The question appears to have arisen nevertheless. Of course humans aren’t computers, but how does that avoid the question?
Sure, thinking is physiological. To our present knowledge, the human brain is the most complex structure in the universe, but I take free will to be not so much hiding in complexity as emergent from complexity. A sense of self, the inner conversation, might represent a discontinuity beyond the range of physical laws, and this is not due to chaos or QM.
How would that be beyond the range of physical laws, and how would it confer libertarian free will? (If you’re talking about compatibility free will, I wouldn’t call that free will.)
It’s not obvious to me why computers can’t serve as subjects for intentional states.
But introducing intentional states into the discussion just raises the problem of what explains the coming into existence, and the particular nature of those intentional states, and whether the choosing entity has any control over that.
That’s sort of the same problem I have with free will, as I can’t make sense of this thing with “doing things differently than they actually do”(if they did them differently, then that would be “what they actually do”).
I suppose you mean to say that, if we could somehow travel back in time and witness the same exact agent put in the the exact same circumstance again to make some choice between A and B(or more options), some X% of the time the free agent would pick B instead of A, or C(etc.).
Perhaps there’d be some distribution of outcomes if we replayed the situation over and over and over many times? Regardless, we’re right back to the question, what explains why one thing is chosen over another at some particular moment?
I think that it is beyond the range of physical laws if decisions cannot be predicted by physical laws.
To incorporate human behavior into physics, free will is generally described as constrained by psychology, sociology, anthropology, political theory, or in some such terms of social science. These are notably not physical laws. In what way can politics be described in terms of Newtonian or quantum mechanics, or physical chaos theory? The claim can be made that it all falls within the range of physical law, but that claim as well hides in complexity, as such a system in far beyond physical analysis.
I think that free will is intrinsic to human consciousness and creativity. Your choices are your deliberation, your thinking is free will, and your ultimate resolution is just an endpoint in that process where you take action. I suppose that is more libertarian than compatibility.
Well in the detail of how humans translate inputs into their outputs, no. But we most definitely are input/output systems of a sort. Me reading your post caused me to begin writing this response. Would I have typed this response into my browser had you not written yours? Of course not. Clearly the types of responses I receive and read are partly the cause of the kinds of things I write.
Computers receive inputs as symbols. We don’t. It is up to us to decide what is a symbol.
In more detail – a theoretical computer (say, a Turing Machine) is a symbol processor. A physical computer, such as the one I currently use, does construct its own symbols from received signals. But how it constructs those symbols is tightly specified, so that the computer has no choice in the matter.
By contrast, we are not so tightly specified. We can be said to construct symbols from received signals, but we have choices (not necessarily conscious) in how we categorize inputs to generate symbols.
How so? I don’t see why that’s relevant to the conceptual coherence of free will, to be honest.
Sprinkle some modal logic on that, my friend.
Possibly((X does Y) and Possibly(X does not-Y)) ↔ X can do other than it actually does
The agent’s reasons for acting, just as I’ve been saying.
It’s a non-constrastive explanation, to be sure - the agent has reasons R and S, and if it acts on R then those reasons are most explanatorily relevant, while if it acts on S then those reasons are the relevant ones instead, even though both sets of reasons are present. The agent is an indeterministic cause. But something similar goes on for any genuinely indeterministic event anyways (i.e. quantum indeterminism).
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Every relevant detail of the functioning of a computer is something within the purview of human knowledge. They’ve all been designed and built by humans. We don’t have that kind of exhaustive knowledge about the workings of the human brain or body.
Because there isn’t any good reason for believing such a thing, Occam helpful rules it out for us.
My own subjective experience of deliberating between different alternatives, and being aware of the power to choose both. Same reason the vast majority of people reject fatalism, I suppose
The agent determines it, for (i.e. with intentional purpose direct towards) reasons that it has. The reasons are intentional states that the agent (i.e. the cause) has, and they certainly factor into the explanation of the agent’s choice, but they aren’t causes in the sense that it is usually used.
Or maybe more precisely, using Aristotelian terminology: the reasons are the “final causes” of the choice. The agent is the “efficient cause”.
It would be Aristotelian; more broad than Thomism strictly speaking. And I kind of have to laugh at the second sentence there. If the substance view of causation is “divorced from any empirical investigation of the world”, so is event causation, or causation of any kind - which is precisely why Hume rejected the notion, if I recall correctly. But there’s plenty of good refutations of Hume.
Sometimes black cubes are boxes that hide contents inside them; sometimes they’re just black cubes. Irreducible entities and casual powers are entirely coherent (and, at least to me, very obviously exist) - unless you want to claim that no reducible entities or powers are coherent either, I suppose.
A free will agent (besides God) isn’t an uncaused cause. Their existence and nature certainly do require causes. They simply aren’t caused to make their free will choices by something else.
Too bad for you, I guess.
So free will is hiding in our ignorance? You’re betting on our future ignorance, which doesn’t seem like a good basis.
