Free will and determinism

I finished "Causation Is Not Your Enemy." It's a good and clear paper about causes not necessitating events. Nothing particularly enlightening, since I'm not sure why anyone would think that events in the real world have only one cause. He did not address the question of whether an ensemble of causes can necessitate an event, though I think he would say no.

I reread the paper as its been some time. I think you are missing the point here. An ensemble of causes would grow until it's the entire prior state of reality or at least a good chunk of the local area.

If you take the entirety of the world picture into account then how could science & engineering proceed? Rather it's because we can identify a cause to produce the necessary effect that can reshape so much of the world to our desire.

Beyond that one has to explain how causes produce effects in some metaphysical picture, which in this case is dispositional powers. So because no cause is bound to produce an effect, this creates a space in the causal picture of conscious agents in the authors' naturalist framework.

I reread the paper as its been some time. I think you are missing the point here. An ensemble of causes would grow until it's the entire prior state of reality or at least a good chunk of the local area.

If you take the entirety of the world picture into account then how could science & engineering proceed? Rather it's because we can identify a cause to produce the necessary effect that can reshape so much of the world to our desire.

Beyond that one has to explain how causes produce effects in some metaphysical picture, which in this case is dispositional powers. So because no cause is bound to produce an effect, this creates a space in the causal picture of conscious agents in the authors' naturalist framework.

Yes, that is why I said that he would disagree that an ensemble of causes necessitates an event. And I'm entirely happy to agree with his disasgreement.

It creates a space, but why is whatever goes on in that space not subject to the same lack of necessitation? Why does it escape the problem of the ensemble growing until it's the entire prior state? And, as always, how might that space include some method of making a free choice?

He said that lack of necessitation cannot tell the whole story of free will. Indeed.

~~ Paul

P.S.: I heard back from Helen Steward. I'm hoping she'll go around with me one more time.

Well that particular paper is about how causes don't necessitate their effects, and that this dispositional causation allows for a space between hard necessity and pure chance. It's not a paper with its own proof/explanation of free will.

That's why it's not the last paper.

(I'm sure they've gone into free will more deeply in their books, but I've not read them save for sections of their Introduction to Causation one.)


Well they are naturalists trying to solve a problem of their own making in trying to fit free will into something close to Materialism. But as the above Stapp and Dyson (two physicists) quotes show, it's more reasonable to have consciousness in place of Pure Chance.

I guess if one needs a formal philosophical argument, and this requires the acceptance of Pure Chance, one may need to write more words than Stapp or Dyson on the matter to satisfy their peers.

I'll move on to the last paper.

~~ Paul

I'll move on to the last paper.

~~ Paul

I'd read the last paper before you reply to Steward, as it references her work. I mean you don't have to, but you'll get a more detailed answer from her if you mention the paper and its contents...or at least that is my guess.

Yes, that is why I said that he would disagree that an ensemble of causes necessitates an event. And I'm entirely happy to agree with his disasgreement.

It creates a space, but why is whatever goes on in that space not subject to the same lack of necessitation? Why does it escape the problem of the ensemble growing until it's the entire prior state? And, as always, how might that space include some method of making a free choice?

Well there is always a lack of necessitating the effect, but ultimately the naturalistic causal "powers" resolve to a manifestation. Recall that in this picture these powers are what produce effects from causes, there is nothing beyond them.

Other way to look at it is in this view there are conditions that are necessary but not sufficient to manifest the cause. The causal power of the brick, perhaps combined with the fragility of the glass pane, is what makes glass shatter so long as no other causal powers/dispositions negate that power/disposition . You have to have a cause that can be isolated as *the* cause, otherwise there is no purpose to science...and in fact it wouldn't be clear there's any real causation. The world could be like the running of frames in an animation where there is no actual causal relations going on just the illusion of them.

Admittedly I don't think you can really grasp cause-effect relations within the confines of naturalism, but the idea here is that the agent is the causal source even while other influences can dispose them toward a particular choice. And, as is important to the naturalist, the conscious agent is not fundamentally special in this regard because powers - in this strict philosophical sense - are spread throughout the whole of Nature.

(I mean the attempts by naturalism to rescue the humanism they've negated...to me this seems like running carelessly into a labyrinth then trying to find your way out of it, but my purpose in posting those papers is that even in the error of naturalism one can give a description of free will.)

He said that lack of necessitation cannot tell the whole story of free will. Indeed.

Sure, since you have to include a Mind in there, which if free will (accidental pun heh) have to be indeterministic in some irreducible fashion...which could seem like special pleading on behalf of conscious agents in a reality otherwise governed by the supposed Chance/Necessity dichotomy. But IMO we already have something comparable to free will in the physical world, namely the indeterministic but not Pure Chance movement at the quantum level. I say this b/c Pure Chance is just so illogical and its implications so bizarre (since I don't think you can have isolated bits of Pure Chance even if QM wasn't describing the lowest reducible level of science) that we should reject it outright.

