The simple and logical argument against free will is that either determinism or indeterminism is true.
If determinism is true, we are not free.
If indeterminism is true, our actions are random, so we did not will them.
We are not responsible either way. Ergo, no free will. Q.E.D.
The flaw in the argument concerns indeterminacy. Because logic is time and space independent, many philosophers assume that if indeterminism if true, randomness is significant and relevant at all times and all places, independent of scale or size.
But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures. Macroscopic structures, including our brains and bodies, are adequately determined - except when some useful indeterminacy helps us to generate alternative possibilities, or (and this is very important) allows us to be creative and bring genuinely new information into the universe.
So could you accept some chance in your own causal chain that would not make your decisions random?
I suggest seven places where even compatibilists and determinists might accept some chance in the causal chain leading up to their latest decision, which I hope they might agree is an "adequately determined" decision that is truly "up to them."
1) Only at the original moment of the "big bang."
(This leads us to Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument).
2) During genetic mutations that created the species homo sapiens.
(Without this chance, none of us would be here.)
3) Nine months before your birth. (It was one in a million which of your father's sperm would win the race to your mother's egg. Without this one, you wouldn't be one of us.)
4) During your moral education.
(These
are those rare events that C. S. Peirce calls the "fixation of
beliefs," and Bob Kane calls "self-forming actions." These are
important because they may contribute to your latest decisions.)
5) When you decided to become a philosopher.
(Again, without this one, you wouldn't be part of the Garden. How many of you think chance might have played a part?)
6) During deliberation about your current options.
(In
these sometimes extended moments, your subconscious processing of
possibilities may consider thousands of input factors and evaluate
enormous numbers of possible outcomes. If you are creative, you may
come up with ideas never thought of by anyone before you. Thus chance
and indeterminacy is involved up until a fraction of a second before
your "moment of choice." This is my Cogito model. www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/)
6) During the decision itself.
(Bob
Kane, Laura Ekstrom, Mark Balaguer and others argue that your decision
must not be "determined" by all the considerations that arise during
your deliberation. You are not free enough , they say, even if some of
the alternative posssibilities might be random combinations of your own
past experiences that you have dreamed up yourself.
Compatibilists should be quite content to think that this decision is adequately determined (that randomness is negligible ) by an evaluation process that included our character and values, our habits and preferences, our current feelings and desires, etc. This then is a "kind of freedom available to us," as Galen Strawson recently agreed.)
I think the Libertarians have been right about the need for some indeterminacy, but they are wrong to try to push it into our decisions themselves, with one exception. Mark Balaguer's "torn decisions," perhaps some of Kane's "decisions requiring great effort," and in general Buridan-type "liberty of indifference" decisions, might all be made by flipping a "mental coin." If we are fully aware that it is a random choice, and if we are prepared to accept responsibility either way, perhaps we can still regard this as an act of our will.
On my Information Philosopher website, I have researched over twenty recent philosophers (including a few Gardeners) who have published versions of this simple and logical argument. It apparently has convinced them, and perhaps hundreds or thousands of their philosophy students and readers of their textbooks.
None of them appear to have seen this flaw. Do you agree that there is a flaw here that might be corrected by a clearer description of how indeterminacy can be limited - to do no harm to an adequate determinism.
More important, do you see how indeterminacy can help to provide a kind of freedom from the fixed past (and the laws of nature, as the argument goes) and an ability for humans to be creative individuals?
For your convenience, I quote below many of these versions of the standard argument, which I expect some of you have used from time to time.
Can you read them over with the suggested flaw in mind?
_______________________________
But nevertheless he states the standard argument succinctly:belief that all human actions are subservient to causal laws still remains to be justified. If, indeed, it is necessary that every event should have a cause, then the rule must apply to human behaviour as much as to anything else. But why should it be supposed that every event must have a cause? The contrary is not unthinkable. Nor is the law of universal causation a necessary presupposition of scientific thought.
But now we must ask how it is that I come to make my choice. Either it is an accident that I choose to act as I do or it is not. If it is an accident, then it is merely a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise; and if it is merely a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise, it is surely irrational to hold me morally responsible for choosing as I did. But if it is not an accident that I choose to do one thing rather than another, then presumably there is some causal explanation of my choice: and in that case we are led back to determinism.
(Philosophical Essays, 1954, p.275)
Dl. I shall state the view that there is "unbroken causal continuity" in the universe as follows. It is in principle possible to make a sufficiently precise determination of the state of a sufficiently wide region of the universe at time to, and sufficient laws of nature are in principle ascertainable to enable a superhuman calculator to be able to predict any event occurring within that region at an already given time t'.
D2. I shall define the view that "pure chance" reigns to some extent within the universe as follows. There are some events that even a superhuman calculator could not predict, however precise his knowledge of however wide a region of the universe at some previous time.
For the believer in free will holds that no theory of a deterministic sort or of a pure chance sort will apply to everything in the universe: he must therefore envisage a theory of a type which is neither deterministic nor indeterministic in the senses of these words which I have specified by the two definitions DI and D2; and I shall argue that no such theory is possible.
("Free-Will, Praise and Blame," Mind, July 1961, reprinted in Dworkin, 1970)
...the notions of moral guilt, of blame, of moral responsibility are inherently confused and that we can see this to be so if we consider the consequences either of the truth of determinism or of its falsity. The holders of this opinion agree with the pessimists that these notions lack application if determinism is true, and add simply that they also lack it if determinism is false.
