Diax's Rake and Free Will

[jack]

Diax'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?

Comments

[andrewducker]

[gerald_duck]

By my thinking as elaborated above, Dogbert is perpetrating a fallacious mixture of reasoning about the physical and metaphysical. While the laws of physics are waggling neurons that stimulate nerve cells to make my body take actions that are rationally attributed to me, my consciousness is making free choices for which it might later be blamed. There is no contradiction.

Fortunately, reconfiguring a constituent part of the universe, conditioning a rational system not to repeat an action and punishing a free-willed consciousness as a deterrent against blameworthy behaviour tend to be the same activity viewed at different levels of abstraction. It's only in fairly complex grey areas that discrepancies become apparent.

[andrewducker]

"my consciousness is making free choices for which it might later be blamed"

I have no idea what this means. Seriously. It means nothing to me. Can you explain in other words that might work better for me?

[gerald_duck]

To link back to a different part of what I said up there: 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.

Similarly, if you show me someone standing at the edge of a high cliff I can exercise free will in whether or not to give them a shove.

Suppose I do. In the realm of the physical I can decide that was an irrational thing for me to have done because it's disadvantageous to live in a world where more people are shoved off cliffs, because people will shun me for it, or whatever. Also, society has deemed it illegal.

But then there's the empathic argument that I wouldn't like it if someone did that to me, therefore what I did was "bad".

You can't prove to me that the person standing on the cliff edge is anything more than an automaton, that it's capable of liking or disliking. Similarly, if I see you push someone over a cliff edge, I can't know you were a conscious being exhibiting free will.

If a conscious being makes a free decision to push someone off a cliff, they're to blame for it. If an automaton pushes someone off a cliff, no such concept pertains. That, to me, is the difference, and the nature of blame.

[andrewducker]

"I can do so without consciously feeling any compulsion or constraint."

So by "My consciousness is making free choices for which it might later be blamed" you mean "I don't feel constrained".

That sounds more to do with feelings than with the existence of anything. If you want to talk about whether you _feel_ free, then that seems to me to be in a different class to whether you _are_ free.

"You can't prove to me that the person standing on the cliff edge is anything more than an automaton, that it's capable of liking or disliking."

You seem to be saying that automatons cannot like things. Are you saying that "liking" is connected to whether we actions are deterministic?

[gerald_duck]

No! I'm saying that the debate about determinism versus quantum indeterminacy and the debate about simplicity versus chaos and emergence are physical debates, whereas there is a conscious/unconscious dichotomy that is metaphysical and not susceptible to physical analysis.

A conscious entity can feel, can like, can choose, can be blamed. An unconscious entity, an automaton, cannot.

To try and link the issue of whether or not I have free will with the issue of whether or not the universe is deterministic is level confusion.

[andrewducker]

A conscious entity can feel, can like, can choose, can be blamed. An unconscious entity, an automaton, cannot.

Nope, still not getting it - what has feeling and liking got to do with free will?

[gerald_duck]

That they are aspects of consciousness.

And, therefore, that they are all metaphysical. I know I do them, but I also know I can't prove that to you.

The best I can say, I have already said — that symmetry arguments suggest to me a good working assumption is that other humans are similarly conscious. (That reasoning breaks down in a way that is problematic when considering non-humans.)

[andrewducker]

I don't believe that one has to be conscious of oneself to like things. One would have to be conscious to be aware that one liked things, of course.

And I don't see what consciousness has to do with free will, of course.

[jack]

ROFL. I'd forgotten that, yeah that seems to sum it up for me :)

[naath]

I don't have free will; I blame people for their actions even though they don't have any either because my blaming them is pre-determined.

I'm not sure I really see the problem there :-p