Neuroscience and free will

[Laird]

Rearranging the order of the quoted parts of your posts for better flow...

I think laws are descriptive, but when we are confident of them we talk as if they are prescriptive. However, that does not give us the "right" to describe individual events and call them laws. A law describes a large class of phenomena.

I've (roughly) been using Prof. Swartz's definition of laws. He has this to say about physical laws and individual events on page 28 of his book:

And just as there is no science of events per se, there is, equally, no science of ‘individual events.’ This follows, of course, from my insisting a moment ago that physical laws must be purely descriptive in their terms. Mount Saint Helens’s eruption on May 18, 1980, falls under physical law inasmuch as it was an eruption (of a certain kind Q), occurring under circumstances (of a certain kind R) of a volcano (of a kind S), etc. But there is no physical law pertaining analytically to Mount Saint Helens exclusively. This is not to say, however, that there might not be one or more physical laws such that the circumstances leading up to the eruption and the eruption itself were those generalizations’ only instance. Generality does not require that there be more than one instance; nor does it require, even, that there be at least one instance. But generality does require that the proposition not be analytically restricted to specific individuals (or events).

One must be careful, then, when speaking of some particular event E as falling under a physical law. Descriptions that are often sufficient to individuate an event (“the first eruption of Mount Saint Helens in the twentieth century,” “Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon,” etc.) are often very meager, often contain proper names and other restricted terms, and often fail to specify – as is required for ‘falling under’ a law – a sequence of events. Thus Ford’s pardoning Nixon is an event that falls under a physical law only to the extent that it has some general description and is identified as a member of a pair (or sequence) of similarly generally described events.

Why is this important? Because we are trying to clarify what determinism means, especially to you, and, as I suggested to Linda in my immediately previous post, the conditions for a causal relation (law) could apply on a single occasion within the entire universe, and that causal relation (law) could still be deterministic. So, if you agree with that suggestion, then you would seem to be arbitrarily excluding certain (deterministic) causal relations from your conception of a physical law if you do not also accept (something like) Prof. Swartz's definition, which allows for a general law to apply in only one instance.

Can you accept this definition of physical laws after all?

Also, I'm not sure that descritivism means we are free to assume that the described phenomena could have happened differently. Just because we shouldn't assume the laws are prescriptive doesn't mean that they are in fact flexible.

I don't think that that's justifiable though. Here's why:

Given that the described phenomena could only have happened differently if the laws had been different (since the laws are simply generalised descriptions of what actually goes on in the world), to drop the assumption that the phenomena could have happened differently would be to eliminate the possibility that the laws could have been different, which would make them necessary, which is essentially prescriptive, which contradicts our descriptivism. So, I don't think we'd be assuming anything; I think it's logically entailed.

I'm happy to have a crack at this, but I'm not really sure of the point. It seems like a lot of work just to end up with a couple of sentences that give an inkling of how a free decision is made. But let's go for it.

Well, paraphrasing/repeating what I wrote in that old thread on Skeptiko where we first discussed all this, I think psychology and psychoanalysis are the disciplines that most deal with the processes of free decisions. You could try introspection too.

You seem to be looking for laws of free choices that, per your understanding of laws, "describe a large class of phenomena". I suppose that there might be some, but I haven't thought deeply about nor looked carefully into it. Again, there's probably a wealth of material within psychology and psychoanalysis. We could probably come up ourselves with some general methods that people "freely choose to choose by", but I'm not sure how easy they'd be to formulate as physical laws.

Also worth considering is that laws of free choice which described a "large" class of phenomena might tend to reduce the freedom of the agents participating in those phenomena, since they might limit the range of possibilities. I guess though that it would depend on the exact nature and scope of the laws.

You got a few bonus sentences there, and an early delivery. Not sure about the inkling.

I don't understand physical laws well enough to determine whether they can all be framed in term of events.

Anyway, let's assume I agree and continue.

OK. So, you've agreed that physical laws are (or can be taken to be) conditional descriptions of events. I should make explicit what's implicit in that: that the descriptions are accurate, true, and correct.

Here's my next contention for you then: A true description of the world is necessitated by the way the world is; the way the world is is not necessitated by the true descriptions of it.

Agreed?