(Freedom and Resentment, 1962, reprinted in Watson (ed.), Free Will)
The metaphysical problem of human freedom might be summarized in the following way: "Human beings are responsible agents; but this fact appears to conflict with a deterministic view of human action (the view that every event that is involved in an act is caused by some other event); and it also appears to conflict with an indeterministic view of human action (the view that the act, or some event. that is essential to the act, is not caused at all)." To solve the problem, I believe, we must make somewhat far-reaching assumptions about the self of the agent — about the man who performs the act.
("Freedom and Action," 1964, in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Keith Lehrer, 1966, p.11)
Both determinism and simple indeterminism are loaded with difficulties, and no one who has thought much on them can affirm either of them without some embarrassment. Simple indeterminism has nothing whatever to be said for it, except that it appears to remove the grossest difficulties of determinism, only, however, to imply perfect absurdities of its own.
Determinism, on the other hand, is at least initially plausible. Men seem to have a natural inclination to believe in it; it is, indeed, almost required for the very exercise of practical intelligence. And beyond this, our experience appears always to confirm it, so long as we are dealing with everyday facts of common experience, as distinguished from the esoteric researches of theoretical physics. But determinism, as applied to human behavior, has implications which few men can casually accept, and they appear to be implications which no modification of the theory can efface..
(Metaphysics, 1963, p.46)
Without free will, we seem diminished, merely the playthings of external forces. How, then, can we maintain an exalted view of ourselves? Determinism seems to undercut human dignity, it seems to undermine our value.
Some would deny what this question accepts as given, and save free will by denying determinism of (some) actions. Yet if an uncaused action is a random happening, then this no more comports with human value than does determinism. Random acts and caused acts alike seem to leave us not as the valuable originators of action but as an arena, a place where things happen, whether through earlier causes or spontaneously.
("Free Will", chapter 4 of Philosophical Explanations, 1981, p.291-2)
Here is an argument that I think is obvious (I don't mean it's obviously right; I mean it's one that should occur pretty quickly to any philosopher who asked himself what arguments could be found to support incompatibilism):
If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.
I shall call this argument the Consequence Argument.
[A variant argument van Inwagen called the Mind Argument after the Mind journal] proceeds by identifying indeterminism with chance and by arguing that an act that occurs by chance, if an event that occurs by chance can be called an act, cannot be under the control of its alleged agent and hence cannot have been performed freely. Proponents of [this argument] conclude, therefore, that free will is not only compatible with determinism but entails determinism.
(Essay on Free Will, 1983, p.16)
Van Inwagen dramatized his understanding of the indeterministic brain events needed for agent causation by imagining God "replaying" a situation to create exactly the same circumstances and then arguing that decisions would reflect the indeterministic probabilities.
If God caused Marie's decision to be replayed a very large number of times, sometimes (in thirty percent of the replays, let us say) Marie would have agent-caused the crucial brain event and sometimes (in seventy percent of the replays, let us say) she would not have... I conclude that even if an episode of agent causation is among the causal antecedents of every voluntary human action, these episodes do nothing to undermine the prima facie impossibility of an undetermined free act.
("Van Inwagen on Free Will," in Freedom and Determinism, 2004, ed. Joseph Keim Campbell, et al., p.227)
As far as human freedom is concerned, it doesn't matter whether physics is deterministic, as Newtonian physics was, or whether it allows for an indeterminacy at the level of particle physics, as contemporary quantum mechanics does. Indeterminism at the level of particles in physics is really no support at all to any doctrine of the freedom of the will; because first, the statistical indeterminacy at the level of particles does not show any indeterminacy at the level of the objects that matter to us – human bodies, for example. And secondly, even if there is an element of indeterminacy in the behaviour of physical particles – even if they are only statistically predictable – still, that by itself gives no scope for human freedom of the will; because it doesn't follow from the fact that particles are only statistically determined that the human mind can force the statistically-determined particles to swerve from their paths. Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules in directions that they were not otherwise going to move. So it really does look as if everything we know about physics forces us to some form of denial of human freedom.
(Mind, Brains, and Science, 1984, pp.86-7)
It is a compelling objection. Surely we cannot be free agents, in the ordinary, strong, true-responsibility-entailing sense, if determinism is true and we and our actions are ultimately wholly determined by "causes anterior to [our] personal existence"* And surely we can no more be free if determinism is false and it is, ultimately, either wholly or partly a matter of chance or random outcome that we and our actions are as they are?
(Freedom and Belief, 1986, p.25)
The argument is exceedingly familiar, and runs as follows. Either determinism is true or it is not. If it is true, then all our chosen actions are uniquely necessitated by prior states of the world, just like every other event. But then it cannot be the case that we could have acted otherwise, since this would require a possibility determinism rules out. Once the initial conditions are set and the laws fixed, causality excludes genuine freedom.
On the other hand, if indeterminism is true, then, though things could have happened otherwise, it is not the case that we could have chosen otherwise, since a merely random event is no kind of free choice. That some events occur causelessly, or are not subject to law, or only to probabilistic law, is not sufficient for those events to be free choices.