In which case we can see that an electron on a baseball may not have a perfectly predictable position, but its probability distribution will follow the arc of a curve ball. So it isn't fully determined but it has relation to the world, and thus it doesn't seem to be beyond Nature if a free agent is influenced but not ultimately motivated by emotions, reasons, etc.

I'm sure the naturalist objection will be to say it's not a legitimate move to assume the quantum stochastic phenomena is comparable to human conscious agents...but aren't they using physics the other way? After all how can reasons, emotions, and other qualitative mental phenomena push a deterministic decision onto an agent unless we picture them as having "force" vectors that are summed up toward one decision?

And why would someone assume that the free agent, in being influenced but not bound by these mental phenomena, is then subject to Pure Chance unless they see a violation of the causal order? It seems their picture of the mind is that the sum of mental "force" vectors should push toward one decision (or mental paralysis) and then there is a swerve of Pure Chance accompanied by the illusory feeling of making a decision. So then the freedom is an aberration of the expected orderly, deterministic reality.

Yet unlike my comparison between the free agent and quantum indeterminism, we can see this is immediately wrong on at least two counts. The first being how can qualitative phenomena have quantitative "force" vectors? The second being, based on our current best science, is that this deterministic picture they draw from the world and project onto the mind is illusory:

So if Nature is not deterministic, how come that our deterministic theories (like Newton’s laws of motion, or any generalization thereof) actually work so well in practice? If there is no determinism, how come we do not see complete chaos all around us? The answer is rather simple — in some cases chaos theory takes a long time to kick in. More precisely, if we consider a small enough physical system, which interacts with its surroundings weakly enough, and it is located in a small enough region of space, and we are trying to predict its behavior for a short enough future, and our measurements of the state of the system are crude enough to begin with — we might just get lucky, so that the the error bars of our system’s state do not increase drastically before we stop looking. In other words, the apparent determinism of everyday world is an approximation, a mirage, an illusion that can last for a while, before the effects of chaos theory become too big to ignore. There is a parameter in chaos theory that quantifies how much time can pass before the errors of the initial state become substantially large — it is called the Lyapunov time [10]. The pertinent Wikipedia article has a nice table of various Lyapunov times for various physical systems, which should further illuminate the reason why we consider some of our everyday physics as “deterministic.”

So beyond the fact that the physicalist wedded to the Chance/Necessity dichotomy has to believe our most beautiful literature and most elegant math proofs are born of Pure Chance...the supposed determinism is a mental projection onto the world followed by the taking of that false picture of reality and projecting it back onto the behavior of Mind itself. This error arguably goes far back, as noted by Freya Matthews:

I would like to spell out in a little more detail how the conundrum of causation at the heart of science is a consequence, at a subtler level, of the mirroring maneuver at the base of theory. In this mirroring maneuver the mind, as we have seen, projects ‘the world’ as an idealized totality onto a kind of mental screen and in the process differentiates itself, in just the kind of way Kant detailed in his analysis of the transcendental unity of apperception, into a knowing subject, on the one hand, and the world as object or known, on the other. Since this object is, despite its world-content, mentally a passive construct of the subject, it will be understood by the subject to be, in an ultimate sense, inert. In the explanatory scenario of theoria, self-activity, and hence motive power, will always be intuited to lie outside the object. The object by definition, qua object, lacks the power of self-creation or self-animation. It will for this reason seem intuitively natural, from the perspective of the subject, to posit an external source of motive power for the world, a Prime Mover or, as secular substitute for such a Mover in science, a principle of causation, which is, as we have seen, a principle of coercion or force. The laws of nature are held in place by the arbitrary but coercive force of causation

All to say the free conscious agent, in its exercise of a will that is neither determined nor random, is more in line with what our current best science tells us the world is like.

There's obviously more that can be said about free will, why I've posted a variety of perspectives on the subject over the years, but I want to reiterate here that there is no obvious problem for free will. I suspect it feels like there should be some problem because determinism seems to be the default implication of cause/effect relations...however as noted by Matthews above this seems more an issue of erroneous thinking than any hard argument.

Instead it seems to me that Materialism has a far bigger "how" problem to solve, which is to get Something (Mind) from Nothing (a universe the Physicalist tells us has no mental character at its fundamental level). That naturalists don't take their bull dog approach to free will and apply it to the Hard Problem, insisting that a lack of "how" means we should assume Materialism is impossible...well that's pretty telling in and of itself...

P.S.: I heard back from Helen Steward. I'm hoping she'll go around with me one more time.

Nice! (as noted in previous post, read the last paper in my list before you email her as it gets into some critique of her 2012 book)

A lot of pages about the free will side, but wanted to consider the determinism side of the thread title. Going to gather up a few things that have been posted before either here or back on Skeptiko forums.

