Free will re-redux

This depends entirely on your definition of random. 

But I'm happy to agree with you. However, that does not suddenly produce a coherent description of a nonrandom indeterministic event.

~~ Paul

Well I meant "random" as the selection of a possibility by pure Chance, so not in the sense of interest-relative causal ignorance. In fact I think that's inconceivable for the reasons Thomas Nail gives when talking about Pedesis ->

The very idea of a purely random motion presupposes that it was not affected by or related to anything else previously, which presupposes that it was the first thing and before it was nothing, which is a version of the internally contradictory hypothesis of ex nihilo creation: something from nothing. The ontology of random motion claims that from pure disorder of discrete nonrelational particles comes high-level composite order. Given the high level of order and complexity in our present age, randomness is demonstrably not the case.

Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion

I'd say the very fact that we have stochastic knowledge of QM indeterminism (like half-lives) is the biggest reason to reject the idea of quantum "randomness", as - to give another example - the fact 4 out of 100 photons on average reflect rather than pass through glass indicates a relation between the individual instances [of photons making contact with the glass].

Nail also says ->

Indeterminacy, however, is not random or even probabilistic, because position only occurs in continuous relation to momentum. Heisenberg thus showed that even at the quantum level, matter in motion is both relational and uncertain, or pedetic. Pedesis may be irregular and unpredictable, but it is not random. What is interesting about movement is not simply that it is pedetic, but that it is through pedesis and turbulence that metastable formations and emergent orders are possible. By contrast, the ontology of randomness is quite bleak. In a purely random ontology, all of matter would be moving randomly, and thus nonrelationally, at all times.

Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion

To me this is a genuine description of non-random, non-deterministic events. It makes far more sense than the idea that some possibility is actualized for absolutely no reason. It's odd to me that you don't find "randomness" inconceivable...maybe conceivable doesn't mean what you think it does?   

The "how" of a deterministic event is all of physics. That doesn't provide the ultimate bottom "how," but no one is asking for that with respect to a nonrandom indeterministic event, either. Give us the high-level "physics" of such events.

~~ Paul

Isn't the description Laird put in the PsienceQuest Wiki exactly on that level?

Maybe you can pull off a miracle.

Depends on what "conceive" means, how one conceives of randomness, and why Paul said your explanation seemingly agrees with him that free will is inconceivable. I suspect it has to do with irreducibility. I didn't think you were saying that's an explicit mystery, rather than this irreducible factor is the Will being non-composite as otherwise it wouldn't be a Will. How such a Will fits into a picture of the Real would differ by metaphysics IMO - In Classical Theism it is conferred by God's total dominion of all causation in Creation (as per Aquinas' 5th Way), in certain types of Idealism the question would be why a conscious agent's free will is limited rather than capable of bending reality directly.

Also I suspect it's true that every genuinely indeterministic phenomenon is temporally irreducible (thread here).

Temporal irreducibility is an example of why I think conversations about Free Will are really conversations about underlying disputed issues of Causation and Consciousness. Consider ->

1) If "conceiving" of Free Will aka Conscious Possibility Selection means rendering it into mathematical terms like that used to describe physics, then the prior issues are:

a) Does mathematics, specifically its limitation of descriptions which are deterministic or stochastic, capture the true nature of reality?

b) As "deterministic" and "random" are based on repeated initial conditions/causes (or the assumption of these), how does one categorize Unique Events? Relevant b/c the agent who has memory is never under the same causal conditions, the effects following from their decision are known to them.

c) How can something with a known probability distribution truly be random? Important because it suggests some causes are dispositional.

2) If "conceiving" means what space is left for free will besides the inflicting of Chance when you add up all the mental causes (which may be partially due to brain states or other factors) then the prior issues are:

a) The idea that mental causes are necessary as opposed to dispositional, or whether any cause can be said to necessitate an outcome.

b) That one can assign force vectors to qualitative/immaterial mental aspects whose distinctions are not clear.

c) We believe mental causes act like forces on us by our experience, so why would we then discount the experience of the Will exerting its own force? For example when one has to will the possibility of getting out of bed and going to work, or the much more pleasant willing of actualizing a possibility after deliberating between ice cream and cake. 