Thus one horn of the dilemma represents choices as predetermined happenings in a predictable causal sequence, while the other construes them as inexplicable lurches to which the universe is randomly prone. Neither alternative supplies what the notion of free will requires, and no other alternative suggests itself. Therefore freedom is not possible in any kind of possible world. The concept contains the seeds of its own destruction.
(Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry, 1993, p.80)
...the well-known dilemma of determinism. One horn of this dilemma is the argument that if an action was caused or necessitated, then it could not have been done freely, and hence the agent is not responsible for it. The other horn is the argument that if the action was not caused, then it is inexplicable and random, and thus it cannot be attributed to the agent, and hence, again, the agent cannot be responsible for it. In other words, if our actions are caused, then we cannot he responsible for them; if they are not caused, we cannot be responsible for them. Whether we affirm or deny necessity and determinism, it is impossible to make any coherent sense of moral freedom and responsibility.
(Freedom and Moral Sentiment, 1995, p.14)
Let us now consider the libertarians, who claim that we have a capacity for indeterministically free action, and that we are thereby morally responsible. According to one libertarian view, what makes actions free is just their being constituted (partially) of indeterministic natural events. Lucretius, for example, maintains that actions are free just in virtue of being made up partially of random swerves in the downward paths of atoms. These swerves, and the actions they underlie, are random (at least) in the sense that they are not determined by any prior state of the universe.
If quantum theory is true, the position and momentum of micro-particles exhibit randomness in this same sense, and natural indeterminacy of this sort might also be conceived as the metaphysical foundation of indeterministically free action. But natural indeterminacies of these types cannot, by themselves, account for freedom of the sort required for moral responsibility.
As has often been pointed out, such random physical events are no more within our control than are causally determined physical events, and thus, we can no more be morally responsible for them than, in the indeterminist opinion, we can be for events that are causally determined.
(Noûs 29, 1995, reprinted in Free Will, ed. D. Pereboom, 1997, p.252)
a random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility. (How The Mind Works, 1997, p.54)
Among the grandest of philosophical puzzles is a riddle about moral responsibility. Almost all of us believe that each one of us is, has been, or will be responsible for at least some of our behavior. But how can this be so if determinism is true and all our thoughts, decisions, choices, and actions are simply droplets in a river of deterministic events that began its flow long, long before we were ever born? The specter of determinism, as it were, devours agents, for if determinism is true, then arguably we never initiate or control our actions; there is no driver in the driver's seat; we are simply one transitional link in an extended deterministic chain originating long before our time. The, puzzle is tantalizingly gripping and ever so perplexing — because even if determinism is false, responsibility seems impossible: how can we be morally accountable for behavior that issues from an "actional pathway" in which there is an indeterministic break? Such a break might free us from domination or regulation by the past, but how can it possibly help to ensure that the reins of control are now in our hands?
(Moral Appraisability, 1998, p.vii)
Accounts of free will purport to tell us what is required if we are to be free agents, individuals who, at least sometimes when we act, act freely. Libertarian accounts, of course, include a requirement of indeterminism of one sort or another somewhere in the processes leading to free actions. But while proponents of such views take determinism to preclude free will, indeterminism is widely held to be no more hospitable. An undetermined action, It is said would be random or arbitrary. It could not be rational or rationally explicable. The agent would lack control over her behavior. At best, indeterminism in the processes leading to our actions would be superfluous, adding nothing of value even if it did not detract from what we want.
(Libertarian Accounts of Free Will. Oxford, 2003, p. xiii)If the truth of determinism would preclude free will, it is far from obvious how indeterminism would help.
(Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 2008)
Any event that’s undetermined is uncaused and, hence, accidental. That is, it just happens; i.e., happens randomly. Thus, if our decisions are undetermined, then they are random, and so they couldn’t possibly be ‘‘appropriately non-random’’. Or to put the point the other way around, if our decisions are appropriately non-random, then they are authored and controlled by us; that is, we determine what we choose and what we don’t choose, presumably for rational reasons. Thus, if our decisions are appropriately non-random, then they couldn’t possibly be undetermined. Therefore, libertarianism is simply incoherent: it is not possible for a decision to be undetermined and appropriately non-random at the same time.
(A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will, NOÛS 38:3 (2004) 379–406)
There are but these two alternatives. Either an action is causally determined. Or, to the extent that it is causally undetermined, its occurrence depends on chance. But chance alone does not constitute freedom. On its own, chance comes to nothing more than randomness. And one thing does seem to be clear. Randomness, the operation of mere chance, clearly excludes control.
(Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2004, p. 16)
Either causal determinism is true, or it is not. If it is true, then we would lack freedom (in the alternative-possibilities and source senses). If it is false, then we would lack freedom in that we would not select the path into the future — we would not be the source of our behavior. Indeterminism appears to entail that it is not the agent who is the locus of control.
(Free Will:Critical Concepts in Philosophy, Routledge, 2005, vol. I, p. xxix)
There are three standard responses to the problem of free will. The first, known as 'hard determinism', accepts the incompatibility of free will and determinism ('incompatibilism'), and asserts determinism, thus rejecting free will. The second response is libertarianism (again, no relation to the political philosophy), which accepts incompatibilism, but denies that determinism is true. This may seem like a promising approach. After all, has not modern physics shown us that the universe is indeterministic? The problem here is that the sort of indeterminism afforded by modern physics is not the sort the libertarian needs or desires. If it turns out that your ordering soup is completely determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe 10,000 years ago, and the outcomes of myriad subatomic coin flips, your appetizer is no more freely chosen than before. Indeed, it is randomly chosen, which is no help to the libertarian.
