Free Will

[andrewducker]

Following an interesting discussion I had here I'm intrigued to see what other people think about Free Will:
[Poll #811650]

Comments

[ninox.livejournal.com]

The main aspects of free will is choice and ability of action. In a legislative society this is prohibited. There also incurs problems if your free will intrudes of that of others. Nice concept - good philosophical debate.

[andrewducker]

I'm not talking about "How does your free will intersect with society" though, but whether people have any freedom of action in the first place, or whether it's all just atoms bouncing about mechanically (with or without some quantum randomness).

I don't believe there's any such thing as "free will" - stuff happens because the stuff before it caused it to happen, people's belief in free will is purely down to ignorance as to how the universe works, and when you look closely at what people mean by it, it doesn't tend to mean anything at all.

[yobadself.livejournal.com]

So I could have chosen to reply to this comment or not. But something, say, your comment, made it 100% certain I WOULD reply.

I love philosophy. Not sure I agree with you, but I can see and understand the argument.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

But that's definitional, surely? You can choose to define free will through the perceptions of the person with the will, or through chaos theory. The first definition would mean, yes, there is free will, because people perceive themselves acting according to their will, the second that, no, everything is linked and the perception of will is not a more important link than any other. It's only about what you mean by the words, really, not "the truth"; I tend to think that people, who are after all only capable of perceiving through their own senses and abilities, rightly give a key place in their definitions of the world to their own perceptions.

[andrewducker]

I'm not saying that people can't perceive what they like - but perception of something doesn't make it true, it just makes it a perception.

And it's those very definitions that I'm interested in. If people have a definition of "Free Will" that's different to "random elements" then I'm fascinated to see what it is.

Yours confuses me though - "there is an element of my own will in my actions" - of course there is. The question is whether that very will is anything more than the result of causation/randomness.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

But perception is as real as anything else - it's about neurons and chemicals and actual physical eyes and ears and brains. And furthermore, since the linguistic system we're arguing about - the definition of "will" - is based in the same area of reality, I don't see a problem with making that, rather than the quantum level, the centre of the definition. Not the centre of the world, but the centre of the definition.

So my definition is that my will is part of the chain - it has both causes and effects. That doesn't make it trivial any more than, say, a car accident is intrisically trivial.

[andrewducker]

Perception is not as real as anything else. There are real things, and unreal things, and then there are our perceptions of them.

Now, some things are purely perceptual (prettiness, for instance), but I don't think that will is one of them. Unless your definition of Free Will is "I feel like I'm not being controlled", in which case that's fine.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Perception is not as real as anything else.

We simply disagree, then. I think you're perpetuating the fallacy that there is an objective reality and that it's the job of philosophy, or of questioning processes like this one, to pin it down at its most fundamental levels. I think the observer's paradox is more absolute than that, and furthermore I'm comfortable with the fact that words mean what their users think they mean.

[andrewducker]

then. I think you're perpetuating the fallacy that there is an objective reality

And I think you're perpetuating the fallacy that there isn't.

If there isn't one, what are our various perceptions _of_ and why do they match so closely? Assuming, of course, that you _also_ live in a city with a castle, river, large hill, etc. And not one with pink elephants, exploding clowns and rampaging mechanical aliens.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I believe there is a reality, but I also believe that our perceptions of it cannot be wholly unmediated. I live in the same city as you, but I don't doubt that we could argue as to the truth of some facts about it because we perceive them differently and therefore the representation of Edinburgh in each of our brains (and that is real, too - as an atheist I don't believe that my memories and knowedge exist on other than a physical plane) is different. Not radically different, but different. For example, my experiences may mean that I perceive an area as threatening when you don't.

[andrewducker]

I believe there is a reality, but I also believe that our perceptions of it cannot be wholly unmediated.

So we do agree - I thought as much. There _is_ an objective reality, but we have no direct access to it, as everything comes in through our senses, which are flawed, and then are interpreted by our brains to produce our actual sensations.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

We sort of agree - I don't think it's possible to say perceptions are "flawed". They just are what they are. They alter things, certainly, and for the most part they do it for a reason - to conserve energy expended in perceiving (all that stuff about "seeing" actually involving a lot of outward projection from memory and presumption), or to conserve memory space (systematically discarding the actual words of a conversation in favour of remembering the gist). That, to me, as it relates to the equally objective reality of human capacity, isn't a flaw, but a fact of interaction.

