Free will re-redux

Well, there might have been another option if randomness is involved. But I'm not sure why it being inevitable bothers you.

Yes, randomness may lead to options. And conscious decisions might often be the way we choose. I just don't understand how that choice can be freely made.

I think Einstein was pretty focused and could make a sandwich without losing track of what he was doing. Hell, I can do that and I'm no Einstein. Or even a grilled cheese.

~~ Paul

Well look at it this way, if you're sitting around having a beer, and some guy comes along and just smacks you right in the back of the head, it's not his fault, because he was always going to do it. He had no other option.

And I don't know how they would be 'freely' made. Again, I'm a combatibilist. A person can do what they will but cannot will what they will. Shaped by our environment but with the ability to choose between options, there's no gun to our head or divine hand forcing us to pick one path over the other, we simply pick one option because it is what is most appealing to us. But we still choose it, it is not dictated to us. 

As for Einstein, it's just a wild example. Could say something like Stalin, if his dad didn't smack him around 1 too many times, wouldn't have been such a dick and started killing just literally everyone in Russia. Shaped by our environment and even the smallest thing can have massive implications, good old butterfly effect.

And I don't know how they would be 'freely' made.

I know I already asked this, but why would you doubt the choices are freely made?

And of course this doesn't answer your probably unanswerable question of what could that essential something beside the deterministic/random dichotomy be - it just establishes that it must exist.

Wait- do you actually understand what they're talking about regarding why we should think there's a deterministic/randomness dichotomy?

I mean even the in-deterministic electron position can be mapped to a stochastic distrubtion, namely the atomic orbital or "electron cloud". That right there seems like something that's neither deterministic nor random.

Same with the probabilistic "law" that [4]% of photons bounce back rather than pass through a window, which is why you can see your reflection and what's on the other side of the window at the same time. We don't know which photons, but we know enough to gauge the distribution. So not deterministic, but not wholly unpredictable/random either.

As I said earlier, I think it more plausible that such probabilistic laws - along with deterministic ones - are fine tuning by conscious agents.

That's part of why it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me that a conscious agent could have an irreducible/simple/non-composite ability to select between a set of possibilities. Now just like the above indeterministic behaviors you can't get "under the hood" in terms of pulling apart that possibility selection otherwise the free will wouldn't be free.

So the question is what is a good model of causation, and does this irreducible/simple/non-composite conscious possibility selection fit within that model. For example drawn from world religions if God grounds cause-effect relations (obviously this would have to be argued for), then He/She/It could gift this ability in limited fashion to conscious agents in His/Her/Its creation.

Smaw, I don't know how long you've been following these forums or how familiar you are with a long history, prior to the existence of Psience Quest. Some of these things go waaay back.

Yeah I went back to search through the Skeptiko Forum for something and while I knew this is an old debate I was actually shocked how the back & forth could almost be perfectly verbatim.

...the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and await a new beginning...
  -Thoth Hermes Trismegistus

I wanted to dig a little deeper into this issue of causal explanation.

There's a level of causal explanation that asks "What events Y, if they occur, result in outcome X's occurrence?" for "deterministic" cause-effect relations and "What events W, if they occur, result in a chance for outcome Z's occurrence?" for "random" cause-effect relations.

But "random" seems to cover a range of behaviors. There's the idea of true chaos, what Meillassoux calls "hyper chaos" where things are truly unpredictable. An electron can grow to the size of a golf ball and change into a tree frog.

That's obviously not what is meant when describing electron position in-determinism. So we know it's not true randomness in that sense. But even with regards to the electron's position while no singular measurement can be predicted perfectly from the prior state of the universe a series of measurements shows the position of electrons resolves stochastically to a distrubition - the atomic orbital whose shape varies depending on the elements/compositions in question.

That doesn't look like "randomness", rather it seems like something neither "random" nor "deterministic".

And when someone says, "deterministic" they mean those cause-effect relations which so far at least are unchanging. But just as a fair pair of dice can possibly come up snake eyes for a million rolls, however implausible that is, there's no way just from outside observation to know which "deterministic" cause-effect relations are just "lucky streaks" precisely because we don't have an explanation for what makes some cause-effect relations better modeled by singular output functions and other cause-effect relations better modeled by random variable functions.

So these attributions of "deterministic" and "random" seem iffy to me. After all if I've followed a routine for decades - say visiting a coffee shop and always getting the same thing (black coffee & bear claw) you could say that's a "deterministic" cause-effect relation. And if I change it up despite all relevant causal factors observable from the outside of my inner life staying the same you'd say it was "random".

Similarly, if the universe is Finely Tuned then the observed physical "deterministic" and "random" cause-effect relations are actually the result of mental causation. One variation of this argument is that the oddities in physics are better explained if our universe is a "simulation" running in the consciousness of some Ur-Mind (God?) ->

I agree that the attributions are iffy to some degree. What makes them not entirely iffy is that we can predict things. As far as your routine is concerned, I would never say that relevant causal factors are static, and so if you change things up it might be random, but it might just be a long-term deterministic result, or both.