(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B (2004) 359, p.1776)
Either determinism is true or it's not. If determinism is true, then my choices are ultimately caused by events and conditions outside my control, so I am not their first cause and therefore...I am neither free nor responsible. If determinism is false, then something that happens inside me (something that I call “my choice” or “my decision”) might be the first event in a causal chain leading to a sequence of body movements that I call “my action”. But since this event is not causally determined, whether or not it happens is a matter of chance or luck. Whether or not it happens has nothing to do with me; it is not under my control any more than an involuntary knee jerk is under my control. Therefore, if determinism is false, I am not the first cause or ultimate source of my choices and...I am neither free nor responsible.
(Arguments for Incompatibilism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007)
The ascent problem is to show free will is incompatible with determinism. The descent problem is to show that free will is compatible with indeterminism.
Kane says that if free will is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either.
Imagine that the task for libertarians in solving this dilemma is to
ascend to the top of a mountain and get down the other side. (Call the
mountain "Incompatibilist Mountain": figure 4.1). Getting to the top
consists in showing that free will is incompatible with determinism.
(Call it the Ascent Problem.) Getting down the other side (call it the
Descent Problem) involves showing how one can make sense of a free will
that requires indeterminism.
(A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, 2005, p.34)
__________________________________
Note that compatiblism with determinism has always been a great deal easier to accept than compatibilism with indeterminism. Professed "agnostics" on the truth of determinism and indeterminism implicitly equate the two difficulties, whereas there is a great asymmetry between the two. Indeterminism (irrational chance) is much more difficult to reconcile with freedom than is (causal and rational) determinism.
Bob,
One of the problems that I have with your view is that I do not see the need for metaphysical indeterminism in your view. It seems that logical indeterminism (viz., the unpredictable and complex behavior exhibited by chaotic, deterministic systems) is all that is required to generate the "options" that an adequately determined will selects from.
In your opinion, is (microscopic) metaphysical indeterminism important to free will?
In my opinion, if we can provide an account of free will (or MR) that is compatible with logical indeterminism (e.g. deterministic chaos), then that account would also extend to cover the compatibility of free will (or MR) with microscopic metaphysical indeterminism.
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | June 27, 2009 at 05:08 PM
Mark,
There is nothing metaphysical about my Cogito Model.
As you say, the complexity of chaos theory is completely deterministic. Do you see that the causal chain of determinism back to the big bang can only be broken by irreducible chance?
Chance today is available through quantum indeterminacy. And yes, microscopic indeterminism is critically important to the "free" part of "free will."
Dennett's "Valerian," Mele's "Modest Libertarianism," as well as the best event-causal Libertarians Kane, Ekstrom, and Balaguer, all use a "quantum event in the brain" to generate such indeterminacy.
None of them know the location - the "when and where and how" - of such an event that can be amplified to the macroscopic brain to impact our decisions without doing harm to rational control.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/location.html
The Cogito Model does not depend on single quantum events with Rube Goldberg amplifiers. I review these crude mind mechanisms here;
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/mechanisms.html
Instead, information philosophy depends on the ever-present noise - primarily thermal noise but also quantum noise - in any information processing and communication system.
Noise in our neural circuitry introduces errors into the storage and retrieval of our experiences.
When we dream, when we deliberate, when we cogitate, the thoughts that "come to mind" have a significant random "free" component, one we recognize psychologically as free association.
This randomness is all we need to generate alternative possibilities for thought and action.
The miracle of the brain (actually the miracle of any organism) is that it can maintain its informational stability in the presence of the randomness and noise of quantum indeterminacy.
Quantum events in the brain are not rare events, like those that drive Bob Kane's self-forming actions. Nor are they the more common ones Mark Balaguer wants for his "torn decisions."
There are very likely billions of quantum events in the brain - every time a bit of information is stored or retrieved there is one. The information-processing rate of the brain is unknown, but it at least comparable to today's computing machines with gigabits per second CPUs and gigabytes of storage.
Computers suppress their inevitable noise with error detection and correction mechanisms. The brain has evolved its own noise suppression systems (there are many examples in biology that maintain stability against noise - parts of our DNA has had the same genetic code for 2.8 billion years.)
So the brain can suppress noise when it needs to for its adequately determied macroscopic will.
And the brain can access that noise when it wants to - generating alternative possibilities for thoughts and actions, every one of which breaks the causal chain of strict logical and physical determinism back to the big bang.
At the moment that the mind decides to end the generation and evaluation of alternative possibilities, it decides to act. This event creates and stores new information in the brain. This decision is an adequately determined event, except perhaps in those "liberty of indifference" or Buridan situations where Kane, Ekstrom, and Balaguer want indeterminacy in the decision itself.
Randy Clarke calls these latter "centered" event-causal accounts. The Cogito Model is what Clarke calls a "deliberative" event-causal account. It is less libertarian then Bob Kane's model, but it is physically realistic and arguably the model most consistent with the common sense or "folk" view of free will.
