I don't have any formal training in philosophy outside of a couple undergrad courses I took over a decade ago. However, I like to stimulate my mind and have been listening to this channel over the...
I don't have any formal training in philosophy outside of a couple undergrad courses I took over a decade ago. However, I like to stimulate my mind and have been listening to this channel over the past few years.
In particular, I love the debate between free will and determinism, and I thought this was a great video to explore some of the contemporary ideas around this. I'll admit that I can't fully wrap my head around the arguments for compatibilism that distinguish it from determinism, but hopefully with enough perspectives it can click on why this is such a popular view amongst philosophers.
I wouldn't recommend just straight watching this video - it's very dry! I listened to it while doing some menial work, but that certainly doesn't work for everyone. For those interested in the...
I wouldn't recommend just straight watching this video - it's very dry! I listened to it while doing some menial work, but that certainly doesn't work for everyone. For those interested in the discussion but unsure of the terminology, the Key Terms section runs through the commonly understood definitions, and I suppose is my sticking point.
Hmm, I'm not sure if it's the knowledge that makes someone have agency or not. Let me try to pull an example from the video to illustrate the disconnect. From 23:44 - 44:55 Sapolksy lists influences on our will that go beyond the immediate moment - hormonal, genetic, environmental, and evolutionary. Now, Schmid and Cyr point out some simplifications he brings up and warn against generalizing, which is fair, but I don't find those as convincing against determinism.
I find the consequence argument to be a pretty good summary of my disagreement or maybe at the very least my misunderstanding of compatibilism. We see this causal chain of events that set us up to be where we are at this very moment, and we had no control over that. If we follow Sapolsky's line of thinking via biological reductionism, then I don't see how it is that we make real choices because I don't understand what we're supposed to be free from as an agent. I didn't really ever choose to have a preference for apples over bananas - this was influenced by my upbringing, my genetics, and so on.
So to bring it back to your example - if you know, with 100% certainty that I'm going to pick the apple in this moment, that in fact, it's impossible for me to choose the banana because of a multitude of factors (not that I am coerced or restrained, I just have 0 desire for the banana), am I making a choice? It certainly looks like it on its surface, but did I really have the opportunity to choose differently?
Sapolsky's book Behave is a much longer treatise on the factors that affect the way humans act. There is a bit of philosophical discussion about free will at the end, but primarily the book is...
Sapolsky's book Behave is a much longer treatise on the factors that affect the way humans act. There is a bit of philosophical discussion about free will at the end, but primarily the book is about popular science.
The complaint I have about this take is it seems to knock a lot of the potentially useful meaning out of the term "free will". It is trivially true that humans — as well as many/most/all other...
The complaint I have about this take is it seems to knock a lot of the potentially useful meaning out of the term "free will". It is trivially true that humans — as well as many/most/all other animals, and possibly other entities as well — have something we might call a will. But the emphasis in these debates seems to be the "free" part of the phrase "free will", and it's just not at all clear to me that we actually do possess truly free will, in which our choices unimpeded by constraints outside of our control.
An animal eating food because otherwise it may starve is an example of will, but not free will; the animal eats due to the situation it finds itself in, not because it truly wants to eat in and of itself. Likewise, an animal eating food because it is compelled by overwhelming instincts honed by eons of evolution is an example of will, but not free will; the animal eats only because of complex evolutionary factors outside its control, not because it chose to have those compulsions. A caterpillar has a will to eat leaves, while a pelican has a will to eat fish, but caterpillars don't choose to be caterpillars and pelicans don't choose to be pelicans; thus caterpillars and pelicans lack free will with their food choices.
All evidence I've seen points to the brain being a deterministic organ, exactly like every other organ in our body, and thus all of our choices are the outputs of complex biological processes we barely understand, let alone control. Every choice we make is, at its heart, like the choice an animal makes when it eats. Our brain's choices constitute our will, but it's not free will because we do not get to choose the processes that make these choices.
As far as I can see, the only alternative to determinism (i.e., your choices are based on prior factors, like your personality and the situation you are in) is randomness (i.e., there is no context to your choices; anyone of any personality or circumstances would have just as likely made the exact same choice, and if we were to turn back time and play the scenario out again and again, your choices would differ without rhyme or reason). But this still does not satisfy. To me, a truly random decision hardly constitutes even will, let alone free will; I would characterize it almost like an impulse.
