Free will re-redux

[Laird]

It's a definition. There is no question of evidence and whether believe it, one way or the other.

Are you asking me why I believe that a person could or could not act without being coerced?

Whoosh. Right over your head. Or maybe you're just playing the straight man.

Second, we have contingency (as opposed to necessity). Contingency (as opposed to necessity) is obviously conceivable because it's a well-recognised concept in formal logic: contingent truths are those whose truth is not necessary.

Putting the two together, a contingent causal relation comprises some cause (or set of causes) according to which an effect occurs, but which does not necessitate that effect.

There is no inconceivability at any point.

If you want to argue that there is, then go ahead and try to make a cogent argument to that effect.

Surely randomness is the inconceivable option? Has there ever been a defense for the coherency of randomness?

If anything, the contingent causal relation you describe here is better suited to describe quantum phenomena than the idea of pure Chance resulting in measurable/replicable probability distributions at the QM level. After all the word Chance here is not standing in for an animistic spirit or a tutelary spirit like Lady Fortune, behind the curtain is literally Nothing.

And it is hard to imagine - I'd say inconceivable - Nothing is ensuring different radioactive isotopes are holding to their respective half-life rates of decay, providing a positional probability distribution for every electron, and making sure 4:100 photons reflect back off window glass rather than pass through.

It makes much more sense to think each instance of indeterminism is its own case of contingent causal relations, for example each isotope having its own active/dispositional causal power. As noted by Ajum & Mumford:

Understanding irreducibly probabilistically constrained causation is not easy unless one accepts that it involves a dispositional connection that is neither entirely necessary nor entirely [RANDOM]. Our coin tends towards a 50:50 distribution, but in a sequence of trials there could be any distribution of heads and tails. We know that an actual 50:50 distribution is unlikely, especially when the number of trails is low. But we also know that if the number of trials is high then a distribution wildly at odds with an equal distribution is highly unlikely. There is a principle of probabilistic distribution that, applied to this case,says that the proportion of heads and tails will tend to 50:50 as the number of tosses tends to infinity; or, the higher the number of tosses then the closer to 50:50 the distribution is likely to be. This principle is appealing and yet we might wonder why it is true. Is it just some brute fact about the world or does it have a truthmaker? The powers theory offers a truthmaker for the principle. The coin has a tendency to land heads and tails with equal chance, a tendency which manifests itself over a sequence of trails. But this is only a disposition towards such a distribution. It does not necessitate it, as we know when we acknowledge that any actual distribution is possible for any sequence of tosses. Yet the distribution is not entirely [RANDOM] either, as we know when we acknowledge that distributions at variance widely from 50:50 are unlikely, proportionate to the number of trails.

The case of probabilistically constrained causation thus corroborates our account. It is noteworthy in so far as the account seems to accord entirely with what we already accept pre-theoretically to be the data of chancy causes.

Where it gets more interesting is when we consider the world of physics currently suggests an "adequate determinism", defined on the Information Philosopher site:

There is actually no strict determinism at any "level" of the physical world. Determinism is an abstract theoretical ideal that simplifies physical systems to allow the use of logical and mathematical methods like differential equations. The macroscopic statistical "determinism" we see is the consequence of averaging over extremely large numbers of microscopic particles. Statistical determinism is a corollary of the probabilistic "law of large numbers" when dealing with a great many independent events.

Corroborated by the physicist Marko Vojinovic in Farewell to Determinism:

So if Nature is not deterministic, how come that our deterministic theories (like Newton’s laws of motion, or any generalization thereof) actually work so well in practice? If there is no determinism, how come we do not see complete chaos all around us? The answer is rather simple — in some cases chaos theory takes a long time to kick in.

So empirically we can argue against determinism, and then rationally conclude that between Chance and Contingent/Dispositional causal relations the latter wins out.

Interestingly enough the inclusion of parapsychology also suggests this kind of contingent/dispositional causation, as per Eric Weiss' The Long Trajectory - Reincarnation & Life After Death:

The human being attends to the pebble and the aims of the human being modify the aims of the occasions in the pebble so that they now desire the novelty of a movement against gravity. This will change their calculations regarding their next positions, and the pebble might then begin to levitate. If this is the process governing macro psychokinesis, true, then any attempt to identify efficient causes in causes of macroscopic levitation will fail, and we will have to learn to look to the interaction of final causes for an intelligible explanation.

Weiss here assumes the necessity of a consciousness to instantiate "final causes", but one could simply speak of the dispositional causation of the pebbles being altered by PK. Which gives us a nice example that isn't based on probabilities or interrupting expected cause-effect relations.

The other thing that the PK example gives us is the idea of a mental causation possessing a kind of dispositional causation of its own that informs the actions of the body the mind is seated in. Obviously there's the question of how rationality can play a role, and how this mental power could deliberate before making a decision and still have a place in the causal sequence while establishing a novel (to its own PoV) effect from a set of prior causes.

But that's all covered in the reading list...

