Free will re-redux

If you believe that determinism fails to account for any kind of causation, then I very much doubt you can make the case that anything else accounts for causation. Down at the bottom, you will not be able to go any deeper.

There are all sorts of philosophical debates about how to explain causation, they could be surveyed in a similar manner to the survey you linked.

For example, a chapter from Gregg Rosenberg's A Place For Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World ->

The argument that raises problems for the causal relevance of consciousness contains a promisingly questionable inference: It moves from the scientific adequacy of physical explanations to the conclusion that physical explanations tell everything fundamental there is to know about causation. To my knowledge, this inference has never been formally challenged. In this chapter I challenge that inference. To do so, I need to present a solid idea of what causation is and what a full explanation of causation should look like.

The theoretical framework I develop is called the Theory of Natural Individuals. The first piece of the framework, developed in the next three chapters, is the Theory of Causal Significance. This chapter is an introduction to the Theory of Causal Significance that is intended to motivate the general approach the theory represents and to introduce and explain the basic concepts. This chapter:

• Defines the problem of causation, explaining why a theory is needed and important.
  
  
• Explains why physics is not a theory of causation.
  
  
• Gives a taxonomy of traditional approaches to causation and explains why the Theory of Causal Significance must fall outside of the traditional taxonomy.
  
  
• Abstracts a very general essence of causation that the Theory of Causal Significance can represent and shows how to modify the traditional taxonomy to create a place for the Theory of Causal Significance.
  
  
• Emphasizes that causal significance is not necessarily the production relation of cause and effect.
  
  
• Introduces the ideas of effective and receptive properties, arguing that they are conceptually and empirically distinct aspects of causation.
  
  
• Together, these properties are said to provide the nomic content of an individual.
  
  
• Defends a proposal to treat receptivity as a connective property.
  
  
• Analyzes the causal nexus, defining key terms, giving examples, and laying down the fundamental principles of a theory of the causal nexus.
  
  
• Explains what a natural individual is and discusses how and why natural individuals might emerge at many levels of nature.
  

What do I mean by the deep structure of causation? By focusing on causal significance, I am suggesting that the causal realist should treat our ordinary idea of causal responsibility as something akin to the surface structure of a grammar. According to one school of thought, the grammar of a specific language is an idiosyncratic development of a more general and universal structure, called the deep structure of language, which is common to it and all other possible human grammars. By analogy, I am proposing that the way we have come to think about causation in our world represents the surface structure of the deeper grammar of causal constraint common to this and all other possible causal worlds. The deep structure of causation is the concept of real constraint, conditioned by a variety of parameters whose specific settings represent hypotheses about the structural features that direct the flow of constraint.

Actually I'd say this sample chapter is also required reading in addition to the PDFs I mention lie at the nadir of the post I linked to in my last post. For convenience here they are again ->

Free Will and Mental Powers

Real Dispositions in the Physical World

A Powerful Theory of Causation

Causation is Not Your Enemy

As for the rest of the post ->

Can't you conceive of how a computer works correctly consistently? Just look at one go.

Hmmm...then isn't the conceiving of free will just a matter of reflection before/during/after making a decision?

In any case I can observe and make use of a computer working, but at every step of the computer running under adequate determinism why of all the possibilities that could happen at the QM level do the actualized possibilities resolve into a seemingly reliable determinism? Why do they happen in such a way that preserves the computer functionally (for the most part) as expected?

As far as randomness is concerned, I can conceive of there being no causes for an event.

Can you explain this? I don't know what to insert between the final moment before the causes that were precursors to the random event and the outcome that apparently wasn't necessitated but also not chosen by a conscious entity.

What I cannot conceive of is making a decision by a means other than computer + picking random numbers. I can conceive of various different sources for such a decision, but not the decision itself. I do not know what to insert between the final moment of indecision and the first moment of decision.

The papers I've mentioned above should help.

[Laird]

Once upon a time, there lived a poor, starving orphan. It wasn't his fault that he was an orphan: after all, he couldn't conceive of how his parents could exist, therefore, they didn't.

The poor, starving orphan knocked on the door of a family home. "Oh, see here", said the family, upon opening the door to their home. "A poor, starving orphan on our very doorstep. And at Christmas time too. You poor thing."

