Free will re-redux

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.

and proof that people will see whatever they want to see.  Considering we like to think we are the most intelligent species, we haven't really come very far.

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.

See, I told ya!

~~ Paul

See, I told ya!

~~ Paul

I still want to know your opinion on the entire thing. Are you a compatibilist or believe in no free will?

[Laird]

I still want to know your opinion on the entire thing. Are you a compatibilist or believe in no free will?

Now you're getting the idea. Just remember: whatever he answers, ask him again. You can frame it like this: "How could it be that you believe that? I haven't seen a good 'how' explanation yet." When he offers one, reject or ignore it, and repeat your question. Endless fun!

I still want to know your opinion on the entire thing. Are you a compatibilist or believe in no free will?

Uh oh, I'm not sure I know the difference. I don't believe in libertarian free will, but I'm fine if we use the term free will in the legal sense. What does that make me?

~~ Paul

Now you're getting the idea. Just remember: whatever he answers, ask him again. You can frame it like this: "How could it be that you believe that? I haven't seen a good 'how' explanation yet." When he offers one, reject or ignore it, and repeat your question. Endless fun!

I believe we can use the term free will in a legal sense, because in that context it simply has a definition.

You've posted significantly more words of criticism of my opinion than it would take to give a succinct 3-sentence description of the "how" of free will that you claim has been presented to me numerous times.

~~ Paul

[Laird]

Sci, I made an exception and "liked" your post even though I didn't read everything you linked to, because I wouldn't have been able to respond for days and days if not weeks if I had tried to.

I did at least try to read the papers you recommended for Paul, and managed to do that except (so far) for the first one, by Gregg Rosenberg. Even though a lot of it was diagrams, forty five pages were a bit beyond me for the moment. I've done a little initial reading and some very brief skimming of it though.

For the most part, I agree with the points you make in your post, and have nothing to add, so I won't respond in detail in turn. Just a few things:

I wasn't exactly sure how your comments near the top re "adequate determinism", which are well taken, relate to the quote of mine to which you were replying.

I didn't quite follow the Henry Stapp quote because it was a little too technical for me (especially the reference to "state vectors"). Your general point that this curious Chance-as-a-force makes most sense grounded in consciousness is well taken though.

I didn't follow the entirety of your six-point general argument, but some of its individual points seemed well worth making.

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.

And I don't think we've seen a sound argument that it is anyway. "I personally can't conceive of 'how' it could work" is not at all compelling as an argument.

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 ->

This is juicy stuff, and all very helpful, Sci. Thanks. Some thoughts on each of these.

The Theory of Causal Significance

I've yet to read this in full but it looks promising.

Taking the next out of order:

Causation is Not Your Enemy

You'd linked to this earlier, and I'd responded in part with:

Its authors note that accounts such as Aristotle's of superficially dispositional causality ultimately "resolve into some form of necessity, such as conditional necessity". However, in the golfing example, they seem to base their claim of genuinely alternative possibilities (to the golfer's successful shot) in the genuine possibility that different circumstances obtain, such as that the ball hits an obstacle which deflects it. This basis though seems to be weaker than the strongest one possible in that it does not (explicitly) affirm that alternatives are still genuinely possible given the actual circumstances, and thus it does not (again, explicitly) deny necessitation at the most abstract level: that the state of the universe at time T1 restricts the possible states of the universe at T2 to a single state. Perhaps, elsewhere, they do explicitly deny this sort of necessitation, otherwise their dispositional account of causality seems just like Aristotle's to "resolve into some form of necessity".

It was, then, interesting in this light to read the earlier paper by the same authors which you also included in your reading list for Paul:

A Powerful Theory of Causation

Along the lines of my earlier response quoted above, I was not convinced by their "argument against necessity", which runs as follows:

"Let us call a group of polygenic causes C1, ... Cn and assume that there is a case in which together they produce the effect E, the match lights. Nevertheless, it can be claimed, had all of C1, ... Cn occurred but also some interfering condition I been present, such as a gust of wind, then E might not have occurred. We are taking I to be a real natural or physical possibility, rather than a mere logical one. This shows that C1, ... Cn, although they caused E, were nevertheless consistent with E not occurring. Therefore, C1, ... Cn do not necessitate E, even if as a matter of fact they do cause E."

I wasn't convinced because I think it remains open to necessitarians to respond with this:

"Although we allow that adding I to C1...Cn could conceivably prevent the occurrence of E, and that in that sense, C1...Cn do not necessitate E, this situation nevertheless remains consistent with another, and more important (to us), sense in which a given combination of causes does necessitate whatever effect follows: that being the sense in which the contribution each causal power makes, and the manner in which these contributions are summed, is necessary.

"This is supported by your own framing, in which you write (bold emphasis added by us): 'That powers are pleiotropic means that they make the same contribution to any effect of which they are a cause. The same power always makes the same contribution, when it manifests'. In this context, 'always' is a synonym for 'necessarily', and since the 'vector addition' you describe by which powers add or subtract towards any final effect is the only possible means for arriving at that final effect, it, too, is in the sense we intend 'necessary'.

"Thus, although in one sense you have demonstrated that causes do not necessitate their effects, in a sense more important to us, and equally physical, you have not."