The Cogito model sits between the Libertarians like Kane and the Compatibilist Dennett/Mele suggestions to "give the Libertarians what they want."
Dennett and Mele got the basic idea right. They just could not explain the mysterious quantum event amplifier, nor could Bob Kane.
Our explanation of quantum noise limited to generating possibilities is a two-stage model of free will.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/two-stage_models.html
First "free" thoughts that "come to us."
Then "willed" actions that "come from us" and for which we are responsible.
Please see the Cogito Model.
Posted by: Bob Doyle | June 28, 2009 at 08:43 AM
Bob,
I appreciate the lengthy response, but perhaps my question was a bit too subtle. Do you think that the consequence argument is sound?
You advocate that we ought to think of a free will as a will that is adequately determined and able to select from a set of "randomly generated" alternatives (I suggested previously that chaos might be sufficient for this purpose). In the consequence argument, Van Inwagen seems to have a very different take on free will, because he claims that his variety is incompatible with determinism.
Perhaps you personally accept the consequence argument. That's fine. However, is there something that I am missing in the model to prevent someone else (one of your students perhaps) from labeling your model as a compatibilist account?
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | June 28, 2009 at 12:14 PM
I agree with Mark that deterministic chaos is sufficient for the "noise" you refer to. And that the Cogito Model could be a compatibilist one. But I'll go a step further than Mark, and change the "could be" to a "should be". It's not fine to accept the consequence argument, because that argument relies on an unacceptable inference rule (Van Inwagen's Beta).
Posted by: Paul Torek | June 28, 2009 at 01:11 PM
Hi Mark and Paul,
Let me try a couple of brief responses.
The Cogito Model is compatibilist. But the determinism it is compatible with is only "adequate" macroscopic determinism, valid in the limit of large numbers of atoms - the real determinism we have in the world.
I agree that deterministic chaos is a source of noise, but it does not break the causal chain of strict logical and physical determinism since the big bang.
Call that van Inwagen's Consequence Argument if you like, but it is just the determinism horn of the twenty versions of the standard argument against free will that I quoted above.
Yes I accept it and am not bothered by sophisticated rule Beta problems.
Quantum indeterminacy is the only source of noise that breaks the causal chain. Do you agree? Van Inwagen thought so, but he then ran into the other randomness horn, which he dubbed the Mind Argument. Please see the arguments above.
The Mind Argument is much harder to reconcile with "free will." The Cogito Model allows indeterminism, but it is limited to generating alternative possibilities. Indeterminism has negligible effect on the adequately deterministic will.
So the Cogito is doubly compatible, with the physical determinism of the real world, and with indeterminism - provided an adequately determined will can suppress noise in the evaluations and determinations of the will.
My compatibilist students like it, as you guessed. It provides unquestioned responsibility.
But, as Galen Strawson says, it offers a "kind of freedom that is available to us, though it is all you can get." So my students with a common sense view of free will also like it. They like the fact that the Cogito Model also explains creativity and novelty, the originality that comes with being the authors of our own lives.
Posted by: Bob Doyle | June 28, 2009 at 06:13 PM
Bob, you say that
"I agree that deterministic chaos is a source of noise, but it does not break the causal chain of strict logical and physical determinism since the big bang."
This suggests that you're looking for something to break the deterministic chain, that your model is, perhaps, motivated by a desire to find genuine metaphysical novelty in nature, not just epistemic novelty for us non-ominiscients. But of course we have to be careful not to project our desires onto nature when modeling it.
"So the Cogito is doubly compatible, with the physical determinism of the real world, and with indeterminism - provided an adequately determined will can suppress noise in the evaluations and determinations of the will."
This raises the question of the extent to which your model depends on empirical discoveries about human decision-making. Is it established that quantum randomness generates macro-level alternatives to select from, the alternatives that actually occur to us when considering courses of action? And is it established that the will is adequately determined such that QM indeterminacy is suppressed when we select?
Lastly, I’d say that in analyzing free will, the notion of "free" or “freedom of human action” need not mean an evasion of determinism, but rather an evasion of control by other agents such that my choice is justly said to be up to me, not anyone else. This side-steps indeterminist worries (which apply to all agents, and thus wash out) and the perhaps unreasonable demand for metaphysical novelty. Such freedom doesn’t depend on future discoveries about QM and human decision-making, and is all we need to justify holding each other responsible.
Posted by: Tom Clark | June 29, 2009 at 09:41 AM
Bob,
You said,
I agree that deterministic chaos is a source of noise, but it does not break the causal chain of strict logical and physical determinism since the big bang.
I agree that determistic chaos does not break the physical chain, but it does break the chain of logical determinism.In a chaotic system, there are no external rules that dictate the next iteration of the system. The only reason it might seem that way is that when we observe a chaotic system in an experiment we have designed, we are aware of the rules and think of them as being external. However, in *actual* chaotic systems the rules are internal to each agent/automaton, and each agent/automaton's next state is a function of its internal rule set, its current state, and the inputs it presently receives. This is especially apparent when there are agents/automatons that have different rule sets in a single system.
The reason we can conclude that this is not logically deterministic, is that we cannot externalize a formula to predict all future states of the system based upon a past state. Rather, we would have to know the internal rule set of every agent/automaton in the system and the corresponding state of every agent/automaton at some point in the system's timeline. With that innformation, we would have to "run it forward" in a simulator until we reach the desired prediction point in the timeline.
