[coldtea]

>Of course, randomness isn’t the only thing necessary for free will

Not only that, but randomness and determinism are equally against the (casual) idea of free will.

Free will, as commonly understood, means there's an "extra layer of abstraction" between the universe (material objects and their relationships) and me. What people called "soul".

It's not just that our decisions (will) are random instead of predetermined by a cascade of material interactions.

Note that if one presumes a soul, free will is then not an illogical impossibility. It's just an extra layer of abstraction: it can decide based on our material-timeline-history (our interactions with the universe and others), but it's not absolutely bound by them (in the way a deterministic brain would be).

A soul, in that sense, is like when a protagonist in a movie breaking the fourth wall. They exist in the world of the movie, but they have some footing outside of it. (Of course in the case of the movie, the breaking is scripted).

[simonh]

The idea of punting the problem off to some metaphysical cloud in the sky is just plain old fuzzy thinking.

We're starting from the position that we are not entirely sure how the physical world works. From that starting point, pushing the problem of free will off into some other metaphysical realm which we also don't fully understand solves no problems. Unless we can posit rules or mechanisms that apply to souls but that can't apply physically, and show what those are, they are philosophically indistinguishable.

Personally I'm very much in the compatibilist camp. For a decision to be mine, it must depend on my state. If the decision does not derive directly from my state (memories, personality, emotions, etc) then it is not my decision. So the extent to which a decision comes from some other source, to that extent the decision is not mine. Again punting the problem off to a 'soul' adds no conceptual value. Either the soul is part of me and part of my state, or it isn't.

[nardi]

You seem to be saying that only explanations that rely solely on the physical world are valid or worthwhile. But when doing philosophy, it would be hasty to say that only empirical facts are knowable.

[simonh]

I' not really saying anything about non-empirical facts. I'm open to the principle they might be knowable. I tend to thin they must be encoded physically in order to affect us in any way. How does a non-physical thing with no representation in the physical world have a physical effect?

That aside, I'm saying that I don't see how non-physicality solves the problem of free will. In a physicalist interpretation decisions can be influenced by internal state, influenced randomly, or influenced by external forces. Non-empirical facts are still state. What additional factor does non-physicality contribute that I didn't list?

Is a 'soul' part of the person or external? Does it have state? Does it contribute randomness? What is it that it actually does except add something else we have to ask these questions about?

[Fjolsvith]

I'm of the mind that soul involves the encoding in DNA and the magnetic fields generated and sensed by the electrical systems of the body.

When you have a group of people "gathered together" ("In my name") there surely must be a subtle but coherent magnetic field that interacts with the physical to bring about "unexplainable phenomena". Perhaps the notion of God/gods could be explained this way.

Indo-european rune technology involves subtle magnetic fields in complex shapes, and are believed to affect the physical in "non-deterministic" ways as well. [1]

1. "Runelore" by Edred Thorsson

[scotty79]

> But when doing philosophy, it would be hasty to say that only empirical facts are knowable.

Only if you want to stay with reality not venture into phantasy.

[simonh]

I don't think it's fantasy. There are some reasonable arguments on that side. Even though I'm not entirely convinced on them I've got an open mind on that point. I just don't think it makes any difference to the question of free will though, at least I've not yet seen a coherent argument to that effect.

[hashr8064]

> It's not just that our decisions (will) are random instead of predetermined by a cascade of material interactions.

You seem somewhat knowledgeable about this topic, so maybe you or someone else can answer this.

Why can't free will just be a complex system feedback loop and name for the way we humans perceive our own decision making process in this loop. I mean why can it not be that "free will" is the decision making process which is influenced by unconscious processes and in turn influences those unconscious processes? It could be deterministic and random or the universe could turn out to work differently at some level and it really wouldn't matter.

Is something like this a standard view in this whole debate on Free Will?

[newacctjhro]

This is called compatibilism and yeah it seems to be a mainstream view in the academic debate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

[naasking]

More than mainstream, it's the majority view among philosophers (59% Compatibilists, the rest even split among 3 other possibilities): https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

[monkeydreams]

I wonder if it is mainstream because it is functional rather than because it mirrors reality. The ability to ascribe a moral weight to a choice and then punish or reward an individual for that choice, resolves issues such as nudging people toward "appropriate" behaviour, enacting some vengeance against people who do harm to others, etc. It appears to me to be a neat legal fiction but, perhaps, not the most effective tool.

[naasking]

First, I think it's important to distinguish justice from moral responsibility. Punishment and rehabilitation are about justice. Free will is about identifying who is morally responsible. So accepting free will doesn't automatically mean you can punish wrongdoers.

Second, I'm not sure what you mean by "mirrors reality". The debate surrounding free will is about defining the term and its properties and how it's a factor in moral responsibility. To do so, it must provide a justifiable framework for moral reasoning and our moral language to make sense of how we use the term. Compatibilism convincingly meets the necessary criteria, and that's why it's the majority view.