So even if God can predict the outcome of true randomness (though I don't know how that could be, given that randomness is fully unpredictable by definition, but maybe it makes sense if we say that God exists at the end of time and can see absolutely everything that has ever happened before — which is to say, God does not predict anything, but instead can reference things that have already happened), I still don't see how this solves the free will problem.
To be honest, I think "free will" is a nonsense phrase, as silly as "true falsehood".
Caveats:
I have not had time to watch this video yet. Maybe it presents some side of this debate that I had not considered before.
I was raised by atheists and I find the concept of God inherently illogical (at least as this term is commonly defined in the present day; there are some historical conceptions of God and some modern obscure conceptions of God that I am not such a gnostic atheist on, but these definitions are largely irrelevant to the concept of free will), so my understanding of the phrase "free will" is limited to a secular viewpoint. Perhaps religious people use a different definition that I am unfamiliar with or unable to grok.
I am very sympathetic to this view. I too find arguments of the form 'quantum mechanics is random, therefore we have free will' nonsensical. Indeed, one proposal is a kind of dualism—c.f....
To me, a truly random decision hardly constitutes even will, let alone free will
I am very sympathetic to this view. I too find arguments of the form 'quantum mechanics is random, therefore we have free will' nonsensical.
Perhaps religious people use a different definition that I am unfamiliar with or unable to grok
Indeed, one proposal is a kind of dualism—c.f. 'soul'—it can be treated as a sort of ineffable. For me the trouble, for the longest time, was that no one would explain what they meant by free will. It's not so much a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, or finding it coherent or incoherent, as not even having any idea of what people are trying to communicate. (Edit- to give an example. There was an experiment that was supposed to refute free will. They showed that they could ask people to make a choice, and then predict with a brain-scanning machine what choice they would make before they claimed to be conscious of having made a choice. I have no idea what this was supposed to demonstrate.) Eventually, fairly recently, I found my answer on an insane person's blog. I don't know if this is at all meaningful to anybody else—I expect not—but it gave me some degree of closure on the matter; she said:
Free will is tautological. Whatever determines what you do is whatever determines what you do.
I don't understand this point. Yes, eating is required. Most animals eat to live. What does take make about humans who choose to go on hunger strikes, to the point where prison guards are forced...
Every choice we make is, at its heart, like the choice an animal makes when it eats.
I don't understand this point. Yes, eating is required. Most animals eat to live. What does take make about humans who choose to go on hunger strikes, to the point where prison guards are forced to feed them to keep them alive, to protest societal injustice?
The idea that we have no free will seems strange to me. What drives us to create art, music, writing, poetry, and so forth? And the immense variation of our creativity.
I personally don't "agree" with the fully deteriminstic model. And I don't believe that "randomness" is the "only alternative" — that appears to be a false dichotomy.
I'm not religious either; I don't believe in the concept of a soul. Spiritual, maybe, but I follow no "organized spirituality" or religion. I suppose I do believe that there is something that exists that makes it so that whatever people are trying to calculate or "determine" is impossible to determine.
I do believe we have free will. I don't know why, I can't prove it I suppose, but I don't really care. I am an absurdist, I guess. The debate on free will can eventually get down to the level of light particles. If I believe we are not all simply deteriminstic complicated particle reactions, then do photons have free will? And I guess I'd have to say, as an absurdist, sure why not... lol. That sounds hilarious, let's go with that!
I haven't watched the video myself either, I prefer to read, but I'll let my comment act a bookmark to remind me to give it a watch when I have two hours free. I do find this topic interesting.
Going on a hunger strike exhibits strong will, but not free will. People go on hunger strikes because of outside circumstances (political strife) and because of their biology (their personality...
Going on a hunger strike exhibits strong will, but not free will. People go on hunger strikes because of outside circumstances (political strife) and because of their biology (their personality and, perhaps, their internal experience of hunger). Note that very few people go on hunger strikes, and essentially no animals do. It takes a very special person in very special circumstances to do it, and we simply don't get to choose who or what we are born as or the circumstances we are born into.
All of our decisions—yes, even including art—are not made in a void. We don't choose them truly freely; we choose them because we have the inclination and the incentive to do them. If art were completely free and unconstrained, such that people did it randomly for absolutely no reason at all, would it even be art anymore?