"I am a poor, starving orphan," said the poor, starving orphan. "Please, have you anything to eat?"

"Oh, see how polite this poor, starving orphan is", said the family. "But of course we will feed you." And they took the poor, starving orphan into their home and gladly fed him a meal.

After he had finished eating, the poor, starving orphan said, "So... about that meal...".

"Yes?" asked the family. "Was it to your liking?"

But the poor, starving orphan said only, "I mean, I would like to have it, please."

A little puzzled, the family conferred amongst themselves. "Have we not just fed him?" they asked, wondering. "Perhaps one meal was not enough. Well, in any case, he is, after all, a poor, starving orphan. And such a polite one. Let us see about feeding him again."

So, they returned to the kitchen, determined to provide the poor, starving orphan with an even better meal than the last.

After careful preparation, they brought the poor, starving orphan a second meal. Tipping it on the floor, the poor, starving orphan turned to the family and said, "I see that you are good, Christian people. And I, a poor, starving orphan. Please, I would be particularly grateful for some sustenance from such decent folk as yourselves."

The family, a little taken aback, again conferred amongst themselves. "How could this be?" they asked. "We have already fed this poor, starving orphan a meal, and he seems still to be hungry - yet he will not eat the further sustenance with which we have provided him. Could we have chosen the wrong ingredients? Perhaps we should bring in the professionals."

So, they engaged the services of a renowned dietitian and a decorated chef, who consulted with the poor, starving orphan to make sure that the next meal accorded with his palate. "Here", the family said to the poor, starving orphan. "We will not allow that the hunger of a poor, starving orphan on our very doorstep is not satisfied, nor that we fail to meet his tastes. Please, consume and be sated."

Taking a look at the third meal, the poor, starving orphan again tipped it onto the floor, and again looked up at the family, who surrounded the table, anxious to see the effect of the meal they had so carefully had prepared.

"I do wonder", said the poor, starving orphan, licking his lips, "whether such people as yourselves, who so rightly pride themselves on their charity, would be so kind as to please provide this poor, starving orphan with a meal."

Once again, the family conferred amongst themselves. "What is this?" they asked. "Though this poor, starving orphan has already eaten a meal, he continues to ask to be fed, yet casts aside all of the carefully-prepared food with which we supply him. Nevertheless, we cannot allow that a poor, starving orphan rely on us for sustenance and we fail to provide it. He is, after all, an unfailingly polite poor, starving orphan. Let us, then, serve him a banquet. That is sure to satiate his awful hunger."

So, they set out on their finest table the finest livery they had, and, one by one, brought out their finest, most sumptuous dishes. "What more could this poor, starving orphan desire?" they asked themselves. "Surely, this time his awful hunger will be sated."

Turning his back on the banquet table, the poor, starving orphan said, "Alas. I remain a poor, starving orphan. Nobody will feed me."

"But not only have we fed you, we have provided you with further meals; indeed, we have provided you with an entire banquet," the family replied. "What is the point of asking for food that you will not eat?"

"It seems, then, that there is no food to be had anywhere", said the poor, starving orphan. "Alas. I remain a poor, starving orphan."

I'm still hoping that chef Parnia will one day provide something so irresistible, Paul's hunger may be finally satisfied.

I'm still hoping that chef Parnia will one day provide something so irresistible, Paul's hunger may be finally satisfied.

It is interesting to connect this question of choice to the NDE - our moral sense being more than some evolutionary advantage seems to be suggested if not confirmed by the life review, and moral sense is grounded in the idea that one can choose to act otherwise in a given situation.

And since morality can't be grounded in descriptions of the physical world, and is part of our irreducible consciousness...why would it exist if we weren't free?

So, your complaint simply has no merit, because deterministic processes reduce analogously to an irreducible element (the laws of physics) - and randomness seems on your account anyway to be irreducible right from the start (let alone explicable).

Given how quantum indeterminism preserves the cause/effect relationship at the Macro/Classical level, and the fact that we at least seem to have only an "adequate determinism" where the quantum "chaos" resolves into the classical "order" thanks to statistical averaging, it is hard to see how physics supports or even gives us any explanation for why of all effects that could follow from a set of precursor causes only one effect does.