....There's some essays that sadly aren't available as free PDFs that might in some cases be better or should come after the last paper Free Will & Mental Powers, but the list is a good overview at the least of starting with the realization of how much deeper one can go beyond observing causation and ending with an idea of what free will would look like as a causal power that's inline with our daily experience of it.

[Laird]

A killer post, Sci. Rocking it, dude.

I just want to pop in a quick clarification:

It makes much more sense to think each instance of indeterminism is its own case of contingent causal relations, for example each isotope having its own active/dispositional causal power. As noted by Ajum & Mumford:

Understanding irreducibly probabilistically constrained causation is not easy unless one accepts that it involves a dispositional connection that is neither entirely necessary nor entirely contingent. [remainder of quote snipped by Laird for brevity]

I think that here, Ajum and Mumford are using "contingent" in a different sense to that in which we (Sci and I at least) are: they are using it in the sense which on our wiki page we explicitly disclaim of our use, namely, "subject to chance". This is similar to the sense of (genuine) "randomness" as per the second pole of Paul's supposed dichotomy between causal necessitation ("determinism") and randomness - that which lacks a cause and is thus arbitrary - except that in Ajum and Mumford's use it does not imply a lack of a cause.

We instead use "contingent" with respect to causal relations in its logical sense as applied to truth; as in the context of truth simply meaning "true, but not by necessity; rather, just happening to be true". I think it is important to note that even in the logical context of truth, to say that a truth is "contingent" in the sense of "just happening" to be true is not to say that it is irrational or otherwise unamenable to reason (and thus is not to say that its truth is a matter of mere chance, as in Ajum and Mumford's usage above): contingent truths can certainly still be the conclusions of sound arguments, just as we can say of contingent causal relations that they can be (and on our definition, are) rational in the sense that their truthmaker is a (set of) reason(s) supplied by, for example, a conscious agent.

But, coming at it from a position equal to Paul's, compatibilism is a solid choice, with room for potential discoveries
saying that we might actually have more free will than we originally thought or less.

This Menuge paper might be of interest:

A basic problem is that “reasons-responsiveness” is ambiguous between a passive and an active notion. On the passive view, a computer is reasons-responsive because it responds to a rational program. However, all this shows is that the computer behaves in accordance with reason. Almost no-one thinks that the computer is reasoning for itself. So what compatibilists need is the active notion of reasons-responsiveness, according to which an agent actively selects,endorses, or takes responsibility for reasons, making those reasons his own. However, the problem is that only the passive notion of reasons-responsiveness is available to the naturalist. For on the naturalistic view, all an agent is reduces to,or depends on,a bundle of passive, automatic, event causal processes. There is no mental substance, agent cause or transcendent self over and above these processes that can select/endorse/take responsibility for some of them and not others. On the naturalistic view, we precisely are passive, organic computers, and so the best we can hope for is that our brains behave in accordance with reason, not that we can reason for ourselves or be responsible for our decisions.

I realize the compatibilist can retort that they believe in a soul just not one capable of "Libertarian" free will. (Really there's only one kind of free will but for clarity I'll add these terms.)

But I don't think this gets them very far, as it is unclear exactly how one deliberates via reason if the logical process is determined by the prior causes of the universe. As Menuge continues ->

John Searle argues that a Humean bundle of causal processes cannot account for human reasoning. He argues that we must postulate an irreducible non-Humean self, unified at a time and persisting over time.6Searle points out that in clear cases of human reasoning, an agent’s reasons cannot be viewed as sufficient event causes of his decisions, for then there is no distinction between compulsive and non-compulsive decisions.7 For example, we judge that if I am so seized by a desire, e.g. for double-chocolate cake, that I devour it like a machine, then although there was a reason for my action (my desire), my action is not the result of reasoning. Likewise if the ratiomaniac makes decisions that arise automatically from his reasons prior to deliberation, then deliberation is a pantomime that makes no difference to those decisions. Deliberation involves attending to evidence, goals and means, evaluating all of these, and drawing a practical or theoretical conclusion. But as Searle argues, this process has a point only if my beliefs and desires are not by themselves sufficient to yield the decision: there is a gap between my reasons and that decision (and other gaps as well 8). If selves were just Humean bundles of beliefs and desires, then they would transition automatically to a decision. Since there is gap between these beliefs and desires and the decision, this gap must be bridged by something else, and the clear evidence of introspection is that this entity is a unified, enduring self, that owns these beliefs and desires, and evaluates and selects some of them in making that decision.The obvious problem of this admission, however is that a non-Humean self sounds like a mental substance, with active agent causal power, both of which are incompatible with a naturalistic ontology.

It's hard to see the compatibilist soul, or just irreducible mental self if one prefers, is much different than the naturalist's Humean Bundle. What distinguishes the two, besides just the idea of a "soul"? After all the thinking to be done is entirely based on a deterministic chain stretching (infinitely?) far back in time.

So the paper's more damning to those who are Physicalists but I think the two critiques I pick out do show compatibilism-sans-Physicalism still leaves critical gaps in how determinism can account for rational actors.

A killer post, Sci. Rocking it, dude.

I just want to pop in a quick clarification:

Ah good catch. Philosophy's use of words gets challenging when the same word means different things.