The holdouts are people who insist free will must have certain properties that Compatibilism probably doesn't have, but they haven't been able to argue this convincingly enough to persuade a majority.

[dmreedy]

An idea that's been tickling me lately is that 'randomness', as perceived by people inside a system, is actually an avenue by which free will from some hypothetical meta-system might assert itself.

The actions causally derived from randomness in our universe seem random because we inside the system have no Informational view in to the meta-system in which they have some kind of causal logic, but the decision makes sense when you have access to that higher-order logic in the meta-system. The random state of some set of particles in someone's brain that makes them choose one action over another, could be a connective tissue by which the meta-'soul' asserts its control.

It's useless for any kind of pragmatic ethical effort, and really it's just pushing the problem up one level, but it's fun to think about.

[joycian]

This is why the standard interpretation of QM to me implies that there is a higher-order universe, which seems a high price to pay (in Occam units) for an experimentally successful theory, even if it is so incredibly successful as QM.

[posterboy]

Razor Blades aren't short in supply

[naasking]

> Free will, as commonly understood, means there's an "extra layer of abstraction" between the universe (material objects and their relationships) and me. What people called "soul".

This was commonly believed for a long time, but there have been numerous studies in experimental philosophy that actually tested this question, and it turns out that people's moral reasoning is Compatibilist. See the latest:

Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and Millan, https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDWCI-3

So people only claim to be incompatibilists when they confuse determinism with fatalism. Regardless, they tended to agree strongly with Compatibilist moral reasoning.

[cthalupa]

>So people only claim to be incompatibilists when they confuse determinism with fatalism. Regardless, they tended to agree strongly with Compatibilist moral reasoning.

I pretty strongly disagree with this statement. I am not a compatibilist, but I am fully aware of the differences between fatalism and determinism. If I believed in fatalism then I would believe that If am fated to recover or die from an illness, it would happen regardless of whatever actions I take, etc. With determinism I believe the outcome from whatever illness I receive will depend on the illness, the actions taken, my overall health, etc. etc. etc., all the way back through the causal chain at the start of the universe.

I believe everything adheres to causality. Compatabilists and I would both agree that we cannot determine our motivations, but then we would disagree if there is "free will" in the choice we make based on those motivations. My brain is a physical entity, ruled by the laws of physics. Every decision I make is ruled by those laws, because my brain cannot work in any other way. If we had perfect knowledge of how the brain works (and I believe this is possible), you can boil down the thought process of "I have a memory of stubbing my toe and it hurt, so I will make the conscious effort to avoid stubbing my toe" to the composite physics that result in said thought process. Given all of the same inputs, the same outputs will come in to play.

This somewhat ignores the randomness of the quantum world, but I don't think it particularly effects the outcome - if time could be rewound to the start of the universe, and the play button pushed, quantum effects would likely mean that we do not end up with the same universe we have today, but I don't see how having randomness fundamentally would mean that I as a human being have any increase in my ability to come to a decision. The inputs would be different, if I were to exist at all, but I would still be bound by the same laws of physics that determine how my brain functions.

Compatabilitists and I sharing similar ideas about moral reasoning doesn't change that. My "moral reasoning" is that things like the laws we create are still all based on causality, and that the actions people take are in turn causally related to the inputs we give them, such as the laws. Changing this inputs results in different outputs when considering things like potential futures, which are then inputs into the decision making process, etc.

But I also believe that it doesn't really matter, as far as day to day life goes. At current, humans lack the ability to perceive life in such a way that we can figure out how any of that shit actually works. I can behave and think in a way that is similar enough to how free will would work that it doesn't matter. To change this, we would need perfect knowledge of how basically everything works, have the ability to measure every necessary input in the system, and calculate the outcomes. If we are ever able to reach that point, I'm pretty sure it'll be so far into the future it's nothing worth worrying myself about.

[codeulike]

To change this, we would need perfect knowledge of how basically everything works, have the ability to measure every necessary input in the system, and calculate the outcomes. If we are ever able to reach that point, I'm pretty sure it'll be so far into the future it's nothing worth worrying myself about.

Its pretty easy to argue that this is impossible. To exploit determinism to 'predict the future' you'd have to simulate a large chunk of reality at the sub-atomic level. Arguably, you might have to simulate the whole universe. But lets just say you were trying to simulate our planet - you would need a computer running a model of the world at the sub-atomic level and somehow running it faster than the world itself unfolds. I'm 100% sure that would be impossible. Also, there's the whole 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' for your simulation (see chaos theory etc).