I'm fine with the entire box of frogs being the result of mental causation. Again, though, that's just the source of the supposed free will. I still don't understand how the mind can make a free decision. What factor(s) go into choosing between two breakfast cereals if every cause of the choice, including my mental state, is the same as yesterday?

~~ Paul

Well look at it this way, if you're sitting around having a beer, and some guy comes along and just smacks you right in the back of the head, it's not his fault, because he was always going to do it. He had no other option.

And I don't know how they would be 'freely' made. Again, I'm a combatibilist. A person can do what they will but cannot will what they will. Shaped by our environment but with the ability to choose between options, there's no gun to our head or divine hand forcing us to pick one path over the other, we simply pick one option because it is what is most appealing to us. But we still choose it, it is not dictated to us. 

As for Einstein, it's just a wild example. Could say something like Stalin, if his dad didn't smack him around 1 too many times, wouldn't have been such a dick and started killing just literally everyone in Russia. Shaped by our environment and even the smallest thing can have massive implications, good old butterfly effect.

And yet we are still going to attribute fault to the guy who smacked you.

What sort of compatibilist are you?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

~~ Paul

I agree that the attributions are iffy to some degree. What makes them not entirely iffy is that we can predict things. As far as your routine is concerned, I would never say that relevant causal factors are static, and so if you change things up it might be random, but it might just be a long-term deterministic result, or both.

I'm fine with the entire box of frogs being the result of mental causation. Again, though, that's just the source of the supposed free will. I still don't understand how the mind can make a free decision. What factor(s) go into choosing between two breakfast cereals if every cause of the choice, including my mental state, is the same as yesterday?

~~ Paul

It seems you're saying that the causes of the choice either have to result in the same choice every single time, and if this didn't happen it would mean the choice was random. But "cause" here seems to just mean events that came before the "effect", whittled down for specificity.

So regarding the cereal choice varying I don't understand why that's "random" since that would mean the change happened for no reason at all, just some arbitrary aspect of the universe.

To me every observation of randomness makes more sense as a choice made by some conscious agent, as "random" means "no reason, just because". 

Maybe that's the divide, that I don't think "randomness" exists nor do I think "determinism" exists since that's just randomness of a special kind IMO. I don't see how someone can conceive of randomness but cannot conceive of free will being a property of conscious agents.

As I've said a few times none of this is an argument that free will exists, just my reasoning for why I don't find free will incoherent.

It seems you're saying that the causes of the choice either have to result in the same choice every single time, and if this didn't happen it would mean the choice was random. But "cause" here seems to just mean events that came before the "effect", whittled down for specificity.

So regarding the cereal choice varying I don't understand why that's "random" since that would mean the change happened for no reason at all, just some arbitrary aspect of the universe.

To me every observation of randomness makes more sense as a choice made by some conscious agent, as "random" means "no reason, just because". 

Maybe that's the divide, that I don't think "randomness" exists nor do I think "determinism" exists since that's just randomness of a special kind IMO. I don't see how someone can conceive of randomness but cannot conceive of free will being a property of conscious agents.

As I've said a few times none of this is an argument that free will exists, just my reasoning for why I don't find free will incoherent.

I can conceive of randomness because an event without causes is arbitrary. Are you suggesting some conscious agent is spending its time selecting the alpha particles that are going to decay, but in a way that appears random? I don't often bring up Occam, but what is the point of introducing such complexity? The particle decay just brute force happens arbitrarily, but within certain statistical parameters that we can observe and model with QM.

I cannot conceive of free will because I have not heard an explanation for a free event. You say it isn't truly random. You say it isn't determined. So what is it? How does the agent select the cereal without it being entirely determined by their mental state? What goes into the choice other than their mental state? Or, if it is some aspect of their mental state, by what method does that aspect decide between the two cereals?

Perhaps you are right about the divide. Perhaps you have something in your thinking that makes sense to call free will, but that I somehow cannot imagine and you cannot impart.

~~ Paul

Perhaps you are right about the divide. Perhaps you have something in your thinking that makes sense to call free will, but that I somehow cannot imagine and you cannot impart.

~~ Paul

I mean do you believe in free will at all?

I mean do you believe in free will at all?

Not in the libertarian sense, no. There is a perfectly reasonable legal definition having to do with not being coerced or forced.

There is also some discussion of some sort of compatibilist free will that is compatible with determinism, but I have never understood what those folks are getting at.

~~ Paul

Then you said you just can't conceive of something other than determinism or randomness....and at that point it's not clear what you want the rest of us to do.

This is the bottom line to Paul's personal conundrum.

He is demanding an explanation of how a free decision might be made while limiting the explanation to terms he has defined and is willing to accept.  His constraints limit us to providing the explanation either in terms of causal or random; nothing more.

As I've been saying since the start, his question and associated terms for any response is incoherent.  There is no ability to provide an answer, today.  Maybe tomorrow or maybe in 100 years, but not today.