That we deliberate, even agonize over a choice, also suggests mental causes are dispositions but do not necessitate an outcome.

d) Given each instance of a decision is a Unique Event due to Memory, can one even avoid a circularity that offers no ultimate predictive power ->

The mental force sum for picking Ice Cream was stronger than the mental force sum for picking Cake, and we know the summed mental force vector for Ice Cream was stronger because I picked it over Cake. Tautologies are a bad starting place to try and argue for causal connections.

e) That the "I-self" is just a container for mental states as opposed to a "further fact" reflexive observer.

f) Whether the reflexive observer is/has an Intellect from which the Will follows.

g) What genuine divisions exist between Thinking/Willing/Feeling? What genuine divisions exist within a conscious agent at all?

Each of those pieces makes a difference. For example if mental causes (desires, fears, morals, etc) are at least dispositional, it potentially negates the randomness/deterministic dichotomy if one thinks consciousness is itself irreducible ->

Causation is Not Your Enemy

In the traditional division between compatibilism and incompatibilism, we see that many philosophers have thought there to be a tension between free will and prior causes. They effectively thought of free will and causation as incompatible. We saw the reason why: they thought causation entailed necessity, which then entailed determinism. For instance, Libet’s (1985) neuroscientific experiments show at the most, if they show anything at all, that conscious decisions have prior causes. This impinges on the debate only if you think that free will is incompatible with prior causation.

The real threat, we argued, was necessity because free will seems to be incompatible with determinism qua necessity (Mumford and Anjum 2014 also offer a defence of this kind of incompatibilism). This result is not alarming to any adherent of the dispositional modality for it is just an instance of the more general thesis that causation is incompatible with necessity, and thus with determinism qua causal necessity. Once that move has been made, the possibility is open for a re-appropriation of the term compatibilism. Our view is that free will is certainly compatible with causation. It is not something an agent needs to escape in order to be free. Indeed, how would freewill be possible other than through causation: allowing agents who are active, exercising causal powers in response to the worldly causes that affect them? The problem has been that many have thought the only way causation can work is through necessity and this has led them to assume that free will is threatened by causation per se. We have shown that it is not. Once causation and necessity are separated, you can see that causation is not your enemy.

As I said earlier in the thread, they in a sense predicted that the Libet Experiments would be debunked...

No kidding. I choose to exit the cycle, which in programming terms appears to be an endless loop: a while(1) with no break statement. I'll keep following the thread though. Maybe you can pull off a miracle.

This is the same as many philosophical debates. One starts with a set of rules at the outset, and follows through the consequences. If the rules don't change, the consequences remain the same. A bit like noughts-and-crosses (apparently also known as tic tac toe I've heard). Referenced in the movie "War Games". The conclusion, in the context of that film is '"a strange game" in which "the only winning move is not to play".

[Laird]

I suspect it has to do with irreducibility. I didn't think you were saying that's an explicit mystery, rather than this irreducible factor is the Will being non-composite as otherwise it wouldn't be a Will.

At the very least, I could say that the irreducibility I suggested is less of a mystery than the mystery of why "necessitating" deterministic rules hold; or of how a coherent "effect" (that which exemplifies the "randomness" postulated in this thread) could be without a cause.

Also I suspect it's true that every genuinely indeterministic phenomenon is temporally irreducible (thread here).

I saw that thread when you posted it and noticed with interest that it presented a concept that was compatible with the view expressed in the wiki article I seeded. (Incidentally, the only reason I didn't "like" your posts in that thread is that I have a policy of "liking" a post only if I've read/watched/listened-to all of the content/links shared in it, to be sure that I can "like" them too - and I haven't (yet?) done that for your thread. This, unfortunately is why I've withheld "likes" from so many of your threads/posts that I otherwise would have enthusiastically given: I don't have a lot of concentration for reading/watching/listening-to content these days.)

Temporal irreducibility is an example of why I think conversations about Free Will are really conversations about underlying disputed issues of Causation and Consciousness. Consider ->
[items in the lists elided by Laird for brevity]

Nicely done! A potent list. I won't comment on any of the issues that you raise, but they do seem very worth considering.

Each of those pieces makes a difference. For example if mental causes (desires, fears, morals, etc) are at least dispositional, it potentially negates the randomness/deterministic dichotomy if one thinks consciousness is itself irreducible ->

Causation is Not Your Enemy

A very interesting paper. Our wiki article that I seeded is broadly compatible with it, especially in the sense in which both recognise that the true barrier to conceiving of free will lies with the limiting of causation to necessitation. This has been the thrust of my part in these debates from the beginning (over on Skeptiko), as inspired by the Lecture Notes of Norman Swartz to which I link at the bottom of our wiki article. Obviously, Norman Swartz is not the only philosopher to have made this point; I expect that there are others than Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford too, but I'm simply not well-read enough to know who they are.

