Diax's Rake and Free Will
Jun. 18th, 2012 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackDiax's Rake
Diax's Rake says "Don't believe something simply because you want it to be true". It's from Anathem -- I'm not sure if there's a real-world name?
It sounds obvious, but in fact I keep coming across it in contexts where I hadn't realised "believing in something because I wanted to" was what people were doing.
For instance, the most common argument that there's an absolute standard of morality seems to be "But if we didn't, it would be really terrible. Blah blah blah Hitler." But that seems to be an argument for why it's not desirable to live in that world, but it offers no reason other than sheer optimism to think that we do live in that world.
But another case seems to be free will. Why do people think we have free will. It seems like the most common argument is "But if we didn't, it would be terrible! Our lives would be pointless, and we wouldn't be able to philosophically justify prison sentences." But again, that seems to be "we WANT to have free will", not "here's a reason to think it's LIKELY we have free will".
Free Will
However, that's somewhat misleading. I feel like at some point society started toying with the idea that "have free will" or "not have free will" made no seriously falsifiable assertions, even in principle.
At which point, some people said "Look, our future actions are basically predetermined by the physics of our minds. 'free will' is basically a meaningless concept."
And other said, "No, wait. Look at what we associate with 'free will': rights, responsibilities, choices, law, etc, etc. We do have all that, we don't care if it's predetermined or not. I think 'not having free will' is basically a meaningless concept."
And the thing is, THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT. "free will" being meaningless and "not having free will" being meaningless are exactly the same statement, they just SOUND like they're opposed. They're somewhat opposed: they agree how the world works, but disagree whether "free will" is an appropriate description to use to describe it.
And arguing about "should we use this word or not" is almost always pointless, with people regressing to assuming that they're still arguing for the concept they used to assocaite with the word, without recognising that the other people don't disagree, they're just doing the same thing.
Many people who know more about philosophy than me seem to be self-defining as compatibilists (the idea that free will and determinism aren't contradictory?) If someone says they're compatibilist, I generally find I completely agree with how they say the universe works. But I don't understand the assertion that free will exists. Is there a basis for that? It's not just pandering to people who have a really intense intuition that free will is a well-defined concept that exists, at the expense of alienating people who at some point because convinced it doesn't?
Diax's Rake says "Don't believe something simply because you want it to be true". It's from Anathem -- I'm not sure if there's a real-world name?
It sounds obvious, but in fact I keep coming across it in contexts where I hadn't realised "believing in something because I wanted to" was what people were doing.
For instance, the most common argument that there's an absolute standard of morality seems to be "But if we didn't, it would be really terrible. Blah blah blah Hitler." But that seems to be an argument for why it's not desirable to live in that world, but it offers no reason other than sheer optimism to think that we do live in that world.
But another case seems to be free will. Why do people think we have free will. It seems like the most common argument is "But if we didn't, it would be terrible! Our lives would be pointless, and we wouldn't be able to philosophically justify prison sentences." But again, that seems to be "we WANT to have free will", not "here's a reason to think it's LIKELY we have free will".
Free Will
However, that's somewhat misleading. I feel like at some point society started toying with the idea that "have free will" or "not have free will" made no seriously falsifiable assertions, even in principle.
At which point, some people said "Look, our future actions are basically predetermined by the physics of our minds. 'free will' is basically a meaningless concept."
And other said, "No, wait. Look at what we associate with 'free will': rights, responsibilities, choices, law, etc, etc. We do have all that, we don't care if it's predetermined or not. I think 'not having free will' is basically a meaningless concept."
And the thing is, THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT. "free will" being meaningless and "not having free will" being meaningless are exactly the same statement, they just SOUND like they're opposed. They're somewhat opposed: they agree how the world works, but disagree whether "free will" is an appropriate description to use to describe it.
And arguing about "should we use this word or not" is almost always pointless, with people regressing to assuming that they're still arguing for the concept they used to assocaite with the word, without recognising that the other people don't disagree, they're just doing the same thing.
Many people who know more about philosophy than me seem to be self-defining as compatibilists (the idea that free will and determinism aren't contradictory?) If someone says they're compatibilist, I generally find I completely agree with how they say the universe works. But I don't understand the assertion that free will exists. Is there a basis for that? It's not just pandering to people who have a really intense intuition that free will is a well-defined concept that exists, at the expense of alienating people who at some point because convinced it doesn't?
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 12:35 pm (UTC)Firstly, symmetry. Symmetry is fundamental to the physical universe, right down to time being differentiated from space by the past-future asymmetry.
I perceive an asymmetry between my consciousness and the world of my senses. This I regard as my sole metaphysical axiom: I feel myself to be something that has feelings, which pretty much defines consciousness as it's normally understood — yet I couldn't prove to you that I'm conscious.
Having accepted my consciousness axiom, symmetry strongly suggests that other people are conscious, too.
I see determinism as a concept pertaining to physics, and free will as a concept pertaining to metaphysics. I am conscious of having free will, yet we know what will happen when a weight is dangled from a spring, and the neurones in my brain are as susceptible to determinism and/or uncertainty principles and chaos theory as anything else.
So then there's AI. Supposing I were placed in front of a terminal with two chat windows, one connected to you and one connected to a supercomputer that was perfectly emulating your mind. Is the emulator conscious? How could science ever tell us? Is there any moral difference between them? I can't tell.
It boils down to why we accept the Golden Rule, and I'd say it's a combination of instinctive empathy, conditioned social contract and rational symmetry arguments about interpersonal interactions. People without the empathy are psychopaths, people without the social contract are sociopaths and people without the rational symmetry are illogical or short-sighted. Many people would add that people who claim a metaphysical justification for disobeying the Golden Rule are evil.