So you can think of the universe as a computer that is calculating its own future in real time. There is no way to 'get ahead' of the univere's own unfolding. As such the fact that it might be deterministic becomes irrelevant because there is no way to exploit that determinism. Simply put: It may be deterministic but its fundamentally unpredictable.

[cthalupa]

>Its pretty easy to argue that this is impossible.

Yep! It is very likely that this is impossible.

>you would need a computer running a model of the world at the sub-atomic level and somehow running it faster than the world itself unfolds. I'm 100% sure that would be impossible.

I'm not 100% sure.

The universe? Sure. We know that's impossible because of our understanding of physics - we cannot store the amount of information in the universe in anything smaller than the universe, much less compute on that information. Every single state we compute would again require the entirety of the universe to be stored, plus any transitional states in between. But I can't say with 100% certainty we'll never be able to compute everything necessary to predict how humans behave.

It might be, at some point in the future.

But my point was less about the theoretical possibility of this and more of how the fact that it currently is not, and is unlikely to be so at any point that is particularly relevant.

[codeulike]

Chaos theory is what seals the deal on this one.

[seekingcharlie]

This is called Laplace's Demon. It has been disproven by chaos theory.

[cthalupa]

>This is called Laplace's Demon.

Pretty close!

Laplace's Demon also talks about seeing the past - which my hypothetical does not. Nor am I concerned with calculating the entire universe, only the portions that would effect human cognition - just that which will be observable. Much of the universe is beyond our light cone, and unless we are in the center of the universe, almost certainly the vast majority is, and none of that needs to be calculated. Severely restricts the requirements vs. Laplace's demon.

>It has been disproven by chaos theory.

Not quite! Chaos theory relies on imperfect information. It does nothing to disprove Laplace's Demon, which involves perfect information. For chaos theory to be applicable, there has to be minor variations between the initial conditions. Chaos theory is not a theory that we cannot predict things because they are unpredictable, it is a theory that says that minor variations at the onset can result in huge differences in the eventual outcome. These problems only exist if you do not have perfect information.

Thermodynamic irreversibility disproves Laplace's Demon's seeing into the past portion. The Copenhagan interpretation of quantum mechanics also puts a nail in the Demon.

Things get interesting if we are ever able to create a 300 qubit quantum computer - at this point, you can perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the known universe. Is that granular enough to accurately determine human behavior?

The whole computer thing is more an aside than anything, though - just providing a hypothetical in which case free will not existing would actually have practical application on how humans live. Without it, I can't think of any reason why we should behave in any other way than we do, regardless of the underlying truth.

[codeulike]

Oh and also your simulation would most likely be part of the region you were trying to simulate, meaning you'd have to simulate your simulation as well. Doubly impossible

[naasking]

You've written a lot of text, most of which I might agree with, but you haven't demonstrated why any of it precludes the existence of free will.

Compatibilism is specifically the position that free will is compatible with deterministic agents. Merely stating you disagree that this qualifies as free will isn't particularly compelling. Compatibilism makes sense of our moral language, we clearly have the free will described by Compatibilism, and it's strongly predictive of our moral reasoning as the paper I linked shows.

That seems to describe what most people mean when they use the term "free will" quite well, just like "day job" describes quite well what I do every weekday from 9AM to 5PM.

[cthalupa]

>but you haven't demonstrated why any of it precludes the existence of free will.

Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now.

Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism, but from my point of view, it doesn't really matter what philosophers think. It's a matter of what the science says.

I don't see any real incompatibilities with moral reasoning between a universe where there is no free will and one where it is compatible with determinism, so saying that compatbilist moral reasoning is predictive of how we generally behave is not an argument for free will.

[naasking]

> I don't see any real incompatibilities with moral reasoning between a universe where there is no free will and one where it is compatible with determinism, so saying that compatbilist moral reasoning is predictive of how we generally behave is not an argument for free will.

Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent definition/non-empty set.

Compatibilism entails that any universe featuring intelligent agents acting on reasons and capable of understanding and learning from their actions will have free will. So basically, you're claiming that a universe that features such intelligent agents is indistinguishable from a universe that has no such intelligent agents.

> Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now.

I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply not relevant to this sort of question. What populations are you comparing here exactly?

Secondly, Compatibilism describes exactly what humans do because it's compatible with both deterministic and indeterministic worlds (see point above re:universes with Compatibilism). Compatibilist free will clearly exists in our universe virtually by definition, ie. we are clearly intelligent agents acting on reasons and capable of understanding and learning from our choices.

> Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism

Because most people don't have the requisite knowledge to evaluate possibilities that require profound domain knowledge. Would you be similarly derisive if I referenced the medical consensus when wading through a health debate?

[cthalupa]

>Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent definition/non-empty set.

It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct. There's no evidence that this is the case.

>I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply not relevant to this sort of question. What populations are you comparing here exactly?

