Putting the Will Back in Free Will

Another post from Ghenadie Mardari:

"Dear Gardeners:

I would like to thank all of you who replied to my previous post (Ghenadie
Mardari on free will).

http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2008/11/ghenadie-mardari-on-free-will.html

Your comments and questions helped me advance a little farther in my work
on free will.

This time, I would like to bring to your attention a very short paper (8
double-spaced pages), in which I summarize my current position on this
issue. I have come to the conclusion that modern debates on free will
focus too much on the “free” part, and not enough on the “will” part. The
will is a concept that only makes sense in a (more or less) dualistic
picture. Mind and matter are supposed to be functionally independent, at
least when the initiation of action is expected to take place. Will is the
property that mediates between them. In other words, the body is like a
machine, and the mind can push its buttons through the “magic” of the
will.

I wish to suggest that the will, so defined, can be described as free
without running into conceptual problems. It leads to an understanding of
agency and responsibility that resonates with our intuitions and social
practices. In the final analysis, the only problem is physicalism.

The text can be found here:
http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~ghena/thesis/Ch.III/Wil4will.pdf

Thank you,
Ghenadie"

Comments

[Ghenadie Mardari]

Dear Gardeners:

I would like to explain my claim that the will, as commonly understood, can be free without conceptual problems. First of all, the will is supposed to belong to a shared “folk picture” about the world, in which the mind has power over matter. In other words, there is a functionally independent mind, which makes decisions, there is matter that can be acted upon, and then there is the will that does the acting. In physicalist models, which reduce all types of phenomena to physical causes, the mind cannot be functionally independent from matter, and therefore there is no room for the will.

The will is free in the following sense:

1. It acts on matter through non-deterministic “gateways”. Think of Kane’s cascade switch that is triggered by a quantum fluctuation. Macroscopic events are determined by microscopic events through non-linear mechanisms. The quantum fluctuation is fundamentally random, and therefore not directly determined by prior events. Similarly, we can assume that the will does its “magic” through indeterminate processes. In other words, the quantum state is collapsed by the will in a desired manner, rather than by some probabilistic laws. The physical history of the Universe leads to a junction with indeterminate outcomes. The will determines what follows next.

2. The will is not identical with the mental decision. First, the mind decides something; then the will takes note of it and… implements it or not. People who can follow their decisions with action are appropriately described as having “strong” will, in contrast to the rest of them who have “weak” will. Of course, the reasons and motivations for the decision must be determined directly by physical events, in order to be relevant for the context of action. However, the will is independent from them. Therefore, there is no “back door” causation from matter on the act of will.

Is the will mine, given this sort of independence? Yes, because it is determined by my sense of self. As described in the comments for my previous post, the sense of self is assumed to develop on the basis of my past developmental acts of will. When I exercise my will, it is either because I have an appropriate tag for the type of decision that is proposed by my mind, or because I want to acquire such a tag. The sense of self develops through acts of will alone, and is therefore not reducible to prior material states of the Universe. As a result, I can determine my actions in a manner that does not raise issues about intelligibility. That is why I claim that free will is a meaningful concept.

[ESZ, James]

I agree with wut u say!

This is wut I think about it:
http://jamesesz.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/the-seventh-meditation-homo-sapiens-the-limitations-of-man-and-the-possibilities-of-homo-superior/

I will read through the paper in the near future..My exams are looming! lol..

~ESZ, James

[Sofia Jeppsson]

Perhaps I don't belong to the folk, because I find this description of the will extremely weird.

If I was to describe what a "will" is, it would rather be something that is identical to the conscious act of deciding. And what I experience when I decide to do something, can probably be described from another angle by looking at events in my brain (I'd be surprised if it turned out that this is not possible).