I personally don't "agree" with the fully deteriminstic model. And I don't believe that "randomness" is the "only alternative" — that appears to be a false dichotomy.
Can you explain what third option there is? It seems to me that an action can either happen for a reason (determinism) or it can happen for no reason (randomness), or possibly some mixture of the two.
If I believe we are not all simply deteriminstic complicated particle reactions, then do photons have free will?
To my mind, I don't see how any entity — real or hypothetical — could ever possibly exhibit free will.
The free in free will depends on randomness. Every constraint, internal and external, infringes on freedom. The only true freedom can come from a total absence of reason for anything you do.
But the will in free will depends on determinism. Decisions are borne of constraints. If you don't have any reason for the choices you make, it's just mindless impulse that is wholly disconnected from your thoughts and desires.
Perhaps this comes as no surprise, but I find much greater beauty and meaning in actions borne of great will than in actions borne of great freedom. The most profound art, the most profound movements, the most profound everything that humans do come not from people doing them on a random whim, but from people doing them because they feel they must do them — that the thing they are doing comes from something much greater than themselves alone. And they are right.
We are all interconnected with the whole of time and existence through this incredible deterministic process. Even writing this comment on Tildes takes on a kind of spiritual significance in this light: I am an instrument of the universe, and every tap on my keyboard is intricately woven with everything that has come before me, everything that exists around me, and everything that will come after me. My will is not free and cannot be free, and I would not want it to be free, because that would orphan me from the universe and invalidate everything that makes me who I am.
I think you answered your own question. :) I think that's what I "feel" about all this (and I fully know it's just my personal feelings/beliefs that can be illogical and no one else is required to...
Can you explain what third option there is? It seems to me that an action can either happen for a reason (determinism) or it can happen for no reason (randomness), or possibly some mixture of the two.
I think you answered your own question. :) I think that's what I "feel" about all this (and I fully know it's just my personal feelings/beliefs that can be illogical and no one else is required to accept). Some "mixture" of the two. I am reminded of some physics concept, something like 90% of the time, two particles collide and bounce off each other, but sometimes, the other 10%, they pass right through each other? I think this is related to Feynman diagrams? (I'm really not a physics person though, so I acknowledge that I may be misunderstanding concepts.)
I think your last two paragraphs are beautiful and I appreciate you taking the time to reply. You've given me a refreshing new perspective on the concept of "free will."
This is also my issue with ... well, just about every argument for free will that I've heard or read. They tend to rely on some degree of equivocation. Very weak versions of free will can be...
The complaint I have about this take is it seems to knock a lot of the potentially useful meaning out of the term "free will".
This is also my issue with ... well, just about every argument for free will that I've heard or read. They tend to rely on some degree of equivocation. Very weak versions of free will can be argued convincingly, but those versions don't come close to the essentially dualistic thing that people commonly mean by the term.
To be honest, I think "free will" is a nonsense phrase
An "ignostic" stance makes some sense here, I guess.
@C-Cab, did you mean to link to 1hr 35m into the video? I assume not, so I have removed that timestamp part of the URL. But if you did mean to link to that specific timestamp, let me know and I...
@C-Cab, did you mean to link to 1hr 35m into the video? I assume not, so I have removed that timestamp part of the URL. But if you did mean to link to that specific timestamp, let me know and I can add it back.
p.s. Please label this as offtopic so it doesn't detract from any on-topic discussion.
I don't have any formal training in philosophy outside of a couple undergrad courses I took over a decade ago. However, I like to stimulate my mind and have been listening to this channel over the past few years.
In particular, I love the debate between free will and determinism, and I thought this was a great video to explore some of the contemporary ideas around this. I'll admit that I can't fully wrap my head around the arguments for compatibilism that distinguish it from determinism, but hopefully with enough perspectives it can click on why this is such a popular view amongst philosophers.
I wouldn't recommend just straight watching this video - it's very dry! I listened to it while doing some menial work, but that certainly doesn't work for everyone. For those interested in the discussion but unsure of the terminology, the Key Terms section runs through the commonly understood definitions, and I suppose is my sticking point.
