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 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.