Opinions seem to differ on which aspect or aspects of that consideration constitute "morality".
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 01:16 pm (UTC)I think "I am conscious of having free will" is the bit I'm not sure of. People experience feeling something that we describe as "free will". But I'm not sure we've specified that precisely enough for it to be falsifiable, or whether it's more like "feeling we have free will" is a feeling we may or may not get, but uncorrelated with any actual phenomenon called "free will", or something else entirely.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 02:05 pm (UTC)And then it's only a good working assumption on my part that your "free will" is anything at all like mine. Or even that it exists. Possibly I'm talking to the emulator.
But in a wishy-washy nebulous casual sense, if you fan a deck and ask me to "pick a card, any card", I can do so without consciously feeling any compulsion or constraint.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 01:35 pm (UTC)I think that's a good example. For what it's worth, how you describe that accords with how I feel, and I tentatively suspect that we do feel the same, although I agree we can't ever be sure of it. (And in some cases, things people assumed people must experience similarly, they apparently actually didn't.)
And I agree that "not feeling constrained" is something like what I mean if I do talk about free will.
So if free will means "some pressures on my actions feel like constraints, but some don't", then I agree we it's fairly well defined and we have it.
But I feel people want to make the leap to assuming that that feeling corresponds to an actual property of things that affect our actions, and divide those, including:
* conscious effects
* wanted unconscious effects
* unwanted unconscious effects
* external threats and blandishments
* external direct effects, ie. electrodes stimulating certain parts of the brain
into categories of "actually unconstrained" and "actually constrained" of which our feeling of being constrained/unconstrained are an imperfect reflection of.
And I think that's natural, but wrong. I think the whole story is that there's a variety of effects on what we do, and some of them feel like us and some don't, and we normally choose to consider some of them to "be" me and some not to be me, and call the ones that aren't me constraints. But I don't think there's any other difference than what I choose to call me, and I think that's purely a matter of defining the word, I don't think it has any truth-value.
Sorry, that's not quite complete, but I need to leave it. I'm not sure if that's what you're saying or not.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 04:44 pm (UTC)Hm. I like that description, and I agree there's a bunch of stuff which doesn't have a good definition yet, but we do have some sense what they mean (probably even a shared sense) even if it's hard to convey in words.
But I'm not sure free will is one of those. I feel like it used to be, until we realised that the mind was basically deterministic signals in neurons, but I'm not sure there's anything left.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 05:24 pm (UTC)Firstly, as mentioned passim, I personally treat "free will" as a wholly metaphysical concept, a manifestation of consciousness rather than of mind or brain. In that sense, I have free will.
Secondly, I feel that in mainstream philosophical thought that's always been the crux of free will, it's just that it often extends into (or at least informs) physical concepts of indeterminacy.
Thirdly, the definition of free will I use meshes well with metaphysical concepts of morality and culpability and places sharp focus on various questions surrounding tissue cultivation, cloning, genetic modification, animal intelligence, artificial intelligence, etc. Seeing the problem's not nearly as useful as seeing the solution, but it's at least a start.
I think I see why a lot of people are confused in this area, but I don't think I myself am.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 11:15 am (UTC)In a previous LJ discussion I used the following example of a subjective experience of free will, and the more I think about it, the more I think it's a good and illustrative one.
Scenario: your employer makes some demand of you that you're not very happy with. (Nothing morally wrong, just not very nice. Let's say, assigning you to spend months working on something rather more boring than what you thought you signed up for.) You grudgingly accept this demand, for whatever reason, but as you walk away you mutter (or think) to yourself "I don't have to put up with this sort of thing, you know, I could tell you to stuff your job."
That, it seems to me, is a quintessential 'experience of free will': a clear subjective awareness that your decision in some sense 'did not have' to go the way it did, but 'could have' gone another way.
But the interesting thing about it, to me, is that it's fairly clearly an experience of the compatibilist sense of free will. Because if I imagine myself in that situation and mentally mutter that sentence in more detail, I find it ends with "I could tell you to stuff your job if I felt strongly enough about it." That is, there's no implication that I might have made the same choice differently starting from the same mental state; I'm acknowledging that my choice was a function of my mental state, and what I'm saying is that in a different mental state I might have responded to the same situation by making a different choice. (And, in particular, that my employer should beware of putting me in this situation repeatedly, since my mental state might be less forgiving the next time.)
So all I'm saying, and feeling, with my 'experience of free will' in this example is that I'm not being externally coerced to the extent of being unable to act on that choice. (If I were forcibly enslaved rather than employed, I'd have muttered something very different under my breath.) And that's compatibilism!
If anyone has an example of what a subjective experience of free will might feel like that's not compatibilist in this way, I'd be interested to hear it.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 02:19 pm (UTC)I think there's examples of constraints on our behaviour that are examples of us "having free will" (whatever that means), such as yours, where we may choose to succumb, or not succumb, to some external threat.
And there are examples of constraints which DO seem to abbrogate our free will (whatever that means) such as involuntary responses that we THINK are for some rational reason, but are actually due to some subconscious drive we didn't realise was dictating the outcome.
The problem seems to come with internal drives that I think of as being me. Do I think of myself as something separate, dictated to by those processes? If so, I feel I'm constrained, even though I can't feel the constraint. Do I think of those as nothing other than me? In which case, only constraints external to that demarkation count as "constraints", and I feel I'm not constrainted. I think...
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 04:07 pm (UTC)Are you sure about that?
Time is different from space because of the minus sign in the space-time metric (d² = x² + y² + z² − t²). The past is different from the future for thermodynamic reasons (the universe has lower entropy in the past and higher entropy in the future).
It is not remotely clear to me that these two facts are connected.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 04:57 pm (UTC)