Hmm, I'm not sure if it's the knowledge that makes someone have agency or not. Let me try to pull an example from the video to illustrate the disconnect. From 23:44 - 44:55 Sapolksy lists influences on our will that go beyond the immediate moment - hormonal, genetic, environmental, and evolutionary. Now, Schmid and Cyr point out some simplifications he brings up and warn against generalizing, which is fair, but I don't find those as convincing against determinism.
I find the consequence argument to be a pretty good summary of my disagreement or maybe at the very least my misunderstanding of compatibilism. We see this causal chain of events that set us up to be where we are at this very moment, and we had no control over that. If we follow Sapolsky's line of thinking via biological reductionism, then I don't see how it is that we make real choices because I don't understand what we're supposed to be free from as an agent. I didn't really ever choose to have a preference for apples over bananas - this was influenced by my upbringing, my genetics, and so on.
So to bring it back to your example - if you know, with 100% certainty that I'm going to pick the apple in this moment, that in fact, it's impossible for me to choose the banana because of a multitude of factors (not that I am coerced or restrained, I just have 0 desire for the banana), am I making a choice? It certainly looks like it on its surface, but did I really have the opportunity to choose differently?
Sapolsky's book Behave is a much longer treatise on the factors that affect the way humans act. There is a bit of philosophical discussion about free will at the end, but primarily the book is about popular science.
The complaint I have about this take is it seems to knock a lot of the potentially useful meaning out of the term "free will". It is trivially true that humans — as well as many/most/all other animals, and possibly other entities as well — have something we might call a will. But the emphasis in these debates seems to be the "free" part of the phrase "free will", and it's just not at all clear to me that we actually do possess truly free will, in which our choices unimpeded by constraints outside of our control.
An animal eating food because otherwise it may starve is an example of will, but not free will; the animal eats due to the situation it finds itself in, not because it truly wants to eat in and of itself. Likewise, an animal eating food because it is compelled by overwhelming instincts honed by eons of evolution is an example of will, but not free will; the animal eats only because of complex evolutionary factors outside its control, not because it chose to have those compulsions. A caterpillar has a will to eat leaves, while a pelican has a will to eat fish, but caterpillars don't choose to be caterpillars and pelicans don't choose to be pelicans; thus caterpillars and pelicans lack free will with their food choices.
All evidence I've seen points to the brain being a deterministic organ, exactly like every other organ in our body, and thus all of our choices are the outputs of complex biological processes we barely understand, let alone control. Every choice we make is, at its heart, like the choice an animal makes when it eats. Our brain's choices constitute our will, but it's not free will because we do not get to choose the processes that make these choices.
As far as I can see, the only alternative to determinism (i.e., your choices are based on prior factors, like your personality and the situation you are in) is randomness (i.e., there is no context to your choices; anyone of any personality or circumstances would have just as likely made the exact same choice, and if we were to turn back time and play the scenario out again and again, your choices would differ without rhyme or reason). But this still does not satisfy. To me, a truly random decision hardly constitutes even will, let alone free will; I would characterize it almost like an impulse.
So even if God can predict the outcome of true randomness (though I don't know how that could be, given that randomness is fully unpredictable by definition, but maybe it makes sense if we say that God exists at the end of time and can see absolutely everything that has ever happened before — which is to say, God does not predict anything, but instead can reference things that have already happened), I still don't see how this solves the free will problem.
To be honest, I think "free will" is a nonsense phrase, as silly as "true falsehood".
Caveats:
I am very sympathetic to this view. I too find arguments of the form 'quantum mechanics is random, therefore we have free will' nonsensical.
Indeed, one proposal is a kind of dualism—c.f. 'soul'—it can be treated as a sort of ineffable. For me the trouble, for the longest time, was that no one would explain what they meant by free will. It's not so much a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, or finding it coherent or incoherent, as not even having any idea of what people are trying to communicate. (Edit- to give an example. There was an experiment that was supposed to refute free will. They showed that they could ask people to make a choice, and then predict with a brain-scanning machine what choice they would make before they claimed to be conscious of having made a choice. I have no idea what this was supposed to demonstrate.) Eventually, fairly recently, I found my answer on an insane person's blog. I don't know if this is at all meaningful to anybody else—I expect not—but it gave me some degree of closure on the matter; she said:
I don't understand this point. Yes, eating is required. Most animals eat to live. What does take make about humans who choose to go on hunger strikes, to the point where prison guards are forced to feed them to keep them alive, to protest societal injustice?