That's even before one considers that it is at least arguable physics points to Idealism, as per this Sci Am article, the particular metaphysics where it is very hard to see why there must be some logically mandated distance between the experience of deciding and actuality. In Objective Idealism at least the Ur-Mind should be free willing up the wazhoo.

Free will: (Summarising my answer) By a conscious agent participating freely and holistically in a contingent (that is, non-necessitated, non-random) causal process which can be explained in terms of (sets of) psychological (including ethical) reasons. For example, we can explain how (or why) a person makes a free choice to adopt veganism in terms of such reasons as being ethically committed to minimising harm, having a personal love of animals, and having an emotional repugnance for the mistreatment of animals. The discipline of psychology provides systematic study into the reasons which people tend to use in freely (and sometimes not-so-freely) making their decisions, and why they tend to use those reasons.

If we go back to the tried and true plot of cartoons, we have the moment when the protagonist is given the choice to execute or at least seriously injure the enemy who has harmed them (killed their parents, tormented them, etc).

Of course the protagonist chooses not to inflict violence, or at least not grievous injury. If you asked a child why the protagonist refused, they would say because of such-and-such moral reasons. Now if you ask the child, "What if they had gotten revenge, what were the reasons?" the child would enumerate the villain's evil actions in previous episodes.

The idea that reasons don't count because the protagonist could have done otherwise would be baffling to the child, as to our common sense one's intent "tips the scales" but that doesn't negate the importance of the reasons. In fact the reasons are what makes the choice between not killing the villain vs. getting revenge a meaningful plot point. As noted by Eli Kelly ->

Experience hardly suggests that one type of reason (e.g. pragmatic concerns) always trumps another (e.g. physical gratification)...The notion of willpower exists because agents sometimes do what they do not feel they want to do most—for example, the dieting man who passes up his favorite dessert. Likewise, weakness of the will can be said to occur when an agent does what she feels is not in her best interest—the student who goes to a party the night before her final exams rather than studying, for instance. Keeping these things in mind, the definition of “strongest reasons” becomes elusive if we prohibit references to what an agent already did or will in fact do.

What other properties does a “strongest reason” possess, other than being a reason on which an agent will or did act? 

The silence is telling.

All to say the idea that our reasons are force vectors that can be summed is an error of going from World explanations (like physics) to Mind explanations. Especially since it's actually possible/plausible to go the other way, the most obvious being the move to Idealism (which isn't to say that metaphysics is true).

More on this below, specifically the tautological circularity of "strongest reason" determinism as an explanation.

Whereas we have no answer to the two devolved "how" questions for determinism, we do have them for the analogous questions for free will:

1. The reasons (analogous to physical laws) for free will choices exist in the first place because they are aspects/functions of - and in part chosen by - conscious agents.
   
2. These reasons effect (analogous to "necessitate") free choices by the power of conscious agency.
   

Thus, the "how" answer for free will is better grounded than the one you posit for determinism, and given that for randomness we have only the vaguest "how" answer, and not even a reducible one, the "how" answer for free will is obviously better grounded there too.

If we take up Typoz's suggestion to pick a meaningful choice, the issues with the other two usual options - determinism and randomness - seems even clearer. Let's say Bob asks for Ann's hand in marriage, and Ann says Yes. If she isn't free to choose, because Free Will doesn't exist, then it seems one or the other below happens:

Randomness: Absence explanation, just something happening for no reason at all. Makes not just Ann's decisions but the entirety of the Real unintelligible, because you can't have a little randomness without making a hole in the relationships between entities. It's like the saying, "If you put a drop of wine into a barrel of feces and a drop of feces into a barrel of wine, what you get is two barrels of feces."

It's the kind of Chance mentioned in the paper Paul linked us to:

"One of the various understandings of chance is of chance as a kind of force with powers of its own, a purposeless determiner of events that are otherwise unaccount-able.  On  this  reading,  “chance”  might  well  be  capitalized,  as  one  might  say  that Chance caused the event in question or that Luck caused it, as if Luck or Chance were  a  mysterious  agent  loose  in  the  world."