As noted in my above post, there doesn't seem to be any determinism in the physical world according to our best science if one insists on reductionism. This is because everything reduces to the quantum realm which as far as we know right now is indeterministic. Regarding the possibility that one day a deterministic solution will be found, I think Scott Aaaronson gives us good reason to doubt this:

To say I’m not a fan of superdeterminism would be a super-understatement. And yet, nothing I’ve written previously on this blog—about superdeterminism’s gobsmacking lack of explanatory power, or about how trivial it would be to cook up a superdeterministic “mechanism” for, e.g., faster-than-light signaling—none of it seems to have made a dent. It’s all come across as obvious to the majority of physicists and computer scientists who think as I do, and it’s all fallen on deaf ears to superdeterminism’s fans.
So in desperation, let me now try another tack: going meta. It strikes me that no one who saw quantum mechanics as a profound clue about the nature of reality could ever, in a trillion years, think that superdeterminism looked like a promising route forward given our current knowledge. The only way you could think that, it seems to me, is if you saw quantum mechanics as an anti-clue: a red herring, actively misleading us about how the world really is. To be a superdeterminist is to say:

OK, fine, there’s the Bell experiment, which looks like Nature screaming the reality of ‘genuine indeterminism, as predicted by QM,’ louder than you might’ve thought it even logically possible for that to be screamed. But don’t listen to Nature, listen to us! If you just drop what you thought were foundational assumptions of science, we can explain this away! Not explain it, of course, but explain it away. What more could you ask from us?

Here’s my challenge to the superdeterminists: when, in 400 years from Galileo to the present, has such a gambit ever worked? Maxwell’s equations were a clue to special relativity. The Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations of classical mechanics were clues to quantum mechanics. When has a great theory in physics ever been grudgingly accommodated by its successor theory in a horrifyingly ad-hoc way, rather than gloriously explained and derived?

Another way to look at this is why a determinist holds to their position. Usually the argument is something about how everything that happens needs a reason, and the sum total of reasons has to lead to one outcome. But once you start asking "why" and looking for reasons you have to ask why any causal relation holds...this, AFAICTell, leads one to some kind brute facts about how Nature works and thus the supposed Laws of Nature. But this concept, I believe, suffers from a logical deficit that leads either to the nonexistence of such Laws or to the existence of God sustaining the Laws...in which case we are talking about Mental Causation and not Determinism in a strict, naturalist sense. To give some idea why I think this, here are few papers:

No God, No Laws

Nancy Cartwright

Introduction. My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God. It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however. I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God. Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God. That depends of course on what we mean by ‘laws of Nature’. Whatever else we mean, I take it that this much is essential: Laws of Nature are prescriptive, not merely descriptive, and – even stronger – they are supposed to be responsible for what occurs in Nature. Since at least the Scientific Revolution they are also supposed to be visible in the Book
of Nature, not writ only on stone tablets nor in the thought of God.

My claim here is that neither of these features can be made sense of without God; this despite the fact that they are generally thought to provide some autonomy of the world order from God. I will focus on recent accounts of laws of Nature and describe how the dominant ones fail without the efforts of God; I shall also outline one alternative that tries to make sense of the order of Nature and the successes of modern science without laws of Nature and without immediate reliance on God.

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Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen?

Stephen Talbott

The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.

If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter...

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Magic versus metaphysics

E. Feser

Indeed, if any view is plausibly accused of being “magical” in the sense in question, it is atheism itself.  The reason is that it is very likely that an atheist has to hold that the operation of at least the fundamental laws that govern the universe is an “unintelligible brute fact”; as I have noted before, that was precisely the view taken by J. L. Mackie and Bertrand Russell.  The reason an atheist (arguably) has to hold this is that to allow that the world is not ultimately a brute fact -- that it is intelligible through and through -- seems to entail that there is some level of reality which is radically non-contingent or necessary in an absolute sense.  And that would in turn be to allow (so the traditional metaphysician will argue) that there is something which, as the Thomist would put it, is pure actuality and ipsum esse subsistens or “subsistent being itself” -- and thus something which has the divine attributes which inexorably flow from being pure actuality and ipsum esse subsistens.  Hence it would be to give up atheism.

But to operate in a way that is ultimately unintelligible in principle -- as the atheist arguably has to say the fundamental laws of nature do, insofar as he has to say that they are “just there” as a brute fact, something that could have been otherwise but happens to exist anyway, with no explanation -- just is to be “magical” in the objectionable sense.

Admittedly I'm not convinced there is such a thing as "pure actuality" beyond descriptive abstraction, but I think the general argument that [naturalist/atheist conceptions of the] Laws of Nature are "magic" in the pejorative sense holds.

A lot of pages about the free will side, but wanted to consider the determinism side of the thread title. Going to gather up a few things that have been posted before either here or back on Skeptiko forums...