So when do we perform "acts of will"?
Suppose your more or less subconscious awareness of cake being good and there being no bad consequences from eating cake makes you start stuffing your mouth with cake while thinking of other matters - in that case I wouldn't call the cake-eating an act of will.
Suppose on the other hand that you actually think "that cake looks good, and since I don't think any bad consequences (health-wise, for example) could come out of eating cake on the rare party, I'll take a big piece of it", then your will was involved. But in everyday speak, I think we normally use the phrase "act of will" more about acts that required a mental effort.
So suppose again that you know, on an intellectual level, that the cake is good and there are no bad consequences from eating it. But since you're in the process of recovering from anorexia, you feel a strong irrational fear of eating cake. Suppose you make a mental effort to calm yourself and eat the cake anyway - I think lots of people would spontaneously label the cake-eating in this instance as a true act of will.
But once again, there seems to be no need for posting the existence of some immaterial agency. It's perfectly consistent with this picture that a neurologist could have monitored your brain while all this was happening and correlating your thoughts, fear, mental effort, decision and cake-eating with various neural events, that might obey the laws of nature as much as anything.

Now, being weak-willed in the sense of not doing what you've decided to do doesn't necessarily imply that the will is something other than the decision, that can either follow the decision or fail to do so. It could just as well be the case that the very decisions of weak-willed people are different from the decisions of strong-willed people. I'm not sure of how to elaborate this at the moment, but I read Mele's "autonomous agents" a while ago. He deals with all kinds of acrasia, in decision, action and belief, and that is done from a compatibilist standpoint and without reference to any immaterial and mysterious wills. Although I don't remember everything about the book, and although I don't agree with all his intutions on moral responsibility, I remember it being very clear and easy reading, and the acrasia definitions being good. (I'm actually gonna reread it now.)

Anyway, if you want to claim that there's a folk intuition about your concept of the will, I think you need some empirical backing. To my ears the whole idea of this immaterial will that acts as an intermediary between decision and action sounds really weird. And perhaps I'm not that far from "the folk"? Who knows, without some kind of empirical investigation?

[Ghenadie Mardari]

Dear Sofia:

Your point is quite valid: hiding behind obscure “folk” definitions of the will is not very constructive. So, let me try to answer your question in terms of my own conceptual preferences. First of all, rational deliberation sounds intelligible to me only as a deterministic enterprise. If there are several competing reasons with regard to any given action, I would want the stronger one to win. When there is no reason for any alternative to prevail, I am simply undecided. I cannot call that freedom and feel good about it. Secondly, irrational drives for action seem equally objective as processes. If I have a phobia, or an addiction, or any other type of irrational drive, it is just a fact of Nature. Whether inherited or acquired, it is there and it is not up to me. Third, when there is a conflict between rational resolutions and irrational drives, something else has to break the tie. I attribute this to the sense of self, which completely governs the exercise of the will. Some types of conflicts may be resolved in favor of rational considerations, while others might not. The mental effort that is involved in these situations is not spent on deciding what to do. It is invested in trying to decide what kind of a person I am with regard to the situation at hand. For example, am I the kind of person that can resist temptation?

In this context, the sense of self has to evolve on the basis on my personal history of acts of will, and nothing else. This protects it from external determinism. Note that it is not a physical property. It is a process of awareness, which gives it an invaluable flexibility. (Though, the memory of tags for action must supervene on some sort of physical state). At the same time, the will has to act with non-physical means (in one possible realization, it tells the wave-function which way to collapse) in order to make it true that several actions are simultaneously up to me, even though the final choice may be determined prior to the moment of action. So, the buck stops with me and my actions are not arbitrary. This is how I get to acts of will that are both determined and not reducible to all earlier states of the Universe.

In conclusion, I do not need to insist that my concepts have any sort of empirical support. My goal is to propose a model of free will that is both intelligible and “worth wanting”. If free will is defined as a property of decisions, we get into well-known paradoxes (it is incompatible with determinism, and incompatible with indeterminism, or else I am not the ultimate cause of my actions). My claim is that we can avoid these difficulties by shifting the focus to this alternative definition of free will. I am asking for your help, in order to see if this claim is justified.