I agree that there is a sort of internal logical necessity operating in chaotic systems (that governs the individual state transitions) and certainly there is physical determinism, but I believe that only full blooded (external) logical determinism (which is the same as fatalism) is what we (all of us) find fundamentally incompatible with free will.
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | June 29, 2009 at 01:33 PM
I haven't been following this discussion closely, but this may be relevant: some interpretations of chaos theory (non-linear dynamics) say that despite the fact that such systems are deterministic, they may be *in principle* unpredictable. The basic idea, as far as I can understand it, is that unmeasurable differences lead to measurable differences.
Of course, even if these interpretations turn out to be unfounded and deterministic but complex events, such as human actions, are predictable in principle, chaos theory still suggests that these events, though deterministic, are not predictable in the way imagined within the Newtonian mindset of mechanical systems. This leads me to think that there will never be a "mind reader" (e.g., brain scanner) that can predict what we will do ahead of time in complex situations involving complex deliberations.
But regarding *simple* situations, thoughts, and choices, see
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5119805n&tag=contentMain;contentBody
Posted by: Eddy Nahmias | June 29, 2009 at 02:00 PM
Tom,
You are right that my Cogito Model is more than an epistemic solution (chance that is mere human ignorance of the exact information in the world). I am considering the ontological (not metaphysical) chance that is quantum indeterminacy.
You are also correct that the "free" question of quantum indeterminacy in human deliberations, and the "will" question of adequate determinism in our decisions are both empirical questions.
I listed at the top of the post seven chance events, most involving quantum randomness, and asked if Gardeners could accept any of them without any impact on the adequate determinism of our current decisions.
I will repeat them here, since Gardeners may just tune in to the comments. Can any of you accept chance...
1) Only at the original moment of the "big bang."
(This leads us to Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument).
2) During genetic mutations that created the species homo sapiens.
(Without this chance, none of us would be here.)
3) Nine months before your birth. (It was one in a million which of your father's sperm would win the race to your mother's egg. Without this one, you wouldn't be one of us.)
4) During your moral education.
(These are those rare events that C. S. Peirce calls the "fixation of beliefs," and Bob Kane calls "self-forming actions." These are important because they may contribute to your latest decisions.)
5) When you decided to become a philosopher.
(Again, without this one, you wouldn't be part of the Garden. How many of you think chance might have played a part?)
6) During deliberation about your current options.
(In these sometimes extended moments, your subconscious processing of possibilities may consider thousands of input factors and evaluate enormous numbers of possible outcomes. If you are creative, you may come up with ideas never thought of by anyone before you. Thus chance and indeterminacy is involved up until a fraction of a second before your "moment of choice." This is my Cogito model. www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/)
6) During the decision itself.
(Bob Kane, Laura Ekstrom, Mark Balaguer and others argue that your decision must not be "determined" by all the considerations that arise during your deliberation. You are not free enough , they say, even if some of the alternative posssibilities might be random combinations of your own past experiences that you have dreamed up yourself.
Posted by: Bob Doyle | June 29, 2009 at 02:54 PM
Mark,
I'm not sure I follow how chaos breaks logical determinism, but I agree that there is an algorithmic (computer logic?) problem that you identify.
In any case, as a physicist I should back off to breaking the physical deterministic chain.
Can you accept any of my seven suggested breaks?
Posted by: Bob Doyle | June 29, 2009 at 02:58 PM
Eddy,
I very much agree with you that there will never be a "brain scanner" that can predict what we will do ahead of time.
The deep reason is that even we do not know what we are going to do. That depends on (among other things like random external circumstances) the ideas that we creatively generate during our deliberations.
Does that sound right to you?
Can you agree that any of the random events above might have happened in your causal chain, with no significant effect on your current decisions?
Posted by: Bob Doyle | June 29, 2009 at 03:04 PM
Bob,
Logical determinism could be defined as:
W(t) = L( W[t - n], t - n ) where t - n => 0
where,- W[t - n] is a description the state of the world at t - n
- L( state, duration ) stands for a description of the physical laws applied to a world state for a given duration to produce a new world state
This could be state in more plainly as the present is the result of the past plus the laws of nature.Logical determinism entails that there is some sort of master formula that exists that could accurately predict the future state of the world at any time, given a prior state.
Even if my formulation here is suspicious, let me simply say that by "logical determinism" I simply mean the kind of determinism that the consequence argument is concerned with.
This kind of determinism is fundamentally impossible in chaotic systems (for the reasons I described in my prior post), and I shall try to demonstrate this with a through experiment.
Think of it this way: the only way to "predict" the future state of chaotic system S is produce a simulation, S*, that is exactly similar to S, and then we speed up time in S* to see what things will be like at a future state of S. Then, when we known the state that S* will be in at time (t), we can say that the state of S at (t) will be equal to the state of S* at (t). Does this mean we have predicted the state of S at (t)?
On the one hand, the answer is obviously yes because we can use the state of S* to know with 100% accuracy the state S will be in in subsequent iterations. On the other hand, the answer is obviously no because we haven't achieved a general purpose way of knowing future states of S; we have merely cloned S and made time run faster in the simulation. The simulator thus functions as a form form of time travel with respect to S... this hardly seems to capture the full sense of what we mean by "prediction".