A few more:

From Freya Mathews:

... one definitive question that can never be answered by physics, ‘Why does the world cohere?’, has an almost self-evident answer from the strategic perspective. Or rather, it has no more need of an answer than does the question, ‘Why does the field of my own subjectivity cohere?’. The question arises for physics because when the world is conceptualized in physicalist terms, as a manifold of logically discrete physical elements only externally and contingently stuck together by causal laws, then it is a mystery why these elements remain stuck together—why the ‘laws’ continue to hold. For, as we have seen, nothing can be shown to anchor those laws, ontologically speaking. Causality has been unmasked as illusory, at least insofar as it is supposed to confer natural necessity. There is therefore no reason why the universe should not simply fall apart at any moment. On the other hand, when we consider the nature of subjectivity, it is immediately self-evident that it is a field-like phenomenon. I can no more conceive of subjectivity as free-floating, un-referenced to a subject, or of a given subject’s subjectivity as somehow scattered or existing in discrete fragments, than I can conceive of thoughts and feelings having hard edges or clearly defined boundaries. The whole phenomenology of subjectivity is of a unified though unbounded field-phenomenon with shifting patterns of  activation permeated with patterns of meaning that take their shape and coloration from the field as a whole. No segregation of thought or feeling can occur in this field, and every instance of experience is shaped by the larger meanings that inform the field and whose continual unfolding may drive change in the field as a whole. Cohering then is integral to subjectivity. If reality is experienced as cohering in similar fashion, this is good prima facie evidence, from the viewpoint of the strategist, unencumbered as he is with dualist presuppositions, that he and reality share a common nature. Reality coheres because it is, like him, inwardly constituted as a subject, as a field of subjectivity.

And from Vincent Torley's (adapted from Feser who adapted from Aquinas) Proof of God:

The argument proceeds from the premise that the laws of Nature are not merely descriptive (as many philosophers have claimed) but are also prescriptive: they not only tell us how things in the world actually behave, but how they ought to behave. In other words, the laws of Nature are statements expressing rules, which either define the various kinds of natural objects, or (in the case of general laws such as Newton's law of universal gravitation, the law of the conservation of momentum, the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of quantum mechanics) which apply to all natural objects. If the laws of Nature weren't rules of some sort, then we'd have no particular reason to trust that they will hold in the future (i.e. that things will behave in the same way tomorrow as they do today). Scientists would have absolutely no assurance that things will behave predictably, when performing their laboratory experiments. Since scientists do in fact rely on the laws of Nature holding as they go about their everyday work, they must implicitly suppose these laws to function as rules, constraining the future behavior of natural objects.

I expect some skeptical readers will be spluttering in protest at this point. For what I'm claiming is that without rules, there's absolutely no rational warrant for induction - e.g. for the belief that the Sun will rise tomorrow at the forecast time. Repeated observations of natural objects behaving regularly in the past provide us with no warrant for believing that they will do so in the future, and to think otherwise is to commit the reverse gambler's fallacy ("I've tossed four heads in a row with this coin, so the next coin toss will come up heads as well!") Regarding the regular behavior of objects: there are infinitely many ways in which objects can go "off the rails" and fail to behave in their usual fashion, but there's only one way in which they can stay "on the rails"; hence the expectation that natural objects will continue to behave regularly in the future is tantamount to a gigantic article of faith. Nor can appeals to simplicity provide belief in induction with a rational warrant, as we have no grounds for believing that the simplest explanation of past phenomena will be the explanation that hold true in the future. There are countless other, more complicated explanations that can account for the past regularities we have observed, but which also posit a violation of those regularities at some point in the future. To say that we should ignore these explanations (which are fully compatible with our observations to date) because they lack the virtue of simplicity is to project our desires onto the cosmos. We might like simple explanations; but that doesn't make them any more likely to be true. We are forced to conclude, then, that unless the tendencies we observe in Nature are rules which constrain and define the very nature of things, there is no good reason for scientists - or ordinary laypeople, for that matter - to believe that they will continue to hold in the future.

The view that laws of Nature are rules is additionally supported by the fact that the laws of Nature are all capable of being given a rigorous mathematical formulation: they can be written down as mathematical equations. In other words, they are formal statements. But a mathematical equation, per se, is not a prescriptive rule; what makes it a rule is that it prescribes the behavior of something. Platonic abstractions are defined by their forms, but they do not follow rules; only real things do that. Things behaving in accordance with a rule must have a built-in tendency, under the appropriate circumstances, to generate the effect that the rule states that they should. This built-in tendency of things to produce specific effects under specific circumstances is what Aristotelian philosophers refer to as immanent finality. Thus the rules we see holding in the natural world embody two fundamental features: formality and finality. Both are needed, in order to adequately describe reality.