alternatives to perform a certain action. This describes how things feel to be true. I have the option of picking up a cigarette and lighting it, replacing the batteries in my keyboard, adjusting my webcam, a great number of things I can choose from…or so it seems. Enter determinism. Determinism essentially states that there is no such thing as a †˜free will’ part of our mind, that we simply do as the physical laws, past experiences, genetics, environment altogether dictate. This of course isn’t to be confused with Newtonian determinism. Newtonian determinism essentially states that the universe acts in such a way that it’s a Calvinistic-esque wound up clock, and everything that will ever happen is set from the very beginning part of the causal chain. The problem with Newtonian determinism is that it presupposes a predictive capability to what we would call agency, agency being the way in which humans act. If Newtonian Determinism were true, we should, theoretically, be able to peer into the future somehow and predict what’s going to happen and when. This doesn’t appear to be the case. Most determinists nowadays are pretty accepting of the idea that even if things are determined, predictability is nigh impossible because we have this thing called the Information Theory within Quantum Theory. The idea is that in order to predict things we would need a calculating machine that can calculate better than the universe, and to do that would be by almost its very definition, impossible. It’s an extremely complicated subject that I’m not all that well versed in, but suffice to say…no absolute predictability in a deterministic universe.

But what’s the implication? Well, the idea is that determinism, even as it’s considered today, is incompatible with what we would call the libertarian sense of free well. If it is not the agent which is making decisions, but the genetics, environment, and sum of our experiences and the physical laws, then there is no real agency making decisions is there? Well this is where one of the other options one can take comes from. It’s called Compatibilism. And if we are constrained, if we are forced to talk in terms of †˜free will or no free will’ then you can call me a Compatibilist. But what IS a compatibilist? Well as Daniel Dennett explains: “The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.”

Essentially, yes, we may be determined, but our biology is such that when we come to a decision, we do so after having considered, to some degree, alternate decisions. And while the end result might be somewhat predictable given that the agent is a reasonable one, that doesn’t mean that the end result wasn’t still a choice.

Think about the idea of omniscience vs. free will for a moment. If someone knows the choices you’re going to make, before you make them…does that mean you didn’t make those choices? IF I were to snap my fingers in 5 seconds, and some God or something knew I was going to *snap* dammit! Do you see how silly that sounds?

So you might be asking yourself, “What do you mean when you say †˜if we’re constrained to there being free will or no free will’ earlier?” Well, the conversation is a bit muddled. Free will is a strange concept, and even my definition I gave before has strange implications. Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine an elk trapped in a cage. Is the elk free? Probably not. What if the cage was the size of a back yard? Still probably not really all that free. But what if the cage was the size of Rhode Island? Do limitations really mean that we don’t have free will? I’m inclined to think not. So the better question is: How much control do we have?

And this is a good question. In 1994 John Martin Fischer wrote a paper called “The metaphysics of free will” where he said that we have a †˜guidance control’ mechanism which allows us to stop ourselves from doing something we chose to do, should a better option arise. You’ll stop yourself from crossing a road if the option to not get hit by the speeding car you see coming towards you arises. Now a determinist might tell you “That’s just a biological mechanism in your body trying to keep yourself surviving.” But that biological mechanism is no less a part of you than your love for music is a part of you, or chocolate. In further papers he writes with others that this mechanism belongs to the person, in the same way any of your bodily functions do. And that we are convinced, provided we are reasonable, by reasons, to change our minds about things. Now, this may be †˜inevitable’ according to the determinist, but saying we have no free will really does nothing to explain this phenomena.

In the same sense that this doesn’t explain how when certain parts of our brains are manipulated, we change our behavior. When I get a tumor on my brain that makes me speak backwards, did I lose my free will to speak normally? Or is this just a part of the deterministic process? I had control at one point…then I lost control…but it’s all still determined? Makes no sense. It also makes no sense to say I DID have free will prior to the brain tumor but for some strange reason when physical process happen, my free will goes away. Why? Where did it go? What happened to me to all of a sudden not have this thing that we call free will? In a coherentist epistemology we’re supposed to be able to explain things in terms that we can understand that aptly describe that which we’re explaining and the reasons why the thing works the way it does, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has been coherently capable of explaining EXACTLY what free will is, WHAT it comes from, and be able to defend it in all cases. That’s why this has been debated for over literally two millennia. If we can’t come to an answer after two thousand years to this question…is it not possible that it’s because we’re asking the wrong questions?

Asking the question "Are we free?" We'd need someone more evolved to give us the answer. But right now til - until further notice - the end of our our existence we'll probably never find some "Wise Grandpa" or a "Lecturing Teacher" figure. So I do concur that we'd need to rearrange the given question, since we most likely won't get a valid "Yes/no" answer from old gramps nor from the wise philosophists, psychologists,. . .
I do beg your pardon for I haven't read much literature on the given topics-determinism,biological mechanisms, quantum physics or the like- written by the bright minds of the centuries - but I do have read SOMETHING about it and hopefully will read more.
But! The question, which I think can't be answered by humans alone. Well, not 100% surely. Instead of asking the 50/50 question we should ask instead of the wrong questions - like you pointed out BigLundi - ask the question: "How free are we?" - which doesn't exactly mean that we are free nor that we aren't. That's because, if a person, for example is in jail, he still has a sort of a freedom, which is more restrained than that of a law-abiding citizen. Like your example of a deer in a small cage, big cage, bigger cage. So, our "cage" is the size of a few planets, good for us.
Okay, I'm out of tea.. so confusing-TL;DR: Instead of yes or no "are we free?" question we should ponder upon the question "how free we are?" which can be very relative on individual scale, but well...the world is a woman- you'd need terabites of space for the first pocket volume out of 100.

Quick question, totally unrelated and just out of curiosity: Big Lundi do you actually read any of the Hentai on this site?

This.

Well...since you asked...yes. I do. That's the original reason I found this site, that and there was a contest going on in Incoherent Babble at the time I was interested in. I prefer the doujins to anything else, personally. Hope that clears things up.

It does, thanks.

Faith Is Not A Virtue, Faith Is Gullibility!