Free will and determinism

If by arbitrary you mean Pure Chance, if this were true there wouldn't be any philosophers who believed in free will.

I guess this means the randomness/determined dichotomy is faith-based, and there is no actual argument you know for it?

The argument that I know for it as that no one can describe the third sort of thing that breaks the dichotomy. But, for the 20th time, I've long ago given up insisting that it is a dichotomy.

~~ Paul

Preferences, habits, emotions attractions or repulsions ~ all of these influence the decision that the perceiver / point-of-view / experiencer ultimately leans towards.

You want a "how" for something where we make decisions all the time without needing to ever be aware of the "how" or "why". It comes so naturally to us that it doesn't require any puzzlement over why this but not that. Else we'd be stuck in a loop of analysis paralysis.

Why do I want Vietnamese over, say, Thai? My mind veers towards Thai because... the ghost of Thai food plays on my tastebuds. Why? Welcome to the brick wall that stops progress on the "how" or "why". I don't know "why" or "how"! I just... do. And I don't feel the need to question it, because there's a silent intuitive understanding that I... know "why" and "how", but defies being able to be put into any form of words that may satisfy your... hunger for "hows" and "whys".


Just because you don't experience all of the steps, doesn't mean you don't make decisions.

Your subconscious does a lot of work for you, because your conscious mind cannot. You want to accomplish something, so your subconscious picks up on that and begins working on a solution in the background, unawares to you, seemingly.

Just because something is subconscious does not mean that you didn't ultimately make the decision or come up with the answer ~ it was your subconscious, which is you, that did it. Unless you don't perceive your subconscious as you.


You could go and buy some shrimp...? Or maybe that idea didn't immediately occur to you at the time? Why not? Who knows. For you, it just... didn't. Maybe you were subconsciously distracted by something else at the time. Something you can only ever look back at in retrospect.

We can make a long list of things that influence a decision. But that doesn't explain how they do it indeterministically.

I didn't say that I don't make decisions. I just pointed out that I don't experience all the details of making them. Whether subconscious decisions can be considered free is a point of contention, I believe.

~~ Paul

I am starting to wonder if this question is undecidable. Once you decide (without hard evidence) that the mind operates solely inside the brain and that the brain runs on purely materialistic lines, then you can't define what a decision is!

An IF statement is a high level statement chosen (decided by) by a programmer. It is translated into a set of bit encodings to suit the machine on which it runs, and it then operates in a completely automatic way - like clockwork.

From your point of view the programmer himself is not making any decisions, he is just letting his wetware run.

David

Indeed, it runs completely automatically. But it does make a decision when it executes the IF statement. It's a completely deterministic decision, but a decision nonetheless.

I see no reason why we can't distinguish deterministic from indeterministic decisions. And within indeterministic ones, between random decisions (that a computer might make with an RNG device) and this other sort of free decision that we are looking for. We can say an awful lot about the first two kinds of decisions. I'm asking for just a little bit about the indeterministic free decision.

I'm starting to read the list of papers that Sciborg posted. I'll see if I learn anything there.

~~ Paul

describe the third sort of thing that breaks the dichotomy.

Half-lives. Reflection of the photon. Etc....

Edit: Or to put it another way, that dichotomy is just a mental abstraction. As Whitehead would say, to assume that dichotomy is something in the actual world rather than, say, something that describes the limitations of mathematics, is a case of "misplaced concreteness".

Your subconscious does a lot of work for you, because your conscious mind cannot. You want to accomplish something, so your subconscious picks up on that and begins working on a solution in the background, unawares to you, seemingly.

Just because something is subconscious does not mean that you didn't ultimately make the decision or come up with the answer ~ it was your subconscious, which is you, that did it. Unless you don't perceive your subconscious as you.

Good stuff...This made me think of a few things. Firstly how we proponents should sometimes think of the subconscious as the larger part of our selves, though at times we may also want to consider negative influences. Even if there aren't evil spirits it may be helpful to think of negative aspects as "other" to help make us better people.

But there does seem to be a greater Self, like even when I do a math proof sometimes it feels as if the answer is bubbling up from a watery depth. As Attanasio would say:

"He was struck by the sky-wide realization that his soul was not in his body. Rather, his body was in the cosmic immensity of his soul."