Adding your work from the wiki page it seems we've got the following covered:

1. There are no laws of nature pinning down the Will.

2. Based on current scientific understanding, the macro/classical world has only an "adequate determinism" born from the "averaging out" of quantum indeterminism.

3. Quantum indeterminism makes more sense as contingent causal relations, suggesting different indeterministic behaviors are not-determined but also not-random.

4. The prime candidate to explain this non-determined, non-random behavior is causal powers/dispositions. Since this probabilistic disposition exists at the "bottom" of the physical world, these dispositions of contingent causal relations are the "nature of Nature" so to speak.

EJ Lowe, in his sadly not free essay, shows the next part of the challenge ->

As for the will’s being an active power—one whose manifestation or exercise is never caused by something acting upon the agent whose will it is—this is a claim that I believe to be supported on both phenomenological and metaphysical grounds. I shall return to this matter later. At present I merely wish to emphasize that one cannot object to such a claim on the supposed empirical grounds that no such powers exist in nature, since modern atomic physics tells us otherwise, the power of spontaneous radioactive decay being a case in point.

Ruth Groff. Powers and Capacities in Philosophy (Kindle Locations 3822-3827). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

But also ->

Indeed, since I have already likened the power of will to the spontaneous power of a radium atom to undergo radioactive decay, it might seem that I am particularly vulnerable to this objection [that the will is random]. However, although I do indeed classify the will as a spontaneous power—meaning thereby that it is an active, non-causal power—I by no means want to say that it is in every other respect just like the power to undergo radioactive decay.

Ruth Groff. Powers and Capacities in Philosophy (Kindle Locations 3858-3862). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

So there's a ways to go, but single steps beginning 1,000 mile journeys and all that. There are a variety of seemingly "side concerns" that I think are worthy rest stops, as they will show varied characteristics of the mind as supportive of the final (for forum purposes at least) account of how a kind of mental power is able to act in reason and as more than simply "shadows on the water".

I'll put it this way then: if I understand correctly, you contend that free will is logically impossible because (1) the required contingent causal relations are inconceivable (at least to you) and (2) conceivability is a necessary precondition for logical possibility.

I make no such claim, because I think the idea of conceivability is at best muddled and at worst incoherent. All I'm asking for is a high-level description of what happens between the final moment of indecision and the first moment of decision.

So, let's examine the conceivability of contingent causal relations. We can break this concept down into two parts. First, we have "causal relations". These comprise some cause (or set of causes) according to which an effect occurs. I think we all agree that causal relations are conceivable.

Sure, happy to agree for the sake of the conversation.

Second, we have contingency (as opposed to necessity). Contingency (as opposed to necessity) is obviously conceivable because it's a well-recognised concept in formal logic: contingent truths are those whose truth is not necessary.

Happy to agree.

Putting the two together, a contingent causal relation comprises some cause (or set of causes) according to which an effect occurs, but which does not necessitate that effect.

There is no inconceivability at any point.

That's fine, except I was not asking you to give a conceivable definition of contingent causal relation. My question is to explain how the contingent decision-making moves from indecision to decision.

Note that adding randomness to determinism makes everything contingent.

This is just inane. It's like asking for a description of the difference between seeing the colour red and seeing the colour blue. The difference is right there in the meaning of the words!

Huh? So the color perception process in the brain is explained entirely by linguistics?

~~ Paul

Whoosh. Right over your head. Or maybe you're just playing the straight man.

Do you realize how often you do this? It partially explains why these conversation go around in circles.

~~ Paul

Surely randomness is the inconceivable option? Has there ever been a defense for the coherency of randomness?

We can watch stochastic processes, so I'm not sure why we would need a philosophical defense.

You may certainly question whether there is actually some deterministic process going on underneath alpha decay, but then you would have to explain how a deterministic process can produce the measurably random effect of choosing which particle to decay at any given instant.

You could also propose that there is a libertarian free process going on underneath, but then we are just back to step 0.

~~ Paul

We can watch stochastic processes, so I'm not sure why we would need a philosophical defense.

But the very thing that post addresses is that stochastic processes, rather than being random (pure Chance), make more sense as contingent causal relations. Namely dispositional causation.

If there's a part of the argument you wish to challenge definitely feel free to do so.

But the very thing that post addresses is that stochastic processes, rather than being random (pure Chance), make more sense as contingent causal relations. Namely dispositional causation.

If there's a part of the argument you wish to challenge definitely feel free to do so.

It's too complicated and lacks evidence. Are people suggesting that large groups of particles have some sort of hive mind that selects when each particle will decay but organizes the decays so that the half lives work out? We have detected not a shred of evidence to support this model. I am no more able to imagine such a low-level behavior than I am to imagine a stochastic behavior.

But let's say for a second that such is the case. How does the hive mind decide when particle n will decay?

I'm not sure why people keep bringing up the 4 out of 100 photons through glass thing. That is not a stochastic process like particle decay (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questi...ass/199905).

"The macroscopic statistical "determinism" we see is the consequence of averaging over extremely large numbers of microscopic particles."

I agree.

~~ Paul