2017-08-29, 03:23 PM
The Solution to the Problem of the Freedom of the Will
Quote:"....the attempt to reconcile human autonomy with the complete randomness of human actions is surely hopeless.2 At first sight it appears that, despite the initial worries about determinism, indeterminism makes the conception of freedom of the will even less tenable.3
Despite the untenability of the ideas just mentioned, my aim in this paper will be to show that the solution to the problem of the freedom of the will does lie, nevertheless, with the truth of indeterminism. To see how this is so, it is necessary first to distinguish two very different grades of indeterminism. The indeterminism entailed by the common understanding of quantum mechanics, while it denies that the causal upshot of a situation is a determinate function of any fact about that situation, still insists that there is a complete causal truth about every situation. It is just that this truth is in the form, not of a unique outcome, but of a range of outcomes with specific probabilities attached to their occurrence. Thus situations are still conceived as evolving according to laws, just laws of a somewhat different kind. I shall refer to both determinism, and this brand of moderate indeterminism, as versions of the thesis of causal completeness. Even if determinism is false, causal completeness requires that there be some quantitatively precise law governing the development of every situation. If we maintain the doctrine of causal completeness, then the only retreat from physical determination of our actions is in the direction of more or less unreliability, hardly a desirable philosophical goal. However, the indeterminism that I wish to advocate is something quite different, the denial of causal completeness. I shall maintain that few, if any, situations have a complete causal truth to be told about them. Causal regularity is a much rarer feature of the world than is generally supposed.
And the real solution to the problem of freedom of the will, I shall argue, is to recognize that humans, far from being putative exceptions to an otherwise seamless web of causal connection, are in fact dense concentrations of causal power in a world where this is in short supply."