Also some stuff from Nondualist Scott Roberts:

Divine and Local Simplicity, and the Question of Will

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) is a claim of classical theism (the theism of most all pre-modern theologians, from the Greek Fathers and Augustine to Maimonides and Aquinas). The claim is that the First Cause (what I call "fundamental reality") cannot be a composite, that it cannot have parts. For if it did, it would then be explainable by the joining of those parts, and so not be fundamental. I concur with this argument, and indeed see it as affirming nondualism, from which classical theism is only a step away. (That step is that classical theism needs to abandon the idea that God is unchanging for the idea that God is the tetralemmic polarity of permanence and change. But that is not our concern here.)

What this means is that local consciousness (like mine or yours) is just as "simple" as divine Consciousness. Or rather, it is ontologically simple, but made enormously complex by being local, or limited. Take the question of will. (Note: I consider the phrase "free will" to be redundant -- if it is not free it is not will. And while I'm at it, I consider the phrase "blind will" to be oxymoronic. Since it is Consciousness that is Will, there is no "unseen" act of will.) To will is to think, and to think is to will. Since we think, we obviously have will. But not so fast. Can we truly say that it is me that thinks? Given the large quantity of uncontrolled thinking we experience (what Buddhists call "monkey mind") it is not obvious that this is me thinking. On the other hand, there seems to be controlled thinking as well. If nothing else, there is the control exercised by being able to stop, at least momentarily, monkey mind. But there is more, with the clearest example being mathematical thinking.
Consider, first, that when God thinks, that which is being thought is being created. On the other hand, if I think of, say, a house, no house is created. But when I think of a Euclidean triangle, that thought is a Euclidean triangle. The following is from Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought (p. 15 -- internal quotes are Coleridge's words):

"Mathematical lines, points and surfaces are "acts of imagination that are one with the products of those acts." And this remains true of the figures constructed with them. A geometrician draws three meeting lines on a slate; but the 'triangle' which he then sees merely represents to him (and imperfectly) an ideal figure he has first had to produce by an act of thought or (it is practically the same thing) an act of imagination...

...[the] spirit in man (that is, the will) shows its own state in and by its acts alone; even as in geometrical reasoning the mind knows its constructive faculty in the act of constructing, and contemplates the act in the product (that is the mental figure or diagram) which is inseparable from the act and co-instantaneous."

In other words, when doing a mathematical exercise, we are, inseparably, thinking and willing. (And feeling, though for many that is not so obvious, but is why mathematicians speak of the beauty of mathematics).

The idea of DDS is a bit too far for me, but I do think the argument is an interesting one...

Also some stuff from Nondualist Scott Roberts:

Divine and Local Simplicity, and the Question of Will

The idea of DDS is a bit too far for me, but I do think the argument is an interesting one...

I remembered I had a thread going into this stuff in more detail, basically looking at a solution to the free will "problem" from another angle...IMO there is no single answer as each metaphysical picture is different and one has to ponder how free will fits. Same with Survival, Psi, mathematics, human mentality, physics, etc.

An IF statement is a high level statement chosen (decided by) by a programmer. It is translated into a set of bit encodings to suit the machine on which it runs, and it then operates in a completely automatic way - like clockwork.

Yeah the decision is made at the time of programming. There are no decisions in the program itself, though there are variations when different conditions are met.

Easy way to see this is if there is a flaw in the program - whether this is intentional or accidental is dependent on the programmer. A flawed online calculator could work just as the programmer intended.

Indeed, it runs completely automatically. But it does make a decision when it executes the IF statement. It's a completely deterministic decision, but a decision nonetheless.

Well I don't know, on a PC (which is typical) you have a set of registers and the computer reads an opcode from main memory (a set of bits) that forces it to perform some sort of test - e.g. compare a specific register with zero. This sets a bit in another register known as the condition codes. Then the computer reads the next opcode, which forces it to perform the following if the condition codes are set - it reads some more bits that are (typically) added to the Instruction Pointer (yet another register). 

That is a bit rough and ready, but I can't see a decision in that lot, and anyway, at that level there is absolutely no context.

Computers compress everything into a mush like that, which is very hard to think of as decision making!

I think like Sci - the only decision that is really made, is done by the programmer - maybe shared by someone who specifies what the program is meant to do.

David

Well I don't know, on a PC (which is typical) you have a set the computer reads an opcode (a set of bits) that forces it to perform some sort of test - e.g. compare a specific register with zero. This sets a bit in another register known as the condition codes. Then the computer reads the next opcode, which forces it to perform the following if the condition codes are set - it reads some more bits that are (typically) added to the Instruction Pointer (yey another register). 

That is a bit rough and ready, but I can't see a decision in that lot, and anyway, at that level there is absolutely no context.

Yup. It would be like saying a pinball machine is making decisions.