The idea that we have no free will seems strange to me. What drives us to create art, music, writing, poetry, and so forth? And the immense variation of our creativity.
I personally don't "agree" with the fully deteriminstic model. And I don't believe that "randomness" is the "only alternative" — that appears to be a false dichotomy.
I'm not religious either; I don't believe in the concept of a soul. Spiritual, maybe, but I follow no "organized spirituality" or religion. I suppose I do believe that there is something that exists that makes it so that whatever people are trying to calculate or "determine" is impossible to determine.
I do believe we have free will. I don't know why, I can't prove it I suppose, but I don't really care. I am an absurdist, I guess. The debate on free will can eventually get down to the level of light particles. If I believe we are not all simply deteriminstic complicated particle reactions, then do photons have free will? And I guess I'd have to say, as an absurdist, sure why not... lol. That sounds hilarious, let's go with that!
I haven't watched the video myself either, I prefer to read, but I'll let my comment act a bookmark to remind me to give it a watch when I have two hours free. I do find this topic interesting.
Going on a hunger strike exhibits strong will, but not free will. People go on hunger strikes because of outside circumstances (political strife) and because of their biology (their personality and, perhaps, their internal experience of hunger). Note that very few people go on hunger strikes, and essentially no animals do. It takes a very special person in very special circumstances to do it, and we simply don't get to choose who or what we are born as or the circumstances we are born into.
All of our decisions—yes, even including art—are not made in a void. We don't choose them truly freely; we choose them because we have the inclination and the incentive to do them. If art were completely free and unconstrained, such that people did it randomly for absolutely no reason at all, would it even be art anymore?
Can you explain what third option there is? It seems to me that an action can either happen for a reason (determinism) or it can happen for no reason (randomness), or possibly some mixture of the two.
To my mind, I don't see how any entity — real or hypothetical — could ever possibly exhibit free will.
The free in free will depends on randomness. Every constraint, internal and external, infringes on freedom. The only true freedom can come from a total absence of reason for anything you do.
But the will in free will depends on determinism. Decisions are borne of constraints. If you don't have any reason for the choices you make, it's just mindless impulse that is wholly disconnected from your thoughts and desires.
Perhaps this comes as no surprise, but I find much greater beauty and meaning in actions borne of great will than in actions borne of great freedom. The most profound art, the most profound movements, the most profound everything that humans do come not from people doing them on a random whim, but from people doing them because they feel they must do them — that the thing they are doing comes from something much greater than themselves alone. And they are right.
We are all interconnected with the whole of time and existence through this incredible deterministic process. Even writing this comment on Tildes takes on a kind of spiritual significance in this light: I am an instrument of the universe, and every tap on my keyboard is intricately woven with everything that has come before me, everything that exists around me, and everything that will come after me. My will is not free and cannot be free, and I would not want it to be free, because that would orphan me from the universe and invalidate everything that makes me who I am.
I think you answered your own question. :) I think that's what I "feel" about all this (and I fully know it's just my personal feelings/beliefs that can be illogical and no one else is required to accept). Some "mixture" of the two. I am reminded of some physics concept, something like 90% of the time, two particles collide and bounce off each other, but sometimes, the other 10%, they pass right through each other? I think this is related to Feynman diagrams? (I'm really not a physics person though, so I acknowledge that I may be misunderstanding concepts.)
I think your last two paragraphs are beautiful and I appreciate you taking the time to reply. You've given me a refreshing new perspective on the concept of "free will."
This is also my issue with ... well, just about every argument for free will that I've heard or read. They tend to rely on some degree of equivocation. Very weak versions of free will can be argued convincingly, but those versions don't come close to the essentially dualistic thing that people commonly mean by the term.
An "ignostic" stance makes some sense here, I guess.
@C-Cab, did you mean to link to 1hr 35m into the video? I assume not, so I have removed that timestamp part of the URL. But if you did mean to link to that specific timestamp, let me know and I can add it back.
p.s. Please label this as offtopic so it doesn't detract from any on-topic discussion.
Haha no I did not! I picked it back up from last night and decided I wanted to share it. Thanks for noticing that and making the adjustment.
YVW. :)