The reason this is significant is that in a chaotic system, there is no way of describing the physical laws in a way that satisfies the definition of logical determinism.
I believe that chaotic systems break the threat of logical determinism that the consequence argument is concerned with. I have yet to see anyone create an argument that deals strictly with the incompatibility of physical determinism and free will. So, even if the consequence argument is true, it does not prove that compatibilism is false since logical determinism is only one type of determinism.
Moreover, deterministic chaos blocks fine grained "back-tracing". In other words, in a world that it chaotically deterministic, it is logically impossible to trace the world state backward through time with 100% accuracy. That, of course, does not prevent us from engaging in the course-grained "back-tracing" that is involved in macro-level physics. This leads me to wonder whether intuition pumps like the 7 cases you suggest, or the 5 cases that Pereboom suggests, are not fundamentally misguided.
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | June 29, 2009 at 03:53 PM
Dear Bob,
Your reasons 1, 2 and 3 clear will deny free will. Reasons 4, 5, 6, and 7 (inadvertantly also listed as 6) are simply examples of common choices, and they are each either causally or randomly determined. For your assertion that indeterminacy restores free will to hold true, you would have to show how such a process is controlled by the human will rather than mere chance.
Posted by: George Ortega | June 29, 2009 at 08:02 PM
Bob,
Like most compatibilists, I see a mild level of indeterminism - one that allows for "adequate determinism" as you say - as no problem. All 7 of your times for chance events are perfectly benign, provided that, during the agent's activity, the chanciness is suitably limited. In case 6, for instance - just as you say - chance is OK, maybe even good, in formulating options, but it's bad in evaluating options (unless neither option is better, in which case chance is still OK).
I agree that in physics as we know it, quantum indeterminacy is the only source of noise that breaks the causal chain. But I'm not interested in breaking the causal chain. Instead of trying to evade the Consequence Argument, I propose to walk right up to it and trample all over its Beta.
Posted by: Paul Torek | June 30, 2009 at 04:26 PM
Paul,
Your statement that "most compatibilists see a mild level of indeterminism as no problem" is most encouraging.
Are there other compatibilist Gardeners out there who agree with Paul?
If so, we may be able to reach a consensus on what we might call a modern "reconciling project" - following Hume's compatibilist goal in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, "Of Liberty and Necessity," p.95 (Selby-Bigge:
"to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science; it will not require many words to prove, that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute, in this respect also, has been hitherto merely verbal."
In my study of the history of reconciliation attempts, I think Dan Dennett and Al Mele both got it right when they "gave Libertarians what they want" and I would add, what they need.
But Dan and Al could not see how "a quantum event in the brain" could be so perfectly timed and located and be amplified (perhaps by deterministic chaos) to be helpful with a decision.
As Jack Smart put it recently:
"Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug."
(Atheism and Theism, 2003, p.63)
The Cogito Model provides the explanation - not single quantum events amplified by chaos, but billions of quantum events throughout the brain that show up as noise in information storage and retrieval.
Please see the Cogito Model.
I am hopeful that the Cogito Model, which builds on ten earlier two-stage models including Dennett's and Mele's, is something that Libertarians following Kane can also accept as a reconciling of "free" and "will."
Two-Stage Models of Free Will
The concept "will" has always been more or less clear.
The concept "free" is complex and difficult.
Hume wanted only enough liberty to not be constrained by external coercion, but today we need to include the imagined logical-physical-causal chain of PvI's Consequence argument, which in my opinion is just the determinist horn in the standard argument against free will with some extra logical window dressing.
Hume made it abundantly clear that the liberty we need is not the libertine chance that would destroy all responsibility.
"For what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connexion with motives, inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other. For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will;" (p.95)
The Cogito Model attempts to reconcile those two views of liberty (chance vs. spontaneity) and the conflicting views of Determinists and Libertarians.
The Cogito Model goes beyond the standard compatibilism because it is doubly compatible.
It is compatible with the adequate determinism we have in the real world.
It is also compatible with an indeterminism that is limited to help and not harm as you put it nicely Paul - "chance is OK, maybe even good, in formulating options, but it's bad in evaluating options (unless neither option is better, in which case chance is still OK).
Posted by: Bob Doyle | July 01, 2009 at 07:58 AM
Paul,
Regarding your statement;
"Like most compatibilists, I see a mild level of indeterminism - one that allows for "adequate determinism" as you say - as no problem."
A "mild level of indeterminism" does not exist in nature. The universe is either completely deterministic or completely indeterministic. Considering that prediction is possible both at the macro level and at the quantum level through probability equations, Bohm's deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, and Bohr's indeterministic Copenhagen interpretation is incorrect.
Posted by: George Ortega | July 01, 2009 at 01:31 PM
George,
Your short statement "The universe is either completely deterministic or completely indeterministic" is a succinct version of the simple and logical Standard Argument Against Free Will.
Your view is shared by dozens of philosophers, as I showed in my original post above.
But it is flawed because it assumes that even a little indeterminism would utterly destroy causality, reason, etc.
And I am afraid your idea about the current state of physics is wrong (again a notion held by a sadly large number of philosophers).