So what’s the good reason for believing in free will?
Fatalism and determinism are not the same thing. And your subjective experience is not a reliable guide to what’s going on.
But the final cause creates the efficient cause. There’s no place for free will to enter into it.
I do not understand this objection. Hume rejected causation? Yet you reject Hume? Is there any evidence for “substance” as there most definitely is for causation?
Coherence and existence are different, though I suppose that existence is evidence of coherence. But I see no evidence for such existence. What are you thinking of?
Ah, but the choices made by these agents are uncaused causes, right? God has the advantage of being (supposedly) eternal and thus needing no cause. But choices are not eternal. The agent causes the choice, but nothing causes the agent to make that choice. That’s an uncaused cause right there.
Doesn’t that put free will at the mercy of our current degree of understanding and computational power?
Who knows? I don’t find it meaningful enough to make any statement.
So? We receive inputs as nervous impulses and a few other physiological things. Computers receive inputs as electrical signals, not symbols. How is that different in a way that makes a difference to free will?
Do we? How do you know, especially if the choices are unconscious?
I understand laws to be descriptions of how nature works. If the human brain doesn’t obey newton’s laws, it could be because Newtons law is not a complete description of the “natural” time-evolution operator NT. In fact, that’s the only conclusion possible under materialism.
Can you define what you mean by emergent… it seems to be another word for physics +… maybe its physics + magic?
So, from the Christian standpoint, you are scientifically arguing predestination again…which is free-will, but an omniscient God already programmed the sequence, including how we would respond, so not really free-will after all…and, God made you think that way and He knew how you would respond, so not really free-will. Predestination is certainly coherent with physics, free-will not so much. Maybe you need a God’s will variable in the equation.
Hey, it’s not my equation. How does God’s will help?
That is not what I said. In fact I don’t think free will is hiding in our ignorance - I think we already know enough that it is reasonably evident that we have it (and to boot, that free will, along with the rest of our conscious experience, is irreducible to physics).
I’ve written about my reasons for thinking so a couple years back on my blog (see linked post and others before and after it). Feel free to check it out.
No they don’t. The final causes (the agent’s reason for performing the action) do not create the efficient cause (the agent itself) in any way.
Hume rejected that we can know anything about causation. For similar reasons he rejected that we can know anything about substances, either. I think there are good arguments against both those rejections. There certainly is good evidence for causation, and specifically there is good evidence for the Aristotelian position that substances are causes. Our everyday experience of the world, in fact, suffices: we experience the world as populated by substances that act on each other as causes.
Feser’s books Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle’s Revenge go over some of those arguments if you are interested.
Whatever the fundamental entities of physics are, they will be irreducible in the relevant sense and have irreducible causal powers. Unless you want to believe that the “laws of physics” themselves are some kind of immaterial force that causes everything to happen. You could go that route, I suppose, but I don’t see how it is any more reasonable than my position.
The choices aren’t causes. The agent is the cause, and causes the choice (an event). The agent is not caused to make the choice, and I suppose could be called an uncaused cause in that sense. But it is not the same sense in which God is an uncaused cause.
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I believe you are confusing the agent with the choice. The final cause doesn’t cause the agent; it causes the agent to make a particular choice.
But substances are caused to act on each other; they don’t do it spontaneously (except for certain quantum events). Could you define “substance”, by the way? Is helium a substance? Are leptons and quarks?
The laws of physics are mathematical descriptions of what happens. Don’t know why you feel a need to bring them up. What we see in the world is unbroken causal chains as far as the eye can see. Why is that wrong?
Of course they are. Choices cause things to happen; otherwise there would be no point to them. The agent causes the choice, and the choice causes other things. You assert that nothing causes the agent to make the choice, so the making of the choice is an uncaused cause, not the agent. I believe you think that the agent itself is caused, i.e. created. But an uncaused cause is incoherent; God only gets out of the problem by being eternal. Agents don’t have that out.
By the time there are neural signals, categorization has already happened.
The electrical signals are prior to categorization. The symbols are what result from categorization.
The categorization in computers is controlled by humans (mostly, the engineers). The computer itself has no say in that categorization. And that’s different from what happens with people (or other animals).
I certainly completely disagree with this characterization of the doctrine of predestination. The actual doctrine stipulates that God must supernatually intervene to replace your heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Supernatural interventions are not coherent with physics.
In fact, I would argue that the Arminian view of salvation, which relies on coming to faith prior to conversion (the reverse ordering from the predestination view) and consequently relies a lot of fortuitous human events-- being in the right place at the right time to hear the gospel, having a missionary show up on your shores, etc. is a lot more dependent on the universe being arranged favorably by pure physics. Okay, that might be a stretch, but nevertheless it is not at all obvious that predestination view is somehow less free will and more physics.
That seems odd. Where does that categorization happen and what constitutes that categorization?
Is it? How? In what way do you (whatever we might mean by “you”) control the categorization?
Calvinism is fine with God using circumstance to achieve His ends.