What? The null hypothesis is 100% relevant to this sort of question. The scientific null assumption is that something doesn't exist. If you are claiming it does, you're the one that needs to prove it.

>Because most people don't have the requisite knowledge to evaluate possibilities that require profound domain knowledge. Would you be similarly derisive if I referenced the medical consensus when wading through a health debate?

Philosophers do not have profound domain knowledge in determining how the universe actually works. Physicists do. The medical consensus question makes no sense because that is a false equivalency.

[coldtea]

>so the null hypothesis still holds true

And who said the existence of free-will is the null hypothesis?

[cthalupa]

>And who said the existence of free-will is the null hypothesis?

How could it not be? You don't assume that literally everything is true without evidence of its existence.

Otherwise there is an infinite amount of an infinite variety of things existing in my room right now that I can't observe.

[fsloth]

I take the computational approach. Even if a system was computable in a finite time, if that time is too long, then effectively for all practical purposes the system is computationally intractable.

I find even the idea that we could one day compute the human brain completely preposterous. We can't even compute water flowing in a pipe today (I'm saying this as an effective non-expert who has dabbled a bit in computational physics).

So, if the philosophical basis is that "if we can deterministically compute something, it's deterministic" then human cognition at the moment is most indeterminate.

Free will or no free will, we really can't know the difference. So it's best to behave like you have a free will, and own your own actions as far as you can.

This is a slight modification to Pascal's gamble :)

[cthalupa]

Sorry, I think I must have written this in such a way that some people are mistaking my point. I'll try to clarify. :)

>So, if the philosophical basis is that "if we can deterministically compute something, it's deterministic" then human cognition at the moment is most indeterminate.

My belief, based on my understanding of physics, is that human cognition is deterministic, regardless of whether or not we can compute it.

But I do largely agree with your broader point that whether or not we have free will should have little impact on the inputs in our system. Even if I believe that everything is deterministic and we have no free will, I can't use that information in any practical way, and human cognition (or perhaps more accurately modern Westerner cognition) is slanted towards believing in something resembling what we call free will. No reason to worry about it for anything beyond philosophical discussions. I brought up the computation as a hypothetical point at which acting differently would matter.

[naasking]

> So, if the philosophical basis is that "if we can deterministically compute something, it's deterministic" then human cognition at the moment is most indeterminate.

I think computational complexity is important, but I also think it's important not to conflate "unpredictable" with "indeterminate", even if they are behaviourally indistinguishable.

> Free will or no free will, we really can't know the difference. So it's best to behave like you have a free will, and own your own actions as far as you can.

Dennett calls this the "intentional stance", ie. that any system of sufficient complexity should be treated as if it were acting with intent.

[davemp]

> Not only that, but randomness and determinism are equally against the (casual) idea of free will.

I'm not sure that I'd agree. Maybe the layman doesn't think about how to reconcile determinism with their concept of free will, but it is possible. Talking about free will without a working definition is hard.

If free will is: "You are free to make any choices presented to you."

Then it becomes simple to argue that you are in fact making these choices regardless of whether what makes up you is pre-determined. The same you would of course make the same choices, but then it is still you making them. The outcomes and opportunity of the choices is irrelevant.

[lordlimecat]

I'd define free will as used by the average person to mean the ability to make decisions that are based at least in part on something other than your makeup and environment.

[davemp]

I'll go poll the world and get back to you to see if you align ;)

[naasking]

Already been done. They do not: https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDWCI-3

[coldtea]

Or so says a paper. Assuming no methodological errors and replication, in which Psychology (this being posted in "Philosophical Psychology" is a very bad culprit, and stats/polls even more so).

[naasking]

Let's be fair, it's more than one paper. That's just the latest in a whole series of papers empirically testing lay people's intuitions on this question (see the citations).

[coldtea]

>Then it becomes simple to argue that you are in fact making these choices regardless of whether what makes up you is pre-determined. The same you would of course make the same choices, but then it is still you making them. The outcomes and opportunity of the choices is irrelevant.

I made the same argument in my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18607762

[jwally]

Why wouldn’t a soul be subject to the same cause / effect nature of the universe?

Even if the universe was run by Greek gods, it would still follow this chain of causality or be completely random. It seems like this applies to any thing you can ask “why?” of.

Interestingly enough you run into a paradox because the chain of causality had to begin some where...which begs the question “why did time begin? What triggered it?”

[ravenstine]

The problem with looking at randomness as evidence of free will is that randomness has a nature in and of itself. True randomness is predictably unpredictable, therefore meaning that it's highly constrained and not really lending itself to free will anymore than nonrandom mechanisms.

[ozy]

In either scenario, there can be knowledge about the future, which, paradoxically, might cause that future never to materialize.

[lordlimecat]

In such a situation it was not knowledge of the future, but something else.

There's no paradox, just a wrong assumption.