In the end, Bohm himself did not hold that his interpretation (developed because Einstein, Schrödinger, and other determinists asked him to work it out) was an improvement on standard quantum mechanics or even a testable hypothesis.
"Hidden variables" just held out the dream of a deterministic world with no real chance that had been the hopeful idea of thinkers from the 18th and 19th centuries, especially the mathematicians like Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Posted by: Bob Doyle | July 01, 2009 at 02:29 PM
Bob,
Hidden variables,specifically, non-locality, was empirically strongly suggested by Alain Aspect's experiments.
But a far more simple proof of universal determinism is available. The extremely accurate predictions made with quantum probability equations could not succeed if the individual particles which comprise the collection of particles taken into account by the equations were behaving indeterministically. To assert otherwise would require an explanation of how individual particles behaving indeterministically somehow shed their indeterminism in the collective in order to allow for accurate quantum probability predictions.
A stronger proof of a completely deterministic universe is available through the law of conservation of energy, which has never been violated in nature. When one quantum particle interacts with a second quantum particle, one of the particles gains energy and the other particle loses energy. This energy exchange clearly demonstrates causality at the most fundamental level of nature - elementary particle interaction.
Even the often touted suggestion of indeterminism with regard to radioactive decay, wherein an unstable atomic nucleus losses energy, is subject to this same fundamental causality required by the law of conservation of energy.
Posted by: George Ortega | July 01, 2009 at 07:38 PM
Though I am no physicist, in the same vein as what George posted, I heard that the clarity of the images produced by Hubble was problematic for the indeterminist interpretation of quantum theory.
If quantum indeterminism exists, then the theory suggested that the distant galaxies, etc., would appear blurry due to quantum fluctuations at or above the Plank level. Yet, Hubble continues to produce images of very distant objects with crystal clarity:
In fact, astronomers of the Hubble Space Telescope have been disappointed in their findings that Plank-size quanta were not detected in clear images (expected to be blur by Plank-size Quantum fluctuation), implying that something even smaller than Plank-size fluctuations is at work.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_timePosted by: Mark Smeltzer | July 01, 2009 at 08:06 PM
Bob,
I have attempted to reply to the "Reading Mark Belaguer" thread (here) on your blog. My comment is "awaiting moderation". I didn't know how else to contact you other than mentioning it here.
George,
Are you suggesting that quantum events adhere to a more strict frequency distribution than that implied by the Central Limit Theorem? If so, could you provide a reference that explains this difference between quantum "probability" and ordinary probability?
Posted by: Paul Torek | July 03, 2009 at 03:46 AM
Paul,
No. My proof is a more general and physical observation that because quantum prediction based on probability equations applied to collections of particles succeeds, and with such amazing precision, those particles, en masse, are clearly behaving deterministically. As such, it appears inconceivable that the individual quantum particles comprising that collection initially behave indeterministically, and then subsequently shed this indeterminacy when accounted for within the collection. A more simple and rational explanation is that Copenhagen and other interpretations of quantum mechanics have wrongly attributed indeterministic behavior to individual particles. After all, Bohr himself was adamant in asserting that we cannot describe what we cannot measure. Describing individual particle behavior as indeterministic clearly amounts to such an ignorance-based description, leaving us no rational alternative than to conclude that, as far as we known and presumably can know, particle behavior is completely deterministic.
Posted by: George Ortega | July 03, 2009 at 07:19 AM
Bob,
You state the following as if indeterminacy is an assumed fact of nature;
"But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures."
Responding to Kip's "Are Humans Glorified Thermostats?" post, I just came up with a completely new proof for deterministic elementary particle behavior that doesn't, like Copenhagen, rely on an interpretation of uncertainty principle prohibitions to conclude particle indeterminacy. My new proof is empirical rather than interpretational, and shows in a direct and readily observable-by-experiment manner the deterministic nature of elementary particles.
I'll quote it below, and challenge you to refute it or acknowledge that the standard argument, as you have represented it, is flawed only to the extent that it allows for indeterminism; more deeply flawed is the interpretation of quantum mechanics as indeterministic. I, again, stress that the proof I have just devised is brand new, and has not yet been challenged.
Here's the proof;
We know that as temperature rises, particles move faster. While they will still evade simultaneous position/momentum measurement, their completely causal response to temperature changes demonstrates that the particles are, in fact, behaving deterministically.
The only possible refutation I see to this proof is a stalemate challenge asserting that elementary particle behavior is both deterministic and indeterministic. Such a prospect, however, seems difficult if not incoherent.
Posted by: George Ortega | July 04, 2009 at 12:17 AM
George,
Your argument contains an equivocation. You aren't using the word determinism as it was defined earlier in the thread. You can't claim "universal" determination if the intensity of molecular motion is the only phenomenon that is causally determined. If molecules speed up deterministically, but their positions and momenta change in indeterministic ways, then you don't have a deterministic universe.
Moreover, temperature is usually defined as "MEAN kinetic energy", isn't it? So even temperature is statistical.
Everyone,
Pay careful attention to the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology when inferring from unpredictability. Scientists typically fail to do this when they venture into this topic.
One more thing -- who says macro systems are completely predictable, anyway? I don't see how anyone who has trusted a weather report, watched an NBA star at the free throw line, or used Windows can say this.
Posted by: Mike in MI | July 17, 2009 at 06:39 AM