As you say Laird it makes Chance into a kind of irreducible force acting immanently in the world....you know, like one might expect of consciousness. Probably why words like "choice", "decide", "telling" come up in discussion about quantum indeterminism. As noted by the physicist Henry Stapp, it just makes more sense to ground indeterminism in consciousness than this arbitrary and utterly mysterious power ->

...According to orthodox quantum ideas, this selection event is controlled by pure chance. The use of “pure chance” in a pragmatic context is completely acceptable. But it is not acceptable at the level of ontology. In the context of a naturalistic science some explanation in terms of physical quantities is needed,at least in principle, for how the particular reality that actually appears is picked out from the collection of alternative possibilities that are created by the local deterministic part of the dynamics.

The simplest naturalistic possibility is that the selection is controlled by the state vector itself, since this vector, and its changes, represent the physical reality. A most natural possibility would be for the choice to be controlled by the aspect of the state vector that specifies the environment that defines the possible states between which the selection event must choose. In our case that aspect would be the state of the brain itself, or, perhaps, even the aspect of the brain associated with the “I” mentioned above. In this latter case it would be the “I”, as it is represented in the quantum dynamics, that selects the sequence of templates for action that controls the behavior of the organism...

Determinism: A set of prior causes pushes Ann to say yes. This might seem to be all that's necessary, but it assumes a conscious entity has mental aspects that can be assigned force vectors, with the final vector pointing in the direction - however weakly - of the decision. Yet once we mark the difference between qualitative Mind and a presumed quantitative World trying to actually explain why her mental aspects lead to the Yes decision becomes quite confused.

The simplest general argument probably goes something like this:

1. Physicalism is false (just see the dismal responses in the Physicalism Redux thread), so Consciousness - the Subjective First Person PoV - is irreducible. This includes the memories of experiences, particularly the effects of decisions.

2. Determinism needs to be fixed by some unchangeable regularities that ensure a cause is constrained to produce a single effect. In the external World where one assumes there's only Necessity or Chance one can always produce the same causes that yield the same effects (Determinism) or they can just be Random which destroys the intelligibility of the entirety of Reality including Ann's decisions, Bob's decision to propose, etc.

3. If a person's memory of a decision made prior contains the results/effects of that the decision, the next time s/he finds themselves in similar circumstances their memory is included as part of the cause.

4. Memory + First Person PoV means each set of circumstances is a Unique Event, and so it is difficult to see exactly how there could be some principle of constraint existing prior to the person's existence. It's not just that the mental character of a person is qualitative, it's that those aspects have a something-it-is-like quality for that person alone.

5. Unlike physics with its force vectors, the act of deliberation itself is pulling up memories, goals, feelings. As such Ann is not a static word problem in a text book, but rather an entity that is continuously dynamic. As she deliberates Bob's proposal the total state of her mental aspects is shifting up until the decision is made.

6. Since no Law (in the sense of some binding written into reality from the 'beginning') constrains the continually dynamic consciousness + the fact Laws of Physics don't make things happen, and Randomness just demands the Impossible, the only recourse for the determinist explanation is a circular tautology:

The sum of Ann's mental aspects in favor of marrying Bob were greater than the sum of her rejecting his proposal, and we know that because Ann said Yes to his marriage proposal.

So for the deterministic interpretation the reason why Ann says Yes instead of No would have to, as you say Laird, involve a kind of irreducible force to explain why of the two possibilities only one is ultimately chosen. And what could this force be but Chance? So attempts at Deterministic explanations of Choice fail to uphold Determinism...

Thus it is difficult to see how either Randomness or Determinism - assumed due to observations of the World - can properly capture the varied aspects of Mind. However the Mind - if only the Ur-Mind of Idealism or God of Theism - can account for both of these causality options, and thus can explain why something happens as well as all the other live possibilities don't happen ->

“… How can there be a relation, an ordination between two things which do not exist in any fashion, or between a thing that exists and a thing which does not? For a relation or ordination to exist between two terms both terms must exist. Therefore an effect of an action must somehow exist if the agent is to be determined, ordained or inclined toward it. What does this mean? It means that the action or effect must exist before it is produced or realized.
 