A few things I found interesting/curious in that article are:

1. Contra Kant, its authors claim that humans are not exceptions to an otherwise-necessitating causality of the external world, but rather that dispositional causality is the norm in (all of) the world. I think that this claim (assuming it is true) tends to suggest a conscious basis for, or a pervading consciousness in, nature, since consciousness seems to be a requirement for, or at least the best explanation for the existence of, dispositional causality.
   
   
2. 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".
   
   
3. They restrict free will to agents capable of normative higher-order thinking, particularly (exclusively?) thoughts about other agents, and thus suggest that "free agency [is] an emergent phenomenon of [...] society". This to me seems to be an unnecessary restriction.
   

In any case, that article has got me considering strongly that I ought to replace "contingent" with "dispositional" in our wiki article, given the unfortunate alternative sense of "contingent" as "subject to chance" - exactly the meaning it is (in our article) supposed to be contrasted against, rather than identified with. What do you think? Or is there an even better word in the context of that wiki article?

[Laird]

This is the same as many philosophical debates. One starts with a set of rules at the outset, and follows through the consequences. If the rules don't change, the consequences remain the same. A bit like noughts-and-crosses (apparently also known as tic tac toe I've heard). Referenced in the movie "War Games". The conclusion, in the context of that film is '"a strange game" in which "the only winning move is not to play".

An interesting comment, Typoz. I'd be curious to know how you itemise or otherwise describe the set of rules that apply (or are being applied) in this particular philosophical debate - but only if it takes your fancy.

An interesting comment, Typoz. I'd be curious to know how you itemise or otherwise describe the set of rules that apply (or are being applied) in this particular philosophical debate - but only if it takes your fancy.

I think, almost as my previous post suggested, I will decline that invitation.

At the very least, I could say that the irreducibility I suggested is less of a mystery than the mystery of why "necessitating" deterministic rules hold; or of how a coherent "effect" (that which exemplifies the "randomness" postulated in this thread) could be without a cause.

Yeah as Consciousness and Causation are (the only two?) intrinsic irreducible properties, rather than relational, it is less bizarre that they have some irreducible convergence than randomness (determinism being randomness of a special kind).

I saw that thread when you posted it and noticed with interest that it presented a concept that was compatible with the view expressed in the wiki article I seeded. (Incidentally, the only reason I didn't "like" your posts in that thread is that I have a policy of "liking" a post only if I've read/watched/listened-to all of the content/links shared in it, to be sure that I can "like" them too - and I haven't (yet?) done that for your thread. This, unfortunately is why I've withheld "likes" from so many of your threads/posts that I otherwise would have enthusiastically given: I don't have a lot of concentration for reading/watching/listening-to content these days.)

No worries. I think Smolin's idea of a "thick present" gets us passed the kind of spatial divisions of time that lead to Xeno's paradoxes as well gives a picture for how indeterminism in a general sense operates in reality

Nicely done! A potent list. I won't comment on any of the issues that you raise, but they do seem very worth considering.

Yeah it's a bunch of priors, though I should have added the argument that Intentionality - the aboutness of our thoughts by which we apprehend the Real - is how we achieve interest-relative causation and itself goes in the opposite direction of causal flow.

I think Tallis mentions this in the article you linked on the Wiki, How Can I Possibly Be Free?

A very interesting paper. Our wiki article that I seeded is broadly compatible with it, especially in the sense in which both recognise that the true barrier to conceiving of free will lies with the limiting of causation to necessitation.

Yeah this is pretty much what the Anjum and Mumford article is saying too. Causes can dispose entities toward effects without necessitating them. In fact given physics - by current evidence - supposes an underlying indeterminism to reality it would seem all causation in the outer world is dispositional.

Contra Kant, its authors claim that humans are not exceptions to an otherwise-necessitating causality of the external world, but rather that dispositional causality is the norm in (all of) the world. I think that this claim (assuming it is true) tends to suggest a conscious basis for, or a pervading consciousness in, nature, since consciousness seems to be a requirement for, or at least the best explanation for the existence of, dispositional causality.

Yeah I think this [position of Naturalism on their part] is wrong but offers a sense of optimism for the proponent. After all morality with its attendants like righteousness and regret is seated in the idea of humans making genuine choices. And without choice, what is the point of the Life Review?

