Neuroscience and free will

[Laird]

Personally I'm wary of trying to cash out Final causes into Efficient causes...at least how I am thinking of Final Cause which [may] not be congruent to others' usage...gonna try to clarify so now I must apologize for possible upcoming pendantry!

I think the "Efficient Causes Only" picture leaves the gap in causal explanation where, in the explanation of why something happened, we need to explain why something else didn't happen. To me Final cause is synonymous with the determination of a particular possibility out of all potential states, like Penrose's remarking on the "decision" which ends superposition. To me every event has the set of possible outcomes out of which one is selected, and I'd contend everyone sees this same need to lock down the outcomes otherwise there'd be no talk of Natural Laws.

All to say IMO Inner/Final Cause is the answer to Gregg Rosenberg's question about causation, "Why this One Thing rather than Everything?"
If there were only Efficient Causes, it seems to me the determination of why things are the way they are goes back to the Laws and their attendant problems that ultimately bring us back to the reality - as per Talbott's essay - that the governed entities themselves must have something within them that makes them law abiding. That "something within them", to me, is Final/Inner Cause.

I think I see what you're saying, although in light of what you write below, I might be misframing it. "Final causation" is "that which 'selects' which of the potential GCDEs (and the more specifically 'natural/physical laws') applies in actuality". If it weren't for final causation, we would not be able to say why the given GCDE applies as opposed to some other GCDE which is a logical possibility. "Efficient causation" alone can at best describe "that which happens (causally) under the given GCDE", not why that given GCDE applies and hence why that particular thing happens (which it does under that particular GCDE).

Am I reading you aright?

That said, I'd agree that Final/Inner causation follows from Efficient/Outer causation, just as the stochastic position cloud of an electron (Inner Cause) constituting a ball is determined by the arc of my throw (Outer Cause).

My thinking on the "fossilization" is of the entire Actual Occasion rather than a final cause unto itself, apologies if that wasn't clear. If we think of final causes as decisions, the idea is that your past decisions - in tandem with the consequences of those decisions - determine the new Possibility Space of the Now.

I think I get you. Efficient/outer causation set the circumstances under and within which final/inner causation freely select the outcome... which then in turn contributes to the setting of the next set of circumstances under and within which the free decision which is "selection of an outcome by final/inner causation" is made. (And final/inner causation is by definition a function of a conscious agent). Right?

I think this Whiteheadian+Sartre picture is the right one, placing free will as power over the effect rather than power over causality. The Libertarian goal of defying causation only exacerbated the "Misplaced Concreteness" of reifying the mathematical modeling of events.

This is the bit that I hope doesn't mean I misframed things above. It (the lack of power over causality) could be interpreted as disqualifying my framing that final causation 'selects' which of the potential GCDEs applies in actuality. I don't think it does, but I'm just raising it as a possibility.

Additionally with the proper kind of Efficient/Outer and Final/Inner causation introduced, there's the ready analogy of the electron with its stochastic position cloud helping to make up a thrown ball. As I've said before, we can even consider a qualitative "stochastic variable" to represent a person's character (dare I say "disposition"?) so even externally we now have a predictive modeling of decision making that is - as per Mumford & Anjum - neither absolutely necessary nor absolutely contingent.

Maybe it is better to speak of External Causes and Inner Causes, but I suspect the complete picture of how we "hook into" the world will draw upon Material & Formal causation before the end so I wanted to keep the terms Efficient & Final.

Fair enough. I'll just flag that with "predictive modeling" we move from metaphysics/ontology to epistemology. and I think it's useful to maintain a clear distinction.

Yeah I think the issue may be "Final Cause" has a lot of teleological baggage attached to it where events move toward some God/Fate-determined goal. My point isn't to claim "What Comes After Determines What Comes Before", rather simply that for anything possible to happen you have a set of events that have contextualized the Possibility Space - the Efficient Causes - and then the new event comes about due to a selection from that space - the Final Cause.

[Also Whitehead uses "entity" for something perishing with each Possibility Selection and I think of an entity in the same way I think of an agent, something that survives numerous such selections....I should straighten out the language usage...apologies...]

That all makes sense to me.

Yeah this is how I would see it. No singled out cause has the power of Fate behind it, it is subject to counterfactual analysis. This doesn't, however, IMO do enough to prevent the conclusion that a total summation of Outer causes without any interest-relative framing necessitates the event. OTOH, one could argue that if no single cause is inexorably binding, what makes the total set of causes binding?

If there was only Efficient Cause it seems to me the response would be how could the total set not be binding, given we observe change happening? (Though analysis would still suggest the explanatory gap.)

Agreed! Especially with the bits I've emboldened.

So it's also here that I think Mumford and Amjun err in trying to take this same concept of dispositional causation and apply it to indeterminate events which being "random" in the sense of being stochastic suggest Disposition is used in a different way, closer (at least in analogy) to our own mental causation.

They're conflating the Outer set of causes "impacting" an entity thus putting the entity into a new Possibility Space, and the Inner causal power/property that selects a possibility...which then becomes part of the "impact" determining the next Possibility Space in the subsequent Now....

Right. There has to be an original contribution from within for free will to be meaningful (versus merely "compatibilistic").