But how in the name of heaven is this possible? Only if the action or effect exists as present in thought, with the existence of knowledge. Only in this way can it exist – in thought – before it exists in reality.”

“We see, therefore, that the sufficient reason for an agent’s action, that which determines it to a particular action or effect rather than any other is the effect, the action itself – not as produced and accomplished, but as that which is to be produced, accomplished and therefore as preconceived by a thought, so as to preordain the agent to that action.”

Now, remembering that my only concern in this thread was the question of coherence, it seems this explanation for causation has to at least be true in those possible worlds where Idealism holds. And this mental causation can provide a Determiner for "Determinism" and a Freedom to ground "Chance".

So there is at least one free willed being, the Ur-Mind, in Idealist possible worlds. So free will isn't incoherent.

Mere mortals can derive some benefit from this grounding as well ->

Now a question suggested by our discussion of the argument from motion in chapter 3 is whether our wills can in fact be free. For if God is the first mover underlying all the motion or change that takes place in the world, that would have to include the motion or change that results from our voluntary actions, in which case God must be the ultimate cause of those actions. But in that case, how can they be free actions? Aquinas considers this question himself (QDM 6; cf. ST I.83.1). His answer is that though God does move the will, “since he moves every kind of thing according to the nature of the moveable thing … he also moves the will according to its condition, as indeterminately disposed to many things, not in a necessary way” (QDM 6). That is to say, the nature of the will is to be open to various possible intellectually apprehended ends, while something unfree, like an impersonal physical object or process, is naturally determined to its ends in an unthinking, necessary way. When you choose to have coffee rather than tea, you could have done otherwise, whereas when the coffee maker heated your coffee, it could not have done otherwise. This is so because your will was the cause of your having coffee, while something outside the coffee machine – your having keyed certain instructions into it the night before, say, together with the electrical current passing into it from the wall socket, the laws of physics, and so forth – was the cause of its behavior. But God causes both events in a manner consistent with all of this, insofar as in causing your free choice he causes something that operates independently of what happens in the world around you, while in causing the coffee machine to heat the coffee he causes something that operates only in virtue of what is happening in the world around it (the electricity, laws of physics, etc.). In this way God causes each thing to act in accordance with its nature.

-- Edward Feser. Aquinas . Oneworld Publications (academic). Kindle Edition.

Now can we capture something of this idea of a rational power apprehending and then acting on decisions without getting God involved?...well that's what the papers I recommended to Paul are for....reposted here for convenience ->

The Theory of Causal Significance

Real Dispositions in the Physical World

A Powerful Theory of Causation

Causation is Not Your Enemy

Free Will and Mental Powers

But there are no reasons to think determinism and randomness, in the sense of existing "just because", are something actually a part of reality.

They are models of what we see. There is just as much reason to accept these models as there would be if there was a strong model of libertarian free will.

The most poignant one being that random is the idea that something happens for absolutely no reason at all which is by definition irrational.

I'm not sure I would throw around "by definition" when the claim for free will is just a "by definition" assertion.

He's asking what the actual argument against free will is.

My argument is that there is no coherent description of how it might work. I believe that is the reason why only 13.7% of the philosophers in the article I posted opt for libertarianism. (https://philpapers.org/archive/bouwdp)

For example let's say Idealism is true and Everything is Consciousness. What exactly would be the reason one should think their experience of deciding is somehow logically distinct from what is actually happening?

What would be the reason for assuming that everything you believe is actually true? It's clear that we do not experience the entire process of making a decision. So how can we know how it works by incomplete introspection? And how do we know the brain isn't fooling us into thinking we have free agency?

Or to put it another way is there an actual argument against free [will] that Idealists should worry about? Or Theists who say free will is a gift from God who is the Ground of Being, King/Queen of All Reality?

Yes, they should worry about the fact that they cannot give a coherent description of how it might work. Every description is a new just-so story, possibly with various new terms for the source of the decision or the name of the nonrandom indeterministic "force of will."

…Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion. If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain…

Huh? He appears to be suggesting that the interpreter of the stop sign is not a part of the brain. What does he mean?

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.

Then what is going on with the stop sign?