And once this agent is irreducible, as Arvan notes, a lot of the arguments against free will dissolve ->

According to Libertarian Compatibilism, the beliefs and desires we experience are -- much like Kant said -- experiences of physical information outside of us. Although our beliefs and desires incline us to act in various ways, on Libertarian Compatibilism we nevertheless have a brute capacity (outside of the physical world of information) to reflect on our beliefs and desires and decide whether to act upon them...

...on this theory, the beliefs and desires we have now are partly the result of libertarian choices we made in the past

This relates to our past conversation, where the decision within a particular Possibility Space translates the conscious agent into a new Possibility Space.

But even without a soul in the usual sense the above note about the Intentionality being outside the usual causal ordering applies. Yet this Kantian sense of mental causes being dispositions on the "outside" of the I-self shows that just as intentionality allows one a special place in the causal order of the external world, it also allows one to stand - by our reflective capacity - in special relation to our inner mental aspects.

Its authors note that accounts such as Aristotle's of superficially dispositional causality ultimately "resolve into some form of necessity, such as conditional necessity"...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".

Yeah in another paper they note quantum indeterminism is an argument for dispositional causation of the physical world.

But them being naturalists ultimately leaves them in more trouble than a proponent would be in. After all if we sum up all of physics in the Universe for any one event it's hard to see how causes could be understood. The Real would like the progressing/cycling of animation cells, with no separable causes - which we know is false because our own causal power is how machines are made, catapults built, etc. But our causal power is through our self-reflexive identification as causal agents.

They restrict free will to agents capable of normative higher-order thinking, particularly (exclusively?) thoughts about other agents, and thus suggest that "free agency [is] an emergent phenomenon of [...] society". This to me seems to be an unnecessary restriction.

Yeah their naturalism leaves them in a bit of a quagmire. They made a good first step by suggesting dispositional causation, but because they are saying consciousness is grounded by the "physical" - whatever that term mysteriously refers to - rather than the other way around they are left with multiple issues.

After all, Conscious Possibility Selection is the only view we have of causation from the intrinsic perspective - it's our only  "inside" view into how for anything that happens there's a grounding of why every other live possibility didn't happen. There's stronger arguments dependent on different metaphysical pictures but that would be the starting point.

In any case, that article has got me considering strongly that I ought to replace "contingent" with "dispositional" in our wiki article, given the unfortunate alternative sense of "contingent" as "subject to chance" - exactly the meaning it is (in our article) supposed to be contrasted against, rather than identified with. What do you think? Or is there an even better word in the context of that wiki article

Possibly, but I'll check the private message you sent with more details on what gets changed.

Intentionality - the aboutness of our thoughts by which we apprehend the Real - is how we achieve interest-relative causation and itself goes in the opposite direction of causal flow.

I think Tallis mentions this in the article you linked on the Wiki, How Can I Possibly Be Free?

As an addendum, here's the SEP's section General Objections to Causal Theories of Mental Content.

Also I just added Feser's Some brief arguments for dualism, Part V to the thread linked in the quote, but for ease of reference ->

Now, again, what is it about this complex chain of events that justifies picking out A and B specifically and labeling them “the beginning” and “the end” respectively? Why is it the cat’s presence on the mat that counts as “the beginning” – rather than, say, the flipping of the light switch, or the flow of the current to the ceiling lamp, or the arrival of such-and-such a photon at exactly the midpoint between the surface of the cat and the observer’s left retina? Why is it brain process B exactly that counts as “the end” of the causal chain – rather than, say, the brain process immediately before B or immediately after B, or the walk over to the refrigerator, or the motion of such-and-such a shard of glass from the broken milk bottle as it skips across the floor? Of course, we have an interest in picking out and identifying cats and not in picking out and identifying individual photons, and an interest in brain processes and their associated mental states that we don’t have in shards of glass. But that is a fact about us, not a fact about the physical world itself. Objectively, as far as the physical world itself is concerned, there is just the ongoing and incredibly complex sequence of causes and effects, which extends indefinitely forward and backward in time well beyond the events we have described. Objectively, that is to say, there is no such thing as “the beginning” or “the end,” and nothing inherently significant about any one event as compared to another.