[andrewducker]

I meant flawed as in "Is imperfect." not as in "Is bad." But other than that, yes, I agree :->

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I think it's reasonably fair to say that our perceptions of the objective reality are, in fact, wholly mediated or, rather, that reality is wholly mediated by our perceptions. There's a Hindu concept regarding knowing the nature of the divine called Neti neti meaning "not that, not that". As a concept it works as well for reality as for God and is (as I've just discovered) a negative theology, attempting to define God by what It is not. In essence, whatever you point to, describe, talk about, think about or experience is not The Objective Reality but just some distorted reflection. Intransients in physiology (from both an evolutionary and adaptive point of view, so the final result rather than how it originated) result in intransients in observed reality (which is the only reality we can ever know). Anything in this reality is only our sense of it and many arguments simply dissolve when you start talking in these terms. It is no longer "a chair" but "my sense of a chair". It is no longer "free will" but "my sense of free will", which is how I can also be a mechanist but say "yes" to the poll above.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Yep, wholly mediated, but only (probably) partly different from the next person's perceptions, and from the Venn-diagrammed consensus perception (presumably that's a reasonable definition of mental illness - perceptions that overlap with the consensus to a lower-than-threshhold degree).

And also, thanks for the link - iteresting concept. I still think, though, that the philosophical obsession with adding bits on to perfectly usable langage tends to miss the point - when people say "chair" they can only mean their perceptions of a chair, as they don't have anything else to use as referent, having only ever perceived. So why say "my sense of a chair"? That must, by the nature of it, be what you mean. It's cleverism and obfuscation.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I agree with your statement about mental illness. As to adding "my sense of" to every statement, I only really meant implicitly, but often you have to be explicit, at least once in a while. When you say "That must, by the nature of it, be what you mean" it's very often not what people mean because people often think that their subjective reality really is objective, enough so that even people that believe in consensus subjectivity instead of objectivity often presume that the person they're talking to doesn't, which can lead straight into arguments.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

the fallacy that there is an objective reality

I look forward to your proof that there is no objective reality.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Yep, bad phrasing. I believe there is an objective reality, but that as subjective beings with our own perceptions as unavoidable mediators, we can't know it fully.

[taromazzy.livejournal.com]

Cool, I'll reinforce to all the rapists I know that they couldn't help it - it was because the stuff before it caused it to happen.

They believe that too.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

I want to believe in Free Will.

I had, previously, supported romantic notions of free will but after spending some time researching this topic for essays at Univ, I became slowly more and more horrified by the arguments put forward by the mechanists because, well, they simply made more sense. Mechanist arguments boil down to describing human 'choices' as being wholly governed by a brain that is simply an extremely complex electrochemical machine. We have no 'mind'. What we think of as 'thought' is a byproduct of electrical and chemical reactions to stimuli.

If this is true and if one were able to know the electrical and chemical state of the human body and brain and if one were able to know the electrical and chemical thresholds required, throughout the body and brain, for various reactions to take place - then one could exactly predict the action of that person given certain stimuli. i.e. their action could be pre-determined.

Of course, given our current abilities, you'd have to be God to know this and to know the thresholds of stimuli but this doesn't detract from fact that it could be predetermined...

Like I say, I want to believe in Free Will but the mechanists have the most compelling arguments. I'm happy to dig some of this stuff out the bookshelf if you want some more info.

[andrewducker]

S'ok, we're working from the same basis here - I _want_ to believe in Free Will in the same way I want to believe in an afterlife and in magic. The world would be a more interesting place to me, and less scary in many ways if I could believe in them.

[darkoshi]

I don't know. I neither believe nor disbelieve. I generally do think that if you get down to it, everything is caused by other things.... but then again, in thinking about times when I waver between actions... not knowing what I want to do... this, or that, or neither... even very simple things like whether or not to get up right now... perhaps there is some randomness to it.

I guess to me, Free Will does boil down to randomness, though.