I understand, but the problem is I can give this exact description for a computer.
Why does the computer act the way it does instead of some other way? Well you see it’s the computers own nature to choose to do that, given those inputs. It is not the inputs that cause the computer to choose A over B, it is the nature of it’s hardware, how it is wired, that makes it have that reaction to that input. In this sense, it is the computer itself that is the cause of the choice of action, it was not determined to act in this way by something else.
How so? If the agent acts as the initiator of a causal chain, and does so for certain reasons (but could have done otherwise, for other reasons)… its not caused by something else, and its not capricious.
I’m not sure that I agree with you that “choice must involve some causal process” - when a free agent makes a choice, the agent itself is that cause of that event, initiating a new causal chain. (It might help to point out explicitly that I hold to a substance view of causation: substances are the causes of events. You might be thinking of events being the cause of other events.) So, the agent is the cause of the choice. The agent also is the cause of “the agent’s causing the choice”, but there’s no regress - “the agent’s causing the choice” isn’t really a distinct event from the choice itself. And there’s no circularity either - the agent (a substance) is obviously distinct from the choice (an event).
You ask what is going on “inside” the agent to causally explain why this choice is made, but in my view this is a category error. The agent is an irreducible entity and its free will actions are the exercises of irreducible causal powers - i.e. for human free will my view entails either some kind of hylemorphism or substance dualism, where the human person is a single, unified entity with causal powers that cannot be attributed merely to the molecules that make up the neurons that make up the brain.
Then I will say it another way, the statement, “I choose to love you enough to agree with you.” can never be precise. Feelings/choices/beliefs are relative and change constantly, ambiguously, without precision or reason. I understand that the discussions here tend to sway to the scientific side, and I applaud taking a scientific approach to theological questions, but it feels at times that you’re using a thermometer to measure the color of a rainbow.
It seems to me that it is contradictory to say the agent acts as the initiator of a causal chain for certain reasons, but is not caused by something else. But then how are those reasons not the cause of the agent acting the way it does?
But we can still ask the question, why does the agent react, why is the agent initiating this new causal chain? Would it still be doing that without those certain reasons?
Not appropriately analogous, for a number of reasons.
Computers are entirely reducible to their parts. We know this because we put them together. But this means they aren’t single, unified entities on a metaphysical level.
Given 1, computers can’t serve as subjects for intentional states.
Given 2, since computers don’t have intentionality, they don’t have reasons for doing things the way free will agents do.
For any set of inputs, computers can’t do anything differently than they actually do. (Even if they did - if they incorporated some truly indeterministic internal element - they still wouldn’t have intentionality.)
Because of 4, the inputs to a computer actually do act as determining external causes.
So computers aren’t free (4,5) and don’t have will (1,2,3). And yeah, there’s some metaphysical assumptions behind those assertions that we probably disagree about. But all I’m trying to argue here is that the idea of free will is coherent.
What determines whether the agent chooses one thing or another? If it’s reasons, that’s causation. If it isn’t, that’s caprice. If it’s “just because”, that’s meaningless.
I do not understand that view; is it Thomist? It seems divorced from any empirical investigation of the world.
That’s more or less a black box that we are forbidden to look inside by the claim that there is no inside at all. It seems equivalent to “‘Shut up,’ he explained.” And I thought God was the only uncaused cause.
Humans are entirely reducible to their parts. We know this because my parents put me together. Or, if you prefer, how do you know that God doesn’t add a soul to every computer the first time you turn it on?
How do you know that humans can?
I don’t think any of that advances your case. Free will appears to be a black box with nothing inside that works in a way that can’t be explained or articulated. I do not find that coherent.
Do you mean that you don’t know what a false dichotomy is or that you don’t know which false dichotomy I was talking about? If the former, google should help. If the latter, it should be obvious that I was referring to your choice between “mathematical formalism” and “intuition and nebulous phrases”.
Sentences can be “well formed” or not, chains of reasonings can be “logical” or not; two completely different concepts. False dichotomies that are sentences are neither logical or not; they might be “well formed” or not. Asking whether “false dichotomies are logical” is meaningless unless you mean them not as sentences, but as a chain of reasoning from an axiomatic system. But then your question is still meaningless because we never agreed upon an axiomatic system.
It’s obvious that @John_Harshman does not appreciate striving for more rigor and precision, and there is nothing I can do to change his mind, so I will exit this side conversation.
Furthermore, conventional computers are entirely reducible to the analog world, and their outputs in principle predictable from electrical theory. Computers do not make choices.
If this is true in the same way as computers, people’s actions can be predicted from, say, capacitance, inductance and resistance of their brain circuits, or some such basic physical quantities. Now, I would think you are making a case for a more expansive physics, but if human action is not predictable from circuit theory but is constrained by physics, what are the physical laws can in principle predict choice? If these cannot be readily identified, in what sense is human action determined by physics?
Sure. If humans were made of electrical circuits, that would certainly be true. But of course we aren’t.
All the physical and chemical processes that cause neurons to fire or not fire at particular times. Whether we actually can work out all those influences is not relevant. Whether we can identify them is not relevant, though we certainly can as a general case. We know how neurons work, though we can’t predict what a great mass of organized neurons will do, just because it’s so complex. I hope you’re not saying that free will hides in complexity.