It's partly a matter of semantics, but not entirely.

That said, I think that the approach this paper describes of thinking of causality in terms of "dispositional powers" is useful (in the context of free will)...

Real Dispositions in the Physical World

...and which this paper complements nicely, although some of its more technical aspects went over my head...

Free Will and Mental Powers

...and to which this paper adds a thoughtful accounting of the self-determining power of free will in terms of its embodiment of reason(s), suggesting that (footnotes elided):

the peculiar self-determining character of the power to act is a consequence of its intrinsically rational nature. More precisely, it is a consequence of the fact that making up one’s mind about what to believe or do is a self-conscious activity: an exercise of a power for inference, as we have seen above, is not independent from the agent’s knowledge that she exercises it. If this is right, then the power to act is not just a power that is exercised ‘in the light of reasons’, as on Lowe and O’Connor’s accounts—the agent’s reasons are not just circumstances in which the power is exercised. Instead, an agent’s making up her mind in practical reasoning just is her exercising her power to act.

I think this all helps, and I agree that it would be useful for Paul to read these papers - the one I've quoted last in particular.

[Laird]

I believe we can use the term free will in a legal sense, because in that context it simply has a definition.

That doesn't answer my question. How do you believe that? It seems that you can't explain. Thus, your belief is incoherent, and you do not actually hold it. Simple logic.

[Laird]

If you could describe the difference between a contingent decision and a necessitated one, that might do the trick. All I've read just sounds like "contingent" is coined to mean "caused but not dictated," which gets us nowhere.

If you could describe why you think that gets us nowhere, that might do the trick better. What about that do you fail to understand?

I wasn't convinced because I think it remains open to necessitarians to respond with this:

"Although we allow that adding I to C1...Cn could conceivably prevent the occurrence of E, and that in that sense, C1...Cn do not necessitate E, this situation nevertheless remains consistent with another, and more important (to us), sense in which a given combination of causes does necessitate whatever effect follows: that being the sense in which the contribution each causal power makes, and the manner in which these contributions are summed, is necessary.

"This is supported by your own framing, in which you write (bold emphasis added by us): 'That powers are pleiotropic means that they make the same contribution to any effect of which they are a cause. The same power always makes the same contribution, when it manifests'. In this context, 'always' is a synonym for 'necessarily', and since the 'vector addition' you describe by which powers add or subtract towards any final effect is the only possible means for arriving at that final effect, it, too, is in the sense we intend 'necessary'.

"Thus, although in one sense you have demonstrated that causes do not necessitate their effects, in a sense more important to us, and equally physical, you have not."

It's partly a matter of semantics, but not entirely.

That said, I think that the approach this paper describes of thinking of causality in terms of "dispositional powers" is useful (in the context of free will)...

I'll respond to the rest later - I've got a few replies I owe to respondents here - but I wanted to note this idea of summing all contributions.

I think the challenge here is that if we include the contribution of every aspect of the reality at once it leads us to a kind of Cinematic Universe, in that taking any state of the entire universe  (S1 of U at T1) and then noting the next stage (S2 at U at T2) doesn't give us a real sense of causes. The entire Universe is the cause of the future Universe. Thus it also becomes difficult to separate background support causes from simply irrelevant conditions, to say nothing of the direct cause-effect relations we find so helpful in our manipulation of the environment, definitions of moral responsibility, etc. It is like scenes on a reel of film, where there is an illusion of cause/effect in the fiction displayed when the reel is in the projector.

For a bit of historical record, Hume's argument against causation itself was noticing that there is no necessity to a single observed cause-effect relationship in that each such relationship can be prevented (in theory at least, though often enough in actuality). This was why Hume, and in modern times New Materialists supporting the idea of "Hyper Chaos", said anything could happen but thankfully we have long lucky streaks of predictable effects happening from purported causes. The idea of dispositional causation, by not invoking Necessity, actually preserves the idea of causation against Hume's argument that causation is just lucky streak correlation.

But I would agree that this is not the strongest argument for dispositional causality, which comes into play more clearly when trying to explain the probability distributions that current science takes to be genuine indeterminism. The alternative is Nothing is not just doing Something, in the sense of the "Ex Nihilo" causation assumed by genuine Randomness, but doing a lot of different "somethings" each with a different probability distribution that holds so well people can speak of "probabilistic laws".

Of course this is all just taking physics into account, and not even thinking about how Psi phenomena would work, which I think also can be used as an argument for dispositional causation..

And once one has entered into the realm of causation as dispositions one has a "ground floor" where reality is moving in ways that are neither pure-Chance nor pure-Necessity. From there go "upward" to start looking at causal powers in mental causation, which in this context [is] continuing through the reading list, and eventually you get to the idea of generalizable/contextual "two-way" powers. 

Which is not to say one has to agree with any of that. But at the very least what the reading list provides is a possibility that should be conceivable/coherent. Of course one can disagree with that as well, but then at least something substantial is being debated/discussed where each layer of metaphysics is given a hearing.

"We already subsist... Within the current of causality.
We who exist beyond the physical are still merely shadows on the water...

...Maybe you aren't a shadow on the water...But instead, a fish that breaches the water's surface."
  -Kentaro Miura