~~ Paul

Can you explain this? I don't know what to insert between the final moment before the causes that were precursors to the random event and the outcome that apparently wasn't necessitated but also not chosen by a conscious entity.

You insert exactly nothing. You can insert things and get determinism. You can insert nothing and get an arbitrary event. What I'm trying to imagine is something other than the step-by-step deterministic things and the zero-step random things. Something that apparently has more than zero steps but is not inevitably step-by-step.

~~ Paul

Once upon a time, there lived a poor, starving orphan. It wasn't his fault that he was an orphan: after all, he couldn't conceive of how his parents could exist, therefore, they didn't.

The poor, starving orphan knocked on the door of a family home. "Oh, see here", said the family, upon opening the door to their home. "A poor, starving orphan on our very doorstep. And at Christmas time too. You poor thing."

"I am a poor, starving orphan," said the poor, starving orphan. "Please, have you anything to eat?"

"Oh, see how polite this poor, starving orphan is", said the family. "But of course we will feed you." And they took the poor, starving orphan into their home and gladly fed him a meal.

After he had finished eating, the poor, starving orphan said, "So... about that meal...".

"Yes?" asked the family. "Was it to your liking?"

But the poor, starving orphan said only, "I mean, I would like to have it, please."

A little puzzled, the family conferred amongst themselves. "Have we not just fed him?" they asked, wondering. "Perhaps one meal was not enough. Well, in any case, he is, after all, a poor, starving orphan. And such a polite one. Let us see about feeding him again."

So, they returned to the kitchen, determined to provide the poor, starving orphan with an even better meal than the last.

After careful preparation, they brought the poor, starving orphan a second meal. Tipping it on the floor, the poor, starving orphan turned to the family and said, "I see that you are good, Christian people. And I, a poor, starving orphan. Please, I would be particularly grateful for some sustenance from such decent folk as yourselves."

The family, a little taken aback, again conferred amongst themselves. "How could this be?" they asked. "We have already fed this poor, starving orphan a meal, and he seems still to be hungry - yet he will not eat the further sustenance with which we have provided him. Could we have chosen the wrong ingredients? Perhaps we should bring in the professionals."

So, they engaged the services of a renowned dietitian and a decorated chef, who consulted with the poor, starving orphan to make sure that the next meal accorded with his palate. "Here", the family said to the poor, starving orphan. "We will not allow that the hunger of a poor, starving orphan on our very doorstep is not satisfied, nor that we fail to meet his tastes. Please, consume and be sated."

Taking a look at the third meal, the poor, starving orphan again tipped it onto the floor, and again looked up at the family, who surrounded the table, anxious to see the effect of the meal they had so carefully had prepared.

"I do wonder", said the poor, starving orphan, licking his lips, "whether such people as yourselves, who so rightly pride themselves on their charity, would be so kind as to please provide this poor, starving orphan with a meal."

Once again, the family conferred amongst themselves. "What is this?" they asked. "Though this poor, starving orphan has already eaten a meal, he continues to ask to be fed, yet casts aside all of the carefully-prepared food with which we supply him. Nevertheless, we cannot allow that a poor, starving orphan rely on us for sustenance and we fail to provide it. He is, after all, an unfailingly polite poor, starving orphan. Let us, then, serve him a banquet. That is sure to satiate his awful hunger."

So, they set out on their finest table the finest livery they had, and, one by one, brought out their finest, most sumptuous dishes. "What more could this poor, starving orphan desire?" they asked themselves. "Surely, this time his awful hunger will be sated."

Turning his back on the banquet table, the poor, starving orphan said, "Alas. I remain a poor, starving orphan. Nobody will feed me."

"But not only have we fed you, we have provided you with further meals; indeed, we have provided you with an entire banquet," the family replied. "What is the point of asking for food that you will not eat?"

"It seems, then, that there is no food to be had anywhere", said the poor, starving orphan. "Alas. I remain a poor, starving orphan."

And that is because everyone involved in preparing the meals had no clothes.

~~ Paul

Yknow I'm starting to believe that determinism is true because it really seems like this is a repeat of the last free will thread. We're at 40 pages now. I feel like this is the defenition of talking past each other.