Popper’s point, and Putnam’s, is that what count as the “beginning” and “end” points of such a causal sequence, and thus what counts as “the causal sequence” itself considered in isolation from the rest of the overall causal situation, are interest relative. These particular aspects of the overall causal situation have no special significance apart from a mind which interprets them as having it. But in that case they cannot coherently be appealed to in order to explain the mind. It is no good saying that the representational character of our mental states derives from their causal relations when the causal relations themselves cannot be specified except in terms of how they are represented by certain mental states. A vicious circularity afflicts any such “theory” of intentionality.

This parallels the arguments made by the neuroscientist/atheist/philosopher Raymond Tallis in How Can I Possibly be Free?

"That intentionality cannot be understood in terms of the laws of physics may seem a rather startling claim. It will help to explore a very basic example: my perceiving a material object — more specifically, my seeing a material object. If you believe the kind of account that underpins determinism, the light from the object enters my eyes and stirs up neural activity, and this activity is the basis of my seeing the object — and, moreover, my seeing the object is nothing more than this neural activity. But this story is incomplete. For while the passage of light into the brain is an instance of standard physical causation, the gaze that looks out most certainly is not. It is different from a physical causal chain in two respects. First, whereas the directionality of the phenomenon of light passing into the brain is “downstream” from cause to effect (from the object that deflected the light to the neural activity in the brain), the directionality of the gaze is “upstream,” from the effect to its cause (the neural activity to the object of the perception). And second, whereas the “forward arrow” of the causal chain that includes the triggering of neural activity by the light extends without limit forward into the causal nexus, the “reverse arrow” of the gaze is finite: it refers to and so comes to a rest on the object, and does not, for example, refer or look beyond the object to the earlier history of the light.

This “bounce back,” this causal reversal, has crucial consequences. The object that is picked out by the gaze has some notable features, the most important of which is that in human beings and not in any other sort of beings, it explicitly exceeds the experience of it. The perception is not just of the appearance of the object but about the object as something that is more than its present appearances. It is experienced as a source of future possible experiences. These possible experiences have a generic character, quite different from the definite particularity of the items in the material world. Objects of perception open up, and hold open, what we might call a Space of Possibility that exists explicitly for embodied subjects such as you and I. The object is also public, accessible by any other embodied subject; it is therefore the ground floor of a shared Space of Possibility — what the American philosopher Donald Davidson called “the community of minds.” This is the human world that unfolds through the joint and shared attention we pay to things. It is outside of material causation. Indeed, it is in this shared human world that, as the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling put it, “Nature opens her eyes and sees that she exists.

When a Traditionalist Catholic Theologian and Atheist Secularist Neuroscientist agree on something...

And then:


Did I pick it or what?

Yes, you did. Why? Because you said:

"In considering S3, we might find that although to an extent it can be broken down a little, at some point it becomes irreducible: the person, given the full context of his/her situation, simply holistically and contingently makes the choice. At that level, the choice cannot be broken down any further."

You've declared the critical part of the issue---how one makes a nonrandom indeterministic decision---to be irreducible. That's fine, but why don't you (and others) simply answer my question: I do not know how a nonrandom indeterministic decision is made. Then I would not keep pestering you in the hope that you have something to say about it.

I'm not sure why I should believe in the possibility of nonrandom indeterministic decisions based solely on a claim of irreducibility.

~~ Paul

I think this depends on what Paul means by "conceive".


Of particular interest is what he means by "conceiving" of randomness.

Also I feel like there's this cycle that needs to be explained:

1) We seem to start off with the issue of the randomness/determinism dichotomy. This seems to be the source of the idea that free will is incoherent.

2) But then we are told the "how" problem exists even if one (temporarily at least) forgoes the dichotomy.

3) Yet attempted clarification of the "how" problem always seems to lead back to the inability to conceive of something that is neither deterministic nor random.

I skipped around in the 75 page thread and this was the same problem there. Of course this is why I said people should stop talking about free will until they've had a good conversation or ten about causation...

But there is no clarification of the "how" problem. At least Laird is being straightforward in saying that it is irreducible in between and below the point where it is deterministic and/or arbitrary. So now I am left with deciding whether I want to have faith that there is a nonrandom indeterministic component.

You keep saying we should talk about causation. I don't know what to say beyond the fact that we have computers and particle decay. Below that I agree we don't have any way of explaining how or why. But with free decisions, we have no explanation at any level. We have no examples to point to except our own feelings of what is going on.

But if you think you can offer something in the context of causation rather than decision-making, I'm happy to listen.

~~ Paul